Thank you Nooah Buscher via Unsplash for this image!
In the tale of Snow White, the evil queen asks the magic mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all? The magic mirror replies that she, the queen is the fairest in the land. As we know, the queen is somewhat obsessed with her own appearance and continues to ask the mirror the same question every single day at exactly the same time. The mirror, which we assume to be truthful and trustworthy, reflects back to the queen the answer that she wants to hear, again and again.
The queen’s habit becomes deeply reinforced through daily practise over a long period of time. She becomes dependent upon the praise and the flattery, delivered by the mirror and her brain’s reward system becomes increasingly contingent upon these messages, until out of the blue, the magic mirror breaks the pattern, and declares that Snow White has become the fairest in the land. Having lost what she perceived to be her source of power and status, the queen is devastated by the mirror’s apparent betrayal and drops into symptoms of severe withdrawal. Her sense of identity fragments like shattered glass.
She vows to deceive and poison Snow White who seemingly caused her so much unnecessary pain and suffering. This projection of personal suffering onto another person is directed by the ‘mirror’ within the queen’s nervous system. Our nervous system acts as a ‘mirror’ whenever we are engaging with our environment. It feeds information up to the brain, which responds according to the context, so that we might anticipate reward, relief, dread or fear.
Mirror neurons
For instance, whether through gestures, vocal sounds, words or simply facial expressions, our most rewarding or ‘fun’ experiences take place when we feel ourselves ‘in alignment’ with others: bouncing stories, ideas, jokes and memories in playful banter. In fact our brains even have an area dedicated to ‘mirror neurons’, which specialize in the type of behaviors that help us ‘fit in’ through social skills such as mimicry for example, allowing certain behaviours to spread within a group, even without our conscious awareness. Although these neurons may appear to be primarily social, they might also have played an important role in human survival in times of hardship.
Reflection to infinity
Many years ago, as a child, I managed by chance to align two mirrors in my parents’ bedroom. I could see myself reflected into infinity in two directions simultaneously. At the age of six, this was such a surreal and powerful experience that I told no one about it and crept back into the room to see if it would happen again. Of course, the effect was still there and I felt I’d seen all the ‘secrets’ of the universe in a single wardrobe door. Experimenting with the angle of the mirrors was a risky business because I thought that the magical effect could be lost forever. It seemed that the alignment between the mirrors had to be very precise for the light to form an infinite pattern of images. Of course, I learned that the relationship between the mirrors was what mattered most, and that I even had the ‘power’ to manipulate the mirrors by bringing them in and out of alignment.
Peering into the reflections, I could see that each one was repeated, with each iteration considerably smaller than the one it preceded. The sequence continued until the reflections were so small that they were just little dots in the distance. When the relationships between the shapes were consistent - and I didn’t really appreciate the importance of proportions and ratios at the time - I could see that the gradient was (to my childish eye) an ‘even slope’. In other words, when the relationship between the reflections was absolute and predictable - always the same, it provided absolute clarity, perspective, harmony and truth.
Reflecting each other
So, how might this visual delight help us to understand phonemes, rhythm and language? To my mind, it is actually very simple. If the alignment between child and caregivers is not quite steady - for example imagine the wardrobe doors are not consistently reflecting each other, then the depth of that relationship, the consistent qualities of that relationship and the precision of the communication will not really be ‘anchored’ or stable or able to achieve that level of clarity, that a true and steady alignment can bring.
True alignment allows for all the smaller elements to line up and fit into the larger ones. Yes - as a design it is worthy of Louis Vuitton, who created a system of luggage that utilised space efficiently and eased the flow of baggage during transit. The dimensions of each piece differed in terms of shape and size, the entire set was designed to fit into the largest piece of all.
Grammatical structures
The grammatical structures of language and music share this same principle that underpinned the Louis Vuitton concept. In a language utterance, the tone, the pace and the shape of the sound waves carry a message at every level - from the smallest phoneme to the arc of the entire sentence.
The shapes of individual syllables are contained within the shapes of words. The shapes of words are contained within the shapes of phrases and sentences. Although these are constantly changing in real time - like a kaleidoscope of mirrors, the principle of hierarchy - that a single unit fits perfectly within another - remains robust.
In music, the shapes of riffs, licks, motifs, melodies and phrases are also highly varied, but the hierarchical principle remains a constant here too. The musical message is heard in the tone, the pace and the shape of the smallest and largest units of a musical phrase.
Distortions and protrusions
Just as Vuitton used design to create accurate dimensions at every level of his luggage set, the same degree of precision is also achieved at a subconscious level in spoken language and in music. A protruding syllable, the wrong emphasis or inflection can throw the meaning of an entire sentence out of alignment. A musical message is similarly diluted if a beat protrudes, is cut short or is lengthened, because the length and shape of an entire phrase is distorted.
Arguably, the precise dimensions in Vuitton’s groundbreaking designs reflect a preference for proportion and balance that also underpins all aspects of human communication. Our delight in the consummation of symmetry, grammar and rhyme is present in the rhythm of language and also in music. At a conceptual level, it is ratio that unifies the Vuitton designs with language and music, and it is ratio that anchors our human experience in interaction with one another and our environment.
A return to alignment
This concept of ratio, as well as hierarchical relationships and the precision of rhythm in real time underpin the Rhythm for Reading programme. Think of this reading intervention as an opportunity to reorganise reading behaviour using a beautiful luggage set, designed for phonemes, syllables, words and phrases. It’s an organisational system that facilitates the development of reading fluency, and also reading with ease, enjoyment and understanding. And yes, we understand how ‘mirroring’ accelerates learning.
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About six years ago, sitting in a cosy office, with Headteacher ‘Liz’, I had heard all about the challenges that her rural school was facing. Every child that she mentioned had a different kind of problem. Some were still in the early stages of learning English; others were speaking English as their additional language but not yet reading, and there was no way of knowing whether there were other factors such as dyslexia, attention deficit or autism, that might account for all the issues that the teachers were dealing with. Staff retention was also a concern and I could see from the change in Liz’s pallor that she was not happy with the situation, especially as Ofsted was due quite soon. There was a feeling of relief when I explained that, based on all the results I already had, she would most likely see an improvement in the children’s attention and reading after week three of the Rhythm for Reading Programme.
Together, we watched a two minute video, which showed children engaged in the rhythm-based exercises of the group intervention and we also learned from the Deputy Head of that school that after only four weeks, the children were more engaged, and were able to comprehend and predict what was coming up in their reading.
After watching the video we talked about the Rhythm for Reading programme and how it first began. When I explained how Ofsted had actually been involved, Liz was astonished and thought that I must have been ‘very scared’ at the time. Actually, I had really enjoyed my first encounter with Oftsed and this is how it happened.
About thirty years ago, shortly after John Major’s Government established ‘Ofsted’ (Elliott, 2012), I received a call from the senior leadership team of a primary school. A group of year five pupils, who were eligible for ‘Free School Meals’ were struggling with anger management, were disruptive and had fallen far behind in their attainment in terms of age expectation. Could I help?
The school called me because I had built a bit of a name for myself in the local Music Service. My phone would ring almost every day with new offers of work. I was keen to keep the momentum going and listened with interest as the class teacher described the complex behavioural problems of these children. Little did I know that my whole world was about to change.
My first experience of teaching these children taught me so much, as they were not able to learn in the conventional way that I was used to teaching. After twenty minutes of my most upbeat efforts, in which I launched a stream of activities and learning games, there came a dismal moment: I admitted to myself that they were not learning anything at all. The children seemed to read my mind and their brave exuberance drained out of their pale little faces. There was a strange moment of utter stillness. I could see dread in their eyes. It would be too easy to say ‘this was not for them’ in a very kind way, and I didn’t want this to end in ‘defeat’ for anyone. On the other hand, what alternative was there?
I looked out over the playground and the fields, the line of trees and puffy clouds and wondered if the answer lay outside, outdoors, in nature. I asked them what they liked to do after school and they boasted about their footballing skills. They lived on the same estate. Of course, I had perhaps made an obvious mistake - I had tried so many things already, but I had forgotten all about their feet. I quickly discovered that they were so much more comfortable when they were standing up and using their feet. The same effort went into this new ‘game’. Everything they did began in chaos but at least I could see signs that they wanted to improve the way they were moving their feet. Finally, they were learning - at last there were signs of progress!
Each week, we would spend a few minutes working first with their feet and they gradually built control and extended their focus. All the while, I would keep one eye on the glass door, nervous that someone might ask me what I thought I was doing. It felt so very dangerous to try something new. Weeks turned into months and they could play well known songs by ear on the cello, and had developed a solid technique. They had made faster progress than I’d expected, based on teaching other children of the same age, and one day, I announced that we were going to learn to read musical notation.
Once again, all the colour drained from their faces. They were agitated, anxious and horrified by this idea, protesting that it would be too hard.
After all these lessons, do you really think I would allow you to struggle? I asked.
The following week, I introduced the group to very simple notation and developed a system that would allow them to retain the name of each musical note with ease, promoting reading fluency right from the start. This system, now an integral part of the Rhythm for Reading programme, was first developed for these children, who according to their class teacher, were neither able to focus their attention, nor to learn along with the rest of the class.
