Teach the Way they Learn

It's been a while...

we are coming up to the busiest time for tuition and that has been keeping me a little bit busy, however I have been ruminating over many of the issues that are facing our young people in education so thought it might be time to get some of it out of my head and on paper.

This blog post focuses on the children we teach that have learning differences. I would use the more commonly known phrase, 'learning difficulties' but in my twenty plus years of working in education I have come to view the all encompassing SEND student title very differently. It strikes me that there is less of the 'difficulty to learn' in many cases, we are just not providing the right environments for them to thrive. Incidentally, I believe this could be said of most of our students at the moment.

I started out life in special education, as a highly committed teaching assistant. In the late 90s I was part of the structure of support in school that facilitated the success of inclusion. There was time dedicated to preparing and resourcing personalised programmes of study which a student could access, that would underpin the work that their main teacher was doing with them in the classroom. it was about collaboration, team teaching and a multi-agency approach to supporting children who could not access the curriculum as well as their peers, which in turn helped them cope better in class. This is mainly because back then schools had funding for this.

Fast forward to 2020, much of this funding has disappeared and children with significant learning needs are no longer getting the support they need. This is having a disastrous effect on student's progress and self-esteem. It is more than likely one of the contributing factors to the decline in behaviour in schools, and more worryingly their mental health is suffering as a result.

Students with dyslexic brains, which are now believed to be as many as 20% of the UK population, can possess some of the most technically brilliant minds but are often labelled underachievers because of the way they need information to be presented before they can access it. Autistic students can quite easily struggle with sensory overload in a classroom setting, but if allowed to absorb information in calm environment they can also learn at the same rate or exceed the progress of their peers.

I currently have a case load of ten students, all of them possessing some form of learning difference, but not one of them is incapable of achieving academically - and yet they are all 'underachieving' in school. Now as an ex-class teacher myself, I am not suggesting that class teachers are at fault here, I am more than aware of classroom constraints. Both teachers and students need more support in schools, they are both being failed.

It is true that some teachers are better equipped to teach students with a diverse range of needs, but not all - this is something that should perhaps be addressed at initial teacher training level. I was lucky. By the time I had qualified as a primary school teacher, I had spend eight years undergoing various specialist training as a TA and given responsibility for the progress of a number of students in the school. I learned a lot about matching education to children's individual needs and how to support them so they could work more independently in the classroom. I understand the frustration of standing in front of a class of thirty students, knowing that you are not going to reach all of them.

As a specialist home tutor, I spend the bulk of my time assessing the areas that the students are struggling with and finding ways to address this. For this I am afforded the luxury of  'time' and not having to stick rigidly to a curriculum or traditional teaching methods - my creative approach to teaching comes in handy here, although can get a few funny looks when I am singing maths formulae at the top of my voice! I aim to provide my tutees with strategies to overcome the obstacles that they experience in class, but also foster self-belief. They CAN achieve, because I am teaching them the way they learn.

It is sad that currently only children with parents who can afford to pay for a tutor will get this extra support. Although there are some students who do manage to secure funding, this is extremely rare though and is often used as a last resort when the child's resilience is at an all time low and they refuse to attend school. In an ideal world we would teach in a way that allows all students to access the lesson, take a multisensory approach that stimulates young minds, instead we appear to have resorted to incessant information dumping that overwhelms them. Teachers are under so much pressure to cover an often unrealistic amount of content.

I love my job. It's a privilege to work with the young people that I support. Tutoring neuro-diverse students is not without its challenges, and I don't have all the answers, but the rewards can be amazing! And they are amazing too.

DU

Mind Your Language

         

The language we use around young people of all ages is important to get right. From as young as eight months, children are picking up the words and phrases that adults use and assimilating them into their vocabulary. I am sure there are a more than a  few parents out there who can recall the first time they heard their two year-old calmly blurt out a swear word – usually somewhere in a public place.

However this isn’t really a piece about taking care not swear in the presence of young ears, although the title might well suggest this. I am thinking specifically of another kind of ‘bad language’ that we use around students that I believe we need to be mindful of.

