Take the long view

There is nothing as devastating as watching your children fail.  Failure is natural, but not when you try and try and try again.  I remember when my son, Josiah failed to learn to read.  He just couldn't remember the letters.  In year 2 his teacher said he wriggled on the mat and couldn't sit still.  Josiah who was placid and happy, got very angry.

It was at that point we got help and a diagnosis.  He would have been around 8 years old?  The school had tried everything, but nothing had worked.  I mean everything that was available like reading recovery, a teacher aide 1-1 teaching alphabet sounds and identification, rainbow reading and a Specialist literacy teacher (3 times a week for 1 hour each time).  Josiah could do all the tricks, he could re-run, he use picture clues, he could even work out missing words from context, but he couldn't read small words consistently and he couldn't read without help.  Basically, he couldn't hear sounds and relate them to letters.  We got Josiah labelled at Child and Adolesent Mental Health by a Phychiatrist.  We were very lucky. We got some counseling for him.   We also paid for him to have the special assessment with a developmental eye specialist.  Also we paid for another private assessment confirming the first.

A wonderful teacher aide left the primary school and trained in the Davis Programme.  It was this programme with this teacher that made the difference.  It was here that in two weeks, he learnt his alphabet letters and sounds.  That in it self is astonishing.  We had the job of continuing the process in helping Josiah learn the 220 or so trigger words that.  It is a big job.  Each word takes 30-40 minutes.  We paid for a teacher aide to do this once a day for a while.  Even with all this we didn’t finish.  However, it was enough to make a difference.

The biggest difference from the Davis Programme was that Josiah was at peace with himself.  He identified as being dyslexic and became his old self.  He accepted who he was and how he was.   He also learnt some tools which he still uses and helps him to focus.  Simple but profound.

Over the next few years, Josiah scored a PAT stanine 9 twice in listening comprehension.  We celebrated as we saw how he had compensated and had become an amazing listener.  I will never forget his Year 5 and 6 teacher the most amazing teacher who took him and treated him as an intelligent and able student.  She allowed him to sit in lessons with her highest reading group and highest maths group.  She affirmed him. 

Now Josiah is in Year 11.  NCEA 1 looms.  Josiah is not worried one bit.  His school has applied for compensations, without a paid diagnosis, purely on assessment information and observations.  Sensible, logical stuff, this is how it should be.  We heard this week that he has been accepted no questions.  Common sense.  Wonderful.  He can use a reader/writer or computer.  He can have a room by himself for exams.  The playing field has been made level.

The thing about Josiah is that he believes he can do anything.  He believes he is a learner.  He knows he is successful.  He doesn’t doubt his ability or his skills.  He knows ways around not being able to read and write.  Learning for him isn’t defined by paper and pencil but by thinking, remembering, creating. 

As a mum, my heart sings.  I remember when he was a little boy and the most important thing was to make sure he loved learning. We talked to him lots.  We took him on trips.   We read to him – a lot.  He listened to stories on tape, then CD and then a kindle.    I never forced him to hold a pencil, I never made him practice senseless letters over and over again.  I never made him read over and over again.  He never had to do homework.  Unless of course he wanted to.   I protected his personhood. Even when he wanted to stop the Davis Programme learning we listened.  Forcing was not an option.  What this journey has shown me is that a passion for learning and listening to the person, working for them and not against their will, is fundamental to success. Trusting my son to know what to do and when has been important. 

Reading and writing may be helpful to learning, but it is not essential.

Sure I am under no doubt that the next few years will be hard work, but isn’t it like that for all learners?  New learning is always hard fought for. 

You don't need a pencil to write or do you?

You don’t need a pencil to write or do you?

“As soon as they hit my class, they are expected to sit down and write,” said one teacher of New Entrants.   “Make sure your students know they are Writers from day one, get them sitting down, with a pencil and get them writing in their exercise book” said a person offering professional development.  These statements seem sensible enough after all that is what teachers do, they teach.  What are your thoughts?

I heard the statements, and I didn’t agree with them.

 Who said humans were ready to write at the age of 5 years?  Who said that the definition of writing includes a pencil and paper? Who said that you had to sit down to write?   Is writing defined by a picture of something you did in the weekend and then a sentence written by a teacher underneath?