After only five minutes, the children were delighted to discover that reading musical notation was not so difficult after all. They shrieked with glee when they realised that they were fluent and that it was easy! There was a wonderful atmosphere of triumph in the room that day.
After six months, the entire group had developed a repertoire of elementary pieces that they could play together and as individuals. I had been vigilant every single week, watching the door to make sure that my unconventional teaching method - (which meant that learning was done standing rather than sitting) was not seen.
One day, just as the children had finished the rhythm-based exercises, there was a knock at the door and ‘Mr Brown’, the Headteacher came in, ashen faced. I was so concerned and felt certain that someone had reported me for using an unconventional approach. I smiled and waited for him to speak. The children may have picked up on my fear and sat still, barely breathing.
We could not have been more surprised when ‘Mr Brown’ asked the children to play in full school assembly in front of Ofsted Inspectors on the final day of the inspection. Everyone was thrilled when I said, “Yes of course!”
The children wanted to be ‘celebrities’ and this would be their moment. As their playing was already very good, we practised announcing, and taking applause with an elegant bow. Their stagecraft was actually great and I looked forward to their big day. For me, as a visitor, this was a huge honour and I was simply delighted that these children, with all their complex behaviours were going to receive applause from the whole school.
They played as a group and as soloists. Each child announced the title and composer of their chosen piece, played impeccably, took applause with such grace, and then walked with their instrument to the side of the hall. At the end of the assembly, the children (who I was told were now working at age expectation in the classroom) were invited to join the school orchestra and sit alongside their more privileged peers. The Ofsted team placed the school in the top category, ‘Outstanding’.
At that time I had no idea that in the future, I would retell this story so often. In conferences, in my PhD, to headteachers and now to you - the most important ‘takeaway’ is that these pivotal moments when we choose a new path - and do so for the benefit of others - can prove to be the most exciting decision, as unforeseen new possibilities can open up for everyone.
Reference
Elliott, A (2012) Twenty years inspecting English schools, Ofsted, 1992-2012, Rise Review, November 2012, accessed 4.9.2024,
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To discuss your school’s needs, you are welcome to book a no obligation Discovery Call.
If you would like to book training for your team, we have an in-person option, as well as digital CPD. Book in-person training here and digital training here.
Fluency refers to the flowing qualities in the reading. And these flowing qualities are mercurial in the sense that it is difficult to measure and define them. In the Rhythm for Reading Programme, we use the metaphor of traffic flow to help us to monitor the development of fluency from week to week.
Traffic that is barely flowing stops and starts frequently, but there is still a general sense of moving forward on the journey to the destination. This feeling would apply to word-by-word reading.
Traffic that moves forward for a short period and then stops briefly has a sense of moving in undulating waves that lack real momentum, but despite this, there is a clear sense of moving forward. This feeling is fluent in short bursts, but not sustained enough to convey the shape of a phrase or a sentence.
The traffic that moves forward and then slows suddenly, but keeps moving has an undulating quality. This sense of movement is not yet strong, though it conveys some underlying momentum. This type of fluency communicates the shape and meaning of a phrase, but is not yet self-sustaining.
When traffic is flowing, it maintains a steady pace for the most part. This represents the fluency in reading that is self-sustaining and enjoyable. On occasion, there may be an unfamiliar word which needs a second look, but in the main, it flows well.
It is also possible to imagine the type of driving that is very fast and reckless. How might this sit within our traffic metaphor? Well reckless driving could be erratic, involve cutting corners and even jumping red lights. The same thing happens in reading that is fast but not fluent. Syllables, words and phrases are skipped over and punctuation is often ignored. The reasons for this can be seen in both reading and driving: there is a need to reach the destination, but this is achieved in an unstable, rather than a balanced way.
Balance in reading fluency
If balance is required, then we need to think about poise, stillness and patience. Recent posts have referred to the importance of conversation and social interaction in the early years before a child starts school. This same principle applies to reading fluency. The rhythm of a conversation involves an ebb and flow of turn-taking. This isn’t only about consideration and courtesy on both sides, it’s also about the child’s experience of balance as an integral part of social connection.
Social connection might be stressful, fun or even soothing. Each type of social connection generates its own rhythmic signature and has its own feelings.
Stressful conversations are likely to involve abrupt short phrases and there might be too little or no patience on both sides, generating frustration and imbalance.
Fun conversations are likely to involve ‘banter’ - everyone is playing along. The pace of the conversation is swift and the mood is buoyant. There is a heightened sense of timing. Explosive laughter punctuates the jokes, the quick-fire responses, the mystery and the punchlines. Phrases are sometimes long and sometimes short. The sheer variety is key to playfulness, with some unpredictability in the mix and all of this complexity is likely to elicit laughs, smiles and good cheer.
Soothing conversations are not meant to be entertaining. Rather, they offer reassurance and support, and there’s a timeless quality to these. The ebb and flow of phrases might drift in and out of focus, but momentum does not seem to matter at all. Sharing in the moment feels more important than what is said. In fact the words might be repetitive and uninteresting: tone of voice is key.
Different types of social connection and different types of driving are similar in one way. They require us to anticipate what is about to happen. The exception to this would be reckless driving, which is more erratic and therefore takes more effort to predict. Most of the time, however, it is possible to attune to the flowing qualities of traffic and conversations, and to make accurate judgments in terms of when and how to respond.
When children learn to read, they become fluent if they are attuned to the flowing qualities of the text. A text that encourages very short phrases and sentences will not support a child to read fluently, but one with longer sentences and a credible narrative will. This is because reading fluently requires immersion and a deeper level of connection with the text.
Anticipation in fluency, feeling and flow
To develop fluent reading, children are like drivers who can adapt to the flow of the traffic. It’s necessary to accommodate changes in the shapes and lengths of phrases. A good writer will vary these to maintain the reader’s attention. It is also important to anticipate what lies ahead. Failure to anticipate leads to loss of control for drivers and readers alike. What does anticipate mean? It is a very broad term, which involves projecting a number of possible outcomes at any one time.
For example, there might be a possibility that a lightweight lorry will overtake a heavier one. A driver anticipating this will already have prepared to move into a new road position: failure to do so would lead to braking and slowing down. In comparison, a fluent reader, aware that two characters are plotting against the protagonist might be looking out for small signs that something is about to happen. This sense of anticipation sharpens the involvement in the text, fluency intensifies and reading becomes more pleasurable and rewarding with rising levels of curiosity.
We can see from these examples that a sense of anticipation is fundamental to fluency. An involvement in the text sparks a degree of engagement and a guessing game begins. The text may be factual or fictitious, but once ignited, the reader needs to satisfy their appetite for information. And yet, if anticipation and igniting interest were all that was required to achieve reading fluency, there would be no need to write this post. After all, children are surrounded by adults who are helping them to become more involved and to think about what might happen next.
The missing piece of the puzzle
Like driving, reading fluency is in part, about safety. How safe is this child feeling in this situation? Are they willing to let their guard down? Are they ready to surrender to the power of the text or do they need to maintain their sense of control of their learning situation? Remember that fluent readers are able to ‘get lost in a book’. When children consider themselves to be vulnerable to educational failure because they are being judged as weak, fragile or struggling readers, they are unlikely to relax sufficiently to trust the process of learning and interacting, and are at greater risk of falling behind.
On the positive side, neuroscience has shown that when humans listen to someone speak, they are able to understand them (even as they talk at a pace of 250 words per minute) because they anticipate what they are likely to say. The details of the conversation are the ‘unknowns’, but the subject matter and all the related experiences of that topic are used to anticipate what is coming up in the conversation.
Selecting a topic of conversation opens up a ‘reference library’ of past experiences. If the conversation turned to attending a recent wedding, relevant information might include anecdotes about wedding cakes, family dynamics, embarrassing speeches and beautiful dresses. It would be possible to toggle between these for variety. In this way, the conversation is anticipated and enjoyed with ease.
Given that anticipation is an important part of our ability to predict and understand what is likely to happen next in different types of social interaction, we don’t need to teach this to children, but we do need to help children attune to an aspect of this process. This is known as ‘mentalising’ (or theory of mind) when they read. In other words, to be willing to figure out what others, such as characters or even the writer are thinking.
To return to the analogy with traffic as an example of mentalising, if a driver anticipates what another driver may do, they have also processed this in relation to the broader context. They are likely to avoid a collision and therefore feel safer when driving. If a driver fails to anticipate, they are unlikely to have fully processed the context of the situation. They may misinterpret the other driver’s signals, with a greater risk of an accident. This shows that anticipation and theory of mind are ‘life skills’ as much in reading the road, as in reading a book.
“The most effective teaching of reading is that which gives the pupil the various skills he or she needs to make the fullest possible use of context cues in search for meaning (The Bullock Committee, 1975, Recommendation 73)
It is not difficult to appreciate that making the fullest use of contextual cues involve a certain amount of integration. The information can only make sense if there are logical relationships between the different levels of information.
So, in terms of driving, knowing about the driving conditions would allow the driver to anticipate the flow of the traffic, such as whether
visibility is poor or good,
the road slopes uphill or downhill,
the surface of the road is dry or wet.
