John Bald/language and literacy

Training for Teaching Assistants - Frederick Gent and Abbs Cross Schools

Many thanks to the teachers and assistants at Frederick Gent (Alfreton, Derbyshire) and Abbs Cross (Hornchurch, Essex) for their warm welcome and excellent participation in two training days this week (April 08). As promised, here is a link to the updated powerpoint file that was the basis of the course.

Download synthetic_phoncs_and_the_child_with_special_needs.ppt

Some colleagues asked for more guidance on helping children with modern languages. Here are some key points on that area:

1. Try to make sure you understand the aspects of the language you are supporting. You might find Collins' Easy Learning grammar books helpful. If you're not sure, ask.
2. Get the clearest possible idea of what the child does and doesn't understand.
3. Slow things down, unpack and explain. You may well find a Language Master (Drake Educational) helpful. Colleagues may call this an old fashioned device, but it is amazingly versatile and useful for this purpose. I'll do a separate post on it over the next week, but check to see if your school has one. It may well be stuck in a cupboard.
4. Develop little practice routines for children to work on - don't go on to one thing before they've learned the last.
5. You'll see from other posts in this weblog that I have grave concerns about the National Curriculum for languages, and that I have no confidence in the ability of the QCA and DCFS to improve it. The basic problem is going too fast and not explaining things enough. I've given a presentation to heads of department in Havering on the subject, and am happy to do more work in this area on request.

Thanks once again for making these two of the most satisfying days' work I've ever done.

Beginnings

My friend from university was persuasive. Come and house sit for us for a week. Lovely countryside, nice pubs. True enough, but...a dog to look after, so we couldn't go too far. There was a piano, and in the stool some beginners' music. Easy tunes - one note in the bass, usually, and a simple melody. I'd failed at more things than you could count in music, beginning with the guitar. My teacher, whom I met when I'd just started teaching myself, was a brilliant player who has now made a niche for himself in jazz, but he could never explain to my why the guitar was strung as it is, and I could never get the hang of why the same note could be all over the place on the fretboard, depending on what string you were playing. On the piano, a C was a C was a C, always in the same place, before two black notes. To move up, you moved up, not sideways, and likewise to move down. My efforts were by no means good, but at least I knew what I was trying to do. I slowly moved through the book.   

At the end of our house-sit, we went home via Bath. A young man in the piano shop showed me a Clavinova, which, he said, was good for beginners and would cost around £800. The Clavinova has a slightly different touch from the piano. but only slightly, and has realistically weighted keys. It was better than the Yamaha upright in my friends' house. As it was too expensive to deliver from Bath, I bought one through the Internet for around the same price - model D120, three pedals and lots of extra voices - two types of jazz piano, jazz organ, two nice harpsichords, vibraphone, two church organs, built-in metronome and demonstration pieces. Also a headset, essential to an adult beginner who doesn't wish to be thrown out of the house. Not only people are disturbed by wrong notes - our Dalmatian used to howl to high heaven when I played the accordion, and did so too when I started the piano. I'm pleased to say he now howls less.

Institute of Education, London.

I'm very pleased to have a new client in the Institute of Education, which has asked me to offer the following two day courses:

Using Phonics to Tackle Literacy Problems           Friday October 10th

Using ICT to Teach Languages                             Friday October 3rd

For details, contact the Institute of Education CPD department, [email protected]
Tel: 020 7612 6589/6987

New Role for Senco? A checklist for governors

Sencos are some of the most important people in education, and some of the most put-upon. They have to plan, organise and supervise work across a huge range of learning and social needs - behavioural difficulties have grown like topsy - and keep records to a standard that may eventually have to stand up in court. So, the Select Committee's recommendation that they should be members of a school's management team is entirely right. The Guardian (15th April 08) worries about new responsibilities for governors in monitoring Sencos' work, but in fact governors are already responsible for it, and have been for over ten years.  I offer the following checklist:

1. Does the Senco have time to do his or her work properly?
2. Does the school have a clear system for identifying and investigating special needs?
3. Does it start from when children join, and do all staff know about it and use it?
4. Does it take systematic account of children's and parents' views...and of evidence presented from sources outside the school?
5. Is the Senco fully informed about all types of learning difficulty, and does he or she have clear access to expert advice when it is needed?
6. Is ICT used to its full capacity, particularly for children with cerebral palsy and physical disability?
7. Is there systematic training for teaching assistants, with progression to higher level, degrees and qualified teacher status (possibly a cluster issue)?
8. Do children actually receive the help stipulated on their IEPs and statements?
9. Does the school plan work in normal lessons to back up specialist teaching?
10. Does the school have a system of keeping up to date on the most effective teaching methods?

This is what cricketers call "a big ask". It fully justifies advancing the SENCO's role in management, but it is also crystal clear that it can only happen with the wholehearted and fully informed support of the headteacher and governors.

Interesting Guardian Article

Here is a link to an article by Peter Wilby on Ruth Miskin

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2269709,00.html

It's interesting for the point raised by Henrietta Dombey, but not resolved in the article. She estimates that fifty per cent of words can be read by phonics alone - the basis of this is not  stated, but American research in the middle of the last century reached similar conclusions.

The question then is what to do about the remainder, and the solution is simple. Phonics does not tell us all we need to know about the remaining words, but it tells us a lot of what we need to know. So, we need to explain to children that phonics do not work perfectly, but are an example of fuzzy logic - they work perfectly about half of the time, and the rest of the time we need to add to them other things we know about the writing system - for example, that table is originally a French word, and that the l comes before the e when you say it in French. Children from five onwards can understand this if it is carefully explained. What we can say with confidence, following research by Stanovitch and many others, is that teaching children to guess does not work - we need to use phonics as a basis for teaching about English spelling, and then build on it by further sytematic teaching of its awkward features, of which by far the most important is the French Connection.