Leaps and bounds

(THEME) 00:03

Annalise

Hi, I'm Annalise...

Hrisanthi

I'm Hrisanthi...

Rosie

I'm Rosie...

Christy 00:08

I'm Christy...

Honor

And I'm Honor... and we're the hosts of the podcast Literacy Legends.

?Host

As a Tasmanian, when you hear the word literacy, what springs to mind?

?Host 00:19

I bet it's the statistic that almost half of Tasmanian adults lack the literacy skills they need to get by day to day.

?Host 00:27

It's worrying,

?Host 00:28

So we wanted to know what's being done about it. Is literacy as big as a challenge, as they say it is?

?Host 00:37

Well, yes, it seems to be. But are there stories of hope? You bet there are.

?Host 00:43

We travelled Tasmania to find just some of the people who are working hard to improve these stats.

?Host

They're stories worth celebrating, of hope and progress, and their projects are making a real difference in people's lives.

?Host 01:05

Join us in this series about literacy in Tasmania.

?Host

Episode 4 - Leaps and Bounds.

Georgia 01:16

What was so impressive was within six months of Tanya's intervention, we got a 50% reduction in students who needed that tiered support to halve that number, I just felt so incredibly proud of Tanya and her work and so happy for the kids. My name is Georgia Park. I'm the quality teaching coach at Cosgrove High School. Prior to that, in 2022 I was the coach at Jordan River Learning Federation.

Hrisanthi 01:46

So Georgia, would you describe what the literacy program here is all about?

Georgia 01:51

So the literacy program at Jordan River is based on an MTSS framework, and that stands for multi tiered systems of support. So you have tier one, which is the universal classroom instruction that all students receive, and tier two is more targeted support. And tier three is what Tania is, the area, sorry that Tanya works in, and that is where students receive intensive one on one support for kids who are at significant risk in their language and literacy development, and Tanya works in that space predominantly.

Tanya 02:29

Hi, I'm Tanya Mason, and I'm a teacher assistant at JRL Senior School. We're currently in our reading room at the moment. Along here, we've got our rounded table, which has got all all of my pot plants on it, some incense sticks. Well, not incense sticks, scent sticks. And then through around here, we've got a little mini water fountain, which the kids actually love, love to play in. Over here, we've got our word wall, and the words that go up here are words that the children have read, but they don't have the understanding of it. So we research the understanding of the word and then we write it up on the word wall, so that it's there for them to go back to.

Hrisanthi 03:07

It just grabs your attention. So I can imagine when the students walk in here, they must feel really calm and relaxed with all the plants and the little waterfall. 

Tanya 03:18

Yes, they like to go over the waterfall and have a little bit of a play there. And they all seem to like the plants, and they like to touch and feel the plants a little bit, but they seem quite relaxed in here and quite enjoy it in here.

Hrisanthi 03:29

Could you tell us a little bit about what prompted the school to do this? 

Georgia 03:33

We wanted to align more with what cognitive science was telling us about reading and less with the approaches that required students to map a lot of things to memory. 

Hrisanthi

What does that actually mean? 

Georgia

So you would be teaching letters and sounds, and you would be doing it over and over again with repetition and review, so that students are able to decode letters and sounds. The opposite of that, which is what has been the instruction dominating Tasmania for many decades is learning language in its entirety. So there's a famous kind of a home reader called The Purple Fence, and students would have taken that home and the word purple would have been repeated over and over again. They were finding that students were just really memorizing through repetition of the whole word purple. 

And when we looked at Could... a student break down what you are? The letter combination in phonics is er, they couldn't. So they actually could not decode the word purple. They were relying on repetition pictures. But when pictures were taken away, students who had passed that levelled reader could not decode purple. We want to be able to decode. We can then go on to encode, which is spell and write. Whereas, if we're learning it in its entirety, in its wholeness, when we can't, we get to a certain point where the memory can't cope and hold that many entire words, so how do we then go on to. Code or read, more academic words, more complex words, multi syllabic words? So yes, we absolutely have to learn decoding, which is phonics. 

Hrisanthi 05:09

Can you just explain why the school was prompted to do to take on this new approach? 

Georgia 05:15

Well, Tanya and I, we, we put our heads together. We, we decided we were going to be really innovative, and we were looking kind of the work that was coming out through Professor Pamela snow, through a lot of speech pathologists, are really ahead of us in this and certainly have a seat at the table for literacy in schools. And we just said, Let's go for it. Let's let's take out the home readers, the leveled readers, the whole language approach... as I said earlier, our principal was really supportive, and we went for it, and it was just the results were so exciting.

Hrisanthi 05:53

Tanya, I'm going to turn to you now and ask you, how do you get them through the door and to stay here and keep working with you?