Conditions that change affect the speed of heavy vehicles such as lorries also affect the action a car driver takes to avoid slowing down or risking a collision. Thinking well ahead would allow time to process all the information, while at the same time, maintaining control of the car.
In reading, a change in a character’s behaviour might only make sense to a reader if the context has been fully understood. Anticipation of different possible outcomes would help them to adjust to the twists and turns of the storyline. Just as a speaker can anticipate topics and subtopics in a conversation, a reader co-opts this same behaviour when engaging with a text. The more at ease the reader is with that topic, the more integrated the context feels and making it easier to anticipate what is about to happen.
Fostering fluency and feeling
Humans have adapted to their environment, partly by harnessing the power of communication and by acquiring the perfect balance between curiosity and inhibition. Too little inhibition and we become reckless, putting ourselves and others at risk. Too much inhibition and we are unlikely to engage meaningfully with the social world at all. The point in between is where the ease and joy of learning and reading fluency exist.
According to educators, Purvis and Greenwood (1996), a ‘process approach’ can help children in the early years find safety in learning and to move beyond the boundaries of the immature, egocentric self.
The process approach involves assuming the role of a detective and practising eight different skills:
Describing,
Investigating,
Communicating,
Sequencing,
Explaining,
Observing,
Questioning
Hypothesising.
To put this into practice, they suggest that children sit in a circle and take turns to handle an unfamiliar object - such as a toy from the past, offering their impressions and ideas about this object. This approach promotes positive attitudes towards learning such as:
Motivation,
Curiosity,
Interest in people,
Concern for the environment,
Tolerance,
Self-esteem.
This approach is directly related to reading fluency because it supports vocabulary development, but more importantly, it models for the children the idea that exploration of an unfamiliar object or an irrelevant context may feel uncomfortable, but is perfectly safe.
Achieving a sense of safety when encountering unfamiliar objects in the classroom will help all the children to feel more in alignment with others. This improvement in social cohesion will help them find greater ease and fluency when reading and learning. Of course, the unfamiliar object would need to be so unusual that none of the children in the classroom would recognise it.
To a large extent, socially disadvantaged children are expected to take part in activities that feel alien to them, whereas these same activities are safe and familiar to more advantaged children in that classroom. It is likely that these early experiences of school life are reciprocated by the children’s learning behaviour and attitudes towards learning. Those who feel safe will learn, while children who feel unsafe will put up barriers to learning. If the dynamics of inequality were not reinforced by subtle cues in the classroom in day-to-day activities, disadvantaged children would feel safer and that they had a fairer chance at school.
In the Rhythm for Reading Programme, safety in learning lies at the heart of our ethos. Everyone learns to read a musical notation system that they are unfamiliar with, as we use the bass clef, which is largely new to everybody. The rhythm-based actions that we use are also novel as they are unique to the programme. This sense of fairness - genuine team working in which everyone feels equal - is an important element of the programme. Working as part of a team therefore, and in the context of equality, each child succeeds in reading simple musical notation fluently. Once this is established in a matter of five minutes, the programme builds on fluency and feelings of safety by cultivating ease, engagement and empowerment in the children’s reading skills.
To find out more about the Rhythm for Reading Programme, click here.
The pupils who most need to improve in terms of reading fluency (the lowest twenty percent of children) require support from the most effective teachers. Teaching effectiveness is known to be a strong predictor of pupils’ progress throughout school and for these children, pedagogy that develops a sense of mastery through repetition, reviewing and building familiarity with new words, supports the development of confident and fluent reading.
There’s evidence to show that feelings of cooperation and safety are experienced when humans sing and dance together and many people report being able to sustain hours of music making, when in a group. Other species such as birds and fish also deter predators by forming a large mass of synchronised movement patterns. Murmurations form before birds roost for the night and shoals of herrings achieve the same mesmeric effect when they are pursued by predators such as sea bass.
I believe that together, as educators on a mission to make a difference, we can raise standards in reading. The Rhythm for Reading programme offers a mechanism to achieve this. The programme provides a cumulative and structured approach that supports inclusive teaching and learning.
For instance, in the programme, there is absolutely no need to break down tasks. We strive to lighten the cognitive load on working memory and a light cognitive load is an inbuilt feature of the programme. This is why pupils experience the satisfaction of reading musical notation fluently in the very first week of the programme.
Earlier this year, we started to measure our impact in a slightly different way. Many teachers and head teachers have remarked on the improvement in their pupils’ reading fluency, so it seemed important to try to capture what has been happening. Of course, there are different ways to define and to measure reading fluency, but here is a snapshot of what we found when using two types of assessment.
REFERENCES
Purvis, S. and Greenwood, J. (1996) ‘Mrs Rainbow told us what things were like when she went to school.’ History in the early years. In:D. Whitebread and P. Coltman, Teaching and Learning in the Early Years, London and New York, Routledge.
The Bullock Committee (1975) A Language for Life. (The Bullock Report). London. Department of Education and Science.
Given everything that educational researchers have uncovered about reading and the attainment gap between socially advantaged and disadvantaged children, it is dismal that the ‘gap’ has widened, even though the teaching of reading has been delivered in a specific way, across the nation for the past fourteen years.
Historically, there was a concern that an emphasis on independence in the early years classroom (e.g. Whitebread et al., 1996); and a ‘loose framing’ of learning worked rather well for children from middle class backgrounds, but less well for disadvantaged children. Going back a little further, to Hart and Risley’s (1995) research on the ‘vocabulary gap’ we can see that fundamental inequalities in educational outcomes pointed to differences in exposure to language itself in the child’s home environment.
The link between the attainment gap in reading and Matthew effects (Stanovitch, 1986) in which the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, has been shown to play out not only throughout a child’s school career, but also in adult life as well. For decades, researchers from different nations have used ‘Matthew effects’ to explain the achievement gap in reading and eventually identified ‘school readiness’ as key (Duncan et al., 2007).
A more structured, tightly-framed and traditional form of pedagogy was proposed, but the allocation limited educational resources is always a matter of debate. Intergenerational cycles may influence these decisions, such as persisting patterns of aversion toward school. Within schools, some families have complex needs, such fundamental push and pull factors influence opinion on whether it is even feasible to reverse ‘Matthew effects’.
High standards for all children
Viewing education through the lens of equality - every child should be offered the ‘same chance’ at learning. An equitable viewpoint would offer a more nuanced approach - every child should be given the opportunity to learn in the way that is most appropriate to them. Offering every child the ‘same chance’ is too blunt a tool, whereas the equitable approach is too individualised. The nature of learning is related to the nature of everything because the set point and state of a child’s nervous system is set by their environment, and it is this that has a direct impact on a child’s capacity to learn. By improving the early environment of the child, therefore, there was a good chance that ‘Matthew effects’ could be addressed.
Policies that have improved the early environment for disadvantaged children have provided security and safety, and enabled parents to move out of a fear-based state of pure survival. Initiatives such as ‘Sure Start’ supported the early life experiences of children through a range of services that were tailored to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged families. Single parent families in particular needed support not only to budget carefully, to make healthier choices for their children’s nutrition, but also to cope with depleted reserves of energy and low levels of emotional well-being. Since austerity measures were put in place, however, many ‘Sure start’ centres lost considerable amounts of funding or were closed. In addition to losing those resources, disadvantaged families were forced to choose between heating and eating. For families who chose to eat, the growth of black mould has impacted their children’s respiratory health, whereas families who chose to heat their homes have had hungry children and have relied on free school meals and food banks.
The Rose Report
If addressing the basic needs of disadvantaged families through the ‘Sure Start’ scheme was a first step in reversing ‘Matthew effects’, the second step was a recommendation by the House of Commons Education Select Committee, that the government commissioned an enquiry into the teaching of reading. It was led by Sir Jim Rose, former Director of Inspection for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate. The report recommended that the ‘Simple View of Reading’, wherein reading was the product of ‘word recognition’ and ‘language comprehension’, as proposed by Gough and Tumner (1986), would serve as a model for reading development. An approach known as synthetic phonics became statutory, amid reservations from many influential educationalists, but this was deemed the most appropriate solution to the issue of the decade: the ‘long tail of educational underachievement’.
Gough and Tumner’s theoretical model, like most strong theories is remarkably simplistic and thus, robust. The ‘Simple View of Reading’ was proposed some ten years before the so-called ‘vocabulary gap’ had been identified by Hart and Risley (1995). Viewed through the lens of the ‘vocabulary gap’ it is not difficult to appreciate that socially advantaged children were more likely to find the vocabulary in books to be relevant and relatable. They were also more likely to have longer attention spans, constructed through years of experience ‘conversational turns’ in day-to-day life, and would be expected to sustain their attention from the beginning to the end of a story.
Perhaps most important of all, advantaged children were more likely to have had stories read to them in a nurturing environment and therefore would readily associate reading within an atmosphere of comfort and security. I would imagine that this feeling would predispose them to approach learning with ease and confidence.
Do schools widen the attainment gap?
