Tag Archives: dyslexia

Reading Failure? Not On My Watch! by Jocelyn Seamer

Books have always been a part of my life. Growing up, our house contained bookshelves bursting at the seams with volumes. A wide range of topics were represented; the classics, light romance novels, encyclopaedias, books about Buddhism, Christianity, philosophy, pottery, home improvement, self-improvement, the complete works of William Shakespeare and of course, the Readers Digest condensed books that arrived regularly in the mail. My Mother was an enlightened woman who, acutely aware of her own lack of education (despite being Dux of the School she was not permitted to stay at school because she was a girl) was determined that her children would be able to converse on a variety of topics. We watched documentaries, talked about world affairs, had deep and meaningful conversations about the meaning of life and throughout my childhood, a word of the week had to be used in a meaningful sentence a couple of times a week. Little did she know then that she was ahead of her time. It was my mother who taught me about ‘sounds’ and sounding out, expanded my vocabulary, ensured that I understood what I was reading and made me a voracious reader.  I am so very grateful.

My first encounter with teaching phonics was in 2005 where I volunteered at an independent school in the NSW Hunter Valley. The school had 27 students and was staffed by a principal and teachers whose conviction in the difference we can make the kids was palpable. I recall one teacher angrily declaring, “You never write kids off!” after hearing about their experiences at a previous school. There was a common purpose and passion and enrolments quickly grew.  This school was using a grapheme to phoneme program called LEM which taught students ‘phonograms’ where several phonemes were attached to a grapheme, digraph or trigraph. Children would learn the grapheme ‘a’ and say “fat baby in the bath all washed” learning the associated phonemes.  This school was where I first became aware of spelling rules and the logic of words. I realised at this point that reading and spelling was something that I had always just ‘done’, but not understood.  At about the same time I was seeking a more meaningful base for my study. I was appalled at how soulless and mechanical the teaching felt in my mainstream university.

I felt a call to action and began to tutor struggling students. I reasoned that even with my limited knowledge I couldn’t do any worse for these children than the school system had already done. My first student was a little boy in year 2 who had been diagnosed with Dyslexia. His previous teacher saw no reason to give him a spelling book, so he played during spelling lessons instead. The psychologist who diagnosed him told his parents that they would need to think carefully about the jobs that their son would be able to do when he grew up.  He was withdrawn, sad and disengaged. It made me furious. I tutored this little boy for free for the whole Christmas holidays. With encouragement, a focus on phonics and the effort to make reading fun he went from a little boy throwing his book across the room to one hounding his mother to read another book with him. Once back in the classroom however, this all reversed and he was back in a world of struggle.

In 2006 I found myself at an Independent faith-based tertiary college in New South Wales and the lecturers there helped to fan the flames of my passion for teaching. They were connected with schools, still taught, mentored teachers and above all, were highly dedicated and passionate about their profession. I remember one lecturer talking to us about her time teaching in the 80’s and how she had been instructed not to teach phonics. She told us that she wrote a whole language program and then taught phonics anyway.  She talked to us about the very real responsibility that we had as teachers to set our students up for success. Part of her regular lecturing program was to bring in the parent of an ex struggling student to address the preservice teachers. She made her students see their responsibility through the eyes of a parent whose child had been so very let down by the school system. From this woman I learned a defiance and steadfastness that stays with me to this day.

I continued to tutor throughout my teaching study and, other than that one year (I had a second baby and had to move to a distance program), I recall no teaching about phonics or the evidence around reading instruction.  At my busiest, I worked with 30 students each week from home. Places were tight and I had to start a waiting list. I worked with students ranging from 6 to 14 years old. For those who I saw for reading there was a common theme. They knew ‘single sounds’, a few consonant digraphs and many were very good at ‘sight words’. Without fail these students had no clue what to do when presented with unfamiliar words, particularly those containing vowel digraphs. We worked through these unknown representations systematically and explicitly and children’s reading and spelling improved. I asked parents to sit in on the sessions to build a ‘learning relationship’ with their children. I felt that building the knowledge and skills of parents was a key part of improvement. I was right. Parents would sit and take notes.  They joined in the games and met other parents who helped them see that their child’s difficulties were not because they didn’t read them enough books when they were three. When we left to come to the NT in 2012, parents cried and I felt awful, but I knew there were children even more in need than my tutoring students.

