Curios of the week #84

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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It has started to feel a lot like spring this week in Ballarat. We have had the usual mix of sunshine and showers, but when the sun is out, it’s pleasantly warm. Between the showers, the Sturt Street campus, well tended by our amazing maintenance staff over the term break, is beginning to bloom with new growth.

I have been writing a lot this week. Firstly, I wrote a post about play based on a tweet that was far more controversial than it should have been. Then, I wrote a post about consequences that was effectively a reflection on some of the work my team did last week in our professional learning days, Finally, I wrote an unusual post about some of the responses I had received to my comments about play and why I remain optimistic about social media debate. As I stated at the end of those free posts, if you found them worthwhile or shared them around then you should consider becoming a full subscriber. This will allow you access to my archive and to the entirety of my Curios, including this one.

This week’s Curios include an impressive politician, some survey evidence about physics, and surprising research finding and much more.

Unions of the week

Australia’s federal government has offered more money to states to fund their public schools. However, it is not as much as the states would like and, critically, the feds have tied it to implementing evidence-informed practices such as systematic phonics for early reading instruction.

The Australian Education Union (AEU), the largest public sector education union, has been quite militant about this and according to Natasha Bita in The Australian, has now instructed its members to not implement any of the requested reforms. This seems unfortunate. Withholding evidence-informed reforms to apply industrial pressure neglects the needs of students. However, nobody is dismissing the idea that teacher workloads are an issue. Personally, I would suggest that bad yet ubiquitous practice in lesson planning, managing behaviour and accommodating disabilities and disorders are the main drivers and perhaps the AEU should focus on that.

Interestingly, the AEU is no longer the only show in town. The Teachers Professional Association of Australia (TPAA) is an upstart union that is happy to accept teachers from both the public and independent sectors into its various state branches. They take a dim view of the AEU’s stance. As quoted by Bita, Edward Schuller, secretary of the TPAA stated:

“While the AEU may be more focused on campaigning on political issues, teachers and parents are crying out for genuine reform in our education system.

All of the key issues in education have rapidly spiraled as the bureaucracy has expanded. Student behaviour, the teacher shortage crisis, inclusion policy and plummeting results are consequences of an in­efficient and unaccountable system.’’

It is refreshing to see a teaching union that is in favour of evidence-informed reform.

Substack of the week

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‘Baseball studies’ are recurring reference point in debates about a knowledge-rich curriculum. Briefly, in these studies, students who were regarded as poor readers but who knew a lot about baseball had better comprehension of a text about baseball than students who were regarded as good readers but who lacked baseball knowledge. Advocates of a knowledge-rich curriculum have pointed to this finding to argue that reading comprehension is not a generic skill and depends a lot on background knowledge. Therefore, part of the role of a curriculum is to build a wide body of the most rich background knowledge.

There are those who do not like this argument and want to still believe in generic skills, such as a general skill of reading comprehension. They tend to go after the baseball study research, suggesting baseball is a subject with a unique level of jargon or the finding that has not been replicated.

In a new Substack, Nat Wexler takes on these criticisms and, to my mind, debunks them. It is worth a read.

Politician of the week

There are few politicians who really understand the education brief. Nick Gibb, a former UK schools minister, is one of them. However, we have recently discovered another.