Arguably then, children from advantaged backgrounds would experience school as an extension of home, as evidenced in Whitebread and colleagues’ chapter, “Our classroom is like a cosy little house,” (Whitebread et al., 1996) and that access to books and enrichment would be a strong part of the continuity between the two. Contrastingly, some children from disadvantaged backgrounds start school with only 30-40 words in their vocabulary according to an Ofsted Report, (2014). And according to child development experts, children would be expected to have fifty words in their vocabulary by their second birthday (Wise and Bradford, 1996).
If a child from a disadvantaged background was already struggling with a fragmented attention span and a style of language comprehension that had been forged in a stressful environment, then listening to stories, would prove challenging, (particularly if the child was also hungry). Imagine also, that this socially disadvantaged child must then cope with learning words that are deliberately nonsensical, such as ‘vol’, ‘teg’, ‘jat’ and ‘ind’ (Standards an testing Agency, 2014). This type of teaching has always been controversial, but in the context of social disadvantage it is arguably unethical and presents struggling children with an unnecessary educational hurdle, adding insult to injury to a child with an already strained nervous system.
Verifying ‘Matthew effects’
Educational policy alienates all children, through the Year 1 Phonics Check, which tests children’s knowledge of phonemic-graphemic correspondence by including pseudo-words. Perhaps this amounts to nothing more than a playful ‘curved ball’ for some children, but by Year 1, teachers have already identified those at risk of failing the phonics check and have informed their parents to this effect.
Thus, ‘Matthew effects’ are verified, even at this early stage. One of the functions of baseline testing is to place the children on trajectories of predicted progression, and to hold schools accountable to realising those outcomes. An idealised view of an education system would include the aspiration that it mitigates social disadvantage. The current system however, does not appear to aspire in this way. Typically, it is the children in need of the most support who spend the most time out of the classroom, working with the least qualified members of the teaching team. The most qualified members of the team meanwhile stay in the classrooms, working with socially advantaged children.
The pandemic has widened the attainment gap. Children are still suffering and CAHMS is overstretched, with long waiting lists, with high levels of risk of self-harm placing children and adolescents in urgent need of professional help. At the same time, the culture of scrutiny, and accountability in schools has intensified, and now more than ever, there is an urgent need for balance in education.
Children are more likely to recover their equilibrium and confidence following the pandemic with regular access to opportunities to develop their self-expression. The mode of self-expression would of course vary from child to child and might include sport, martial arts, storytelling, pottery, art, music or dance. As a nation with a strong creative sector, we have ample resources to support children in this way. Time spent in nature, nurturing friendships, and in recreational play is also necessary for well-being, and will help children to gain a sense of safety in the wider context of social life.
Summary
Together, children with their capacity for play and self-expression can help each other to feel a renewed sense of safety and belonging through friendship, creativity and self-expression. Most importantly, when children feel safe, they begin to focus their attention. This enables generalised states of vigilance and anxiety to stabilise and move towards a more balanced state. When children realise that they are able to learn, their desire to learn grows.
The sense of relief that follows, relaxes their muscles around the shoulders, the voice and the neck. They perceive phonemes more clearly and begin to enjoy their learning journey. A structured, small group teaching environment is highly effective in this context and resets a child’s feeling of ease in their social environment. The Rhythm for Reading Programme has a strong track record in helping children to feel happy at school (in mainstream and special schools alike) as well as improving their early reading skills and phonological processing.
The Hart and Risley (1995) study showed perhaps surprisingly that infants initiate conversations with their parents more than the parents do. This may happen at the most inconvenient moments for the adults, but if parents are aware that their child needs to interact in order to develop language skills, that would set them up for life: they would probably pay closer attention to these subtle attempts to initiate interaction.
Although the richness of vocabulary was hugely advantageous for children from better-off homes in the Hart and Risley study, researchers have discovered that the opportunities for conversational turns between parents and their children, for example when sharing a book, were even more beneficial than vocabulary development. Conversations have also been identified as a marker for maternal responsiveness, positive emotional exchange and social engagement (Paul & Gilkerson, 2017).
Recently, I read that an act of aggression is a natural ‘active coping strategy’ and is rewarded by a dopamine hit. Conversely, a submissive, ’passive coping strategy’ results in stress-induced withdrawal and even generates a ‘shutdown’, an immediate energy-conserving behavioural response. The setting for these social experiments was a laboratory. The brains of mice and rats were dissected following each behavioural task. Slices of tissue were examined to determine the levels of reward and stress induced by each type of ‘social situation’ manipulated by the researchers.
How does this relate to anti-bullying week? Well, in terms of brain structure, neurochemistry and behavioural responses, mice and rats are considered to bear a close enough resemblance to humans to deem such work ethical, justifiable and relevant.
In recent weeks, there has been coverage on the rapid rise of ‘baby banks’ (Chloë Hamilton, The Guardian Newspaper). These are like food banks, but specialise in providing free nappies, baby formula, clothes and equipment. We have 200 branches in the UK and just as the Christmas holidays were about to start, there was also a piece about headteachers reporting malnourishment among their pupils (Jessica Murray, The Guardian Newspaper).
Having delivered the Rhythm for Reading programme in schools that also function as community food banks, and having seen children faint from hunger while at school, I am in no doubt that nothing can be more important to a civilised and caring society than children’s physical well-being - hungry children cannot learn anything at all.
REFERENCES
Duncan et al. (2007) School readiness and later achievement, Developmental Psychology, 43 (6), 1428-1446.
Gough, P. and Tumner, W. (1986) Decoding, Reading and Reading Disability, Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6 -10
Hart, B. and Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American Children, Baltimore, M.D., Brookes.
Office for Standards in Education (2014) Are you Ready? Good Practice in School Readiness, London
Rose, J. (2006) Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (The Rose Report). London Department for Education and Skills.
Standards and Testing Agency (2014) Phonics Screening Check: Children’s Materials. London: Standards and Testing Agency
Stanovich, K. (1986) Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy, Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.
Whitebread, D. Et al., (1996) “Our classroom is like a little cosy house!” Organising the early years classroom to encourage independent learning, In D. Whitebread and P. Coltman, ‘Teaching and Learning in the Early Years, London and New York: Routledge.
Wise, D. and Bradford, H. (1996). “You’re supposed to tell me your name now!” Speaking and listening in the early years. In D. Whitebread and P. Coltman, ‘Teaching and Learning in the Early Years, London and New York: Routledge.
Our love of stories, whether fiction or non-fiction creates an appetite for more information. Stories are irresistible to us because they reward our curiosity about others’ experiences. They inspire us and invite us to consider the unimaginable possibilities that exist outside our familiar day-to-day lives.
According to psychologists we are hard-wired to enjoy stories. This is for reasons that are inextricably linked to our survival. Our instincts interpret day-to-day events as stories and the majority of these never reach our conscious awareness; but on the other hand, the most salient moments stand out because they were unusual in some way: it is that that made them memorable.
Narrative and the nervous system
About twenty years ago, I remember riding on a small, rickety electric train. Like most trains, it had seats, mini carriages and wheels, but no sides and no roof. It jolted as it carried us on a miniature railway deep underground. The air became colder and everyone was chattering quietly as we rumbled deep down into the limestone rocks. We were on our way to see prehistoric cave art. In the distance a low murmuring caught my attention. I hoped it might be an underground flow of water, but suddenly our train stopped and the low vibration became louder as it approached us. I had no idea what to expect. The noise was deafening and the lights went out. We sat not only in silence, but in dread.
This is a true story based on the uncertainty that we, the tourists, all experienced in an unfamiliar place, cut off from the outside world and in fear of impending doom! As it turned out the trains always passed each other in this way and the matter of altering the points on the tracks was done manually. Once the lights came back on, and having experienced an immense surge of relief, I think we enjoyed the cave art even more.
Perhaps the drama of the half hour ride into the hillside put us all in touch with the deepest feelings of terror that the nervous system is primed to deliver. There was nowhere to hide during that unusual experience and we all felt vulnerable for about ten minutes. Perhaps it was by design that we experienced what the early artists may have felt when they made the cave art at ‘Grotte de Chauvet’, so far away from the familiarity of mundane life on the surface.
And as today is International Women’s Day, I’d like to acknowledge that the cave art at Chauvet, was most likely made by women. It was executed in red and depicted the female form in relation to sacred animals, as well as handprints of red ochre (Fagan, 2005).
Reflecting on the life ways of ‘Cro Magnon’ man at the end of the Ice Age, Brian Fagan acknowledged the importance of music and stories when he described the challenges of living within the natural world. There were long hard winters and an unpredictable supply of food; but the rhythm of the seasons remained unchanged:
‘People thought of themselves as part of a living world, where animals, plants, and even landmarks and inanimate objects had lives of their own. The environment lived and surrounded one, defined by intangible forces and personalities, whether human or not. To live in such a way required a powerful imagination, the ability to conceptualise, to chant, to make music, and to tell tales that validated human existence and explained the natural order of things.’ (Fagan, 2005, p.142)
However, only a few thousand years later human societies experienced a technological revolution. They harnessed the cyclic seasonal rhythms of nature and through the advent of farming, created a more predictable supply of food. In the transitions from hunter gatherers to farmers, and then into city dwelling civilisations, the functions of storytelling also changed to reflect the new challenges that humans faced. Living in closer proximity, humans experienced profound changes in terms of sanitation and disease.
