As a teenager, I was a regular visitor to Tripoli in Libya. My father was the British Consul there for around four years and being at boarding school, I went and stayed with him during my holidays. One year, it just so happened that hostilities between the USA and Libya were increasing, and many of …
Excited attendees in the Main Ballroom March 2023’s Plain Talk 28th Annual Conference in New Orleans was a fantastic opportunity for me to immerse myself in the world of cutting-edge literacy and learning. The conference brought together a diverse group of experts and practitioners, sharing their insights and experience on a range of topics, from …
Vale Sir Jim Rose, whose life’s work contributed to the betterment of teaching reading and consequently children’s lives worldwide. He was the author of the UK’s famed “Rose Report” in 2006 which led to vital changes in the way reading was taught in Britain. I interviewed him back in 2018. Here is the transcript: Sir …
If parental input is driving your system’s success, there’s something wrong with your system Chilli was a 9 year old boy who couldn’t read or write. He’d been issued with the same type of take-home readers and magic ‘sight word’ list that everyone else in his class had been issued with, year in, year out, …
Recently, in my pre-breakfast glance at social media and emails that have come in overnight, I happened to catch a post on the Levelled Literacy Intervention for Teachers Facebook page that warrants some attention. It neatly highlights the difference between the culture of the science of reading, and cultures who reject that science. I read …
Tutor Puppy-Farms: Find the right tree to bark up It’s true that many children have missed out on vital parts of their education over the last two years. My own dyslexic daughter completed her final education certificate mostly via Zoom and though concessions for the pandemic were on offer, she still missed out on gaining …
Tutor Puppy-Farms: Find the right tree to bark up Read More »
It’s been a bit of a tough week for literacy giants Fountas and Pinnell. Firstly their products were reviewed by edreports.org and found to be wanting. That’s a pretty damning indictment right there. As a damage-control measure, the authors decided to try to ‘navigate to a place of clarity’ by producing some strange, very unclear …
I keep getting drawn into situations where I feel a need to defend my work. That’s what you get when you say things publicly, I guess. I don’t mind at all, because every time I get asked for comment, I get to refine my thinking on my works. But let me clarify a …
Yesterday I spent the whole day with 5 leaders from a K-12 school north of Sydney. Their incredibly supportive principal ducked in from time to time whilst doing everything else he needed to do, and you could see he had complete trust in his team. Indeed, these teachers have been on a long journey, the …
Since sentence diagramming is one of the major activities in the Language for Life book and course, I thought I’d respond to a point raised in The Writing Revolution (P14-15) about the authors’ reservations on this subject. Firstly, I don’t think I disagree with the authors when they talk about the superiority of sentence combining …
Do Language for Life and The Writing Revolution disagree? Read More »