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Aus: 'Teachers report on writes and wrongs of their uni education'

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2019 1:10 am
by Debbie_Hepplewhite
Well done journalist Bethany Hiatt who is not unknown to flag up important stories about the state of play of reading instruction in Australia. Bethany has written this piece in 'The West Australian' - noting the importance work of Dr Lorraine Hammond in the process:

Teachers report on writes and wrongs of their uni education

Bethany Hiatt

Sunday, 3 February 2019
https://thewest.com.au/news/education/t ... 881084862z
The explicit instruction method teaches concepts in small, systematic steps, checking regularly for understanding, to help transfer students’ learning from their short-term to long-term memory.

Dr Hammond said many people believed that learning to read was a natural process, like learning to talk. But research showed children needed to be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters using phonics.

She said it was a problem that many academics were not up to date with the science underpinning effective reading teaching.

“You can’t teach what you don’t know,” Dr Hammond said. “The universities will say every beginning teacher is aware they ought to be teaching phonics, however, it’s how to teach it that they are not taught.

Re: Aus: 'Teachers report on writes and wrongs of their uni education'

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2019 1:16 am
by Debbie_Hepplewhite
And Professor Pamela Snow has included the open letter of a new graduate featured in Bethany Hiatt's piece via Pams' very popular blog, The Snow Report, which you can read here:

https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2019/02 ... l?spref=tw
An open letter to faculties of education

In 2018, I wrote an open letter to student teachers, which I published on this blog. With over 32K views so far, this has been one of my most-accessed blogposts, and I was contacted by a number of student teachers and recent graduates, who told me that my letter precisely encapsulated the way they were "socialised" at university about how to teach reading.

The following letter was penned by Eleanor, a new-graduate from an Australian university. Eleanor has asked me to share her letter on my blog so that the voices of emerging teachers may be heard in the ongoing debate about how best to prepare teachers to do their life-changing work of teaching children to read. Eleanor's letter is the subject of a piece by West Australian journalist, Bethany Hiatt, published today.