Dyscastia

Learning to teach kids living with dyslexia. How to get started and what training you need.

In this episode, we talk to Bill, Sally, Karen, and Louise who run specialist dyslexia teacher training. We find out what’s involved and help you decide whether you should take up the challenge.
Sally Andrew
holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Dyslexia and Literacy from the University of York, UK. Sally has been tutoring students with dyslexia for 20 years and has trained many parents and educators in evidence-based multisensory interventions for dyslexia. Sally is the director of By Your Side Tutoring.
Karen Hodson
is a Director of Fullarton House – Assessment Therapy and Teaching and is a highly sought after Educational Psychologist with 23 years’ experience in supporting students with dyslexia and other learning difficulties. She has conducted thousands of assessments and has extensive understanding of dyslexia across the life span.
 Louise Hanrahan
Louise is a coach with the Literacy Guarantee Unit (LGU).  She is an AITSL, certified Highly Accomplished Teacher with extensive experience in the field of literacy education. Louise specialises in teaching students with dyslexia using a structured literacy approach.  In her role with the LGU Louise supports schools with literacy planning, mentoring, in-class demonstrations and delivers appropriate classroom-based strategies for students in reading acquisition.  Louise has an interest in Initial Teacher Education. She has recently worked with AITSL as part of an expert reading group.  This group developed criteria to enable Initial Teacher Education (ITE) providers to identify well-designed studies, trustworthy research, and meaningful evidence to inform decisions relating to the teaching of reading instruction.
Selected links and extras related to the episode
Teaching Students with Dyslexia Training (TSD)
Is the training that Michael and Bill have both trained in and Bill, Sally and Karen run. Louise is also a graduate of all three levels of TSD. TSD is run only in South Australia as Sally, Karen and Bill all have their own practices that they try to minimize disruption to.
https://www.hansberryec.com.au/copy-of-workshop-19
Speld Organizations around Australia
AusSpeld
https://auspeld.org.au/
Speld SA
https://www.speldsa.org.au/
Speld Vic
https://www.speldvic.org.au/
Speld NSW
https://www.speldnsw.org.au/
Speld Qld
https://www.speld.org.au/
Speld WA
https://dsf.net.au
SEELECT educational supplies
Louise mentioned SEELECT when talking about the team she needed to build around her when supporting her own kids with their learning needs. Felicity and Lyn at Seelect have been supporting teachers, parents and schools to choose evidence-based resources and use them well to help students with learning difficulties. Felicity is a trained multisensory tutor as well as co-owner of SEELECT and is a powerhouse of information and experience in the learning difficulties space.
https://www.seelect.com.au/
Five from Five and The Reading League
Bill mentioned these resources as a great place for information about teaching in line with the evidence. 
https://fivefromfive.com.au
www.thereadingleague.org
 
Other Training Organizations (Besides TSD)
IMSLE Institute for Multi-Sensory Structured Language Education
www.multisensoryeducation.net.au
Dyslexia Orton-Gillingham Institute
https://www.dogi.com.au/
Lifelong Literacy – Lyn Stone
https://lifelongliteracy.com
 
S.A. Evidence-Based Teaching of Literacy Study Tour:
Salisbury Primary School
Using evidence-based teaching to unlock literacy for all students
An invitation to Salisbury Primary School,
*Study Tour 1: June 2-3rd 2022, and 3rd November 2022
*Study Tour 2: 25-26th August 2022, and 4th November 2022
Email Bill to book

How to choose a school for kids living with learning difficulties

In this episode, Michael and Bill discuss a blog that Bill wrote called Schools that teach Reading and Spelling in a Research Informed way: Picking a Winner.
In the episode, we focus on tips for parents to get beyond the sales pitch to make an informed decision about whether the school might be a good fit.
The first part of this episode discusses six red flags to look out for that may indicate that the school doesn't have a scientific approach to its teaching of reading and spelling.
The six red flags are around some of the answers a parent might get to the question:
"Can you tell me about how reading and spelling is taught here?"
"We believe..."
"We promote a love of reading"
"Different teachers teach reading and spelling differently"
"Not all learners learn to read and spell the same way"
"Students are at different points so we don't teach them the same content / same way..."
"We use an inquiry approach to teaching literacy"
In the second part of the episode, we talk about the answers you want to hear when asking this question.
Visit the Dyscastia website for the complete show notes and links.

What’s changing with the teaching of reading in Australia (and why?)

