You can’t teach old dogs new tricks (Part 1).

I read the blog post here by Prof. Pamela Snow on Twitter yesterday and here are a few extracts and my comments.

If by democracy the NCTE (National Council for Teacher Educations) means every child reads as poorly as the next one, they may be right, but that does not address the social justice imperative. The only way for reading instruction to exert force on social justice levers is for it to be fail-safe for the overwhelming majority of students.

A ‘student’ has surpassed his ‘teacher’

A teacher who has more than 50 years’ experience in teaching decided to use my books made available to her.

She started teaching a 6.5-year-old kid and then a 5-year-old kid and has recently started teaching a 4.5-year-old kid.

Beliefs about learning

I read the following that was linked to a tweet yesterday.

Beliefs about learning—once established—tend to be deep-seated, difficult to change, and have a considerable impact on one’s motivation, behavior, and achievement (Bandura, 1997; Pajares, 1992). Thus, it is important that people have adaptive rather than maladaptive views of learning.

I feel so stupid that I believed what I was told instead of questioning authority and evaluating the research for myself.

Discussion or argument on social media

I have been writing on one main idea on my blog since my first dispute, on the theory that phonological awareness deficit is the cause of dyslexia, was resolved. That theory that lasted for about 40 years was debunked in 2015.

Seeds have begun to germinate

One of the good things brought about by Covid19 is the fact that many educators have had the time to read tweets and the links attached.

The "illusion of truth" effect.

The illusion of truth is a mechanism by which one comes to believe something is true when it’s not. In fact, they don’t just believe it; they also defend it as true. Also, they close themselves off to the possibility that it might be false.

Analogical reasoning

The following is a tweet by me to Sue Lloyd Replying @NarelleLynch1 and @RobertSlavin

Here is another video clip in this post where the phonemes represented by letters are read wrongly and yet the university student in Australia is able to read the nonsense words easily.

https://dyslexiafriend.com/2020/04/idiotic-statement-by-dr-robert-slavin.html

Is she reading using SSP or by analyses?

Do the right thing.

Yesterday, my post was on an article on Greg Ashman’s blog post.

Teaching methods not as important as curriculum (Greg Ashman)

Here are some extracts from Greg Ashman’s post and my comments.

We need an early phonics check, like the one recently trialled in South Australia, to ensure that readers are not lost to literacy early. As many phonics advocates have maintained, let’s place a warning sign and a fence at the top of the cliff instead of parking an ambulance at the bottom of it.

Rote memorisation

The following is extracted from Greg Ashman’s blog post which you may read here.

My job is done.

A 5-year-old kid now reads using phonics and a few Dolch words.

“dog” is broken down into the phonemes “duh,” “aah” and “guh.” (Sally Shaywitz) A revisit

The Couple Who Helped Decode Dyslexia

This is a revisit of a post earlier.

I read an article entitled ‘The couple who helped decode dyslexia – The Shaywitz’s’.

I am intrigued by why people swallow Hook line and sinker anything and everything written by so-called ‘experts’.

Reading Reform Foundation, Geraldine Carter and Debbie Hepplewhite

Note: The founder of RRF UK, Mona Mcnee, was a friend of mine. We had exchanged emails until the point she was almost blind and had to read my emails by asking someone to read to her. I then decided to stop writing to her.

Corroborative evidence for why kids disengage from learning to read

This is in response to Tweets from Emily Hanford of APM Reports and Geraldine Carter of Piper Books.

Foundation for further learning

A good foundation is crucial to any building project. It is such common knowledge that it is used as a metaphor for stability in dozens of different scenarios. For instance, basic knowledge in a given subject acts as a foundation for further learning. Our children’s early years’ education is labelled as foundation years.