Learning DISCO, from Miss Emma (The Reading Whisperer). Free advice and support for parents and teachers regarding Dyslexia Difficulties Prevention and Intervention.

Learning Differences Information & Support Centre Online Do you ‘Give a Duck’ enough to help us to develop Dyslexia Doctor Software, so that all Preps are assessed for dyslexia markers, and that underlying issues are overcome? First you need to understand Miss Emma’s position, and why software is developed in this way. Also, how to avoid costly, ineffective commercial programs This article will clarify why I strongly disagree with a suggestion from dyslexia advocates that Orton Gillingham be used with dyslexic students...In fact I was so annoyed by a recent ‘position statement’ within which this was promoted, that I am setting up my own Learning Differences Information & Support Centre Online - the Learning DISCO !

You know I love to rhyme, sing and dance...to share what I think is most useful for parents of Dyslexic kids in particular. The advice being given out there in Australia leaves me feeling positively off key...

The reason the recent LDA gave me hope on the one hand, and annoyed me on the other, is because of how vague 'based on Orton-Gillingham' is...one organisation saying they have based their program on this does not mean it is anything like another O-G based program. To help parents we must be very specific. Anyone with an interest in child centred learning would support the underlying O-G ideas- but how does a tutor or commercial O-G based program actually help the individual? What matters most is OUTCOMES ie how far travelled for each individual student,

not just 'average gains' and also how much it enhanced the teaching ability of each tutor or teacher using it.

The LDA position statement reads as if O-G is one thing - and as I wrote in my recent posts, it absolutely isn't. Someone said that anything recommended by dyslexia support organisations must be research based, which is why I show that if that is you yard stick, O-G does not fare well.. That doesn't mean what people are doing, under the O-G umbrella, isn't. It often reinforces how difficult it is to link education and science - there are so many variables. If two classes are taught using a program, overall gains might be brought down as one teacher had a great relationship with her students, and the other didn't ! I look at outcomes. Where did they start? Where did they end up?...

Look at Read, Write Inc in the UK. Now probably the most popular 'phonics' program, with (I think) 6 of the schools in the 'Reading by Six, How the Best Schools Do It' using this- and yet I am unaware of any 'research'. Why would Ruth care about 'proving' her program- results do that !!And reading and spelling is very easy to measure.

The simple definition of O-G is that 'The Orton-Gillingham Approach is an intensive, sequential phonics-based system teaches the basics of word formation before whole meanings. The method accommodates and utilizes the three learning modalities, or pathways, through which people learn—visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Unlike some scripted and rigid reading programs, the Orton-Gillingham Approach is a system that allows for flexibility.'

Well that means SSP is based on Orton-Gillingham too?!!

That describes SSP to a tee.

And yet anyone who has trained in O-G in Australia will tell you that it is nothing like as flexible as SSP.

Anything that asks students who already hate to try reading and spelling, to rote learn spelling rules, will not get them to be fluent quickly and easily - again why I questioned this inclusion with the LDA statement. Please, be specific, which is exactly what the finding were in previous postings re peer reviewed research.

But I do also recognise the fact that no-one in the LDA has seen SSP in action or even asked us about it. What about dyslexia organisations? If someone tells you there is a new, better way to best serve your clients, is it not worth exploring? Or no, people 'Miss Emma' questions and challenges everything, and thinks outside the box. But isn't this supposedly a good thing, when dyslexic?

I will come and display SSP resources in Sydney August 27/28 at the Learning Differences Convention. Please, come and see for yourself how very different it is. Some might even say I have achieved the 'Orton-Gillingham' approach more effectively, through SSP, than anyone else

has been able to do so far...and not one 'rule' has to be learnt by any student. A cheap, quick and fun way to teach all learners. A good thing, surely.