In his ‘Selfish Gene Theory’, Dawkins (1976) proposed that humans were susceptible to stories, particularly those that involved supernatural powers, (not because our sensibilities were finely attuned to the natural environment throughout our evolution), but because they were gullible and self-delusional. In a similar vein, Humphrey’s ‘Machiavellian Theory’ (1976) acknowledged that as humans became more socially sophisticated, they were better able to deceive and outwit each other. This would involve inferring and anticipating the thoughts of another and also an ability to envision imaginary scenarios. The creation of fiction and story-telling may well have become more important for navigating social structures in the new villages and first cities - anticipating an unpredictable supply of food was no longer society’s primary concern.
Before the first books were written
Before the first books were written, people would share the most iconic stories in verse form or as ballads. The couplets of verse and the regular structures of songs helped with learning and recalling all the details, and this was important for maintaining the integrity and credibility of the narrative with each retelling. The most important information, such as the early laws in Ancient Greece for example, were recited in verse for this reason.
According to Thucydides, the citizens of Ancient Greece were schooled in a rich oral culture through the recitation. These were later written down by Homer as the famous Iliad and Odyssey, which detailed the epic feats of supernatural figures: Greek gods, goddesses, heroes and heroines. The driving metre and melodious quality of the poetry, in particular the rhythmic and repetitive lines, helped the young citizens to commit large amounts of material to memory (Wolf, 2007, p.57). Arguably, the Ancient Greeks had learned to hone and develop executive cognitive functions through these techniques as the benefits of committing large amounts of material to memory included achieving mental focus and control of distraction. Hierarchical structures in the form of the poetry would have supported logical and philosophical thinking as well as provided the ability to ‘step back’ and see the ‘big picture’.
As a side note, today’s professional musicians, dancers and actors in the creative sector’s performing arts are trained through the traditional discipline of each art form to commit large volumes of information to memory for public performances. These are now celebrated and ‘consumed’ via live streaming, broadcasts and recordings, and enjoyed by audiences all around the world.
Prehistory ended when the first story was written down
According to art historian, Zainab Bahrani, the first stories ever recorded were ‘ancient myths of origins’, which dated back to Mesopotamia of the historical era, when higher levels of art and architecture began to emerge. The Mesopotamians credited a god known as ‘Enki’ (Sumarian) and also known as Ea (Akkadian) and this deity was associated with the creative origin of the world.
Similarly, there was a Babylonian myth that described a place called ‘Eridu’. This was thought to be the first place to be created by the gods and ‘Eridu’ was sacred to ‘Enki’, the god of water, wisdom and craftmanship’ ((Bahrani, 2017, p. 42).
‘The city of ‘Eridu’ is recounted here, and even in this early story, translated into English (Bahrani, 2017, p. 36), it is clear that the narrative is presented in a rhythmically coherent way and with a clear structure:
“A holy house, a house of the gods in a holy
place had not been made, reed had not come
forth, a tree had not been created,
A brick had not been laid, a brick mould
had not been built,
A city had not been made, a living creature
had not been placed (within)
All the lands were sea,
The spring in the sea was a water pipe.
The Eridu was made.”
The city of Eridu was discovered in the twentieth century and this work revealed that people had first lived there some seven thousand years ago, and had created no less than eighteen excavated levels of occupation. By studying these levels, academics have been able to map the story of cultural development of this society over many generations, from hunter gatherers, to farmers, to citizens dwelling in complex cities. The stories of this civilisation were first written down in the fourth millennium B.C.E..
The invention of writing was a cultural advance that took place alongside the development of high art and architecture, refined craftsmanship and image making. The creative endeavours of the extraordinary Sumarians involved complex aesthetic structures, ordered and planned spaces and were known collectively as ‘ME’. This word is usually, according to Bahrani, translated as ‘the arts of civilisation’ (Bahrani, 2017, 46). The oldest written texts, which were found in Uruk in Iraq, recorded administrative matters, such as the trade of local produce including cattle and crops. Evidence also existed of other forms of writing in the third millennium B.C.E., and included poetry, sciences and mathematics (Bahrani, 2017).
Why do humans find stories so irresistible?
Prominent thinkers have attempted to answer this question. The classical view was that humans are cooperative and wanted to trade rather than wage war with each other. We only share personal stories when we feel safe and people feel privileged when someone confides in them and builds trust in this way. For this reason, stories may have been an effective means to attain non-kinship ties. These were hard won and even today, families and nations work hard to sustain these links through successive generations. The diplomacy of such bonds requires maintaining trust through high levels of respect and courtesy, verbal and non-verbal social interaction, as well as the sharing of food together. Each level of social bonding would have required a delicate balancing of different perspectives, achieved in such a way that they could not destabilise the all-important trade network.
Perhaps metaphors became important as key negotiating tools of the early traders, when first brokering these networks. The social value of a metaphor for example, could lie in its value as a symbol for relaying sensitive information. Sharing a symbolic reference ( a pair of doves as a gift, representing peace) would build mutual understanding and protect the traders from causing unintended offence. Travelling long distances, they most likely spent considerable time exchanging hospitality with trading partners, and stories would have helped to pass the time, whilst also building bonds of trust.
Most importantly, a story carrying a metaphor could potentially cloak a direct message through its simple arc of beginning, middle and end, and also carry a deeper meaning. The value of sharing a story would have allowed people from different backgrounds to understand one another’s situation from a higher perspective or from a ‘neutral’ point of view.
Anthropologists believe it was possible to build strong networks of social cooperation on a rich understanding of symbolic culture, and this may explain the importance of stories in our evolution in increasingly complex societies. (Dunbar et al., 1999).
Summary
Despite the importance of storytelling for the smaller social groups and the development of large trading networks, its power continuous to mesmerise children and adults alike, whether through films, radio or books. In celebrating World Book Day, many children have created costumes to reflect the characters in their favourite books. This gesture perhaps reminds us all of the importance of stories in our cultural history and prehistory, when humans understood their lives within the narrative of a broader, more cosmic and supernatural context. Although children are not expected to recite poetry as their great grandparents did, it is interesting to see thats superheroes and magical characters are still relevant today. Even more remarkable, the heroes and heroines of today’s literature still embark upon epic journeys of self-discovery, just as they had done thousands of years ago in Homer’s poetry.
Click here to learn how children discovered the joy of reading in our case studies
Optimal experiences are life-affirming, intrinsically rewarding and in terms of pedagogy, they are highly desirable because they boost students’ confidence and motivation. They can be very helpful in realigning attitudes towards reward, so that students become motivated by the sheer joy of taking part rather than wanting to know what they will ‘get’ in return for taking part.
As the approach is rhythm-based instead of word-based, pupils with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia or English as an Additional Language (EAL) benefit hugely from the opportunity to improve their reading without using words. It’s an opportunity to lighten the cognitive load, but to intensify precision and finesse.
We all share a common heritage that stems from traditional pre-literate societies in which metaphors have been extraordinarily important tools of diplomacy and ingenuity. Using the richness of imagery, they allowed delicate messages to be conveyed indirectly, thereby fortifying relationships between different groups of people.
This child’s bold plan moved and inspired me to visit the Norfolk Children’s Book Centre to put together a list of books for children who have discovered the joy of reading and are preparing to visit their nearest library for the first time. The Norfolk Children’s Book Centre houses some 80,000 children’s books. As dolphins, dinosaurs and gladiators feature prominently in our resources and are extremely popular with the children, they provided an obvious starting point for our search for these particular books.
REFERENCES
Z. Bahrain (2017) Mesopotamia: Ancient art and architecture, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London.
R. Dawkins, (1976) The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University press
R. Dunbar, C. Knight abd C. Power (1999) The Evolution of Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
B. Fagan (2010) Cro-Magnon: How the ice-age gave birth to the first modern humans, New York: Bloomsbury Press
J.R. Humphrey (1976)’The social function of intellect, In Bateson P.P.G. and Hinds R.A.. (Eds.) Growing Pains. Ethology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
M. Wolf (2008) Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain, London: Icon Books
There’s tension in teamwork! On the one hand there’s the idea that ‘teamwork makes the dreamwork’, pointing to the ideal situation in which everyone pulls together to attain goals that are shared and for the good of the whole community - for instance in a social enterprise. The maxim, ‘There’s no ‘I’ in team’ tells us that people sometimes contribute to teamwork with other intentions - perhaps they see it as an opportunity to outshine, usurp or even exploit the efforts of others.
Let us think for a moment about a community of traditional hunter gatherers, researched by anthropologist Jerome Lewis at ULC. They have life ways built on teamwork: - Women and men carry out their day-to-day roles in separate groups and the two groups alternate in terms of taking on the responsibility for leadership and decision-making. In this way, the community maintains a rhythmic balance, like the swing of a pendulum, between the perspectives of the men and then the women. The elders of the community, particularly the women, encourage everyone to ridicule any young person who wants to be louder, faster or smarter than others in the group.
