Celebrating success - What do the results say and WHY?

I have been very fortunate this year to work with an incredible teacher and amazing Year 7 & 8 students at Panmure Bridge School.

The opportunity to observe and work alongside these amazing individuals has renewed my passion for teaching and learning. 

Robyn Anderson and I have had many conversations about the needs of her students and the comprehensive ways she has of supporting her students who have very many diverse needs. I really appreciate the opportunity to share ideas, problem-solve, bounce ideas around, work with her students, carry out additional assessments and most importantly to have the opportunity to be Robyn's critical friend.
I totally agree with Robyn Critical friends are awesome!

Today I celebrate the progress her students have made under her guidance.

Robyn has adapted her programme throughout the year to meet the needs of her students.

She has listened to her student's opinions and consider their interests when recrafting her class programme.

I believe the progress made by these students is a direct result of the explicit acts of teaching  Robyn carries out every day.

Regular strategies I have seen in place daily in her classroom

• Recapping learning from previous days or lessons and makes clear links to other curriculum areas
• Checks in with her students regularly to check their understanding of vocabulary and content.
• Regularly involves the students in the decision making about their own learning 
• Constantly reminding students of their learning goals and how they can demonstrate their understanding.
• Reinforced the focus/goal including asking students to share their goals in multiple ways.
• Actively Models the learning.
• Guides and scaffolds the students towards their next step goal with appropriate strategies and support.
• Gets the students to share with a partner their ideas and new learning to reinforce concepts and vocabulary.

But: while these strategies are impressive and I believe they have had a significant impact on learning it is the other important things she does daily that I believe have had an even greater impact -

• Builds a positive relationship with her students - these students know she cares and wants the best opportunity for them.
• Has very clear boundaries around expectation and class rules and culture.
• Checks in with her students daily and is aware of significant events in their life that could have a detrimental impact on the students day eg social and environmental facts that we know can be very extreme in our community.

Explicit acts of teaching and positive relationships make the biggest difference.

This has been a wonderful learning journey for the Teachers and the students!

Assessment - looking deeper

Criterion Assessment

Criterion Teat of Basis skills

The primary emphasis of this assessment is on phonetic word attack skills.
It uses a multiple- sensory assessment strategies to ensure that visual and auditory receptive skills, as well as vocal and motor expressive skills, are tapped.

Sample pages from the test book.

This test allows students to respond in many ways. I have adapted this test and used with non - verbal students.

It includes Letter recognition, Letter sounding, Blending and Sequencing, Phonics patterns, Multi syllable words, sight words.


I carried out this assessment on our target group of students in Year 7 & 9 at Panmure Bridge school.
It clearly showed where the gaps were in their phonics knowledge.

Explicit teaching of Phonics

Explicit teaching of Phonics - helping our students learn to read and write.

The goal of phonics instruction is to help our students learn the alphabetic principle — the idea that letters represent the sounds of spoken language — and that there is a predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds. In our COL we have students who are learning English and as we all know that English is a challenging language to master with some many combinations of sounds.

My research has consistently found that explicit systematic phonics instruction is one of the most effective ways to teach children how to read, especially for students who are struggling to learn to read or have language difficulties. So why do we not continue to teach our students phonics when they still need this explicit input as they move up through school year levels. As our students move up through the school there seems to be little focus in fulling the gaps in the student’s skill.

Phonics teaches pupils that letters they see written on a page are part of a code which represents the sounds of spoken language, and provides them with the tools to understand this magic code. When these skills are developed and embedded the students can then become fluent readers who are able to quickly recognise familiar words and easily sound out new words they encounter. Imagine reading and writing a language you just don't understand the rules of the language and have to stop and decode every word. 

Phonics allows our readers to develop their reading comprehension. With enough teaching of skills and practice, pupils' decoding skills should become so automatic that they are able to concentrate on and understand the overall meaning of what they are reading. While students are struggling to decode and recognise sounds and words it is very challenging to comprehend the text they are reading.

Vocabulary instruction can go hand-in-hand with phonics instruction which is a recognised area of need in our COL.  This is an opportunity to embed Keywords that contain the target letter-sound relationships etc that we are focusing on in our current topic. Teaching phonics and vocabulary can be done in a fun and interesting ways. 
Even our older Year 7 and 8 students enjoy games and competition when it's done in a nonthreatening manner.

My plan moving forward is to work with Robyn Anderson a COL teacher from Panmure Bridge School to see if creating a Phonics programme for identified students in her Year 7/8 will have a positive impact on students Reading and Writing.

Robyn has blogged about our discussion on her blog