In July 2012 I started my first teaching role in a remote Aboriginal school in the NT. I had a class of children aged between 4 and 7 who were all at the same achievement level in literacy. That is, there was virtually no achievement in literacy. Of the 50 or so students at our school only 3 or 4 could read anything approaching appropriate levels for their age.  It was the status quo and, I was to discover, very normal.  Our kids lived in overcrowded, rundown houses, had English as a third or fourth language and very often experienced extreme dysfunction at home. A term into this role I was introduced to ‘Miss O’. Miss O was a veteran teacher, a passionate advocate for children and had taken up the role of literacy and ESL advisor in our region. We were part of a ‘group school’. A cluster of 13 small remote schools managed under the umbrella of a central office in ‘town’.  Miss O was determined that evidence based practice was going to be put in place in our schools. She started with phonological and phonemic awareness which we began to teach explicitly. She then went in search of a systematic synthetic phonics program that could be rolled out to our schools with a minimum of training. With high teacher turnover and hours and hours of driving between each school this was really important. Miss O found Jo-Anne Dooner and the Get Reading Right program. It completely changed the way we approached reading instruction. The whole language movement was very much entrenched in the NT (and in many places still is). Large amounts of money had been spent on Accelerated Literacy and other whole language programs. It was not going away without a fight. In our school we were a group of young, fairly new teachers eager to help kids get results lead by a Principal who wanted the best for his kids. We took Get Reading Right on board for phonics (along with vocabulary teaching and comprehension strategies) and saw results very quickly. Kids who had been stumbling along on the same Level 2 PM reader for four years were suddenly reading level 10, and then 12 and then 15, despite no change in their home lives or overall English skills.  But, at the end of 2013 our Group School was disbanded in favour of school autonomy. Schools were on their own and the momentum of rigorous phonics existed only in small pockets of dedicated classrooms.  We hadn’t had the time to prove that the approach worked. We saw the modest gains made on paper and knew that the potential was there for even more.  Our story is now largely forgotten in the region.

In 2014 we moved to town. I taught in a mainstream school for a term and then accepted the role as Teaching Principal for term 3 and 4. The school is a very small, remote (but otherwise mainstream) school on a cattle station. I took over from Miss Jasmine and was delighted to walk into a school where phonics and explicit teaching were well established. Though my approach differed a little from Jasmine’s the fundamentals were the same and the children there were doing well. We had 3 preschool students. We developed their phonological and phonemic awareness and by the end of their preschool year they were blending and segmenting orally and had begun to do so with graphemes as well. I felt good that they were set up for success. Of course, I had stuck with Miss O’s rule of ‘reading five times every day’ and the school was in a good position.

We were ready for a change and headed interstate in 2015. I selected my next school (and that of our children) based mostly on its approach to teaching literacy. Our eldest was in year 6, our middle child in year 3 and our youngest in her first year of full time school. We wanted only the best for our kids. So, we headed off to another small, somewhat remote school. There I was content knowing that phonological and phonemic skills were taught first, then followed explicitly and systematically by synthetic phonics. A focus on vocabulary and building up all the required skills for reading helped me be confident in the education that my children and the other students. How did I find this school? Well, I followed Miss O!  I knew that I wasn’t going to get all of that anywhere else.

At the end of last year the NT beckoned and we are here once again. I did a stint as acting Teaching Principal at another remote Aboriginal school teaching Direction Instruction (Big D, big I). I won’t go into it here but it’s not my first choice of program. It was, at least, structured and didn’t have sight words.

I am now Teaching Principal at another remote mainstream school. I have 21 students in my care (including my own two youngest) and am delighted at being able to ‘run my own show’ again. I have banished PM readers and sight word programs, introduced a rather eclectic program of explicit systematic synthetic phonics based on a few different programs and my own experience. I am thankful to Debbie Hepplewhite for support when I’ve been ‘standing out on the limb’ with regional leadership. It seems that ‘the limb’ is where I need to learn to be comfortable. We now have rich, decodable cumulative readers in place as well as daily supported reading and writing experiences.  We explicitly teach phonology, morphology, etymology and comprehension strategies and seek to base all that we do on best practice, evidence and what is best for our kids.

Coming in, I have found the same patterns as when I was tutoring. Those struggling with their reading know ‘single sounds’, some consonant digraphs and many are good with ‘sight words’.   In our first term together confidence has grown. Kids are feeling empowered to use effective strategies and parents are positive about the changes.  I feel that we are on the way. It is early days yet but I am hopeful that together we are going to see great growth in our kids. I am lucky to be part of a new project here in the NT that focuses on ‘the good stuff’. There is a common purpose, strong dialogue and a sense of hope that our efforts will result in measureable outcomes.

Despite the extra work load brought about by the loss of group schools, the autonomy we now have means that I can follow the path that I feel is best for the school and respond to the needs of the students in front of me. We still have to PM benchmark as a system requirement but I am not using this to measure our growth. I want to see 8 months growth for 6 months of work. I want to see eyes shining as kids read books. I want parents to give a sigh of relief as they realise that their children can and will succeed. For me, teaching is not about lessons and pay. It’s about social justice. We know that low literacy is one of the biggest risk factors for all of the awful stuff of life. Knowing that, how can we NOT respond to the evidence? How can we NOT fight for change? How CAN we condemn so many kids to a life that is less than they deserve? Reading failure? Not on my watch!

I am still a voracious reader. Admittedly I now read in snippets and half pages in between managing budgets and programs and family time. But I still have at least one book on the go. I am eternally thankful to my Mother who ignited my fire for reading and social justice and to the wonderful teachers and colleagues who have taught and encouraged me. I am so looking forward to learning more and doing better and continuing to make a difference.  Wish me luck!

Jocelyn Seamer

Tackling Inequality Through Teaching: A Letter to the Prime Minister by Dr Marlynne Grant

We are delighted to be able to post this letter from Dr Marlynne Grant, to the Prime Minister, on the subject of tackling inequality through education.