This episode answers the common questions schools and parents have when changing from a whole-language or balanced literacy way of teaching to one supported by scientific evidence.
“Why wasn’t my older one taught reading this way”
“Why have the take-home readers changed and why do the new ones look so basic compared to the old ones?”
“Where have the levelled readers and Running Records gone?”“What’s this stuff about phonological awareness?”
“Why are the students and teachers doing activities that look like ‘rote learning’ and ‘drill’ in the classroom?”
“What happened to “chunky monkey” and “flippy dolphin” and why must we insist on kids sounding out words now”
“Why do parents now have to do a course before being able to volunteer to listen to kids read in the classroom?”
“Why didn’t my struggling 12-year-old get this type of intervention when they were in year one?”
These are the types of questions that schools who have begun changing how they teach reading (and spelling) face from parents who have noticed the differences. They’re excellent questions because when a school flicks the switch and starts to jettison a whole-language or balanced literacy way of teaching, there are highly noticeable changes. So as well as teaching the kids, schools are needing to also teach parents about what’s happening. Some of these questions are very awkward to answer because the ugly truth is that there are students at the end of primary school who have missed out on this higher quality instruction. It’s not fair, but it’s inevitable. This fact breaks the heart of educators and we all look back, with much sadness when we think about what we did before, and the students we could have done better for. If any of us could turn back the clock, of course, we would have taught this way all along.
Is this teaching just another trendy educational innovation that will soon pass? No! Phonics teaching dominated the landscape before whole language and its offspring, balanced literacy became the norm in schools. These ideologies were based on some understandable misconceptions. The popular thinking went like this:
Because (most) kids learn to speak by being immersed in their mother tongue (naturally – with no repetitive explicit teaching needed), then reading instruction should also involve a similar immersion in the printed word, and learning to read must also be a natural process.
This turned out to be a logical fallacy that gave us three decades of way too many struggling readers.
So what came next?
The U.S. published an inquiry into this situation in 2000, the U.K. did their own and then Australia also inquired into this in 2005. All three inquiries looked closely at current reading research. Some of this research was from brain imaging studies that were discovering that there are indeed, brain circuits (hardware) ready to go to learn spoken language. However, no such hardware had evolved in the brain that’s ready to learn to read and write. There was nothing innate or natural about learning to read. The skills of reading and writing have to be carefully and meticulously welded on, through highly explicit teaching, to neural circuits that are designed for other tasks. So, these inquiries from the U.S., U.K. and Australia found the same thing: the teaching of reading needs to be highly structured, highly explicit, sequential and heavily based in phonics to get the best results for the maximum number of students.
Following the release of the Australian inquiry’s findings (2005), not one recommendation was implemented. Blows your mind but also gives you an idea of how deeply embedded whole language approaches were in the DNA of reading instruction and how anti-science the educational policymakers and teacher training institutions really were. There was also significant pushback from big corporations who had built very lucrative businesses based on selling whole language-based programs to schools. So, the vast majority of Australian schools continued on their merry way, doing the same thing. This wasn’t malicious, it was just a failing of quality research to make its way into policy and classrooms and not at all uncommon in education. It was kind of like what’s happening with climate science!
Fast forward almost twenty years and only now are we seeing a groundswell of schools acting on the research in Australia. Listen to our previous podcast with Dr Sandra Marshall and you’ll hear about what’s caused this tectonic shift.
We hope you enjoy(ed) this Dyscastia podcast and that it puts what is happening in schools into a helpful context.
Links from Episode
What are Michael and Bill talking about when they refer to ‘The Scouts’?
Early in the podcast, Bill refers to the classic book “To Kill a Mockingbird” and the main character Scout, who explains in the story how reading just seemed to come to her, without any effort, simply by just sitting on her father’s lap as he read. Scout becomes a metaphor for the 5-10% of students who will learn to read, without explicit, structured, phonics-based instruction.
“I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church–was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger separated into words. But I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow – anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night.”
(To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee, Chapter 2) https://youtu.be/sUdMm9oZ57U?t=2425
Nancy Young’s Ladder of Reading
An elegant model that illustrates the proportions of learners who need particular types of reading instruction. Bill and Michael talk in this Dyscastia podcast about the proportion of students who require a highly structured, phonics-based, intensive form of teaching.
https://www.nancyyoung.ca/ladder-of-reading-and-writing
Book: Language at The Speed of Sight – Mark Seidenberg
Bill mentioned this book in explaining how education has developed a reputation for being ideologically driven and not well informed by research. Mark Seidenberg is a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
https://seidenbergreading.net/
Video: What’s Wrong with Predictable or Repetitive Texts – Alison Clarke
This is a stunning explainer on the importance of decodable reading material for early readers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiyzP3j7jbk&ab_channel=spelfabet
The Three Cueing Systems (aka multi-cueing or searchlight model)
A discredited word attack strategy (never actually was credited) but still widely taught, that encourages readers to attack unfamiliar words using:
semantic cues (can I guess the word from the meaning of the words around it?)
syntactic cues (can I guess the word from its place in the sentence?) and
grapho-phonic cues (can I work out sounds from some of the phonemes I already know?)
This is all good until you strike a word you’ve never seen (outside your sight word bank) or heard (outside your vocabulary) before. Old-school levelled readers are based on the 3-cueing strategy, therefore are a big reason Australian schools pump out a horrifying number of students who can’t read.
David Share’s Self Teaching Hypothesis
Mentioned by Bill when talking about the cohort of kids who get to point of reading development where the act of reading becomes ‘self-teaching’. The Five from Five website explains this very nicely:
https://fivefromfive.com.au/the-self-teaching-hypothesis/
Schools that teach Reading and Spelling in a Research-Informed way: Picking a Winner
A recent blog written by Bill about schools who’ve adopted reading research into what they teach how they teach, the common elements to their teaching approaches and the rationale for this.
https://www.hansberryec.com.au/blog
The whole-word based Dick and Jane series was used in Australian primary schools in the 70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_and_Jane