The qualities of teamwork have also been studied by neuroscientists and there are no surprises here. Teamwork involves joint action, communication and empathy: people’s actions naturally fall into coordination with one another. We see this in social situations where there is obvious mirroring - one person sips water from a glass and then others at that table do the same, perhaps as a symbolic intention of unity.
On the one hand, there are distinct disadvantages to group behaviour and teamwork, because imbalances within the group can generate a false sense of security, potentially affecting many people:
‘groupthink’ - when people are not able to discuss matters openly and one opinion dominates,
bias - when clear thinking is sidelined by ideology and the whole group loses touch with reality,
double standards - when a minority abuse the value system held by the group to dominate and repress the majority.
On the other hand, the advantages of teamwork and a sense of group membership are beneficial in the long term for our health and well-being. For example, it is easier for us to coordinate repetitive actions with others and to communicate regularly in small groups. This is because as humans, we are hard-wired to rely on group effort to guide both our day-to-day behaviour as well as our longer term goals. Teamwork is advantageous in the long term in the following ways:
it is economical in terms of energy expenditure,
coordinated actions look and sound impressive to outsiders,
predators will likely be deterred, and
people feel they belong and are safe.
Musical teamwork
In both contemporary western cultures and extant hunter gatherer societies, humans are coordinated in time by feeling a shared rhythm - whether that is via a physical action, a chant or a song. The repetitive nature of many actions means that the movement is not only coordinated in time but also refined in space.
This is a natural phenomenon that applies to most species - for example, bees secrete wax and form hexagonal cells in honeycomb because a hexagon shape allows for economic use of repetitive, rhythmic movement and energy, without compromising the stability and strength of the cell walls. We see a stylised version of this in formal military displays around the world, and a more relaxed version in informal crowd behaviour (such as a ‘Mexican wave’ or clapping in time) at cultural events for example at a sports stadium - whether enjoying a match or a pop concert.
The formation of a group identity in the context of working together involves mutual trust, respect, a desire to achieve results through coordinated precision and also the flexibility that is needed to achieve an optimal result. In musical teamwork, this level of cooperation is practised as a discipline ‘for its own sake’ because the people involved share joint musical goals. These might be modest such as journeying through a new musical score, or writing a new song together. The joint experience of traversing the musical ‘unknown’ is mysterious and requires coordination and coherence - similar to navigating a cave in the dark. Or, the goal might be more aligned with artistry, such as working together to balance all of the nuances of a known piece of music, so that the performance of a particular work comes across as a sublime entity of perfectly structured, balanced, ’architectural’ proportions, although in real time.
So, in describing different types of joint action in music - as in many things - it becomes obvious that some teams could be described as ‘elite’ and some as ‘inclusive’. In both groups (provided there is a sense of joint action, trust and positive teamwork) the neuropeptide, oxytocin (aka ‘the love hormone’) works quickly to build bonds between people and to form what are known among social psychologists as ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’ (a power imbalance usually favours the ‘in group’).
For instance, in the Rhythm for Reading programme, we uphold an inclusive ethos. This is very important as everyone involved must feel that they can play a meaningful role in contributing to the effort of their group, each week. When, on occasion, a teacher has tried to introduce a new child into a group of ten children, or to swap two children between different groups (there may be six groups of children taking part in one school), the trust and the bonds in the affected groups may be dissolved, probably because of the influence of oxytocin on group identification..
So, to sum up, teamwork is an important and impactful aspect of the Rhythm for Reading programme.
Musical teamwork and empathy
An abundance of research findings point to the ‘prosocial’ impact of joint music-making (Hallam and Himonides , 2022). Being involved in music making requires sustained and coordinated joint action. For example, each person is aware of their own contribution, but they also have oversight of, as well as respect and responsibility for, the overall effect. In other words, each person would be listening and personally invested in the balance of the music in terms of its:
musical texture - anticipating and blending their own sound in proportion to the sounds of others,
pitch and melodic line - anticipating and aligning a single pitch or a melody with the pitch of others,
rhythm and tempo - keeping in time with others, anticipating and contributing to the vibrancy of shared rhythm, and
harmony - phrasing and blending their own sound within a shared ownership of harmony and structure.
In the anthropological work of Jerome Lewis, joint music making within the community of hunter gathers involved singing to their homeland - the nature around them in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Each level of richness of the equatorial forest was represented in their complex music, so that within communal music making, many rhythms and melodies were sung, balanced, and harmonised together. If one person protruded or was conspicuous, the precious balance of the musical ecosystem was lost and that person would be known as, ‘an energy thief’.
In music education in the UK, different types of music tend to require different kinds of musical interaction. These might include:
playing in time with others, focussing mainly on synchrony and tight coordination,
holding a completely different line and harmonising, with additional demands on cognitive control, or,
alternating with each other, with room for greater individual expression, improvisation and flexibility.
Each of these examples emphasises what could be loosely described as a different musical skillset, but at the heart of all of these examples is the need for: empathy and ‘theory of mind’ - being able to read the intentions of others and respond accordingly,
Musical notation, teamwork and empathy
If we feed a child nourishing food, we can say this has enhanced their health.
If we place a child into stimulating musical training, we can say this has enhanced their empathy.
If we place a child into an intervention which teaches them to read musical notation, we can say this has improved their reading skills.
There is a clear pattern of cause and effect, but millions of years of evolution have primed us to respond to optimal experiences that promote health, empathy and communication. This is why children are known to respond positively to an enriched environment (and why an enriched environment is also known to accelerate learning in animals, such as mice and rats).
A more worrisome situation arises when children from disadvantaged social backgrounds, whose fundamental needs of adequate nutrition, shelter and safety (physical, social and psychological), may not have been addressed, are placed into underspecified musical interventions where they are expected to thrive. This may be why many music education research studies have achieved such mixed results (see Hallam and Himonides, 2022 for a comprehensive review).
Closing thoughts
In the Rhythm for Reading Programme, the safety of the children is always the top priority, and this includes ensuring that on a weekly basis they experience a strong sense of:
belonging - through working as a team, and coordinating with the specially composed music in a consistent way,
fluency and ease - through reading simple notation enriched by patterns, repetition and novelty,
happiness and enthusiasm - through participating in shared moments of collective joy.
To read about the extraordinary impact of the Rhythm for Reading programme on children’s reading comprehension click here.
To book a call and discuss group teaching and the needs of children in your school, click here.
Breath is an important part of the Rhythm for Reading programme. We use our voices as a team in different ways and this engages our breath. In the early stages of the programme we use rapid fire responses to learn the names of musical notes and our breath is short, sharp and strong - just like the sounds of our voices.
This post describes the tenth of ten Rhythm for Reading programme sessions. By this stage in the reading intervention, everyone in the group can sight-read both simple and comparatively complex music notation with ease and confidence. To do this, our eyes are glued onto the board, our voices are synchronised and we’ve gelled through teamwork.
By nine years of age, children have assimilated a vast amount of information about their culture simply by learning through experience. Enculturation is a particularly powerful form of deep learning that shapes children’s attitudes and perceptions of the world in which they are growing up. Through working in many schools, I’ve observed that by the age of nine years, children have, through this process of enculturation developed a strong emotive response to the concept of ‘teamwork’.
The Rhythm for Reading Programme creates an environment that allows pupils to focus their attention right from the start. They learn to read music by repeating, reviewing and practising key concepts each week, consistent with the principle of ‘spaced practice’. Consistent rehearsal of musical notes using visual images, as well as hearing and saying the note names, illustrates the principle of ‘dual coding’. The programme is built on a cumulative structure that prioritises fluency, as well as a light ‘cognitive load’ and there is a gradual increase in the complexity of tasks within the context of working together as a strong and enthusiastic team.
References
Hallam, S. and Himonides, E (2022) The Power of Music: An exploration of the evidence, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers
NB References to Jerome Lewis are from personal notes taken during public lectures given by Radical Anthropology Group, Department of Anthropology, University College London.
The importance of respect lies at the heart of school ethos and is the foundation for cooperative behaviour and positive attitudes towards learning. In practice, it is possible to cultivate these positive attitudes deliberately, particularly in early reading development if sufficient empathy and sensitivity exists. This means acknowledging cultural diversity - both in depth and breadth, and recognising the linguistic richness of the school community.
Confidence in learning is one of the greatest gifts that education can offer children, but this too requires empathy. Advantaged children start school socially well-adjusted and ready to learn, whereas disadvantaged children lag behind their classmates in this respect. For example, effective teaching that models thinking and reasoning is essential for disadvantaged children, when their attainment is behind age expectation in early reading development. In this post I look at ways in which a focus on empathy breaches social disadvantage and boosts reading comprehension.
Empathy
Let us remind ourselves that the first relationship that infants have is critical to development, because it precedes their own character formation and the sense of self. The primary caregiver is usually the mother in the first weeks of life, but not always. These early weeks of engagement with the infant are thought to influence the child’s development based on two types of maternal caregiving: sensitivity and intrusiveness.These qualities exist at opposite ends of a continuum and there is a general consensus that if the primary caregiver is sensitive about one third of the time, then the child will be socially well-adjusted and attach securely to the mother-figure. Sensitivity refers to the mother’s ability to empathise with her child, to infer her child’s basic requirements, as well as to respond to the child’s need to be soothed or to engage playfully. Traditionally, mothers have responded to their infants’ needs and desires by singing to them, playing peek-a boo style games and reciting stories. The effects of these activities on the developing brain of the infant have been researched and may help us to understand how to support the young children who struggle with early reading when they start school.
