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This article is about teaching inference in Primary school but the points it raises are valid for our learners. You may find it useful

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Teaching children to read is a complex business. Not only do we need to teach children how to crack the alphabetic reading code by teaching them phonics, we also need to teach them how to infer meaning.

This second task can be much trickier than the first. With decoding there's a clear route mapped out. While it takes some children a bit longer to travel the route, if you stick to the path, in the end you will get there.

But with inference, some children seem to just get it and some really, really don't. And when they don't, it's frustratingly hard to move them on. Why is this?

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Professor Daniel Willingham, the American cognitive psychologist, explains why. It's because inference isn't really a skill that one can practise and get better at in the way that one can practise decoding. Learning how to infer is more of a trick than it is a skill.

Inference tricks

The "trick" of knowing how to infer involves being able to do three things: notice whether or not you are understanding what you read, connecting ideas together and having a wide vocabulary and general knowledge.

As adult "expert" readers, it may seem strange to us that some children do not realise that what they read is meant to make sense. However, if we reflect on what happens when someone learns to read, we can see why some children fail to make that realisation.

When children first start to learn to read, all their attention is caught up with decoding. There is simply no room left in their working memory to also attend to meaning. Teachers compensate for this by rereading and discussing texts after children have decoded it. As children become more fluent decoders and have working memory capacity to spare, most children begin to attend to what it is they are actually reading.

Guessing game

But some don't. They don't realise it is now their job to pay attention to what they are reading and check that they understand what it is saying. This lack of awareness is exacerbated because all of a sudden, children are expected to read in their head. No one has explicitly told them that when you read in your head, you need to pay attention to what you are reading. If something doesn't make sense, then it's your job to go back and reread it again.

What our novice readers have failed to appreciate is that writers, like speakers, leave bits out and expect us to join the dots, assuming we have the knowledge to do so. But speakers usually monitor if we seem to understand and will clarify what they are saying if we seem puzzled, by adding in extra detail or giving fuller explanations.

Books are, of course, completely unaware of whether or not we are understanding what we read. So, therefore, the onus is on the reader to monitor their own understanding and go back and reread if they don't.

Modelling inference

As teachers, then, we need to model how we notice that the author has left out information, how we notice that a sentence does not (yet) make sense. We need to make our thinking process explicit.

Children who do not realise the need for checking their understanding and taking action when things don't make sense will either blame the book and say it's boring or blame themselves, thinking they are just not as clever as other people. Or possibly both.

This brings us to Willingham's second trick: making connections. Because authors leave out information when they write, readers need to make connections between ideas, putting back in what the author has omitted. When we don't understand something, that is often because we haven't made a connection that the author assumed that we would.

So thinking about what that connection might be can be a really good strategy. Willingham uses this trio of sentences to show the processes we go through to join the dots:

Bill came to my house yesterday. He dropped a cup of coffee. My rug is a mess.

Connections and corrections

The reader is expected to draw on their life experience and general knowledge to connect these three sentences together. In this case, the reader is expected to make the connection that the cup of coffee that Bill dropped is the cause of the mess on the rug, even though this is not stated. It is also assumed that the reader knows that coffee is dark liquid likely to stain a rug and that such stains are not usually desirable.

The reader will need to access their long-term memory and retrieve information about coffee, rugs, stains and mess; not just what these things are - though that, too, is important - but how they inter-relate.

The writer is assuming that the reader can make the following connections: dropping a cup of coffee would cause this dark brown liquid to escape on to the floor; sometimes, floors are covered with rugs; if the coffee fell onto the rug, its colour would remain - stain the rug - even after the rug had been cleaned; people usually clean up after spillages, so when the person says that the rug is a mess, they are most likely referring to the stain as being "the mess" rather than the cup and liquid, which have already been tidied up; this is because Bill came yesterday; that means the writer is writing about something that happened a day ago, and people do not usually leave a mess like that for a whole day, they usually clean it up straight away.

Making things obvious

All of this is so obvious to us that we don't even notice we are making these connections and are baffled when children fail to make them.

In order to help children understand the need to make connections, teachers need to think out loud. They need to articulate how they are making connections between different elements of the text, thus making explicit the thought processes involved in making inferences.

However, this is a very under-used teaching strategy. Instead, teachers often ask questions of the children rather than model their own ways of making sense of text.

If children are going to be able to learn this way, they will need a wide general knowledge. A child's background knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of their reading comprehension.

While some children gain this at home, for others this will mainly be learned at school in lessons from foundation subjects. However, in some schools, children who have problems with inference are taken out of foundation subjects in order to do interventions on inference!

