Curios of the week #27

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Those of you in the Northern Hemisphere will be discombobulated to ponder the fact that it is Spring in Australia. And the Ballarat Spring has thrown much at us — some gloriously sunny days, plenty of rain and now, today, a wind that could blow you over. Last weekend, we took the opportunity for a family walk — something we seemed to be doing all the time during the pandemic but that has fallen away recently.

I like walks and I think I will take more of them. However, I need to watch out for swooping magpies and plovers — technically the ‘masked lapwing’ — over the next couple of months. Most of you outside Australia assume that its the snakes, crocodiles and spiders we need to watch out for. That’s because you’ve never encountered an angry plover.

This week’s curios include an expert view of being ‘trauma-informed’, news from Finland’s ministry of education, the reading wars and much more.

Expert opinion of the week

Donna Molloy was Director of Policy and Practice at the U.K.’s Early Intervention Foundation (EIF), an organisation with an interest in supporting children’s physical, cognitive, behavioural, and social and emotional development. The EIF has now merged into another organisation, but in January of last year, Molloy wrote an article that has resonance for teachers.

The topic is ‘trauma-informed practices,’ as implemented in children’s social care teams. However, ‘trauma-informed,’ has also become the latest buzzword in schools and much of what Molloy writes seems to apply equally to education.

Commenting on a survey conducted by the EIF, Molloy notes:

“It is… important to remember that [trauma-informed care] activities were developed to increase engagement with treatments or interventions that had evidence of reducing trauma and improving other child outcomes. They were not intended to be a replacement for such treatments, or work in their absence. Yet our study shows that this is largely how they are being used. We found little evidence that [trauma-informed care] activities were leading to evidence-based treatments. Again this gives us a reason to be cautious, to question how plausible it is that these approaches can improve outcomes in and of themselves.”

I suspect many of us would view the general arm-waving and exhortations to be more trauma-informed teachers in a similar light. These practices, if clearly defined, should be a tool for helping students engage with school and with evidence-informed teaching methods. All too often, they seem to be seen as an end-point.

It is pretty much the same argument that sits behind, ‘all behaviour is communication,’ deepity. The logic, such that it is, is that if teachers only realised that a behaviour has a cause, a miracle would happen and behaviour and learning problems would be resolved. Teachers know behaviours have causes, some profound and unfortunate, and many simply human nature. What they really need to know is how to manage and deal with those behaviours. Simply being ‘informed’ is not enough.

Reading wars of the week

There is perhaps nothing else in the field of education that is more likely to enrage people than the best way to teach young children to read. Recently, however, the centre of gravity in this debate has shifted. What was once an argument between establishment ‘balanced literacy’ figures and a rebellious group of scientists, dyslexia advocates and teachers has morphed into one where the proponents of balanced literacy are becoming increasingly marginalised and losing institutional power.

Likely a result of journalist Emily Hanford’s welcome advocacy and campaigning in the United States, Columbia University recently decided to dissolve its monolithic balanced literacy consultancy. Which means it is a good time for a review of the argument.

“It’s a sad state of affairs — malpractice, really — that so many children are denied the foundation of literacy development required to succeed in school and in life.”