 

rrf-logoThe Rt Hon Theresa May MP
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA

Dear Prime Minister

Tackling Inequality Through Teaching

While the debate about grammar schools hits the headlines, I would urge the government not to take its eye off beginning learners and the primary schools, which are key to ensuring that EVERY child learns to read and write well enough to take advantage of their future secondary schooling.  The real priority is to ensure that all children (including the socially disadvantaged) become properly literate in the early stages, because that opens the way for them to become decently educated, regardless of the type of secondary school they go to.

In our experience some clever children are still struggling to learn to read and write well.  They will never fulfil their potential.  Even excellent secondary schools will not be able to compensate.

We in the RRF (Reading Reform Foundation UK) aim to promote synthetic phonics, now statutory in primary schools, but this teaching is often diluted in schools which do not teach it systematically nor rigorously.  Instead they mix it with other methods of teaching reading (e.g. whole word memorising, guessing from context, Reading Recovery).  Now in Scotland a play-based approach for beginning learners is being promoted (Upstart programme – Sue Palmer).

Of course play is important but cutting out direct teaching will not help those from a disadvantaged background – it will fail them.  Children love to learn from adults and teachers love to teach children.  Not only is it important and good for all children but it is natural.  It is adults avoiding teaching which is unnatural.

I saw evidence of this ‘child-centred’ approach with High Scope and whole language teaching in the 1980’s both as an educational psychologist and as a mother and I know it failed countless children who did not pick up reading naturally.  Please, we must not go back to this position.  It sounds lovely and caring but it failed and frustrated so many children.  It was at this time that reading failure was thought to be attributable to within-child learning difficulties called dyslexia.  Dyslexia centres blossomed and tried to undo the damage that mainstreams schools were doing by their lack of direct teaching.

I attach a paper I wrote and delivered to the ResearchEd conference in London in 2014 of longitudinal research showing how rigorous synthetic phonics teaching from the very beginning delivers effective teaching for ALL children, even and especially for vulnerable groups like Free Schools Meals, Pupil Premium, summer birthdays, boys, English as a Second Language, slow learners etc.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Marlynne Grant

The Reading Reform Foundation

www.rrf.org.uk

@ReadingReform

Click below to download Dr Marlynne Grant’s Longitudinal Research on Synthetic Phonics

The Dyslexia Debate and a Response by Sir Jim Rose

IFERI is pleased to present a new paper by Sir Jim Rose, which was written as a response to Professor Julian Elliott’s recent presentation at Macquarie University, Australia.

Please click here to watch the presentation: The Dyslexia Debate

Sir Jim Rose

The Dyslexia Debate: A Response by Sir Jim Rose

The range and depth of enlightened thinking that DDOLL (Developmental Disorders of Language and Literacy Network) colleagues have brought to this discussion is riveting. It transcends historic wrangles over the term dyslexia that have done little to take us forward. Belatedly, I should like to add a couple of wild cards to this captivating exchange of views. The purpose in so doing is to explore further what might done to make sure far more of the children within the frame of so-called ‘instructional casualties’ receive consistently high quality teaching of reading and related aspects of literacy. Arguably, if schools could achieve this the benefits to children would be enormous and the need for costly intervention programmes reduced.

First, given that the education profession has access to a vastly greater knowledge of reading development than ever before, why is it that we continue to see confusion, not to say dissent, in schools and teacher training, about the teaching of reading, particularly in respect of phonics and dyslexia?

In the UK, although there has been considerable progress over the last decade, we still suffer from outbreaks of phonic phobia and tiresome tensions between fake opposites, such as, phonics v ‘reading for meaning’. Despite the enactment of a National Curriculum which makes such teaching mandatory, we have not yet achieved universal agreement in schools that teaching children how the alphabet works for reading and writing is crucially important.

The mantra ‘one size does not fit all’ is often chanted against phonics. This suggests that some continue to regard phonics as one of several ‘methods’ from which to select and match to discredited notions of ‘learning styles’, rather than a body of core knowledge and skills that has to be taught and practised. In the case of phonic work, if teachers are not convinced of the value of a regularly applied systematic approach it is hardly surprising that mediocre and poor practice persist. What more might be done to make plain what high quality teaching looks like in this domain?

As Alison Wolf (Review of Vocational Education 2011) said, ‘If assessing learning is hard, assessing the quality of teaching is harder’. Because the latter assessment brings with it concerns about ‘blaming teachers’ for children’s failures in reading it leads to reluctance to tackle what are often straightforward, improvable aspects of practice within the control of the teacher and the school.

England may not top the international league tables of pupil performance but we must be among world leaders in the amount of inspection and testing that takes place in our schools, starting in the primary years. Many years spent as a school inspector observing teaching in England and elsewhere convinced me that there is far more variation in the quality of teaching literacy, including reading, between and within schools than there ought to be. Further, we know the distance between leading and trailing edge teaching is associated with unacceptable variations in pupil performance, and that the impact of poor teaching on children who enter school already behind their peers amplifies their difficulties.

Is it beyond our capabilities to assess the quality teaching without blaming teachers?