Reading Comprehension
The effect of storytelling on the human brain was first reported in 2010 by Silbert and Hasson. The research used a brain scanner to record brain activity as each participant listened to a story. The findings showed, perhaps unsurprisingly that in the auditory areas responsible for processing sound, the brain waves tracked the voice of the person reading the story. However, language areas of the brain and the areas responsible for the sense of self and others, lagged behind the auditory areas. The authors thought that the meaning of the story was being shaped by these slower processes. Further research showed that inserting nonsense words into the story scrambled the areas of the brain, assumed to be involved in processing context and comprehension (Silbert and Hasson, 2010).
According to the well known Simple View of Reading Model (Gough and Tumner, 1986), two foundational skills: linguistic comprehension and decoding are essential for the development of reading comprehension. Decoding is complex: it involves sounding our letters (transforming graphemes into phonemes and syllables) and then blending these into words (Ehri 1995; 1998). Even though individual differences affect the development of decoding, researchers assert that ability in decoding is closely aligned with reading comprehension skill (Garcia and Cain, 2014).
However, individual differences in terms of control of working memory, control of inhibition and the ability to update and adapt with flexibility to the development of the text affect children’s reading comprehension and researchers now think that these abilities also account for the difficulties with decoding as well (Ober et al., 2019). How might teachers make use of this information in a classroom scenario?
Empathy and comprehension in child development
Imagine for a moment that two children have been playing together with a spaceship. The adult supervising them hears that one child has monopolised the toy and the other child is crying in protest. To contain the situation the adult acknowledges and describes the feelings of each child and invites the two children to:
read one another’s feelings by looking at their facial expressions,
ask why their friend is feeling this way,
imagine how they could make this situation better, and
figure out a way to share the spaceship.
These are important steps because the children then take on a deeper sense of responsibility for:
self-regulating their own behaviour,
monitoring their friend’s feelings as well as their own, and
planning how they might play together to avoid this happening again.
Through playing together, under sensitive professional guidance, these children are able to develop important life skills such as cooperation, learning to adapt to each other’s feelings, as well as planning and executing joint actions in the moment.
It’s also important to recognise that many children do not receive nuanced guidance from adults. Investment in early years provision and training is vital to address the effects of an exponential rise in social and economic disadvantage, but also, sensitivity to culturally and linguistically diverse children for example of asylum seekers and refugees is just as important. Children and adolescents who receive empathic guidance from adults, would for example need to be trusted by the parents of those children, and need to be appropriately culturally and linguistically informed (Cain et al., 2020).
The most important attribute of empathy is that it involves one person being able to connect their personal experiences with those of another individual. Learning about empathy under sensitive adult guidance promotes the development of inhibitive control. Control of inhibition strengthens working memory. Stability and strength in working memory fosters flexibility in thinking. Each of these executive functions lays strong foundations for the development of inference, fluency, and comprehension in reading behaviour, as Maryanne Wolf says,
An enormously important influence on the development of reading comprehension in childhood is what happens after we remember, predict and infer: we feel, we identify, and in the process we understand more fully and can’t wait to turn the page. (Wolf, 2008, p.132)
The adaptive benefit of empathy
The social benefits of empathy are wide-ranging and in terms of human evolution, the ability to act collectively, maintain social bonds and close ties with others has most likely helped our forebears to envision and execute large scale plans for the benefit of a whole community. For example, collections of animal skeletons have led researchers to conclude that more than 20,000 years ago, parties of hunter gatherers had developed killing techniques, honed over generations to take advantage of the seasonal movement of horses. In one site in France, more than 30,000 wild horses were slaughtered, some were butchered, but many were killed unnecessarily and were left to rot (Fagan, 2010).
Humans are like other mammals in the way that we are able to synchronise and move together. When humans gather socially and dance together this behaviour fosters empathy and social cooperation (Huron, 2001;2003).
Indeed, these types of activities have been shown to enhance the development of empathy and school readiness in young children (Ritblatt et al., 2013; Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009;2010), children in primary school (Rabinowitch et al., 2013), and after only six weekly sessions of ten minutes of synchronised movement, entrained to background music, research findings showed significant improvements in reading comprehension and fluency (Long, 2014).
Bringing this back to empathy again, a large scale study involving 2914 children showed that the benefits of shared musical activity were associated with the development of inhibitory control and a reduction of behaviour issues, particularly among socially disadvantaged children (Alemán et al., 2017).
Summary
Our human brains are wired to be social. Our ancestors worked cooperatively and were able to read their environment and infer the seasonal movements of animals. They planned, coordinated and executed hunting plans with devastating precision. Our ability as modern humans to read printed language with fluency, ease and comprehension is perhaps the most advanced act of human social collaboration of all, as it allows us to receive an enormous volume of information from each other about challenges that face us as a global collective. To what extent are we willing to empathise, to infer, to plan and to work together for our common good in an era that demands we now find our common purpose and act upon it?
Why not read about case studies of the rhythm-based approach in schools? Then click here to find out more about the Rhythm for Reading Programme and discuss it with me in person.
If you have enjoyed the themes in this post keep reading.
Spoken language plays a central role in learning. Parents, in talking to their children help them to find words to express, as much to themselves as to others, their needs, feelings and experiences.
‘As well as being a cognitive process, the learning of their mother tongue is also an interactive process. It takes the form of continued exchange of meanings between self and others. The act of meaning is a social act.’ (Halliday, 1975: 139-140)
In their highly influential study of vocabulary development in the early years, Hart and Risley (1995) showed that parents in professional careers spoke 32 million more words to their children than did parents on welfare, accounting for the vocabulary and language gap at age 3 and the maths gap at age 10 between the children from different home backgrounds.
Mythical tales of abandonment, involving fear of the jaws of death followed by the joy of reunion are familiar themes in stories from all around the world. Sound is a primal medium of connection and communication via mid brain processes that are rapid, subjective, subtle and subconscious. Similarly, the telling of stories, the recitation of poems and songs are also examples of how auditory signals are woven together to communicate for example fear, distress and joyful reunion, or other emotions.
References
Alemán et al (2016) The effects of musical training on child development: A randomised trial of El System in Venezuela, Prevention Science, 18 (7), 865-878
Cain, M. et al (2019) Participatory music-making and well-being within immigrant cultural practice: Exploratory case studies in South East Queensland, Australia, Leisure Studies, 39 (1), 68-82
Ehri , L.C. (1995) Phases of development in learning to read words by sight. Journal of Research in Reading, 18 (2) 116-125
Ehri, L. C.(1998) Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is essential for learning to read words in English. In J.L. Metal & L.C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp.3-40). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Fagan, B. (2010) Cro-Magnon: How the ice age gave birth to the first modern humans, New York, Bloomsbury Press.
Frith, U. And Frith, I (2001) The biological basis of social interaction. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 2001, 10, 151-155.
Gough, P.B. and Tumner, W.E. (1986) Decoding, Reading and Reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7 (1), 6-10
Huron, D. (2001) Is music and evolutionary adaptation? ANYAS, 930 (1), 43-61
Huron, D. (2006) Sweet anticipation. The MIT Press
Kirschner, S. & Tomasello, M. (2009) Joint drumming: Social context facilitates synchronisation in preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102 (3), 299-314
Kirschner, S. & Tomasello, M. (2010) Joint music-making promoted prosocial behaviour in 4-year old children. Evolution and Human Behaviour, 31 (5) 354-364
Long, M. (2014) ‘I can read further and there’s more meaning while I read.’: An exploratory stud investigating the impact of a rhythm-based music intervention on children’s reading. RSME, 36 (1) 107-124
Ober et al (2019) Distinguishing direct and indirect influences of executive functions on reading comprehension in adolescents. Reading psychology, 40 (6), 551-581.
Rabinovitch, T., Cross, I. and Bernard, P. (2013) Longterm musical group interaction has a positive effect on empathy in children. Psychology of Music, 41 (4) 484-498.
Ritblatt, S. et al (2013) Can music enhance school readiness socioemotional skills? Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 27 (3), 257-266.
Silbert, G.J. and Hasson, U. (2010) Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Proc. Nate Acad. Sci. USA 107, 14425-14430
Wolf, M, (2008) Proust and the Squid: The story and science of the reading brain, London, UK, Icon Books
The child’s task is to construct the system of meanings that represents his own model of social reality. This process takes place inside his own head; it is a cognitive process. But it takes place in contexts of social interaction, and there is no way it can take place except in these contexts. As well as being a cognitive process, the learning of their mother tongue is also an interactive process. It takes the form of continued exchange of meanings between self and others. The act of meaning is a social act. (Halliday, 1975: 139-140)
Echoing Halliday’s beautiful description of a child’s construction of a model of his social world, the link between talking, the development of vocabulary and reading comprehension was made by Hart and Risley in their book, ‘Meaningful Differences in Everyday Experience of Young American Children’ (1995). In these studies, they focused on word frequency counts and the number of conversational turns between adults and children. It was ten years later when researchers showed the importance of the quality of the interaction between adults and children for the development of language skills, and thus established that educational outcomes for children were built on the foundations of both speaking and listening.
