Change to learning support by MOE

The Ministry of Education is using the following model when working with schools to support learners with additional needs.

The new Learning Support  Delivery model process.

Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin will be making an announcement about the learning support Co-ordinators role sometime over the next month.
There will be 600 Learning Support Co-ordinators across the country - MOE is saying one Learning support co-ordinator per 500 students - this is a paid position in addition to normal staffing allocation.

Developing Vocabulary

I had the opportunity to hear a presentation by Jill Ritchie Literacy Consultant from Impact Learning Consulting.

Jill had some fabulous ideas about embedding vocabulary into our teaching programmes.

The teaching of vocabulary is a vital part of our Literacy programmes but must be all taught in all curriculum areas.

We need to review, reteach and checking in regularly that our Learners have the required vocabulary and the correct definition.

Explicit acts of teaching vocabulary is vital for our learners.
We need to reference this new vocabulary in multi contexts through out the week to ensure our learners understand this new vocabulary especially specialised specific vocabulary.

I saw a fabulous example of this when working with Robyn Anderson from Panmure Bridge when we discussed her maths lesson introducing new maths language to her learners.

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.

Student view of the own learning.

While working with many students across the Manaiakalani schools I have noticed many of the students are very critical of themselves and their own ability.
They seem to give up quickly and believe before they have even started that the task is going to be too hard.

When reading Karen Ferguson blog post about her students self-talking and the possible impact this could be having on your students, it made me revisit this possible challenge for our students. 

We need to get our students to rewrite the messages in their heads so that they are not giving up or being negative about their abilities and their learning.

I think the Stonefields school Learning pit helps students understand that learning can be hard and that is ok! But we need to be determined and positive and keep going.
The visual representation of the Learning pit works well and students in our Sommerville Satellite class at Stonfields now understand these concepts when matched to a visual and situation.

These learning qualities are so important for all our students. We all know learning is challenging and sometimes we just want to give up! We need to show students how to be Self Aware, and determined. Self Efficacy needs to be a skill we gift our students.

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

Explicit acts of teaching - making the biggest difference

During our COL PLG we were discussing how can we replicate the accelerated progress we achieve in writing and our other focused areas, maths and reading.

There seems to be an overwhelming need to ensure we are using explicit acts of teaching.

Deliberate acts of teaching instructional strategies are the tools of effective practice. They are the deliberate acts of teaching that focus learning in order to meet a particular purpose. Instructional strategies are effective only when they impact positively on students' learning.

Teachers need to be able to use a range of deliberate acts of teaching inflexible and integrated ways within learning activities to meet the diverse literacy learning needs of our students.

These deliberate acts may include modelling, prompting, questioning, giving feedback, telling, explaining, and directing in your class programme.

Giving students explicit instruction about learning strategies will help them take control of their own learning. Deliberate acts of teaching showing our students how to make clear explicit links to prior knowledge and connection to their environment must impact student achievement as well as building new learning.

Sometimes i think we confuse implicit and explicit in our teaching. Our students with language or learning difficulties need very explicit acts of teaching.

Something is implicit when it is implied but not directly stated. Something is explicit when it is directly stated and leaves no room for uncertainty. Our students need EXPLICIT teaching.

Wanting reminders of what explicit acts of teaching look like in Literacy check out: 

Deliberate acts of teaching 

I found this an interesting read around mathematical strategies:

Keeping children engaged and achieving in mathematics

Snap shot - Learning data

Time to get a snapshot of where the target group of students I am supporting at Panmure Bridge are at the end of Term One.

I carried out the phonics assessment in the Criterion Assessment and Robyn Anderson has kindly shared her results from Term  One.

After looking at this data there is a need to continue with the  Phonics programme that Robyn has carefully crafted.  It is also interesting to note the other factors that are impacting on student progress including self-esteem, attitude. confidence and self-esteem.

Robyn is using the data to create a Needs focused 'Phonics programme" to cater for her year 7/8 students who still need to grasp a full understanding of phonics.

Robyn Anderson blogged about our meeting. Across school teacher support.