My second wild card is to ask what we might learn from other professions. Anecdotes are sometimes useful so here goes…

Last year an unfriendly tree wrote off my car. I survived the crash due to the incredible expertise of the medical profession. This unwelcome event had an upside, however, in that it gave me an opportunity to compare the performance of two life changing professions: medicine and education. I had lots of time to catch up on reading about reading while experiencing our National Health Service at its best. Further, I was able to listen to the 2014 Reith lectures by the acclaimed surgeon Atul Gawande. He declared that he was in ‘the disturbance business’ and explored thorny issues, such as, ‘Why doctors fail’. I then read his book: ‘The Checklist Manifesto – How to get things right’ and watched with his TED talk: ‘How do we heal medicine?checklist-6-319x479Many of Gawande’s insights apply to getting things right in education. As a frontline surgeon, he drew upon keenly observed and detailed analyses of medical practice. His concept of our ‘necessary infallibility’ has much to commend it should we dare to explore more forensically why teaching fails while making sure teachers know that the purpose of so doing is to work with them to improve the quality of teaching and achieve better outcomes for children.

Medicine and education are ‘person-to–person’ services subject to human fallibility and to human ingenuity for solving problems: success is won by learning from our mistakes. Both professions look to research for solutions. They also rely on knowledgeable and skilled practitioners to make sure that as far as possible decisions are ‘evidence-based’ and ‘proven’ in practice. Equally important, they must be capable of making sound judgements when faced with the hard question: ‘what should we do when research is inconclusive, evidence is lacking and doing nothing is not an option?’

Among other things, Gawande suggests that doctors fail through lack of knowledge and, or, ineptitude, that is to say, insufficient skill in applying knowledge. He counts himself among them in these respects. He sees mistakes as opportunities: ’we have an opportunity before us, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea? It is far from clear’.

The notion that we should actively build a school and classroom culture that enables teachers and, equally important, enables children as learners, to learn from patterns of mistakes is an idea worth grabbing. Moreover, his ‘Manifesto’ embraces a set of ethical principles and expectations worth taking on board:

“First is an expectation of selflessness: that we who accept responsibility for others – whether we are doctors, lawyers, teachers, public authorities, soldiers or pilots – will place the needs and concerns of those who depend on us above our own. Second is an expectation of skill: that we will aim for excellence in our knowledge and expertise. Third is an expectation of trust-worthiness: that we will be responsible in our personal behaviour toward our charges.

Aviators, however, add a fourth dimension, discipline: discipline in following prudent procedure and in functioning with others.”

For Gawande professional ‘discipline’ is aided by a ‘checklist’ which transforms ‘cowboys into pit crews’. That is indeed a powerful idea – but you must Google his short TED talk to understand it. (Or click at the end of this post to watch it.)

I have rambled on long enough save to ask: is there anything to be said for embracing some of these ideas, including, perhaps, developing a ‘checklist’ for teaching systematic, synthetic phonics?

With special thanks to Macquarie University for allowing us to distribute and use the link to Professor Julian Elliott’s presentation.

The Adoption and Spread of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) in Latin America

The Adoption and Spread of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) in Latin America: Argentina and Chile mainly, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru and Mexico

by Grace Vilar

In 2011, I became an independent, full-time Literacy and Phonics Trainer, and Educational and Literacy Consultant, in Latin America. I started providing training events, however, in 2007 whilst I was still working as Head of English Primary at Colegio San Antonio in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I am the main phonics consultant and trainer developing Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) provision in Latin America. I am not a researcher, however, and I describe my findings based on my experience as teacher, head teacher and teacher-trainer.

Whilst visiting primary schools during a trip to Oxford, England, in September 2006, I discovered systematic synthetic phonics teaching. I was immediately aware that synthetic phonics was the solution to our problems in Latin American schools, as synthetic phonics provides a very easy and effective method to teach our bilingual Spanish/English children how to read and write.

Originally when I was teaching, I had to base my teaching on the whole word and whole language approach. I attended many teacher-training courses and was very much supported by my school and head teacher at that time. With much effort, my pupils did learn – however, I was never very happy with the whole language approach and used ‘decoding’ and ‘encoding’ to support the ‘mixed methods’. In reality I was getting frustrated year after year with mixed methods. In time, I became a head teacher myself, and continued to be very uncomfortable with the prevailing mixed methods. A ‘multi-cueing reading strategies’ approach was also used for struggling readers, and still children were not reading well, and writing… had worsened!

The problem was that our children were using their experience of the ‘transparent’ Spanish alphabetic code to read and write in English resulting in very inaccurate pronunciation and spelling. So once they started to learn the details of the ‘opaque’ (complex) English alphabetic code, together with the core phonics skills of blending (for reading), segmenting (for spelling) and handwriting with the English code rather than the Spanish code, they rapidly started to master the pronunciation and spelling of English with the accuracy I had been seeking. The children soon showed greater confidence in reading and writing and their language and reading comprehension in English grew stronger every day. With knowledge of the English alphabetic code, even the children with special educational needs became successful – such as those with short-term memory, and dyslexic tendencies.

Following my very positive findings of applying synthetic phonics in my own bilingual school, I started to share my experience with other schools – first in Argentina and then in Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico and Brazil. All of these countries learn English as a new foreign language as Spanish is their mother tongue (and Portuguese in the case of Brazil).