So come along and say hi. Even if just to pick SSP apart. I will put up a list of research that supports every element, and not just all research findings behind the Big Six....for example to show how our multimodal use of left to right tracking, and moving using duck hands, lines, numbers and playing the Speech Sound Piano can address Laurie Cestnick's (previously Harvard, now MIT) research into visual attention and developmental left field neglect and it's contribution to dyslexia. She has found that in neurologically intact children this can be present until between 6 and 8 years of age. There is a reason behind absolutely everything we do, and it generally comes down to 'inclusion,' 'personalisation' and 'differentiation.'

Get behind us, to put personalised 'Dyslexia Doctor' software onto tablets for all Prep and Year 1 students, and for older students who need to catch up. Software will cover phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary knowledge, fluency and comprehension...reading, writing and spelling skills. But to understand the underlying principals you need to understand the learning to read and spell phase, especially for dyslexic learners.

Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness and the element required for reading and spelling.

Students must be able to identify the individual speech sounds in words, to blend and segment (order) them. Manipulation if I take this speech sound away, what will I say? ..if I add this speech sound between X and Y speech sounds, what is the new word?) is the highest level.

Therefore splitting words into syllables, consonant blends, or using onset and rime is taking away from this focus - the focus needed to ensure that every dyslexic student learns to read and spell by 6. And yes, we identify who those would have been within the first term of Prep. It does not change the child, and who they are, it means they learn to read and spell quickly and confidently along with everyone else from day 1. There is no need for a dyslexia assessment, for intervention, for Reading Recovery, as the issues were identified when they were 5, and overcome.

WHY would anyone choose otherwise? Cost? Less than $50 per Prep child including a set of Dandelion and Fitzroy readers per class.

INSIST that your Prep child gets SSP so that if they are dyslexic they will not fail. Also to dramatically improve oral language skills.

To simplify things for parents with a dyslexic child who missed this, had to go through emotional pain as the school thought it was the child who needed help, whereas it was the school that needed help, I say that all they need to focus on is 'when does your mouth change'. Below shows the monster used for the associated Green Code Level word ‘sip’ Use Duck Hands to repeat those individual speech sounds, from left to right (to show the brain how these speech sounds will be represented on paper) Then draw the speech sound lines from left to right, saying the sounds as you draw each individual line. Now number, under the lines, again

saying the speech sounds as you write the numbers.

Now 'play' the word using your wiggly fingers over the lines - to again show your brain how the speech sounds used, quickly, to say the whole word, were split for spelling, to represent that spoken word on paper.

Now we need to think about which 'pics' would be used to represent those speech sounds on the lines. When we close our eyes we need to visualise (close your eyes and visualise is an SSP term) the written representation of the individual speech sounds on the lines.

To make it far easier, I have created a cloud to show every 'speech sound pic'. It is the only in the word to show students all spelling choices, regardless of accents. So although within this first level we are focusing on s,a,t,p,i,n the students can already see all the other choices for those speech sounds. This is really important. They aren’t going to learn them, they are doing to discover them, alongside learning the high frequency sound pics, shown in bold (taught explicitly)

SSP Duck Hands

The SSP Spelling Strategy is demonstrated below, using the word ‘house’…

(playing the whole word)

(This particular image has been used, to demonstrate the limitations traditional ‘print to speech phonics’ puts on the brain. As ‘or’ is taught as a representation for the ‘aw’ speech sound teachers could easily overlook the fact that there is also a ‘r’ speech sound in this word. This ‘Code Mapping’ of speech sounds to representations is especially important for struggling readers and spellers, including dyslexic learners. )

Students become familiar with the resources from term 1 of Prep.

As with most things in SSP the Spelling Cloud keyring is a world first because I am a teacher, who 'gets' kids and what they want and need not just cognitively but also emotionally. You only have to look at codedsightwords.com etc to see that. SSP is used with all ages, and not considered 'babyish' by teens, or 'irrelevant' by ESL and Indigenous kids. The resources are not limited to a 'middle to high socio economic class, in white Australia.'

