[Sec] The CLEARR Framework

Written by: Sim Joo Jin

How the framework came about

The problem with teaching English is that language and literacy are complex things. To figure out how to teach them, one needs to break them down into individual skills and concepts. But when you break them down into six areas of language learning and further divide the latter into smaller and smaller categories (i.e. first Learner Outcomes and then Skills, Strategies, Attitudes and Learner Behaviour and Items and Structures), it becomes clear that no one person could possibly know everything there is to put into an EL curriculum. When we developed ELS2010 and ELS2020, one of our goals was to be as explicit as possible about what students need to learn; a teacher could rely on the syllabus to understand what she had to teach.

The funny thing about solutions is that you can count on them to bring along their own set of problems. Given the long list of skills and concepts to teach, how is a teacher supposed to select and integrate them into units so that students can see the relationships among them? How are writing, reading, listening, speaking, representing, viewing, vocabulary, and grammar related? We knew we needed to figure this out and show the way through our own instructional materials.

The CLEARR framework

CLEARR is a blueprint that guides the integration of skills and concepts into cohesive units of learning. It is the skeleton for every unit in Voices At Play, the instructional materials developed to support the implementation of ELS2020 in Secondary schools. CLEARR is an acronym for the four phases of a unit:

• Contextualise, where students begin to explore a theme by learning and using discussion skills;

• Learn and Explore; where students use what they’ve learnt about the theme to support their top-down processing of texts, even as they learn and apply receptive strategies to both comprehend texts and figure out what makes them effective;

• Apply and Respond, where students use what they learnt about both the theme and the type of text to generate their own drafts; and

• Reinforce, where students revise and edit their work and reflect on what they have learnt.

Reflection on innovation

As you can see, CLEARR uses the receptive-productive connection as the linchpin for the scope and sequence of each unit. Yet CLEARR in my mind stands for much more than that, and I would like to share what it has taught me about innovation.

Firstly, I’ve learnt that innovation is play. What I have in mind is like what we do with Lego bricks, Play-doh or wooden blocks. We take whatever we have at hand, and get a feel for how they interact, how they interlock or work together; then we combine them in different ways until something “clicks” and we feel confident enough to continue refining it. In the case of CLEARR, the most important building blocks were ACCOLADE and CLLIPS, the processes and principles from previous syllabi. We asked: How do the different processes and principles work together? Do certain sequences work better than others, given our context? Innovation requires us to play with what we have, and recognize more fully what these existing pieces have to offer.

(On a related note, I think an innovation benefits from a name that invites wordplay. The more “punnable” a name is, the more memorable it becomes; even when people don’t fully understand it, they recall it quite clearly because they associate it with a positive emotion. Over time, people will understand the innovation more and more clearly. Need I say more?)

I learnt that innovation is resilience. Here I am talking about the resilience of the innovation itself, its flexibility in the face of actual use. The process of using CLEARR as a blueprint for the development of units is not unlike testing a new bag: we slot what we need into it – areas of language learning, strategies, approaches – and see if everything fits, distinct from one another but also integrated into a cohesive whole. As we developed unit after unit, we began to appreciate what the framework could do, how it managed to accommodate variety and change. We learn what our innovation is capable of only by actually using it, and this makes us more adept at exploiting its features.

Finally, innovation is community. An innovation becomes something around which critical conversations happen – conversations that bring partners closer. We spent many mornings and afternoons refining CLEARR with the help of colleagues from ELIS and NIE. These were passionate, complex discussions, because everyone wanted a final product we could all fully embrace, and which we could recommend to teachers. Through these discussions we not only developed a tool that we could use, but also developed a deeper understanding of what each team believed in, what we each needed to do, and how we could best support one another. An innovation provides an opportunity for the conversations its users need to have.

Beyond these lessons, the most important thing we’ve learnt about innovation through CLEARR is undoubtedly the importance of teamwork. CLEARR needed a team to build; it needed a team to use it for the development of materials; it needs a team who know it well to help colleagues in school understand and use it. Without people to give it voice, any innovation would be just a hopeful idea.