Year after year more schools in Latin America are using the Systematic Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles as their main and only method for teaching reading and writing in English, and a few of them have even started to use England’s statutory Year One Phonics Screening Check at the end of Year One to get an idea of how they are doing compared to schools in England. In Latin America, however, ‘Year One’ is only the first year of formal, structured phonics provision whereas in England’s schools, formal structured phonics provision starts in Reception so children in England have had two years of synthetic phonics by the time they undertake the Year One Phonics Screening Check. Early signs are that the Latin American schools are getting wonderful results, some at least getting better results than the average results of schools in England!

Further information about Latin America, Spanish-speaking countries

Argentina is the pioneering country for adoption of Systematic Synthetic Phonics. Most of the private schools in Argentina teach English for 8 to 15 hours a week. The level of teaching and teachers’ professionalism is very high in general. Chile and Uruguay follow in terms of adoption of synthetic phonics. These two countries in particular look to England as a guide for updating and perfecting their teaching of English. They take the Cambridge international examinations (IGCSE, A and AS levels, and IB programmes). Even state schools in the city of Buenos Aires have adopted some IB subjects for their secondary schools.

State schools in Argentina also teach English as a foreign language for 3 to 5 hours a week, starting from Primary 1 (5 to 6 year olds) or from Preschool (4 to 5 year olds). Others start in Year 4 (8 to 9 year olds) or they may start in secondary schools.

In the province of San Luis, Argentina, in 2013 the Department for Education launched a bilingual and multilingual project in three schools where English is taught two and a half hours daily following an immersion programme such as the ones used in the private schools in the country. These three schools offer Trinity examinations.

In Mexico, English is taught in all of the 32 states from Preschool (5 year olds) for 2 to 3 hours a week. The first state to adopt a Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme (Jolly Phonics) officially is Aguascalientes where I trained 300 teachers.

As I said before, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile are leading countries and they refer mainly to England’s education, so they adopt all the latest teaching practices and methods. When new methodologies appear, all schools send their staff to be trained and organisations such as the ESSARP centre based in Buenos Aires offer a wide range of courses which now include Systematic Synthetic Phonics courses.  (ABSCH in Chile delivers an annual conference.)

Click here to see an example of SSP course content

I devote my whole professional time now to training teachers around Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico and online in Peru – and little by little interest is also growing in Brazil, where I sometimes have to speak in the Portuguese language to train the teachers in the state schools!

Countries that have adopted the Systematic Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles as their main method to teach how to read and write in English as a foreign language:

Countries Private state
Argentina 70 % approx. San Luis province: 100% City of Buenos Aires: 20%
Mexico 2 % approx. State of Aguascalientes: 100%
Chile 35 % approx
Uruguay 40 % approx.
Brazil 3 % approx. State of Parana: Pinhais and Palotina: 6 municipal schools
Peru 10 % approx

Note: These are not official percentages and these figures are growing daily.

Spreading Systematic Synthetic Phonics

My main objective is to train all teachers in SSP, so wherever they teach, they take along the method!

You can find a list of schools and countries in Latin America using SSP to teach children how to read and write in English on my website (not complete as I cannot control the spread of SSP any more… it is in the hands of the teachers now!)

http://gracevilarphonics.weebly.com/schools.html

Year One Phonics Screening Check

This check is statutory in England; it is freely available to all practitioners and IFERI promotes the adoption of this check.  Click here to find out more, and to read about the success of the screening check in The British School of Costa Rica.

Examples of Children Reading

Fernando, 6 years old, from Argentina, his mother tongue is Spanish: Fernando has had one year of SSP instruction. We see Fernando reading decodable books at ‘first sight’:

Catalina, 6 years old, from Argentina, her mother tongue is Spanish: We see Catalina reading and writing nonsense words:

Grace Vilar is a Bilingual Literacy and Educational Consultant and Synthetic Phonics Trainer. She is also a member of the IFERI Committee.

Special exam arrangements for dyslexia veering out of control

Special exam arrangements for dyslexia veering out of control

Julian Elliott, Durham University

The new English Literature GCSE might be contravening the 2010 Equality Act, according to concerns raised by a teacher. This raises serious questions about which disabilities should lead to students being given special dispensation in exams.

The new GCSE, which will be taught from September 2016, requires students to remember a number of poems and analyse at least one. Mary Meredith, a teacher and blogger who works with pupils with special learning needs, argued in an open letter to education secretary Nicky Morgan that those with dyslexia may be disadvantaged unfairly because they typically experience problems with verbal memory. She has asked for the exam to be adjusted for dyslexic pupils.

There are a number of problems with this argument. The usage of the term “dyslexia” has expanded to the point that it has now lost much of its explanatory value. Initially it was used to describe very rare cases in which people could make little or no sense of the written word. Now it has become the diagnosis of choice to describe individuals exhibiting one or more of a wide range of cognitive difficulties involving areas such as memory, speed of processing, attention, concentration, analysis and synthesis, organisation and self-regulation – controlling oneself and one’s actions.

While not all those with reading difficulties experience memory problems, and not all those with memory problems struggle with literacy difficulties, there is clear evidence that a greater proportion of pupils with reading difficulties encounter problems with short-term or working memory. However, working memory appears not to be a particularly powerful predictor of reading difficulties. Short-term memory essentially involves holding information in your mind for short periods of time, for example trying not to forget a phone number while you struggle to find a pencil. If this information slips away, it is typically gone forever – what is called “catastrophic loss”.