Writing is about communicating ideas.  Physically writing words down is one way we can do this.   Many of the students in our learning community come to school without necessarily having used a pencil.  Consider the writing stages, shown here in this link from https://www.kinderplans.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Writing-Stages.png.

There are many such examples if you goggle them.   My point is children don’t all start school ready to write in books with a pencil.  

Consider this approach.  A group of children are interested in fire fighting.  Our teacher aide is a local firefighter.  He brings in helmets for them to use in play.  He talks to the students about different situations he has been called to.  He explains to them that after every call out, the team sits down and records what has happened.   The following day, another teacher walks past this group.  They are sitting around a table.  They yell out, “We are having a meeting about our call out”.  The teacher says, “You will need something to record it in, and goes and gets a book”.  One child takes charge, and starts to write in the book.  It doesn’t matter how she writes, the point is writing it is now meaningful.  Once students have ‘got writing’ and begin to understand the power of it, further instruction can be given to the particular skills needed to evolve their writing.   

Some writers in our learning community haven’t been exposed to story.  Some find it difficult to speak in sentences.  We believe that before a child can write, they need to speak or at least show understanding of communication.   What would happen, if you arrived in a foreign country, and on your first day, the tour guide said you were in charge of writing the request for breakfast, in the foreign language!  How would you feel? 

Writing is about communicating. You will be able to think of many cultures that have an oral tradition of passing down stories.  Are their stories any less valuable?  Of course not!  Writing reflects the ideas, sequence and logic of the writer. To communicate ideas that are important and rich orally makes the writer no less an author than those who write with pencil and paper.

Of course we want all our students to be able to write, it is very useful being able to record ideas even essential.  Lets face it, much of our paranoia over students sitting down with a pencil, and writing from day dot, is brought about by needing to met a summative assessment. That is expectations that all children write at a certain level by a certain age.  Having goals are important, but the goals must be purposeful, meaningful and show progress.  What happened to meaningful learning that is not parroting someone else’s ideas in a robot like fashion? 

Would it not be more purposeful teaching practice, to identify where the child is in their development of writing, and design learning to meet this need?   Developmentally, the child may need to learn to draw first.  They may need to be in an environment where they hear words and are spoken to.  The achievement objectives of the New Zealand Curriculum say “a school’s curriculum is likely to be well designed when – students are helped to build on existing learning and take it to higher levels;  – the long view is taken: each student’s ultimate learning success is more important than the covering of particular achievement objectives”  (TKI, 2015).   I guess that is my real concern, that young children are being expected to learn something before they are ready and in doing so we risk turning them off learning. 

Personally, I love walking into our learning community and seeing groups of children, self managing themselves, learning, some around white boards, writing, others with paper, drawing, others playing in the family corner, designing some clothes for the doll on scrap paper and still others on reading eggs on the ipad.

What do you think?  How do your students travel with writing?  What is their existing learning in writing?  Are they successful communicators of language?

Reference

TKI (2015) - http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/The-school-curriculum-Design-and-review

Dyslexia and Reading Recovery.

RR is only effective if it is monitored correctly and the students are followed even when they have finished their time on the programme. It isn't a cure for children that have not grasped the concept of reading, but I guess it's better than not doing anything. The phonics, whole word debate have been going on for a LONG time, but the most effective way to teach it is to combine both. Using the cues, (pictures, words in context etc), IS actually very important, but will probably only help those who are able to achieve some success in reading. Personally, I believe that a rich oral language programme in the classroom, will teach the child a great deal about reading and writing concepts, too often we have to rush into both and miss out on the EXPERIENCE of the English language.   Ellen Thompson