Dyslexia advocacy, with Dr Sandra Marshall

In this episode, we talk to Dr Sandra Marshall, BMBS FRACGP Dip Child Health, a General Practitioner in South Australia and Chairperson of Code Read Dyslexia Network. Sandra shares her insights for parents and teachers on advocating for kids living with learning difficulties.
Show notes
Dr Sandra Marshall realized that there was a problem with how reading is taught in Australia when her own sons started to struggle in primary school. After trying to get help for her sons, Sandra found perhaps her most important calling and knew that the journey ahead wouldn’t only mean advocating for her own boys but for kids and their parents all over Australia who were on the same journey. Sandra, a GP by day, donned her superhero cape, and by night became (at least in our opinion) the most influential figure in dyslexia and evidence-based teaching of reading advocacy in Australia.
With unerring humility, patience and grit, Sandra and her muse and mentor, ex-principal Ophie Renner, rallied the troops – parents, teachers, principals, specialists in the area of reading (and the odd politician along the way) and set out on a remarkable journey.
Fast forward a decade and a bit, and there has been a tectonic shift in how we teach reading in Australia. The earth shook when South Australia implemented the Phonics Screening Check (PSC), despite opposition from all of the expected places, but also from some surprising corners! The good doctor and her band of merry followers were instrumental in this, and now, South Australia is considered worldwide to be a leading light in the adoption of evidence-based teaching of literacy.
In this interview, Michael and Bill talk with Sandra about the road behind, the long road ahead and importantly, how Sandra has been so incredibly successful at getting people on board and keeping them on board. Sandra has the special sauce in working with people to make change and has much to teach us all about how we can successfully advocate for our own children and also other vulnerable kids living with the Ds.
Links from Episode
Code Read
Sandra is the Chair of Code Read – see the links below
Code Read is reliant on continued fundraising to operate. Please register for the 2022 Equal Right to Read Virtual Run to support Sandra and others to continue advocating.
https://codereadnetwork.org/get-involved/equal-write-to-read-virtual-run-back-in-march-2022/
So many parents don’t know where to go, and as Sandra says, there’s plenty of snake oil out there. This webpage gives guidance on where to go to get help:
https://codereadnetwork.org/help-is-here/where-to-go/
or for incredible resources, go to:
https://codereadnetwork.org/help-is-here/resources/
If you are in SA, you can also go to www.fullartonhouse.com.au, or if you are looking for a specialist tutor/teacher, you can find one at https://dyslexicstrengths.com.au/south-australian-literacy-specialists-tutor-register/
David Pescud’s ABC’ Conversations’ Interview
https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/conversations/conversations-david-pescud-rpt/8345200
David’s was the impetus behind the formation of Code Read and financially backed the formation of this national body (as long as Sandra agreed to be the Chairperson!) David is interviewed by the amazing Richard Fielder on ABC’s ‘Conversations.’
 