Working memory is very similar but also involves the process of doing something with the information while we are holding onto it, for example, undertaking a complex calculation in our heads. These types of memory are rather different from those involved in remembering information that has been stored for a longer period – such as the ability to recite a poem from memory or the reasons behind the Russia revolution. The evidence that poor readers have particular difficulty with this latter form of “long-term” memory is much weaker, with inconsistent findings from research studies.

Qualifying for special assistance

We cannot assume that someone with a diagnosis of dyslexia has one particular type of memory problem or, indeed, any memory problem at all. There is also the question about how we should respond to those people who have poor memories but are not considered to be dyslexic. It would be a travesty to automatically diagnose all those with working memory problems as dyslexic even though, anecdotally, this seems to be an increasing tendency in university disability services and in some school contexts.

Students’ memory abilities will be normally distributed within the general population – this is typically the case for any cognitive process. So how can we best respond to those who argue that their memory difficulties disadvantage them in examinations? One solution could be to establish a national screening programme to identify all those who encounter various memory difficulties and who might be deemed to need special arrangements. Clearly, this is not feasible or desirable.

Alternatively, if we conclude that all examinations discriminate against those with memory problems, there would be a logical argument to be made for scrapping examinations that place any burden upon recall. Open book exams, where a student has the relevant information in front of them, is one possible solution, but it might also be challenged on the grounds that those with working memory difficulties are still disadvantaged. As I hope it is becoming clear, there is an inherent weakness of logic here.

The go-to diagnosis.
Dyslexia via Groenning/www.shutterstock.com

In reality, examinations are not just designed to test a student’s memory. They tap the ability to utilise knowledge and understanding in ways that are underpinned by a whole range of intellectual abilities. These include processes such as memory, speed of processing, attention, concentration, analysis and synthesis, organisation and self-regulation. But herein lies a major problem: that’s a very similar list (see the second paragraph above) that is often used to describe those with a dyslexic disability and who seek and are offered special assistance or modifications in exams.

Special arrangements were derived to give everyone a fair opportunity to access and engage in examinations. Where someone has a physical disability it makes obvious sense that they should be able to record their responses in alternative ways, for example, by dictation or a modified keyboard. Where a student is blind, it is wholly appropriate that a person or a keyboard should read the questions (and the candidate’s responses) back to them. In such situations, the individual is getting no additional assistance that gives them an advantage over other candidates.

However, where the person’s difficulty involves the same processes as those being used to differentiate between candidates’ academic performance, for example, remembering detail, or being able to marshal and express a complex argument in a time-constrained period, we run the risk of helping some while disadvantaging others.

Where the underlying problems concern cognitive processes such as memory, processing speed or attention, the preferred strategy should not be to modify examination conditions. Instead, it should be to assist students to develop strategies that can assist them to perform as well as possible, targeting additional resources towards the provision of workshops to improve relevant study skills.

Out of control

Currently, understandings and practices around this issue are so confused that the existing systems are getting increasingly out of control. Universities, for example, are provided with assessments and recommendations from privately funded educational psychologists that are often difficult to challenge.

The fact that many of these reports are severely flawed – for example, many still employ the now widely discredited IQ discrepancy criterion for dyslexia – seems not to be considered problematic by politicians and civil servants, whose focus appears to rest primarily around the increasing cost of provides resources for more and more diagnosed dyslexic students.

If individualised resourcing and exam accommodations are to be provided for particular cognitive weaknesses, we need a more sophisticated understanding of exactly which difficulties, at what level of severity, are appropriate for special assistance. What should be more widely understood, however, is that these processes are significant in the way we currently differentiate between students’ academic performance. So to assist one person, but not another, in this fashion throws up serious questions about equity and fairness.

The Conversation

Julian Elliott is Professor of Education and Principal of Collingwood College at Durham University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Samuel Blumenfeld author of Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers and The Whole Language/OBE Fraud has died.

Author of many books and articles on the topic of what’s wrong with education, Blumenfeld has been described as a ‘lonely voice in the wilderness’. His latest book, “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children,” , co-authored with Alex Newman, was published last month (May 2015) by WND Books.

Much of Blumenfeld’s work was dedicated to exposing what he saw as a faulty method of teaching children to read and championing an alternative. His 1973 book, “The New Illiterates,” blamed the “whole-word” method of reading instruction for dyslexia and reading disabilities in many children.

Blumenfeld’s answer was always the same – intensive, systematic phonics. In 1983, he published “Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers” as a way to help parents, teachers and tutors teach children to read in an easy, effective manner.

IFERI acknowledges Samuel Blumenfeld’s contribution to the promotion of effective reading instruction.

‘Why Children Fail to Read’ – a new paper by Sir Jim Rose – 1st June 2015

Why children fail to read

‘’We have an opportunity before us, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea? It is far from clear.’’ (Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto – How to get things right)

The internationally acclaimed surgeon Atul Gawande said that he was in the ‘disturbance business’. His riveting 2014 Reith Lectures, drew upon detailed case histories as he explored such disturbing issues as: ‘Why doctors fail’ despite  the track record of astonishing success of the medical profession.

