Bob Cox, author of the Opening Doors books, shares some key principles and strategies for a challenging primary English curriculum – based on the latest addition to the series.

Every school’s intent is to be ambitious for its pupils. In the privileged role I have as educationist, consultant and writer, I so often admire displays, website quotes, inspirational messages and exhortations to pitch high and achieve dreams; yet I also realise how complex this can be to apply in the classroom on a day-to-day basis.

Primary teachers are expected to be experts in many subjects, so detailed support is needed in specific domains. Along with my team of ‘opening doors’ consultants, and with case studies being explored constantly with the schools in our network, we have been able to condense and express into a new publication some of the key principles and strategies needed to develop high-quality, ambitious primary English from which every pupil can benefit. This means that pupils who are already advanced and need regular immersion in literature, language and ideas are provided for in rich and creative ways: not by discrete divisions from others or by labelling, but through a challenge culture which encourages and enables all pupils to aspire and reach further. 

It's not just a question of talking about risk-taking, the unexpected, the wonder of top-class thinking skills, philosophy and quirky writing; it’s using the resources and strategies to make this all happen. How many keynote speeches have I attended over the years receiving deserved rounds of applause for charisma and style and social justice – but giving little indication for teachers who are not subject experts of where to actually begin.

I’ve seen schools hugely idealistic, wonderfully caring and totally committed, wandering in the dark for pathways to subject-specific depth. It’s all too easy then to adopt a package, a linear routeway, a stepped process which often tends to leave high performance learners revisiting concepts previously mastered. This can leave teachers de-skilled in the longer term too, as the delivery stages can dominate thinking and planning more than creative ideas. The latter needs the constant fuel of new challenging texts, quirky possibilities and curiosity. That starts with the teacher’s autonomy and nurturing of ambition. I am seeing this happen across our network and it’s very exciting!

In short, personalising approaches in any way can becomes harder if teaching to the middle rather than beyond the top takes a cultural grip. If models of excellence and ambition start to be squeezed, teachers themselves may lose sight of their own potential and ‘age-related’ notions become a goal rather than a starting point.

Our new book ‘Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English’ provides the guide that schools have been asking for to confront that key issue of HOW ambition expresses itself in English, with a mixture of research, case studies, ideas and examples of pupils’ writing.

Essentially, high performance learners will benefit from being in a school where challenge for everyone is a priority! 

Five key principles for achieving this:

1. Pitch lessons beyond the level of the most advanced pupil.
2. Scaffold and intervene as appropriate for others.
3. Link quality texts from the past to the present and across the globe.
4. Exploit the potential of literature, including poetry, to give scope for new learning and deep knowledge acquisition as well as general knowledge.
5. Plan for sequencing and progression of knowledge via concepts in English.

Five key strategies for successful implementation:

1. Access support is needed continually, even for advanced pupils; this could include chunking stages; visual literacy; music; drama; questioning as a culture.
2. Productive group work and structured classroom talk provides the explorations of style and language needed for in-depth comprehension of quality texts.
3. Diversify the question layout to meet the needs of the pupils.
4. Develop quality writing via taster drafts which can link into sustained writing.
5. Zoom in to teach the specifics of English; zoom out to offer linked-in whole-text reading.

This is just a snapshot of the exciting work which we facilitate and activate. It’s very fulfilling. Our work is particularly in tune with attempts to inject high aspiration by matching intent to resources and approaches which will lift pupils’ standards and confidence.

Visit our website to read more about the five resource books in the series and the new book which will become the lead one, as it puts into words what schools have already been achieving to inspire so many more to follow. It’s time to make your primary English that much more exciting! 

“Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English: Pitching high and including all” is available to order now from Amazon or Crown House Publishing.

NACE members can benefit from a 20% discount from all purchases from the Crown House Publishing website. Log in to our member offers page for details.

More from Bob Cox:

• Opening doors to challenging English for every pupil: quality text to quality writing
• Recorded webinar: Developing an ambitious English curriculum for all (login required)

Bob Cox, author of the Opening Doors books, reflects on the importance of high-quality, challenging texts for all pupils, and key factors for the successful implementation of a challenging English curriculum.

As the author of the Opening Doors series of books for English at KS1, 2 and 3, I’ve had the pleasure of developing a UK-wide network of schools and organisations committed to providing an enriched diet of English where every pupil has the opportunity to relish new challenges. This is particularly pertinent for those advanced pupils whose whole morale can be threatened by revisiting concepts they have already mastered; but it is just as vital for pupils whose reading scores may be low.