Language development
Decades before Hart and Risley’s landmark study, the Plowden Report had emphasised the importance of spoken language in learning.
Spoken language plays a central role in learning. Parents, in talking to their children help them to find words to express, as much to themselves as to others, their needs, feelings and experiences. Through language children can transform their active, questioning response to the environment in a more precise form and learn to manipulate it more economically and effectively. The complex perceptuo-motor skills of reading and writing are based in their first stages upon speech and the wealth and variety of experience from which effective language develops. (The Plowden Committee, 1967, paragraph 54).
More recently, researchers have measured natural language in the homes of young children using a voice recorder that selected adult words spoken directly to the child, conversational turns - the back and forth of a conversation, the child’s voice and also sounds from televisions and electronic devices.
Whilst the Hart and Risley study showed that the number of words that parents speak to their child, and the number of times adults respond to their child’s voice are of critical importance to language development, a new study was commissioned (Zimmerman et al., 2009) to ask which type of exposure: words, interaction with parents or television, would best predict language development.
The findings showed that exposure to words and interactions with the parents had a significant and positive relationship with language development, whereas exposure to television had a significant and negative association with the development of language skills. When television, words and interactions were analysed together, in order to isolate the most important of these three, it was the interaction with the parents that carried the most influence - the other two variables, word frequency and television were no longer statistically significant.
Parenting styles
In the study, Zimmerman measured Interaction between the child and the parents by ‘turn count’ - in other words: the number of times that the conversation passed between the parent and the child. This metric would probably have been influenced by parenting style. For example, an ‘authoritarian’ parent would be more likely to shut the conversation down using a comment such as, “Because I say so.” Contrastingly, a more ‘authoritative’ parent would be more likely to encourage their child to develop self expression, using language to sustain attention and to develop self-confidence.
In addition to parenting styles, researchers have also considered two important factors which are known to have a positive impact on language development, as well as social and emotional health:
maternal responsiveness (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2001), and
a positive social and emotional environment (Knudsen et al., 2006).
Television and electronic devices occupy children far more now in 2024 than they did fifteen years ago when Zimmerman’s study was published. As ‘digital natives’ children are introduced to screens from the age of four months, and hours of exposure to screens continue to accumulate not only in the home, but also in the classroom, once the child starts school.
Screen time
According to recent research (Muppalla, 2023), children who engaged in screen time for more than two hours per day were associated with an increased chance of developing behavioural problems and a poorer vocabulary. Other factors such as a decrease in young people’s engagement with nature and the outdoors may account for increased concerns about mental health and well-being. However, among children of primary school age, concerns about anxiety, depression and aggression have been associated with excessive use of gaming, general screen use and television respectively.
There are various factors to consider, but particularly so if parents use ‘screen time’ as a reward, as there is the additional ‘specialness’ that comes with attaching a high symbolic value to a device even before the child engages with it. The fast-paced and noisy content of certain games, films and TV shows encourage an abrupt level of cognitive and emotional stimulation, which impacts the reward circuitry of the brain (in a similar way to ingesting an addictive substance). The spike in dopamine disrupts the sensitive balance of this brain circuit and can lead to craving behaviours that are associated with addiction. In terms of motivation and attention, the child may withdraw from everyday forms of social engagement with family and friends and their habit may develop into a compulsion, disturbing the delicate balance of the dopamine system even more.
This picture develops further in terms of its complexity if we factor in homework assignments that involve researching a topic on the internet. Children with a gaming habit are likely to struggle to focus on an assignment that does not consummate their ‘need’ to satisfy the gaming compulsion. If siblings share a device at home, one of them may have no choice but to complete the task late into the evening. As screen exposure at night is known to disrupt the wake-sleep cycle, homework assignments that involve using screens may also frustrate parents who are trying to limit their child’s screen time.
Sharing a book
One way to offset the disruptive effects of screens is to put them away and reach for a book. The interaction between a parent and child when sharing a book extends way beyond the narrative - (the telling of the story). In fact, this is an opportunity for the child and parent to get lost in the book together, whether it is fiction or non-fiction. Exploring the illustrations, experiencing the build-up of tension of the structure and the suspense that this evokes offers parents a chance to accompany their child into a new world of ‘firsts’. Perhaps this story will be the first time the parent sees their child:
feel empathy for a character,
consider different possible directions for the plot,
detect the wicked intentions of the villain before these have been revealed in full.
Drilling into the detail of the text, the child might ask their parent about the meanings of words. This could develop into a guessing game or trigger a shared memory that helps a new word to make sense.
When researchers compared two consecutive days: one with and one without book reading, there was a 148 percent increase in the number of parent and child interactions which were specifically related to sharing a book. This concentrated period of interaction with the child is not only very nurturing for their well-being, but it also provides opportunities to share a different pace and style of language.
The language in a book may well be more descriptive and make use of phrases that would not naturally arise in everyday conversation, and would support children in the development of a broad and rich vocabulary. Not only that, but the length and complexity of sentences are more likely to sculpt a child’s attention in a way that everyday spoken language may not (Saracho and Spodek, 2010).
Key points
The Hart and Risley (1995) study showed perhaps surprisingly that infants initiate conversations with their parents more than the parents do. This may happen at the most inconvenient moments for the adults, but if parents are aware that their child needs to interact in order to develop language skills, that would set them up for life: they would probably pay closer attention to these subtle attempts to initiate interaction. The researchers found that the factors most likely to distract the parents included:
noise from the television,
the parent using a mobile phone,
depression and metal health issues.
The type of speech that parents use with their children actually stimulates the middle ear and changes the physiology of the muscles of the child’s head and neck, allowing the face to move in response to the parent’s voice. This beautiful and congruent system of social engagement is hard-wired into humans and all other mammals. It is through interaction between parent and child in the pre-school years that secure attachment bonds and well-adjusted character formation create the foundations for reading well and academic attainment at school.
In the past five years, researchers have found that conversations require active prediction as speech unfolds over time. Listeners anticipate what is coming up in the speaker’s voice as they infer the most likely content and meaning. Listening is very much an active process and involves entraining (matching) rhythmically with the speaker’s voice. This natural aspect of speech is a relatively new area of research in neuroscience (Lakatos et al., 2019) and allows us to understand the role of rhythm within the deeper structures of language and communication.
If this is of interest, click here to discover the impact of a rhythm-based intervention on reading comprehension and click here to book a discovery call.
In their highly influential study of vocabulary development in the early years, Hart and Risley (1995) showed that parents in professional careers spoke 32 million more words to their children than did parents on welfare, accounting for the vocabulary and language gap at age 3 and the maths gap at age 10 between the children from different home backgrounds.
The waiting lists for local child and adolescent mental health services- ‘CAMHS’ are getting longer and longer. Teachers and parents are left fielding the mental health crisis, while the suffering of afflicted children and adolescents deepens with every day that passes. Young people’s mental health challenges cannot be left to fester, as they affect their identity, educational outcomes, parental income and resilience within the wider community. Here are 10 key strategies that parents and teachers can use to support children and adolescents dealing with distressing symptoms of mental health challenges while they are waiting for professional help.
The most important thing that I’ve learned in the past two years is not only to expect the unexpected, but to embrace it. I’ve noticed that the sharpest twists and rockiest turns along the way have often prompted some of the most intriguing insights into the integrated processes that contribute to reading and learning. Wearing my SENCO hat, I strongly believe that the principle of early reading intervention (as opposed to waiting to see whether a learning difficulty will ‘resolve itself’ over time), and a proactive approach, can narrow the gaps that undeniably exist when children enter primary school.
References
Halliday, M. (1975) Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language. London: Edward Arnold
Hart, B. and Risley, T.R. (1995) Meaningful differences in the everyday experiences of young American children, Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brooks Publishing Co.
Knudsen, E. I. et al., (2006) Economic neurobiological and behavioural perspectives on building America’s future workforce. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103 (27) 10155-10162
Lakatos, P., Gross, J. and Thut, G. (2019) A new unifying account of the roles of neuronal entrainment, Current Biology, 29, R850-R905
Muppalla et al (2023) Effects of excessive screen time on child development: An updated review and strategies on management, Cureus 15 (6) e40608. Doe:10.7759/ cures.40608
The Plowden Committee (1967) Children and their primary schools (The Plowden Report). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Available at: http://www.educationendland.org.uk/ plowmen Accessed 8.12.14.
Saracho, O.N. and Spodek, B. (2010) Parents and children engaging in storybook reading, Early Child Development and Care, 180 (10)1379-1389
Tamis-LeMonda et al., (2001) Maternal responsiveness and children’s achievement of language milestones, Child Development 72 (3) 748-767
Zimmerman F. J. et al. (2009) Teaching by listening: The impact of adult child conversations on language development paediatrics, 124 (1) 342-349.