Much like medicine, education is a ‘person-to–person’ service subject to human fallibility and to human ingenuity for solving problems: success is won by learning from our mistakes. Both professions look to research for solutions. They also rely on knowledgeable and skilled practitioners to make sure that decisions are ‘evidence -based’, and who are capable of making sound judgements when faced with the hard question: ‘what should we do when research is inconclusive, evidence is lacking and doing nothing is not an option?’  From the standpoint of teaching primary children with dyslexia and reading difficulties, this paper explores a small corner of what these two highly valued, life-changing endeavours might learn from each other.

While the quip that ‘Dyslexia is like Marmite, you either love it or hate it,’ may be true it does not help to resolve the debate on why some children have far more serious difficulties learning to read than others. We know for sure that Marmite exists. ‘Dyslexia’, however, continues to come under fire as a myth. At its unkindest, this myth portrays dyslexia as an expensive invention to ease the pain of largely but not only middle class parents who cannot bear to have their child thought of as incapable of learning to read for reasons of low intelligence, idleness, or both. What we can be sure of is that the deep anxiety suffered by parents and children when these stubborn reading difficulties persist is most certainly real and not imagined.

Labelling children to place them into fixed categories is always risky and calls for a separate discussion. Meanwhile, this debate has at least highlighted the question of how, so-called, ‘within the child’, inherited characteristics associated with dyslexia might be disentangled from reading difficulties associated with environmental factors ‘outside the child’, such as, poor quality teaching, weaknesses in parenting, disadvantageous socio-economic circumstances, or a sticky mix of all these conditions that obstruct learning to read. The hardly surprising consensus from research seems to be that both environmental and genetic factors influence reading ability. Further, where ‘genes were strongly implicated, it was more likely that the reading problem would be accompanied by broader difficulties with oral language  …’, [1]

‘Learn to read and read to learn’ is a familiar slogan worthy of a T-shirt. It encapsulates the obvious truth that the goal of reading is not only to sound out but also to understand the meaning of the words on the page. Those children who reach the expected standard in English at the end of their primary education have attained a good level of language comprehension as well as fluent, accurate word reading. Our national tests assess both attributes. The tests also allow us to assemble a picture of how well children spell and write and thus convey meaning to others. Another useful slogan is, ‘If they can’t say it they can’t write it.’ This reminds us of the importance of developing the spoken word and attentive listening, thereby enriching children’s vocabulary so that they have a good stock of words on which to draw.

Defining and getting to grips with the reading problems we are trying to fix are not about ‘blaming’ children, teachers, parents or poverty. Rather, we should start from a picture that is more reliable than dubious headlines about falling standards of reading in England.

According to the Government’s latest statistics [2], the great majority of children in England (nearly 90%) now learn to read to the standard expected of them by the age of eleven: ‘the 2014 figure for level 4 is the highest ever.’ This was far from the case in 1997 when only 69% did so. Should we be content with that rate of progress? The answer is no. We must strive for more because the figures mask patterns of serious under-achievement by vulnerable minority groups. Moreover, some schools in the most unpromising circumstances demonstrate that more is achievable, hence a fair judgement on the state of play might be: so far so good but not yet good enough.

To what might we attribute the rising trend in reading standards? At least four elements have come together to make a positive impact on children’s progress. First, there has been a powerful political and professional drive to prioritise and strengthen literacy, especially through the systematic teaching of reading in primary schools, and in the training of teachers. Secondly, this momentum has been backed by an unprecedented growth of good commercial and government-funded resources for teaching reading, with due attention to phonic work designed to make sure that children understand how the alphabet works for reading and writing. Thirdly, there has been a spectacular growth of excellent children’s literature by our world-class authors. Finally, the last decade or so has seen advances from research, for example, in neuroscience and cognitive psychology that have given us a better understanding of dyslexia, reading disorders and how the brain learns to read. It is often said that learning to read is a complex and difficult task but it is often forgotten that the brain is a complex and highly adaptable endowment that is well-capable of coping with that task in the great majority of children by the age of seven.

Because it is teachers whose knowledge and skills harness these resources to best effect for each child, we are told repeatedly that no education system can exceed the quality of its teachers. In recent years, someone coined the term ‘instructional casualties’ to describe a broad swathe of children who struggle to read because the quality of teaching they receive is simply not good enough, for long enough, for them to become fluent readers. Attaching percentages to the incidence of dyslexia, as factors within the child, compared to instructional failure, as weaknesses in teaching, is far from a precise science. However, it is safe to say that more children fetch up in the latter than in the former category. Moreover, overcoming instructional failure is within the control of the school whereas other factors, such as parenting and background conditions, though amenable to influence by the school, are much less so.

This era of ‘self-improving’ schools has thrown into sharp relief the urgency of strengthening the quality of teaching based on robust evidence of how successful learning is achieved. It is hardly surprising therefore that self-improving teachers are at the heart of self-improving schools. Acceptance of the virtue of reflective, self-improvement is a no-brainer. It should be an ethical principle which applies to all those who provide, and those who provide for, education, including teachers, school leaders and governors, as well as the recipients of education, that is to say, the pupils themselves. Willingness to ask: ‘What do I need to do to improve?’ is a positive and courageous acknowledgement of our ‘necessary fallibility’, irrespective of whether we are leading-edge surgeons or leading-edge teachers. For pupils, too, we ought to foster a strong ‘can do’ attitude and an appetite for self-improvement through which they learn to teach themselves worthwhile things.