I also have a son with dyslexia. He is now 15 and still can't read or write formally. He is however very clever and can learn using computer speech to text and vice versa, although this has been a challenge. He spent some time in Reading Recovery and it didn't help him at all. He actually tried everything the school had at the time including a teacher aide taking him through one letter at a time. This did not help. I believe he finds hearing sounds very difficult. In the end the programme or method that did work was the Davis Dyslexia Method by Ronald Davis. This didn't solve all our problems, but it did solve the main one, self esteem. My son found peace with himself at the tender age of 8 knowing he wasn't alone in his struggle to learn the formal part of literacy. The Davis Method also taught him his letters. It was successful. We actually didn't make it through the rest of the 200 plus words, claying them one by one, but we did what we could. I have noticed as he is in an accepting and helpful Modern Learning Community he is flourishing. I wrote a blog about it and posted it last week. If anyone else is interested her is the link. It is very interesting to me as the journey has been difficult but by keeping our eyes on what is really important we have made it through with our son still loving to learn. I believe literacy is more than de-coding words for reading and forming letters for writing. At its core is communication of ideas. This can be done on computers now.  Tara O'Neill (Me)

Reading Recovery has been a popular remedial reading program in Australian schools for many years, but there has been some recent discussion questioning how effective it really is.
The last time Australian children’s reading achievement was benchmarked against that of other countries in 2011, it was the lowest in the English-speaking world. Given the vital importance of literacy it is important we ask ourselves why.
Reading as a ‘natural’ process
Mainstream early literacy teaching and Reading Recovery are both still grounded in the idea that reading is a natural process, and that children learn merely via exposure to print. However, we now know this is not the case. Reading is a complex, learnt skill.
A small number of children do appear to teach themselves to read. Many others are taught before they start school by a family member or preschool teacher.
However, learning the complex, opaque English writing system takes most children several years. Many children simply can’t learn unless they are taught to discern sounds in words and represent them with letters just one or two at a time, and given lots of practice with each pattern.
A wait-to-fail system
After a year of trying, many children still haven’t learnt to read. Children with speech-language and cognitive difficulties fare particularly poorly. Some children who are good at memorising words visually seem to be doing okay at first, but unless they learn to sound out, they are soon falling behind.
Reading Recovery originated in New Zealand as a way to help struggling readers in their second year of schooling. However, its content does not specifically target the main areas in which most beginners struggle – speech sounds and their spellings, or phonics.
Each Reading Recovery session involves reading familiar and unfamiliar books, with encouragement to guess from pictures, first letters and context. Students also assemble cut-up sentences, write personal sentences, and do a single phonics activity involving building words with movable letters.
Reading Recovery is an intensive, one-to-one program delivered half an hour a day for 12-20 weeks by specialist teachers. It has been in use in New Zealand now for 30 years, so you’d expect Kiwis to be doing well. However, New Zealand’s results were barely better than Australia’s in the recent international benchmarking exercise.
Reading Recovery is a proprietary program, meaning it can only be accessed by teachers trained and registered to be Reading Recovery teachers. This means it can only be researched with the consent and co-operation of its publisher, using teachers who have already been instilled over months of training with the belief that it is of benefit.
Research exists showing it has a positive effect compared to doing nothing or a mixture of interventions of variable quality. But most things teachers do have a positive effect, so that’s no surprise.
More interesting research would compare Reading Recovery with programs we know are consistent with the reading science, and that we know from well-conducted experiments have significant positive effects. I am not aware of any such research.
Many long-term studies of reading achievement have shown that children who don’t get off to a good start with literacy tend not to catch up. Like a rocket poorly lined up on the launching pad, they can end up very far from where they are meant to be.
Teaching needs met from Day One
Louisa Moats, the academic whose criticisms of Reading Recovery attracted recent media attention, is one of the leading US proponents of more evidence-based practice in literacy education. In particular, she urges that teachers be taught more about language, so that they are equipped to teach literacy in a more successful and evidence-based way.
Moats points out that reading is one of the most studied aspects of human behaviour, and we know a great deal about it. Yet the way we teach it typically doesn’t reflect the scientific consensus on what works best.
We vaccinate all children against deadly diseases, regardless of whether they are susceptible or likely to be exposed to them. The risks of not doing so are simply too great.
Likewise, we should be giving all children explicit and well-sequenced instruction about speech sounds and spelling patterns, integrated with work on vocabulary, comprehension and fluency, right from when they start school.
Practices such as guessing from context, pictures and first letters (known as “searchlights” or “multiple-cues” teaching) should be eliminated as having no basis in reading science.
Choosing an effective remedial program can be tricky when vulnerable parents and concerned teachers look to commercial resources. However, teachers and parents should be guided by the principles of effective reading instruction outlined in the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacyand current research findings that highlight the importance of alphabetic approaches that systematically and explicitly teach phonological awareness and phonics to mastery.
Programs that meet these criteria include: MiniLit and MultiLit, Little Learners Love Literacy, Get Reading Right, Jolly Phonics, Sounds Write, Write to Read, Read Write Inc and Letters and Sounds.
This would line all children up correctly on the launching pad, ready for a successful learning trajectory, regardless of linguistic or cognitive skills, or family circumstances.
During her recent National Tour, Moats warned Australians about the gap between research and practice in literacy education and urged us to replace our current wait-to-fail system with one that ensures maximum success for all learners. In our increasingly complex, print-based society, it is simply unacceptable to do otherwise.  ( I am unsure where I copied this from)