We are seeing the high-pitch approaches, encouraged by so many educationists, being turned into reality in the day-to-day classroom by teachers using top-quality texts, poetry, quirky short extracts and contemporary children’s literature with a ‘meaty’ depth. The sheer scope of the language and style is a springboard to genuine comprehension journeys with the teacher’s questioning, knowledge transmission and fascinating oracy being delivered through an inspiring range of methodology. Such is the scope for learning in challenging texts, that the knowledge acquired in the reading can then be applied to the writing.

For example, just read a few lines of Dionne Brand’s Wind: 

I pulled a hummingbird out of the sky one day
  but let it go
I heard a song and carried it with me
 On my cotton streamers
I dropped it on an ocean and lifted up a wave
 With my bare hands…

Now see what Faith Gorman, a pupil at Red Barn Primary, has written:

I came in the night,
Luminous black,
Dashing, darting,
I made the street lamps flicker and jerk as I swept by,
I saw the foxes and owls capture their prey…
 
You can well imagine the range of teaching methodology, word power building and drafting that will have gone on in the process, but without Dionne Brand’s image-making and without overtly exploring the language and techniques, the crafting of the writing would have been less imaginative. There would also have been less knowledge about language acquired: personification, rhythm and meaning; specific vocabulary choices.

Using complex texts and developing the teaching strategies to go with them is key: “start kids out with complex texts that they cannot read successfully; then teach them to read those texts well.” – Timothy Shanahan, February 2017

In my work many years ago as an LA consultant and a freelance deliverer of provision for able pupils – then called ‘gifted and talented’ – there was huge interest from schools in the potential behind the devising of a top-class curriculum; but there were huge concerns about pupils with low reading scores being left behind. That made a lot of sense. In addition, there were concerns that pupils with high learning potential actually disliked risk-taking so much that moving them on to high-level texts and questions was not easy. Schools still report that pupils with very high potential can get upset about an incorrect answer, whereas other pupils can be so used to difficulties that they find it normal to ask their way out of them. [For more on this, take a look at NACE’s work on perfectionism in partnership with York St John University.]

Clearly, challenge for every pupil must become a habit, a norm, an expectation – and then the pupils demand it themselves instead of being wary! I’ve seen this happen in many schools. Resilience grows and healthy ambition prospers. Getting unstuck becomes fascinating, not threatening.

So, when I came to write books for English, pitched high, often asking more of pupils in terms of depth of thinking and breadth of quality reading, I was determined to ensure inclusive routes to excellence which would support equality of opportunity and social justice, and recognising the entitlement to high-class literature – from past to present and across the globe – for all learners, but pitched beyond where the most advanced pupil might be.

These are some key ways in which we have supported schools which are following the Opening Doors approach, and schools have fed back to us as a community growing in knowledge together.

So, what allows those doors to open?

• A whole-school action plan is needed to design an English curriculum which progresses from challenge to challenge, concept to concept, and through transition into KS3.
• Access strategies should flow through the curriculum: scaffolding, responding to need, clarifying, exemplifying and adapting. Pitch high but offer support when needed.
• See the sample units under free resources on my website for examples of our radial questioning layouts, which end the notion of very able pupils treading water on easy questions. We move them straight to high-level challenges if they are ready.
• Opening Doors schools build in whole-text reading in rich and immersive ways, with plenty of choice. Alongside this, extracts provide a focus for language study, depth and comprehension explorations; link reading provides range and diversity in an ethos of skilled facilitation and expectation.
• Teachers develop their own reading and expertise, offering that to pupils as the most wonderful opening of doors to general knowledge, increased confidence and articulation of ideas that there can be. 

So, the quality of the text explored deepens learning immeasurably, and that new learning is applied in ambitious writing – but it’s the teacher who makes the difference! Without you, it’s much harder for this to happen.

Reference

Brand, Dionne (2006; originally published 1979), Earth Magic. Toronto: Kids Can Press Ltd.
Full unit features in: Cox, Bob (2019), Opening Doors to a Richer English Curriculum, ages 6-9. Carmarthenshire: Crown House.

Find out more…

To learn more about the Opening Doors approach, explore Bob Cox’s website. Plus: Bob online on 13 October 2022 for an exclusive live webinar for NACE members – register here.

If you would like to buy the Opening Doors books for your school, remember that NACE members can currently benefit from a 20% discount on all purchases from the Crown House Publishing website. For details of this and all current member discounts, visit our member offers page (login required).

What do we mean by ‘cognitive challenge’?

 

What does this look like in practice?