This is counter-productive; it is denying children access to the one thing that will really make a difference to their ability to make inferences - strong background knowledge.

This is why we should see exposure to a rich curriculum and explicit modelling of inference as the best kind of intervention that we can provide for children who struggle with inference.
Clare Sealy is a headteacher in London

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Inference: how to teach it in primary school

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Teaching children to read is a complex business. Not only do we need to teach children how to crack the alphabetic reading code by teaching them phonics, we also need to teach them how to infer meaning. This second task can be much trickier than the first.

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This website publishes a short story and emails it to you every Friday. They are generally written by young women so may engage your learners.

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'She listens hard...' Read "The Fox' by Hannah Persaud...

Sara has known the town clock face her whole life, but tonight it seems changed. The hands move through five minutes whilst she's standing at the window watching, yet she cannot see them moving. It waits for her to blink. Gotcha.

'It's late, come to bed.' She turns away at his voice.

In bed Scott throws an arm over her chest and she shifts. She wonders again what it would be like to sleep rightfully alone. He snores and she pushes him onto his side. The rain has eased and she can hear the faint ticking of the clock outside; its bright face casting a half moon of light onto the floor. The proximity of the clock to the house had been a selling point; apparently the equivalent to buying a property across from the Acropolis or next door to the Eiffel tower. Back when they existed. The constant ticking irritates her.

Passing time infiltrates her sleep. Tick tock. It's not the clock, it's you, he said. Perhaps he's right. The clock keeps everything in order, chimes at 7am to wake the town, at 10pm to signal sleep. The weather report runs constantly on a screen below. More accurate than the MET office ever was, apparently. Temperatures rising from February to August to a maximum of 28 degrees, dipping down from September to January. Snow on the 24 th of December. Tomorrow, the 1 st of March, a spring breeze will ease its way across the town. Their smokeless barbeque stands to attention. Remarkable, how accurate the clock is. Perhaps it's controlling the weather, she'd whispered at a dinner party once, after too much wine. Silence had crept across the shocked table. You can't say things like that, he'd reprimanded her later. Do you want them to ask us to leave? Of course not, she'd said. But saying something out loud can make it real.

Now, in the ticking clicking shadows, the familiar anger rises. Tip toeing from the room she walks the corridor and checks the bedrooms. One, two, three. Each bathed in the clock's glow. Beds made up with fresh white sheets. They were supposed to hold messy children, sprawling limbs, tousled hair. Tired voices complaining about the light. We're sorry, the doctor had said, but the tests show that at least one is flawed. We can't be sure about the other two. They may not be perfect. She'd bitten her lip and swallowed the words that sprung dangerously close to the edge of her tongue. But what if I don't want perfect? Afterwards, she'd walked the circumference of the town for hours, following the 20-foot high boundary walls.

Slipping into bedroom two, she climbs between the covers. Three little bears. A lifetime since her family of five became a reality of two. She stares out through the gap in the curtains that she opens every morning, closes every evening. Resting amongst the unspoken dreams of childhood, the scar on her wrist itches. It pesters her since she tried to dig out the microchip. What good did you think it would do you? the doctor had asked when she'd lain in the hospital bed, wrist stitched up. You nearly hit an artery. She'd wanted to lose herself in a drunken stupor, exceed their ten unit a week allowance. The chip registers blood alcohol levels immediately, forces the body to eject the contents of its stomach in excruciating spasms; like the contractions of her induced labour after three beating hearts were silenced. She'd almost bled to death.

In bed she can see the black numbers on the clock face, 11.54pm. She runs a hand over her flat stomach and remembers the clarity of the scan; tiny eyelashes, soft downy hair upon their bodies. The birthmark on the side of Ethel's face (they'd told her not to name them.) Her deformed right arm, missing its perfect little fingers. Not perfect, they'd said. She'd leaned against the Pregnacare machine and wondered if she could leave, have them somewhere else. She stayed. She missed being hooked up to the machine after they disconnected her. Missed what it promised. Rest Safe in the Knowledge That We Have Your Care at Heart said the slogan on the side. For months afterwards she'd walked past the pregnancy clinic and stared in at the women sitting there, right arms suspended in the air, magazines on their laps and Life Fluid dripping into their veins. They used to leave it to the woman's body to do the job, the technician explained the first time he'd hooked her up, can you believe it? She saw them afterwards, clutched their tiny bodies to her chest. They'd tranquilised her and when she'd woken they were gone. You can try again, they told her later. Perhaps this was an anomaly.

