Code Read Dyslexia Network Australia

Code Read Dyslexia Network Australia 

Related consultation – Teacher Education Expert Panel Consultation

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Submitter information

Name Code Read Dyslexia Network Australia

Feedback

Feedback to the Teacher Education Expert Panel Discussion Paper

FROM CODE READ DYSLEXIA NETWORK AUSTRALIA- APRIL 2023

CONTACT

W www.codereadnetwork.org

E info@codereadnetwork.org

About us

Code REaD Dyslexia Network is a not-for-profit charity working to create a world where people impacted by dyslexia are acknowledged through early identification, understanding and inclusion; supported with evidence-based teaching, access to accommodations; and empowered with access to opportunity.

Priority messages

Approximately 800,000 Australian students are struggling readers who are unable to fully participate in schooling because they are not sufficiently literate. The majority of these struggling readers are ‘instructional casualties’ who could have and should have learned to read but have/had teachers who did not receive evidence based instructional methods during their Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Reading is the one essential skill that is required to prepare students for spelling and writing; it is also underpins comprehension. Therefore, literacy competency is the most important one to get on top of early in the school journey where it occupies a significant focus and has the potential to predict individual and cohort academic outcomes as early as the first or second year of schooling.

Code Read welcomes the opportunity to share their lived experience in the optimal evidence-based peer reviewed approaches to maximising literacy mastery in school students. Teacher knowledge (that is ITE content and practice) is the key driver to ensure 95% of students become sufficiently competent readers in their early years of formal schooling. Students who conquer this foundational skill are poised to tackle all other areas of the curriculum as they advance through to secondary school. Secondary school teachers should be confident that students are prepared to meet the literacy demands of their specific subjects. Naplan data shows a declining trend in literacy skills especially in Years Seven and Nine- with a growing tail in the lower bands.

Previous Australian government reviews have identified the essential role literacy plays in overall academic achievement but have failed to implement measures that close the research to practice gap- especially in the critical area of ITE programs for teachers of early reading instruction. Most pre-service and in-service teachers are competent readers, writers and spellers; however, much of their knowledge has been acquired implicitly, and as such, they lack the skills to explicitly transfer this to their students.

The 2005 Australian Government investigation into the Teaching reading: Report and recommendations. National inquiry into the teaching of literacy, clearly identified a way forward; this mirrored the USA document of 2000 and the 2006 “Rose Report” in the United Kingdom. Only the later implemented aspects of the findings, resulting in improved literacy outcomes. Australia went on to shelve their report and turn to Naplan as the ideal driver of improving literacy and numeracy standards; to date comparative international data indicates a decline in many of those levels, rather than the anticipated gains; despite increased per capita investment.

In 2014 the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group produced Action now: Classroom ready teachers. This report proposed a variety of options to improve ITE; some of those have been implemented but we would argue that the key issue when it come to preparing teachers is training in evidence-based explicit pedagogies- at a minimum.

1. Strengthening ITE programs to deliver confident, effective, classroom ready graduates

As previously stated most pre-service and in-service teachers are competent readers, writers and spellers; however, much of their knowledge has been acquired implicitly, and as such, they lack the skills to transfer this knowledge to their students in a systematic and explicit manner. The teaching texts educators rely upon also adopt this approach (Lyster et al., 2021). Teachers must understand and explain the rules and idiosyncrasies of English to successfully instruct students in reading and writing. Therefore, they need a deep and thorough knowledge of the complexities and irregularities present in the English language (Stark et al., 2016). Pre-service and in-service teachers do not have sufficient understanding of the foundations underpinning the English language (Snow, 2020) and the interplay between these foundations to provide proper explicit instruction to students when it comes to ensuring that 95 per cent of their students will become effective readers. Furthermore, research conducted by Meeks et al. (2020) amongst Australian pre-service teachers suggests that they have a superficial awareness of explicit language pedagogies.

When it comes to students who experience clinical issues in the acquisition of reading such as dyslexia the important fundamental skill of reading becomes even more difficult to achieve. A low level of literacy impacts academic achievement in all areas and is strongly associated with social, emotional, economic and physical health (Moats, 2020). Dyslexia refers to poor word-level reading despite adequate effort and instruction. Nearly all cases of dyslexia are caused by a phonological-core deficit (poor phonological awareness, rapid automatised naming, phonological short-term/working memory and or phonic decoding). This deficit is present prior to a student’s first day of preschool with children entering classrooms with a less optimal neurodevelopmental capacity to learn to read. Dyslexia is the most common form of learning disability. International evidence suggests around 20 per cent, or one to five children in every Australian classroom, has mild, moderate, or severe dyslexia or is a struggling reader.

These children have the potential to achieve and thrive at school if identified early and provided with evidence-based instruction. Instead, the education system is stuck in a reactive, “wait to fail” model. This is despite having low-cost and highly effective screening and intervention tools available.

The Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD) is an annual

collection of information about Australian school students with disability. NCCD enables schools, education authorities and governments to better understand the needs of students with a disability and

how they can be best supported at school.

There are four categories of disability:

Physical

Cognitive

Sensory

Social/emotional

The cognitive category includes: total or partial loss of the person's bodily or mental functions; and a disorder or malfunction that results in the person learning differently from a person without the disorder or malfunction. Specific learning disorders like dyslexia fall within the cognitive category.

Analysis of NCCD data by Equity Economics indicates the average proportion of students across Australia

falling into the NCCD cognitive category in 2021 as a percentage of total enrolments is 11.9 percent.

