In this episode, Claire had the chance to chat to the wonderfully effervescent and inspiring education consultant, Jane Considine, about the teaching of reading and writing in schools, while they were both at the Reading Rocks North conference.
Jane grew up in Birmingham, and despite having a mother who was a teacher, Jane never wanted to follow in her footsteps. In fact, she resisted it quite significantly, instead choosing to embark on a retail management scheme (although her real dream was to put her tap dancing and drama skills to good use as a West End performer!). While in her retail role, she went on to win awards in Customer Service. When she was put in the training department, she realised quite quickly that her heart was in teaching and so enrolled on a teacher training course at Newman Teacher Training College in Birmingham. Even though she got pregnant in her second year at this Catholic establishment, through sheer grit and determination, she earned a first-class honours degree.
After having taught for a while, Jane was offered a job working at a Local Authority level and relocated her family from Birmingham to Northampton, where she became one of the first National Literacy Strategy trainers in the country.
She decided to go freelance after feeling as though the system was too tightly-scripted for all of the things that she wanted to say regarding education, so she branched out on her own and has never looked back. With many educational resources and books to her name, Jane is widely regarded as one of the most influential education consultants in the UK.
In the podcast, Jane speaks candidly with Claire about her background, as well as giving useful tips that teachers can integrate quickly and easily into their classroom practice. Jane hopes that by sharing her expertise, teachers around the country can become more confident in the teaching of reading and writing, thus benefitting the children in their classes.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

Recognise the value in nurturing kids’ imaginations.Children’s writing is not always going to be what we expect. As teachers, it is vital to understand children’s imaginations and to recognise risk taking in writing and word choices.


Be brave – if you have things to say, don’t be afraid to say them.Because a lot of focus is now on other political issues, people in education are making a stand for what they believe in. If you believe in something, say it! Be real and honest in who you are; embrace your weirdness!


Be the master of your own jobs list.Unfortunately, the jobs list for teachers never ends so you must know when to walk away from it.


Use the Educational Endowment Foundation to discover real and impactful research.Using Google is great, but there can be a lot of information to take in and it’s sometimes hard to know what it relevant. The EEF have done the hard work in terms of research and have filtered what is impactful. This is a good starting point for using research in your school, but you have to live it in your own school and see what works for your children.


When teaching reading, you’ve got to model the invisible.Once you’ve got past decoding, teaching reading is about reading for meaning. To teach children to do this, you have to model the invisible: a way in which you might do this is to stop on a sentence; unpick it; say things like, ‘I think the auhor has used this word because…what does this word suggest?’ and, ‘Is this always the case? I don’t know, but I think…’. By doing this, you are giving the children the tools to read for meaning and articulate their thoughts clearly.


Use Oscar nominated short animations and Carnegie prize winning books to teach English.Using high-quality picture books, novels and films/animations will give children a solid starting point on which to build their own writing.


The sequence of writing is not always the most important thing.If you get the children in your class to be central character writers, you may have less sequence an