In secondary schools up and down the UK, we are letting our students down with just two little words, ‘pass’ and ‘fail.’ Despite a robust grade system, that charts a student’s progress throughout their school years, the language that we are using to describe their progress itself fails to recognise the incremental achievements that students are making, and the effort they are putting in.

A student we worked with in school a few years ago, started Year 11 with a Grade 1 in maths and was already feeling like a failure due to years of being told that she was not ‘good at maths’ and working well behind her peers. Encouraged by a patient teacher and extra coaching sessions, this student was making steady progress by Christmas and achieved a Grade 2 in their mock exam.

Naturally she was pleased to have moved up a grade and this spurred her on to continue to try her best and work hard to achieve that all important door opener – a Grade 4. By the Easter mocks, she was performing significantly better in past papers and seemed to be edging closer and closer to the next grade, this gave her hope that she might reach a Grade 4 by the May exams.

Despite her achievements, she was disappointed by her final GCSE grade on opening her exam results in August. She told me that she had ‘failed miserably’ and was incredibly despondent. Although she did manage to secure a solid Grade 3, she could not see the two grades progress as an achievement and I believe this is partly because of the language she'd been exposed to. We say that anything less that a grade 4 is a fail and so that is how students see themselves.

Of course, I am not trying to negate the fact that there must be a national average for students to work towards and a standard set, I just wish that the system recognised the effort it took this student (and hundreds like her) to achieve the Grade 3. In actual fact many students know that this ‘average’ is really a Grade 5 and that they are still underachieving if they come out with a Grade 4.

Traditionally these students have to re-sit their GCSE until they ‘pass’ which prolongs the agony even longer and further slows down their progress. With maths in particular, the exam doesn’t necessary prove that an individual has good numeracy skills – there are many questions on the paper that they will never have to face in real life. However again, I fully recognise that a standard of numeracy needs to be reached.

Having now taught, coached, mentored and tutored numerous students over the years, I have witnessed first hand the black and white way we are responding to their achievements and the negative impact it is having on our young people. The numbers of students who have low self-esteem, anxiety and other mental health issues, is rising each year. I feel very strongly that we need to change the language we use around them. Of course a student knows if they need a certain grade that they have ‘failed’ if they did not achieve it, but is it really necessary to keep hammering it home? Who does that help in the long run? Certainly not the struggling student who is so worried about their performance in exams that is making them mentally and physically ill.

I have particular concerns about our students with any type of barrier to learning, including special educational needs, and am reminded of this famous quote;

I have the pleasure of knowing some incredibly talented people that this applies to, and they all have major confidence issues that have affected them their whole life due to how the education system mishandled them.

What is particularly worrying though, is that we are meeting children as young as six who already know that they are falling behind in the competitive classroom and Year 6’s who say that they have ‘failed’ their SATs if they get less than 100 on their tests. Over-testing is partially to blame I feel, but also I wonder if we are making them too aware, too young, of the levels they need to achieve. Has our keenness to promote independent learning caused the overburdening of young minds? Are we in danger of squeezing out all of their creativity by asking them to perform for us academically at regular intervals?

I am not suggesting for a minute that we go soft on our students, pushing them to foster a good work ethic and understanding the competitive nature of the world is vital to them achieving success in later life. However, I am concerned with our approach to this. Telling a student that they need to ‘work hard and get good grades’ because it ‘increases their opportunities’ is fine but giving the impression that they ‘have one chance to ‘pass’ their GCSEs’ or their ‘life will be over’ is definitely not.

So what language should we be using? Well ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ have their place in education but we need to re-adopt the shades of grey if we are to stop undermining our student's confidence. I don’t feel those words are appropriate at all in primary school and with secondary aged students they should be used where appropriate. I can’t see what the problem is with sticking to the number system we have recently adopted in favour of the letters G – A/A* and avoiding the words ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ altogether.

It might just be semantics to some, but it also may make the difference between a student feeling as though they are working positively towards the next grade rather than feeling that they are a failure - I think that outcome alone might just be worth it.

         DU