Further, schools like hospitals know full well that there is no escape from professional accountability. OFSTED style inspections and published performance data, for example, are now common to both services. Where schools achieve an outstanding OFSTED report and high national test results parents   beat a path to their door in pursuit of a place for their child. Fail badly on these measures and heads will most likely roll, or resign. Within the context of accountability, recent statutory requirements, such as, the introduction of Education, Health and Care Assessments and plans which focus upon how well schools meet the needs of children with learning difficulties have been thrown into sharp relief and somewhat resemble Gawande’s enlightened idea of a safe-guarding checklist.

Anyone who has spent time working on the frontline, or as a recipient, of either of these two services will quickly conclude that lack of time to do the job well is often, in itself, a serious problem that bears upon the twin concerns raised by Gawande, notably, lack of professional knowledge and ‘ineptitude’: the latter being a failure to apply knowledge effectively.

The title of the memorable ‘Rag Trade’ TV series: ‘Never mind the quality feel the width’ might well describe the curriculum prior to its recent revisions. Unwittingly expanding the curriculum, under the banner of ‘breadth and balance’, has been a besetting sin of curriculum reviews. In consequence, slimming down the curriculum to make it more manageable and resistant to overload have been unmet goals of earlier reforms. Has the new National Curriculum and its assessment succeeded in meeting these goals where earlier attempts have failed? It seems the jury is still out. But the issue should be kept under review not least because of the heightened risk of failure that lack of time presents for those pupils who often need more regular, skilled teaching to become literate. Numeracy, too, should be held up to the same light.

Whatever else they do, primary teachers know full well that it is crucial to induct pupils into the symbolic system of language in its various manifestations because: ‘Language is the core symbolic system underpinning human cognitive activity, vastly increasing the efficiency of memory, reasoning and problem solving. Symbolic systems (language, writing, numbers, pictures, maps) enable the individual to develop a cognitive system that goes beyond the constraints of biology…’ [3]

Reading music, too, requires understanding its code, as indeed does computing where ‘coding’ is now embedded in the new primary curriculum. Making sufficient time for children to learn these various codes is a sizeable challenge for teachers and schools.

As the great edifice of inspection, assessment and testing, curriculum expansion and laudable attempts to co-ordinate services goes up, arguably, outstripping that of our allegedly more successful international counterparts, we may have forgotten that school time is finite. If so, we must find ways to prioritise the essential from the desirable and do less to achieve more. Though easier said than done, this suggests, that accountability for children’s success should extend beyond the frontline in schools.

For ‘instructional casualties’, as for ‘dyslexic casualties’, early identification through comparison with their typically developing peers, combined with good assessments, such as, the recently introduced ‘phonics check’ are invaluable starting points for teaching on a regular, daily basis and from which to plan for continuity. Further, one–to–one teaching interventions for reading need to be ‘quality assured’ and mesh with the rest of the curriculum to make sure that the total experience is coherent from the standpoint of the child.

One of the best recent summations on dyslexia is provided by Professor Dorothy Bishop [1]:

‘A genetic aetiology does not mean a condition is untreatable

Could genetic findings be useful in intervention? All too often it is assumed that if genetic effects are found, the child will be untreatable. Yet, high heritability does not imply immutability: it implies that the range of environmental experiences that is usually encountered in everyday life does not have much impact on a trait, but says nothing about potential impact of novel environmental experiences. When, for instance, a child has the heritable myopia, we do not treat them as passive victims of their genetic destiny. Instead, they are given spectacles: an intervention that is out- side the range of normal environmental experiences, but which is tailored to counteract the genetic effect. Similar logic can be applied in the case of dyslexia: if there are genetic variants that affect how children learn, we need to find out how they work to affect brain development and function. That will allow us to develop ways of intervening to over- come the problem—interventions that may need to be different from regular teaching experiences. We are still a long way from knowing how to do this, but genetic information points us towards the right path. It is not helpful to assume that all poor readers are the consequence of poor teaching and that additional or earlier reading instruction will fix the problem. We need studies that examine which kinds of reading instruction are most effective for children at high genetic risk, who often have disproportionate difficulties with aspects of speech sound analysis and associative learning that other children find easy. Genetic research does not lead us to write off children who are poor readers, but rather to recognize that they may need more individualized instruction tailored to their specific needs.’

Dyslexia is not yet well enough understood as an extreme reading disorder for which we have precise solutions. Pretending it is a myth, however, risks burying our heads in the sand and giving up the search. 

[1] The interface between genetics and psychology: lessons from developmental dyslexia: D.V. M. Bishop Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.  Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20143139. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.3139

[2] Department for Education: National curriculum assessments at key stage 2 in England, 2014 (Revised)

[3] Foresight Mental Capital and Wellbeing Project (2008) Jim Rose 01.06.15

Download a PDF of the paper.