The Waggle Dance

Why education needs its scout bees

“Just because teachers are the worker bees of the education system, it doesn’t mean they have to blindly follow the waggle dance.

Word Mapping teachers went looking for something different.

PRE was launched.”

Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN
Founder of the Speech Sound Pics (SSP) Approach in Australia, the first self-paced bidirectional word mapping programme for reception classrooms. 

What is the waggle dance?

When a honeybee finds a valuable source of nectar, it returns to the hive and performs a waggle dance. The dance communicates where the other bees should go.

Most bees follow those directions. It’s an efficient way to exploit a known source.

But not every bee follows the waggle dance.

Some leave the prescribed route and explore. Most of those journeys may produce nothing, but occasionally a scout bee discovers an entirely new source. That discovery can be far more valuable to the colony than another successful journey to somewhere already known.

Rory Sutherland uses this to illustrate the danger of demanding complete conformity within any system. A system that only exploits what it already knows may appear efficient, but it loses its ability to discover something better or adapt when circumstances change.

The waggle dance isn’t the problem.

Blindly requiring every bee to follow it is.

What does this have to do with phonics?

Teachers are expected to follow policy, programme guidance and prescribed teaching sequences. Consistency can be useful. Established routes can work well for many children.

But fidelity to a programme isn’t the same as fidelity to the child.

Teachers started asking what happened when children didn’t progress as expected. They questioned why every child should receive the same amount of explicit instruction, delivered through the same route, when children enter classrooms with very different brains, speech, language, memory and prior knowledge.

They also started looking beyond the limited number of grapheme–phoneme correspondences included within a phonics programme.

English contains hundreds of ways to represent speech sounds in print. Children encounter words containing those representations long before every possible correspondence has been explicitly taught.

The question became:

How can every child see how the sounds and letters connect in any word, whenever they need to know?

Word Mapping teachers went looking for something different

They didn’t suggest that phonics be abandoned.

They explored it more deeply.

They looked at what skilled readers and spellers actually need to do: connect spoken words with written words in both directions.

From speech to print.

From print to speech.

That means identifying the phonemes in the spoken word, identifying the graphemes in the written word and showing how they map to each other, with nothing ignored or left unexplained.

It means asking:

• Whose phonemes are being mapped?

• How is the child’s accent recognised?

• Can the teacher map the alphabetic code for every word, not only words containing previously taught correspondences?

• Is the child still dependent on explicit instruction?

• Has the child begun using their existing knowledge to work out unfamiliar words independently?

• Are reading and spelling being taught as two directions of the same process?

This is bidirectional Word Mapping.

The goal is self-teaching

The purpose of explicit phonics instruction isn’t to keep children dependent on phonics instruction.

It’s to give each child enough knowledge and skill to become self-teaching.

Once children can use what they know to work out unfamiliar words, each successful encounter with print creates new learning. Their own reading begins extending their knowledge of the code. They use strategies such as Set for Variablity. 

Some children reach this phase quickly. Others need more explicit support, more opportunities to map words and more immediate access to the code.

Responsive teaching means giving each child as much explicit instruction as they need, and no more.

It means checking whether learning is happening, rather than assuming that delivering the programme guarantees it.

Why Phonics Reform England was launched

Phonics Reform England was launched to create space for the questions the existing system has failed to answer.

It exists to challenge the idea that greater fidelity to the same prescribed route must always be the solution, regardless of the child or the outcomes.
 

It calls for:

• bidirectional Word Mapping as the primary route to word reading and spelling

• a clear Word Mapping Standard

• better teacher knowledge of the complete English alphabetic code

• recognition of accent variation

• technology that can show the code for any word instantly

• early identification of children at risk of literacy difficulties

• responsive teaching that changes according to what each child needs

• a clear focus on helping every child become a self-teaching reader and speller

This isn’t a return to whole-language teaching.

It isn’t an argument against explicit instruction.

And it isn’t reading reform.

It’s phonics reform.

The established waggle dance showed teachers one route.

Word Mapping teachers explored what lay beyond.

Phonics Reform England exists to share what they discovered.

Watch Rory Sutherland explain the waggle dance

https://theyardstickagency.co.uk/video-library/webinar-in-conversation-with-rory-sutherland-an-insight-into-consumer-behaviour

Don’t blindly follow the waggle dance

Ask questions.

Look at the children.

Examine the outcomes.

Explore what isn’t yet known.

Show the Code™. Don’t Make Them Wait.