I feel very honoured to have been invited as the sole speaker from the United Kingdom for the ‘global’ GLOW conference hosted by SAAR Education in India. The video is just over one hour long, but my talk starts around the 7 minute point.
Despite the fact that the Department for Education (DfE) in England has now ‘validated’ 45 Systematic Synthetic Phonics programmes, I maintain that these have some significant differences and that if there is to be any further research in the field of reading instruction and foundational literacy, observations of ‘time on task’ is where we need to focus. What does phonics provision ‘look like’ for each and every child – and for ALL stakeholders? That would be an eye-opener for many people, I suggest.
Anyone who has followed my work will know that for years I have been championing paper-based, rich-content to enable plenty of individual practice (for reading, spelling, writing, vocabulary enrichment and language comprehension) for every learner – and that I’m horrified by the persistent message to so many teachers of ‘strictly no worksheets or workbooks’ for the phonics provision. I find this ‘chilling and irrational’. So I say so here:
PLEASE NOTE: Below is the PowerPoint that I used for my GLOW talk. It is intentionally designed to have very full explanations on the slides themselves. As I was running out of time for my talk and had to rush very quickly through the last slides, it may be helpful to use this PowerPoint to be able to read and absorb the information on them (and you can see here for information about the No Nonsense Phonics programme):
FURTHER: If anyone is interested in a free training webinar, with full course notes, featuring teaching English as an additional language, with more detailed information about my approach and resources and programme-design, see this video (an hour and a half long).