1. Design and management of cognitively challenging learning opportunities 

2. Rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse to support cognitive challenge 

3. Curriculum organisation and design

Taking it further…

Additional reading and support:

Dr Chris Yapp, NACE Patron

This past month has been marked for me by the death of two major influencers on my thinking and life over 30 years. Lord Harry Renwick died from COVID-related complications and Sir Ken Robinson from cancer.

Harry was a past Chairman of the British Dyslexia Association, a lifelong passion, and an early supporter of the societal and economic good that computing could bring. He was generous to me with his time and opened many doors in parliament, but also outside. Importantly, he led me to the work of Thomas G West. I still have a signed copy of “In the Mind’s Eye” (first edition) on my shelf. I have been delighted to discover that there is a new edition now available.

Tom’s work in the USA on visual giftedness ought to be as influential and well-known as Howard Gardner’s books. His evidence on visual thinking and creativity in science and mathematics made sense of various anecdotes I had collected over the years but could not make coherent.

That is where the link with Sir Ken Robinson comes in. I did not know him well; we met five times over around 15 years, the last time being a decade ago. I would like to add my tribute to him and address a criticism of his thinking that has been raised in many of the otherwise warm obituaries and tributes to a life well-lived.

I followed Ken Robinson speaking at a conference around 1995. My advice to anyone who would listen was, “Do not accept an invitation to speak after Ken Robinson.” At that time the usual reaction was, “Who is he?” I don’t think there is anyone connected with education now – since his famous TED lecture "Do schools kill creativity?" – who would ask that. He was a brilliant communicator, of that there is no doubt, but I want to pay tribute to him outside the podium.

He was as engaging and fun away from the speaker platform as he was on it. He was an avid networker who loved to connect people who he thought would find each other stimulating company. His network of contacts was truly global. An educator I much admire, Richard Gerver, who was mentored by Sir Ken, has written a very personal tribute here. It is well worth a read.

1999 was the 40^th anniversary of a famous speech by C P Snow, “The Two Cultures”. I gave a talk at a conference on the “Renaissance of Learning”. After leaving the platform Ken came up to me. He wanted to talk about one slide. I had argued that there was a false dichotomy in education policy in the UK but also internationally, that the arts were creative, and engineering was a discipline. Drawing on C P Snow’s ideas I suggested that you could not be a great engineer if you were not creative or a good artist without discipline. I had given examples of “seeing” the mathematics as an aesthetic experience. Ken wanted the reference, which was to Tom West’s work. His advice to me was simple: “Keep saying it, one day they’ll listen.”

Over the years I have been contacted by people around the world on email or social media, where the opening line has been: “I met Sir Ken at a conference and he suggested I look you up. He said you’d been thinking about this for years.”

None of the exchanges that followed have ever been with timewasters. I think the last was around five years ago, five years after we last spoke. He used his global celebrity status to bring like minds together. He was far humbler and more cautious than the public speaker image may project.

The criticism I want to address is this: that he did not appreciate creativity in science and maths. In my opinion, for what it’s worth, he avoided the celebrity status trap of pontificating on things that he had little mastery of. I think he was right to do so.

Of course, he was a passionate about the arts, but he had a genuine interest in creativity in all its forms. The people he pointed in my direction were engaging with his ideas in physics, chemistry, mathematics and many more disciplines.

He will be much missed as an inspiration, but he has left a legacy of a life lived well.

If you are passionate about creativity in education, I can pay no finer tribute to Sir Ken than his own words to me: “Keep saying it, one day they’ll listen.”

About the author

NACE patron Dr Chris Yapp is an independent consultant specialising in innovation and future thinking. He has 30 years’ experience in the ICT industry, with a specialisation in the strategic impact of ICT on the public sector, creative industries, digital inclusion and social enterprises. With a longstanding interest in the future of education, he has written and lectured extensively on the challenges of personalised learning, lifelong learning, educational transformation and the knowledge economy.

Join Chris at this year’s NACE Leadership Conference (16-20 November) for a session exploring the use of learning technologies to extend and enrich learning.
View the conference programme.

1. Do: focus on rebuilding relationships

2. Do: provide opportunities for reflection and rediscovery

3. Do: use positive language

4. Do: find out where your pupils are

5. Don’t: overlook the more able

6. Don’t: narrow your curriculum

7. Do: focus on building learners’ confidence

8. Do: review your writing plan for the year

9. Do: review and adapt teaching and learning methods

10. Do: remain optimistic and ambitious

Join the conversation: NACE member meetup, 15 September 2020