I’m a parent of a black child, and have lived all over the world. Trust me, a huge percentage of resources for 'reading and spelling' have been created without even considering the wider audience.

Look at who created programs and you will see the link with what is included in their program - are they a researcher/ academic? - or are they someone who has actually taught students? Have that started what they do to put research into practice? That may sound great, but 'research' within education is very limiting due to the restrictions on controlling variables. To really evaluate something you'd have to ensure every teacher was the same - how do you control the variable of 'relationships with students'?....

So I look at whether something offered is going to be effective for the highest number of students (I look at whether effective for dyslexics) and whether they will have fun doing it, and become more independent and confident. I think 'so by term 3 will they have the skills to more or less figure everything out themselves, and know how to keep progress- are they in charge of their own learning now, and not reliant on a teacher or parent)

So, why did I start with mentioning that I do not support Orton Gillinghm for dyslexic students. For a start this is like saying 'use phonics'. Compare the 'phonics' in SSP with Letterland, Sound Waves, Jolly Phonics. Nothing like those programs, not just because SSP is a 'print to speech approach' and they are 'print to speech' ...So if someone is using SSP their teaching of 'phonics' is very, very different- and so the outcomes for children in very different (especially if dyslexic) Look at the directive from the SA Education Department (Adelaide) who are doing a fantastic job of sharing information about the Big Six.

SA Education Dept

"When should phonic skills be introduced?

Once children can discriminate separate phonemes (that is, can answer questions like those in the phoneme isolation section), letter-sound relationships can be introduced, as both phonemic and phonic skills can be taught simultaneously from this point. When letters are first introduced, they should be referred to by the sound they represent, not by the letter name.

This rules out Jolly Phonics! Read the teacher handbook...a letter sound should be taught every day for 42 days from term 1 (week 1) of Prep.

The handbook takes teachers straight into phonics, and ignores the overwhelming research that shows that this is not effective if students do not first have phonemic awareness ?! Without phonemic awareness the code (phonics) makes no sense. As dyslexic students have poor phonemic awareness, why would an organisation like SPELD SA continue to promote it, even knowing the education department is giving advice that WILL help their schools to more effectively meet the needs of SA students (if the school leaders listen) They could even see a huge gap with the program- the program creators did not want children reading books until they knew 42 letter sounds! So SPELD SA created codable readers themselves. Why not support an approach or program that is effective for all, teachers don't need to dramatically adapt it, and where children can actually start reading and spelling real sentences within 3 weeks? Why choose something that asks children to learn about the code, and then tells them to memorise high frequency words as 'sight words'. Yes, they are 'tricky' for dyslexic students, and so unnecessary !

Every word in the English language can be 'code mapped' (SSP term for phonics - that includes all 1.25 million words- except 'one' and 'once'- and reinforces this for kid on the Spelling Cloud keyring.

So saying 'use O-G' means anyone who claims to have a program based on this comes under the umbrella of 'too vague'.

I have seen some AWFUL things being given to children, with the developers saying 'based on O-G'.

And this was made clear here:

A search of the research literature for studies examining the efficacy of the Orton-Gillingham Approach did not identify any empirical studies of this approach implemented specifically as described in the Orton-Gillingham training materials. There are numerous studies of intervention programs such as Alphabetic Phonics, Project Read, or the Wilson Reading System, that were derived from the general Orton-Gillingham Approach and implement many of its principles. However, since these programs all contain features unique to their own program and not shared by other Orton-Gillingham derived programs, they cannot be included in this review of research. We must conclude that, although the Orton-Gillingham Approach contains many of the characteristics of effective intervention programs that have been identified in scientifically based research on reading, there are no studies available at present to provide an estimate of its impact on the reading growth of young children.

Here's the link to the Florida Center evaluation

http://www.fcrr.org/fcrrreports/pdf/orton_gillingham_approach.pdf

This writer sums it up well..

What is the Evidence Base of Orton-based Programs?