The average for government schools is 12.3 percent and the average for Catholic schools is 11.7 percent. There is significant variation across the states and territories: Tasmania, Queensland, and the

Australian Capital Territory are below the national average. South Australia is significantly higher than the national average at 17.2 per cent (5.3 percentage points higher)

Recent ITE teacher Testimonials

Teacher Testimonial:

I’m a teacher of 15 years and I teach Year 4 at a Catholic school in Hobart.

When I did my teacher training at Sydney University in 2007-08, Robyn Ewing was head of English and a key proponent of the "whole language" approach to teaching reading. Her philosophy was that, if kids were immersed in quality literature from a young age and were given some signposts along the way, they would pick up reading. Learning to read, we were told, was a rather complex and mysterious process that we only partly understood. This made sense to me back then; after all, it was how I’d learnt to read in the early 1980s.

In my first year as a teacher at a Public School in Sydney, I had a Year 1 class and I could see straight away that many of my students needed much more than just being exposed to quality literature. They needed systematic, explicit instruction. The only trouble was, I hadn’t been trained in these skills and the school I was working in didn’t have a common approach to teaching reading. So my efforts were haphazard and piecemeal at best.

I think back to my first few years as a teacher and I remember those seven-year-olds who left Year 1 with huge gaps in what they needed to be able to learn to read and write. I let them down, just as I was let down by university educators who had demonised a phonics-based approach to teaching reading, and who couldn’t accept that science has something to teach us about the way that children learn to read.

My most valuable learning at university was from a Special Education unit, where the lecturer urged us to be systematic, structured and explicit in our teaching so that those students who are slower to develop the skill of reading have the best chance possible to keep up with their peers. 15 years later, I am still using some of the teaching materials she shared with us.

In 2014, I moved to Tasmania and started teaching in Catholic Education. The Catholic system in Tasmania has been willing to move with the science. In 2015, early years classes were using the UK government’s phonics program, called ‘Letters and Sounds’. It was a systematic, hands-on and highly engaging way to teach phonics.

In recent years, we’ve transitioned to programs that are underpinned by the Science of Reading, and these are beginning to extend throughout the primary years. Students substantially behind their peers in reading skills are given extra instruction in small groups four times a week to boost their phonics knowledge and give them the repeated exposure they need to enable them to progress.

Starting this year, many Catholic schools are diving into a wholesale change of practice, with practice coaches working alongside teachers to hone their teaching skills so that they can deliver high impact teaching strategies that engage students and help them to learn.

The way forward requires good leadership (at a school level and a system level) and a willingness among teachers to step outside our comfort zones. Are we really teaching the way students need us to teach them? Or are we just doing things the way we’ve done them before because that’s what we know and are comfortable with? If we are genuine about our desire to help students to learn, then it’s time for all of us to interrogate the methods that we use as individuals, and that our schools use, to achieve that aim.

New Graduate Teacher Testimonial-.

I completed a Master of Teaching (Primary) online through Deakin University in November 2022. I found the Initial Teacher Education Program/Degree to be highly academic and the information outdated. Whilst I understand the quality and the academic rigour of a master’s degree, most of the assignments were literature reviews of outdated theories and information, critical analysis of literature chosen by the Unit chair which often reflected their own personal views and not relevant to the practical side of teaching in the classroom. Whilst the assessments focused on academic knowledge, they were not related to teaching in the classroom and were more focused on how to reflect and critically analyse academic documents.

My placements were varied, and it was dependent on the mentor teacher and their knowledge, their ability to provide constructive feedback and their own personal teacher identity. The teaching units provided a broad range of content knowledge and little practical information about planning and teaching which are the vital components of teaching in a classroom. The units didn’t focus on children and how they learn, how to instruct them, how to manage a classroom, how to organise yourself as a teacher. It was all assumed that you knew this knowledge and could then put it into practice on your placements. The units didn’t focus on cognitive science for how students actually learn, how to manage a classroom or on the neurodivergent students that teachers have to deal with daily.

I completed four teaching units on Inclusive Education however I found all the readings to be over ten years old, the information was very generic and didn’t align with current knowledge of what is provided by the Victorian Department of Education and what is currently happening in schools regarding Disability Inclusion. I felt I didn’t learn anything from some of these units and that the knowledge and practical experience I had developed was due to my role in Education support and Tutor role whilst working with neurodiverse students.

I was most astounded by the lack of evidence-based research in all my units, especially my literacy unit. The unit was focused on whole language and how to plan for various groupings based on reading level. There was no mention of how to teach the six main components of literacy (Oral language, Phonological Awareness, Phonics, fluency, Vocabulary and comprehension) or anything related to how children learn to read despite the academic knowledge being around for twenty years.

In order to prepare myself to be a graduate teacher I personally enrolled in an Orton Gillingham course to enable me to teach reading and writing effectively, I continued my own learning through online webinars by experts in their field regarding reading, writing and numeracy. My Masters degree did not prepare me for how to teach effectively in the classroom and now currently having to read literature that is useful in teaching as given out by my principal who is passionate about ensuring his teachers have the adequate knowledge and skills to teach effectively using evidence based- research to teach all students to read and write to a competent level by the end of their primary years.

My recommendations would include a unit on communication and ensure that:

- Graduates can communicate effectively and in a professional manner with parents/guardians, colleagues, allied health professionals and leadership

- Graduates know how to write reports, individual education plans and newsletters

- Graduates know how to actually plan effectively rather than reading about the theory of planning and assessing.

All units should be based on evidence-based research and not what the academic running the unit is currently researching, it need to include aspects of classroom management, cognitive load theory, science of learning incorporating reading and writing and practical components regarding report writing, planning and communication.