11.58pm. She shuts her eyes against the past and feels the mattress dip. Their small hands slip into hers. Sleep comes.

In the morning her cup of tea is not beside her. He always remembers this. Something's different. She holds her breath. No. There's no way. Rising from the bed she leaves an indentation of her body on the mattress. Beside it are three smaller depressions, curved against her own like question marks. The doctors were wrong, you can't just start again. They grew up in the shadows.

She listens hard. It is absolutely silent. She pulls back the curtains to reveal a radiant sky. The dark hands of the motionless clock face are frozen at 12.01am. The weather panel below is blank. No date. Standing on her tiptoes she peers down the street at the houses that line it. Not a soul in sight. She is about to turn when a movement catches her eye. Leaning forward, she bashes her head against the window. To open it would violate clause 54 of their contract, jeopardise the entire equilibrium of their passive house. Not to mention the risk of contamination. What contaminates? She'd asked the estate agent. He'd had to call his supervisor to provide her with an answer. Pollen, bacteria blown in from the other side, he'd reported. Then, did you know that in the past, houses used to use electricity from a grid?' Some of the old houses still exist - he waved his hand towards the fields in the distance - out there. Empty of course. It's part of the reason that the thing happened. Even she knew that. The unstoppable stain of the human footprint. Now stopped. Would it be so awful to be part of something? She asked Scott later. To leave a mark? Scott had lowered his eyes to the floor.

A lizard scuttles out from beneath the fence. Lizards only make an appearance on the 29 th of July, the hottest day of the year. Just how hot is it outside? It's only March. She pushes the door to their bedroom open cautiously. Diluted light casts a murky glow upon the bed. Holding her breath, she walks over and looks down at her husband. His eyes flutter lightly against something. Fleetingly, she considers climbing in beside him. Holding him. But a movement from the doorway distracts her and she sees the familiar shadows clustered there, watching. It is too late to forgive him his collusion in their ending.

The beeping of the tannoy pierces the silence. Running downstairs, Sara scans her wrist against the code reader and presses the receiver button

'Do not be alarmed.' The voice of the gatekeeper infiltrates the hallway. 'The clock is down for maintenance. Stay indoors and refrain from contacting anybody.' Outside a siren screeches.

'Message received.' She speaks into the receiver on the wall and presses the button.

'What's going on?' Scott emerges, eyes puffy from sleep. She heads into the kitchen, he follows.

'The clock's broken,' she switches on the coffee machine.

'Broken?' He stares.

'Yes, broken.' Reaching into the fridge she brings out the plastic containers labelled 'Breakfast' and breaks the seals with a knife.

'Shit. That wasn't supposed to happen. It's never happened!'

'Well it has now,' she says helpfully, putting his tray in front of him with a little more force than necessary.

'What time is it?' he asks, sitting down. Sara casts him a slow look.

'The. Clock. Is. Broken.'

'Shit.' He shakes his head. They are not allowed clocks in their houses. If everybody had their own clock, how would we know which was the right time? said the Governors. Nobody argued. They'd all studied history in school. Incidents were well documented. Anarchy is a forbidden word.

'Anyway...' She pulls up the blinds to reveal sunshine so bright that it reflects off the steel surfaces and scorches stars into their retinas. 'I think we have bigger problems. The weather's broken.' Scott stands and peers through the window.

'Good lord, I think you're right.' Though religion is banned, the use of such profanity is common within the privacy of one's own home. It's deliciously indulgent. Sara's eye is drawn to something coming down the street. In silence they stand waiting for it to reveal itself. At first she thinks it human, but as it draws closer she realises it is too small.

'It's walking on its arms and legs,' Scott says. 'And it's covered in fur.' He wrinkles his nose. Sara can make out its ears now, triangular and small. A long pointed snout.

'I recognise it from the books,' she exclaims, running to the lounge. 'Look.' She holds out "Antiquated Animals: Edition 53", then crouches down to rifle through it. 'A fox! See?' She holds out the book to Scott who eyes the photograph sceptically.

'They're supposed to be extinct, the last sighting was 53 years ago.' He shakes his head. She walks to the window, and as the fox draws level with their house it pauses, turns its head and looks her straight in the eyes. She takes a step back.

'Well, either they've got their facts wrong, or we're going mad.' She slams the book down on the counter and storms upstairs. She sits on the end of the bed in room three. It doesn't make sense...unless the gateway is broken, and the fox has come in from outside. The only generation that came from outside is long dead. What if they're wrong? What if there are foxes out there - and houses that still use energy from a grid? What if there are living people out there who survived the Great Death? She puts her head in her hands.

The buzzer echoes.