Source #1: In 2006, Ritchey & Goeke published a review of the literature of OG based instruction. They found that, much like today, these types of programs were being passed from one educator to the next, not based on strong scientific research showing it worked, but rather “fueled by anecdotal evidence and personal experience” (p. 172). They sought to find out if these programs were indeed assisting kids with learning to read. This still occurs today on many blogs and websites, where Orton trained educators often swear by the effectiveness of the programs, while other researchers continue to want proof that they actually improve reading abilities.

After sorting through the research published at this time, Ritchey & Goeke found that the amount of published studies that matched commonly accepted ‘sound research’ criteria were few and far between. They eventually conducted the literature review using just 12 studies that were deemed appropriate for inclusion in the review.

Conclusions of Ritchey & Goeke:

“Despite widespread use by teachers in a variety of settings for more than 5 decades, OG instruction has yet to be comprehensively studied and reported in peer-refereed journals. The small number of existing studies lack methodological rigor that would be required for publication in current peer-referred journals” (p. 182).

“There is insufficient evidence to conclude that OG and OG-based reading instruction meet the requirements of scientifically-based reading instruction” (p. 181).

Source #2: The Best Evidence Encyclopedia is a free site funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education and created by Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education. It summarizes scientific reviews in order to provide educators with “fair and useful information about the strength of evidence supporting a variety of programs available for students in grades k-12.” On this site struggling reader programs were placed into four main categories: 1. Strong Evidence of Effectiveness, 2. Moderate Evidence of Effectiveness, 3. Limited Evidence of Effectiveness, and 4. Insufficient Evidence of Effectiveness.

Only 8 programs fell into the top category with strong evidence of effectiveness, and one in the moderate evidence category. Of those 9, none of the programs were described as Orton-based. There are, however, several Orton-based programs found in the two lower categories.

Within the Limited Evidence category only one, Project READ, was described as an Orton-based intervention. The Wilson Reading Program was found within the last category, Insufficient Evidence of Effectiveness. There is an extensive list of programs that had no qualifying studies so that conclusions could be made about effectiveness including Fundations and Spalding Writing Road to Reading.

The full document, which additionally includes details about many programs that do work entitled, Educator’s Guide: Identifying What Works for Struggling Readers can be accessed online.

Source #3: The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is considered the “research arm” of the U.S. Department of Education and aims to identify what works and what does not, so that schools can improve educational outcomes for students. At this site, research reports about a variety of specific literacy interventions can be read and downloaded. These reports detail the effectiveness of these interventions, based on acceptable scientific studies. Research summaries, program descriptions, and research studies accepted for inclusion are detailed and a full report can also be accessed.

In regard to Wilson Reading System, the summary page reports, “Wilson Reading System was found to have potentially positive effects on alphabetics and no discernible effects on fluency and comprehension.” The term alphabetics is used to describe phonemic awareness and phonics skills. Of the studies reviewed, only one out of nine met the IES standards.

The summary report for Waterford Early Reading Program was identical, with the only change being that 36 studies were reviewed in order to arrive at this conclusion. An intervention report about Fundations can be found in the category related to children with disabilities and was last updated in July 2010. The IES found no studies that fell within their standards, and determined that they were “unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Fundations…” Within the same category, the IES determined that no “Unbranded Orton-Gillingham-based Interventions” fell within the scope of their review protocol, out of 31 total studies.

And so I end this first article with these questions:

Why would schools risk using any of these Orton-based interventions with our most fragile readers if they have yet to be proven, in reliable, scientific, and unbiased research to indeed positively affect reading outcomes including the most essential ones; real reading and comprehension? Especially considering we have a plethora of information regarding interventions that have proven over time to work for a variety of struggling readers!

Another question that I will address in the next article (Part 2) is this: Why would schools also choose to use this type of instruction, yet to be proven to work with struggling readers and designed for dyslexic students, with our typically developing readers in the regular education classroom?