South Australian Evidence-Based Teaching of Literacy Study Tour:
Salisbury Primary School
Sandra discusses the need for teachers to be able to go into other schools doing great things in the teaching literacy space. We do something like this, and we’re pretty good at it! Email Bill bill@hansberryec.com.au to express interest in this professional learning opportunity.
A shout to everyone involved over the journey – all DAGBAGS, Dyslexia SA, Code Read
DAGBAGS/Dyslexia SA members/admins/and helpers along the way:
Adrian BorgAlex WardAlexander EdmondsonAllison QuinlanAllyson DutshkeAmy BunderAndrew McPhailAndrew McPhailAngela WeeksAnna BamptonAnne BamptonAnnette BrockBelinda PringleBill HansberryChantal DenierCherie CollingsChristopher PyneClaire MorrisonColleen StevensDavid PittDavid PescudDeb FaireyDenis DonovanDenise SawyerDonna WillettDr Judy GouldDr Bartek RajkowskiDr Marie GouldEleanor GardnerEliza BamptonEstelle ChappleFelicity ClarkeGail DarbyJackie French
James MagnosonJames PeterkinJan DoneJane RajkowskiJanice James- ValentineJanice McPhailJanice RitchieJeni FerrisJo BakkerJohn Gardner MPJohn IdeJohn SkellyKaren HodsonKaren McKenzieKatherine BruggemanKathryn KriegKay BosworthKerrie DellarKerry WilliamsKylie BudarickKylie FotheringhamKylie HalfordKym ReynoldsLana GrundyLance HatcherLauren PooleLeanne JamesLyn MartinMark Le MessurierMel WhitingMelinda FirthMelissah ErnestiNatalie NolanNeil McKay
Nick Champion MPNicola RathmanOphie RennerPatricia DentPaul BennettPaula MontroyPhil ParkerRachel ShephardRobert KloseRobert SmedleyRoslyn ConboySandra TidswellSandra TidswellSandy MamerowSandy RussoSarah AntoneySarah WormaldScott BryantSharon HolmesStacey BradtkeStephanie MallenSue de BiasiSue TeusnerSusan Close MPSuzy BarlowTom FotheringhamTony Piccolo MPTracey BradleyTracy McInerneyTracy WilsonTricia GardnerTrudie SymondsVanessa O’BrienViv Wright

What is dyscalculia?

Dyscalculia literally means disorder in calculation. It's real and it impacts about 5-7% of the population. It is also one of the Specific Learning Difficulties (SLDs) so we need to talk about it.
It’s so common to hear people say “I’ve just never had a head for numbers” or “I’m terrible at maths” that we don’t flinch when we hear it. But, what would you think if you heard someone say “I’ve never had a head for letters and speech sounds” or “I’m dreadful at reading”? When you think about it, you realise that it’s far more common (and socially acceptable) for people to talk about openly maths difficulties than any other learning issues, so, it’s no wonder that dyscalculia is far less talked about than dyslexia or dysgraphia and remains hidden.

What are dyslexia and dysgraphia?

In this episode, Michael and Bill do their very best to arm parents and educators with information about dyslexia and dysgraphia so they can better spot a good intervention and avoid precious time and money on unproven and disproved treatments.
Dyslexia and dysgraphia – huge enough on their own and often live together in one brain making life doubly hard for people. There’s just so much misleading information out there about these Specific Learning Difficulties. It was just the other day Bill gave some advice to a very grateful tradesperson about not paying a nutritionist who had claimed that a change in his son’s diet could help his dyslexia! Until you understand the core difficulty of any SLD, you are vulnerable to all sorts of snake oil and quackery. What a minefield for parents. 

SLDs and how to talk about them

In this episode, Michael and Bill delve into what Specific Learning Difficulties are and the advantages vs the disadvantages of using terms like learning difference, disability or disorder to describe them.
So what do we call it when a person can’t learn to do something like reading, writing or maths as easily as what is considered normal? 
It’s a touchy subject and to be honest, it probably depends on the context you’re in when talking about it and whom you're talking to. Sometimes our context is trying to get funding schools to better support kids at school, sometimes it’s raising awareness in the community about learning problems and the long term impact they have on students. In these contexts, we want to talk in a way that underlines the functional severity of these difficulties and the lasting impact they have on young people (especially if not dealt with and properly resourced). So, in those contexts, we might use terms like disability or disorder. Then there’s the toughest context – a child who needs their difficulty explained to them, carefully,  in a way that doesn’t talk down to them or minimise the problems they experience, but at the same time doesn’t crush their soul. In this context, we may tread too lightly and talk about brains working differently and put too little attention on the very real hardships the child experiences every day at school.
It’s tough and it deserves exploring because regardless of the context there’s just so much at stake. So let’s go there!