'The clock is being repaired. Do not leave your property. Supplies will be delivered to your doorstep as usual. Do not panic.' Before she hears Scott disconnect the speaker, a noise on the street brings him running. A second shot rings out. They reach the window just in time to see the fox stagger a final step before falling. Its head lolls sideways, face turned towards their house. Rusty fur bleeding. A white van cruises up the road and pauses. Within seconds a team of cleaners remove all evidence of the animal. Her eyes itch and words lodge in her throat. She closes the curtains.

'Well if it was a fox then it was vermin. Better off dead.' Scott doesn't look at her as he heads back downstairs. The urge to sleep is overwhelming. She lies back against the pillows, but a noise from the windowsill rouses her. Looking over, the curtain twitches, as if caught in a breeze. These houses are airtight. It twitches again, followed by a tiny mournful sound, like mewing. She leaps to the curtain and tugs it aside, but all she finds is a vanishing handprint against the glass.

Downstairs Scott is moving furniture around, hauling things into a bag.

'What are you doing?' she peers over the bannister.

'Preparing for us to go into the cellar.'

'Don't you think you're overreacting?' she leans farther out. 'I'm sure they'll fix it soon.' He looks up, fixing her with a withering stare.

'They're not telling us the whole story. They transitioned the calendar from Gregorian to a new modified version some time ago. I heard them talking. The extra day every four years was causing problems.' The authorities don't like anomalies. They get rid of things that do not conform. 'There were glitches.' Scott's not allowed to talk about his work. Panic laces his voice. 'There were concerns...this is the first leap year since it went live. They couldn't be sure how it would respond, they weren't sure what to expect.' He drags the bag across the floor.

'What happens if it goes wrong?' She takes a step down. He drops the bag and stands back, looks up.

'If? It did go wrong Sara. Have you been walking around in a bubble? Now we're stuck in the middle of a day that shouldn't exist and it's blown everything.' He gestures outside. 'They thought they fixed it. The implications are catastrophic; it could take weeks to fix. Everything depends on that clock - the weather patterns, security systems. Our health.'

Sara presses a hand to the back of her neck. She's been such a fool. He's still talking as she moves to their bedroom and reaches for the rucksack. The security systems. That's why the fox got in. That's why they've been told to stay indoors. If the systems are down, the gateway is open. If things are getting in, that means that things can get out. They were always taught that leaving was a choice. Nobody has ever chosen it. That doesn't mean it can't be done. She feels a flush spread across her face. She pauses. What if things are no better out there? What if this is as good as it gets? As she bends to tie her shoelace she feels the distinct clammy skin of little fingers grasping hers, tugging her towards the door.

'Where are you going?' He trails her through the kitchen.

'I'm leaving.' She wrestles with the key, heaves against the doorframe as the door unsticks itself. A wall of hot air plasters her clothes to her skin.

'You can't do that.' Scott is beside the door, but she is outside now and she knows he won't break orders. She considers her goodbye. She wants him to remember her choosing.

Sara does not look back as she walks up the deserted street. The sun is high and she is aware of three scampering shadows behind her. The gateway is open for the first time and the wasteland on the other side emerges, a trail of smoke rising from the roofs in the distance. Beyond, a flash of bright clothing blows on a breeze. She squeezes the small hands that have slid themselves into hers, tightening her grip as she draws closer to the boundary line. In the blistering heat she squints through the sunlight that is refracting off the open iron gates and the metal barrel of the gatekeeper's gun.

Hannah Persuad's debut novel "The Codes of Love" will be published by Muswell Press in print and digital edition and by Bolinda in audio in February 2020.

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'She listens hard...' Read "The Fox' by Hannah Persaud... Sara has known the town clock face her whole life, but tonight it seems changed. The hands move through five minutes whilst she's standing at the window watching, yet she cannot see them moving. It waits for her to blink. Gotcha.

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Even the most carefully prepared pupil can sit in front of an exam paper and become disorientated. Despite all our best efforts, this can severely affect the grade the pupil achieves.

So it's worth giving pupils explicit guidance about how they should navigate the paper. At AQA we have prepared the following for those taking our English exams.

GCSE exam: use annotation time wisely

It's helpful to remind your students to annotate the reading extracts during the advised reading time of 15 minutes for both papers. It's easy to assume that students know how to make useful annotations, but it's sensible to point out the obvious effective strategies.

For Paper 1, where the source is just one text, remind your students to annotate or highlight key words or phrases that they may want to refer back to when answering either the use-of-language question (Question 2) or the structure question (Question 3).

