Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Pick two or three good sources and actually read them: an introduction written for teachers, and one clear book on how reading develops. What you gain is not the ability to run the intervention but the ability to ask the right question and to recognise a good answer when you hear one. It is worth knowing too that much of this material is recent, and the person across the table may have been taught something older in good faith.
Moses said, May I follow you so that you can teach me some of the right guidance you have been taught (Quran 18:66). A prophet asking to be taught settles the question of whether it is beneath anyone to go and learn.
الكهف
قَالَ لَهُۥ مُوسَىٰ هَلۡ أَتَّبِعُكَ عَلَىٰٓ أَن تُعَلِّمَنِ مِمَّا عُلِّمۡتَ رُشۡدࣰ ا
Moses said to him, ‘May I follow you so that you can teach me some of the right guidance you have been taught?’
Qur’an 18:66read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The definition of dyslexia has genuinely moved. Current reviews describe it as a difficulty learning to decode and spell arising from several interacting factors, and set aside the older idea of a single specific cause unrelated to general ability. That is a conceptual review of how the field has changed rather than a study of what professionals know, but it does mean training received some years ago may no longer match the picture.
Snowling MJ, Hulme C, Nation K. (2020). Defining and understanding dyslexia: past, present and future.. Oxford review of education doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Knowing what good practice looks like is what lets you tell whether a child is getting it.
You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.
When reading results lift across a whole state after every teacher is retrained, the lesson is uncomfortable and hopeful at once. A good part of what looks like children failing is teaching that has not caught up yet.
Pouring more in does not help while the lid is still on. A child who is exhausted, wound up or not yet settled will keep very little of the lesson, however good the lesson is.