Flow, Learning and Dyslexia        By Tara O’Neill

 

Recently I have become aware of the concept of flow. 

 

“In positive psychology, flow, also known as zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”  (Wikipedia)

 

In my own life, I can think about past times that I have experienced flow.  I just hadn’t realized that flow was the name of the vehicle that released creative ability and learning.  When I was a younger mum, I used to write music.  The songs would just pop into my head and I would be working on a piece during cooking tea and bathing the children.  It was a passion, and I could never explain how the music would come but now I recognize I experienced flow.

 

Recently, as I have become aware of the concept of flow, I find that I could use it to help me in my post grad study.  Again I am passionate about what I am studying and find flow helps me to get to a place where I am at my creative best and able to apply the study to my work and in creating new information. Sometimes, the flow is over several days which contain must do’s in life such as parenting and work. 

 

Today I celebrated with my son as he too experienced flow at school.  He was completing a ‘flow’ project on one of his recent topics - coding.  He was able to plan his own learning around coding.  He is 15 years old and wants to be a software developer.

 

Josiah spent 9 hours completing his first coding course during school last week. This was a free course via the internet. There was other learning that needed to be done, but he felt comfortable to keep going with his coding as he was obviously experiencing flow.

 

At many schools, learning is broken into subjects like Maths, English, Computer science.  The day is ordered in a very routine way.  One hour for Maths and one hour for English etc. This is not conducive to creative thinking or to developing continuity of learning – flow.  

 

How wonderful that Josiah is able to experience flow in his own learning at school.  Sometimes, you just want to keep going, to keep learning and to finish.  Because he is able to plan his own learning he is able to prioritize completing the course as being important in his day. 

 

 

 

I saw Josiah at school today he was sitting on the sofa and he showed me how he had started to code.  He was putting his knew found knowledge into action.

 

By this evening he had completed his first page on his portfolio.  That is right, he is coding his own portfolio.  He hasn't worked out how to get a web address yet, but he is on the way and one day it will go live.

 

The most impressive and encouraging thing about all of this is that Josiah is a student with the challenge of dyslexia.  He finds reading and writing very difficult. But he loves learning.  I asked him how he could manage to understand coding when he couldn't read.  He said that he understood the logic of coding really well and it was easier than writing and reading because it had one letter that stood for an instruction.  He could ask for help from a teacher aide for the inserting of the words, or he could use his computer for that.   At the moment at home, he is asking his younger sisters how to spell words and they tell him gladly.  He continues to work on creating a portfolio at home, sending me updates to see how it works on my computer.  Sharing problems he is working on “I’m trying to figure out how to make the images smaller.”

 

Learning for Josiah is experienced in the context of real life, both at school and at home. The way school is timetabled allows learning to become timeless.  Technology allows for it to be seamless.  School doesn’t define learning, instead it becomes part of the learning.  Being able to read and write doesn’t define learning. Learning is about using flow to create in and to experiment in.  Flow is a vehicle for discovery. 

 

I am so happy for Josiah, relieved that he is making progress in the area that he really loves and that he can experience success with learning.  How wonderful that he goes to a school that believes in future focused learning and in allowing students to self manage and to achieve flow in their own learning.

 

 

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Tara O'Neill

Films for action article

This is an amazing article.  It highlights so much of what I believe about literacy.  It is what I have seen to be true in my own family and especially with my own son.