This helps with quick referencing of textual detail required for success in both of these questions.

'Chunk' the reading assessment

Equally important for GCSE English language is the obvious reminder that the reading assessment (Paper 1 and 2, questions 1-4) is "chunked out".

This helps students to navigate their way through the unseen texts by reading shorter sections before having to respond to the whole text.

There are two pointers for students here.

The first is, once they have read the whole text, to check they're using the right section of text for each answer (specific line references are provided for Paper 1, questions 1, 2 and 4, and specific line references and specific source texts are provided for Paper 2, questions 1 and 3).

Secondly, for Paper 2, where two source texts are provided, the annotation or highlighting during the advised reading time should be focused on similarities or differences in viewpoint. This will help flag up clear points for exploration in question 2 and question 4, and save time.

It's also worth reminding your students that it's only Question 4 that requires exploration of methods used to convey the similarities or differences.

The writing response

For both papers, the writing response in question 5 is rewarded for the content, the way in which it's organised and for technical accuracy.

The best advice for students in a time-pressured environment is to plan what they intend to write about before they make a start. Planning helps students to ensure that the written response is clear in focus and has a strong sense of the purpose. It also helps them maintain control in their writing which, in turn, supports clarity of communication.

For Paper 2, question 5, the writing task requires a viewpoint and the ability to work through different perspectives. Planning for this style of writing helps students to think about the shape of their point of view and avoid easy mistakes, such as contradicting themselves, which can undermine clarity, purpose and crafting.

For both writing questions, it's better to a have a plan followed by shorter, well-crafted responses that communicate clearly rather than longer responses that lose their thread.

Our Hub materials from summer 2018 provide very useful advice and can be found on our website.
Deborah Pearson is head of curriculum, English, at AQA

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GCSE English: Quick tips from an exams expert

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Even the most carefully prepared pupil can sit in front of an exam paper and become disorientated. Despite all our best efforts, this can severely affect the grade the pupil achieves. So it's worth giving pupils explicit guidance about how they should navigate the paper.

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Please feel free to post to this Padlet. I will be sharing it with other English tutors too.

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Course 12th April

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AfL approaches to planning TLA for progress - English

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The perspective which underpins this lens is based on the premise that our own experiences as learners can influence our behaviour as teachers. This may have a positive or negative impact but the important point is that an ability to use our autobiographical lens will enable us to identify these personal drivers and therefore review our practices.

In the following video Jenny Mackness presents her experience of blogging for reflective practice as an activity to facilitate the autobiographical lens. In the video we learn how Jenny has used the medium of blogging to examine her own personal pedagogies as an outcome of being an active participant within massive open online courses (MOOCs)

T
Transcript of autobiograhical lens video "I have been a teacher for more than 40 years, so reflective learning has always been on the cards and I am familiar with reflective learning cycles such as the Gibbs Reflective Cycle and the work of people like Donald Schon who is known for his insights into reflective learning. "I have also worked as a tutor on Oxford Brookes online Reflective Learning course with Peter Jackson and Jenny Moon, which was when I first put into words how I would define reflective learning and recorded this in this blog, which I created to accompany this course. "Blogging is a wonderful tool for reflective learning. I have been blogging fairly consistently since my first MOOC experience in 2008, in another blog which I call Jenny Connected. The title is related to a growing realisation that reflective learning can be enhanced through connection with others across the web. "Stephen Brookfield has written that autobiographical self-reflection is fraught with dangers. We all have blind spots in our work as teachers - practices and assumptions that we never investigate. "The openness of blogging and the possibility of encountering alternative perspectives is a way avoiding these blind spots. Even if not many people read my blog, or if I don't get many comments on my blog, the very act of openly writing for an 'invisible' audience means that I have to reflect on what I think, what I do and why I think and act in the way I do. Through blogging I surface my tacit understanding and record it - and over time I will develop a history of blog posts that tell my individual learning story. "For me perhaps the best thing about blogging is that it is my own personal space. I am in control. I can choose to share or not to share my reflections, to be alone in a big open space or in the crowd in a similar space. And there are many people I can learn from in the 'blogosphere'."

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Introduction to reflection, Brookfield's lenses, multimedia and further resources

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The perspective which underpins this lens is based on the premise that our own experiences as learners can influence our behaviour as teachers. This may have a positive or negative impact but the important point is that an ability to use our autobiographical lens will enable us to identify these personal drivers and therefore review our practices.

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Allocation of marks

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Please complete these task and bring the sheet along to the course

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Hugh Baird College English Planning Teaching and Learning 12.4.19 (AfL approaches)

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Teaching generic skills