Ritchey, K.D, & Goeke, J.L. (2006). Orton-Gillingham and Orton-Gillingham-Based reading instruction: A review of the literature. The Journal of Special Education, 40(3), p. 171-183.

http://www.examiner.com/article/lack-of-scientific-support-for-orton-based-reading-interventions-part-1-of-2

And this is also useful...

No studies of unbranded Orton-Gillingham–based strategies that fall within the scope of the Students with Learning Disabilities review protocol meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of unbranded Orton-Gillingham–based strategies for students with learning disabilities.

Note 'unbranded' means commercial programs that are based on the OG approach include: Alphabetic Phonics, Wilson Reading System, The Herman Method, Project ASSIST, The Slingerland Approach, The Spalding Method, Project Read, Starting Over, and Fundations.

http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/intervention_reports/wwc_ortongill_070110.pdf

I am a real teacher (with a Masters Degree in Special Educational Needs) who has taught all ages, and all learning differences you could imagine. My claim is that I can teach any student* to read chapter books with fluency and comprehension, and to know if a word 'looks right' and if not, how to change it (without spell check lol) more quickly and easily than anyone else in the world. So, while I am sure that many using ‘O-G’ based programs are doing a brilliant job, anyone making recommendations need to be very, very specific.

How can we meet the needs of all ? Authentic, fun, meaningful teaching that starts with a 'Speech to Print' approach, and breaks it down so that children only have to focus on what they hear, and what their mouth does- to be able to 'map' those speech sounds with their written representation. No syllable splitting, no 'rules', no focus on word origins. Spelling rules are not

needed or used by students using SSP, and to be honest most of the delinquent, teenage boys I have worked with would lose any interest within a few minutes if I started teaching them to rote learn ‘rules’ or talk about word origins. My unique ‘Speedy Paired Decoding’ strategy that allows the eyes of the pointer (can be a lower level coder) to track words, to hear the speech sounds (from the coder who is ‘following the speech sounds) , and for that student to then blend the words, to keep going along the sentence and build fluency. I’m sure others will soon copy as free, but this was certainly a strategy I created before anyone else. You can see teenagers doing it, in high school, after failing to become functionally literate after ten years in the EQ system. (ask me for video links)

Resources are all coded, to allow for sequential, scaffolded learning, and are in Line with Letters and Sounds (UK Gov program).

(Skills and Concepts at the Purple Code Level

Use the free web site to access SSP ‘Code Level’ readers, including SSP readers. www.SSPReaders.com

(All resources available for members, and included in the ‘less than $50 per student per year’ classroom pack, that includes a set of Dandelion and Fitzroy readers)

So when people ask 'what is SSP? I tell them that it is my way of sharing my gift with anyone interested. They, too, can identify dyslexic students, and overcome issues before the end of Prep. I challenge any school who uses SSP in Prep and Year 1 over the next 5 years to then even identify if any of their students are dyslexic. The work they do in Prep and Year 1 actually 'wires' all brains for reading and spelling, and the SSP activities mean they become independent, confident, engaged learners.

Other real teachers who love kids 'get' SSP and will never go back to anything else. I only launched the approach last year, and oh boy are SSP teachers already making huge changes across Australia. We are focused on the journey, and the whole child, but Admin and the Education Department are focused on the outcomes, and are being blown away.

Yes, there is finally something that prevents dyslexic students from heart ache, and will dramatically increase the number of Australians who go out into the work place with exceptional reading, writing and spelling skills. They will also be kinder, and work well with others. Inclusion, co-operation and collaboration is a huge element of the SSP approach, with students not only intrinsically motivated to be their best, but also to help their peers be their best as well. Another key issue is also ease of use and expense. It is affordable and brings about an almost instant improvement in confidence, and motivation to learn more.

Miss Emma, The Reading Whisperer

Support us so that we can tablets/ iPads loaded with Dyslexic Doctor ™ software for students ie their own personalised learning program.

New ! The Learning DISCO (Learning Differences Information Support Centre Online)