EDUCATION |
Dyslexia
Change is afoot with dyslexia
Dyslexia is really common; according to Yale University research, it affects up to one in five people and represents 80–90 percent of all learning disabilities. Surprisingly though, teacher training in New Zealand provides scant instruction on how to best support dyslexic students, leaving teachers feeling bewildered about everything from screening to diagnosis to effectively accommodating the learning difficulty. Nevertheless, there is much you can do in your own school or classroom to ensure that dyslexic students get the help they need to learn in the best way for them. Remember: you have the power to inspire learning, despite how the curriculum is presented. Some of the best feedback to the Dyslexia Foundation of New Zealand’s (DFNZ) nationwide workshops for school SENCOs
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schoolnews Term 1 - 2018
It is important to stress that, while a full diagnosis is highly beneficial and should be part of the journey, it’s not the destination.
and teachers were about simple and pragmatic changes, which can be carried out in tomorrow’s class. First of all are two teacher-led questions to students (once they have worked together for a long enough period to know one another). Question 1: “What do I do that makes learning easy for you?”, and Question 2: “What do I do that makes learning difficult for you?” DFNZ had an overwhelming response from hundreds of teachers who decided to ask their students these simple questions. Some teachers who had taught for decades said that they had learnt more about themselves by asking every child in their class to answer these questions than they had by following a labyrinth of different approaches suggested by different schools, leaders and institutions. From many years working with
DFNZ, my own greatest insight is that children shouldn’t be kept waiting – we make them wait to get to know the next teacher every year at primary school, we make them wait for the next assessment (in case of improvement), we make them wait to qualify (or be bad enough) for remediation, and so on and so on. In all this waiting time, their self-esteem is plummeting, and they are unable to access the day-to-day curriculum because they are held back by their lack of basic skills. At DFNZ, however, we advocate for accommodating difficulties from the get-go. It’s not enough to observe the discrepancies between obvious intellect and poor basic skills and just flag it to wait till a diagnosis may prove it’s true. So why accommodate from the get-go and what does this look like?
Accommodations in the classroom: •
provide audio version of content or reading
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offer extra time to complete written or reading tasks
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provide the syllabus in advance
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recommend reading on digital format to increase the font and have fewer words per page.
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suggest the use of assistive technology (there are many on the market), so that textto-speech and speech-totext is understood and used
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encourage self-advocacy and educate everyone in the class to understand different learners - once you understand as a teacher what makes learning easy