Tanya 06:02

It can be hard at first with the test. Some are coming with some when they do come in, I've actually, I've seen kids actually shaking. They've been that scared. And it's just like, it's okay, it's okay. Just sit down, take your time. This is between you and I, and nobody else needs to know where you're at or what's going on. And that's... the first thing that tends to get them started. Once they've done the test, I just remind them that no-one's going to get them all correct, and it's okay, you know, the ones that you don't correct, that just means that you haven't been taught those sounds yet. So I'm shifting the blame their self blame back onto myself, as in, that's my job to now teach you those.

(CLASSROOM NOISE) 

Hrisanthi 06:47

So these are the workbooks that the students work through.

Tanya 06:51

Yes, so this particular students, she's doing the sounds quote, UNK and as in, DG, that says, so her words are quick, quack, quilt, quiet, aqua, bank, junk, pink, sunk, honk, badge, badge, ledge, ridge and hedge. So she will read those out quickly and then copy them down... and we prefer copying rather than testing for spelling, because soon as they start writing things incorrectly, they're probably going to remember them that way. So copying works really well until it's automatic, and then they're fine... and then they'll write a sentence, and this particular student's written The quacking duck robbed the bank and jumped from a ledge - and that was out of the words that they've got written there. Yes, and now that we're up here, we were into much higher, higher stuff now,

Hrisanthi 07:42

Wow. So we've gone from budge to August, where they're using words like congenital and psychologists. That's just phenomenal. So within a space of what four or five months, they've grown so much. So do you find that the students self esteem improves? 

Tanya 08:02

Massively. That's a huge, huge one. And the confidence and they get keener and keener to learn. They want to learn more and more and more as they go along. 

Hrisanthi 08:11

And just... as an aside, is there more than one tenure in the school, I imagine that, you know, it must be a lot of time spent with each student? 

Tanya 08:22

Yes, it's a minimum of two sessions a week, at a minimum of 20 minutes each session, which is quite intense. So you wouldn't really want to have it any longer than that, because the concentration level has got to be very, very high. But yes, currently there's just me.

Hrisanthi 08:39

What difference has this program made overall to students as a whole here at the school, 

Georgia 08:46

Within 10 months of putting in a systematic approach to phonics, when we screen the students at the mid year and then again at post, post instruction, so at the end of the year, we had 71% of the students participating make growth above their expected age growth. And that's important so that. So we factored in the expected growth that they'd make chronologically anyway, and they were reading above that. And so that was 71% of our students, which we just hadn't had that before. 

And what was most impressive to me was the students that Tanya worked with. Within six months of Tanya's intervention, we halved that number - we got a 50% reduction in students who needed that tiered support, which meant the pulling on the resources was, you know, no longer so heavy, we could return those students back into universal instruction, into tier two, which is a really indicative of a high functioning MTSS, it should be movable. You shouldn't set and forget and stay in a tier for a long, long time. And yeah, to make, to halve that number, I just felt so incredibly proud of Tanya and her work, and so happy for the kids. 

Hrisanthi 10:04

That's... just phenomenal. I can't get my head around those numbers. That's incredible. So you guys really are at the forefront of what is happening in Tasmania at the moment, improve to improve our literacy standards. So congratulations. I'm just stoked being here and listening to this.

Georgia 10:24

Thanks you. And we have... certainly cried in here. We have certainly done little excited dances and squired when we've looked at kids' data, like it's been an emotional roller coaster, but one we're very, very fortunate to be part of, don't we?

Savannah 10:41

I'm Savannah Hickman, and I'm a grade eight most of primary school. I didn't really understand what was going on, how to read and all that. My school did try, but they didn't understand what it was like. They didn't really notice what the main problem was, and all that. Since I've came it's it's still a little bit the same at times. But since I've been coming in here, working with Tanya, I've been having much more easy and with everyone around, they've all been really helpful, helping me with my reading and more. So it's gotten much better with the work I'm doing in here. 

I remember when I couldn't read. I was just sitting in class, just sat there, silenced, acting like I know what was going on. Mm. Most time, that's how it felt. Sometimes was different, but guess there's nothing you can do about it.

Hrisanthi 11:26

And how did that make you feel? Because that's a long day if you don't understand.

Savannah 11:30

I wanted to leave, never wanted to be there, just sat there, done nothing all day. I did try my best. Feels difficult to just sit there and do stuff I didn't understand. 

Hrisanthi

And so how do you feel about reading now?

Savannah

Much better. I don't feel really at like an outsider anymore. I feel more like I can do it. I have more confidence in myself now when it comes to reading. 

Hrisanthi 11:55

And what does that mean when you're doing subjects across the whole school?

Savannah 11:59

Much better. I can, just I can, most of the time I can sit there reading, but if I never need help, I have picked the teachers around me to help me.

Hrisanthi 12:06

Tell me, what is your hope for the future of this literacy program?

Tanya 12:11

To have as many students as possible read to a high level of competence and to be able to complete and be whatever they want to be when they're an adult.

Hrisanthi 12:22

That's just incredible, isn't it that what you do here in those 220 minute sessions a week is going to make these young people go leaps and bounds in their future lives. 

Tanya 12:36

Yeah, I'm just super, super proud of the kids that I work with, and it takes a lot of courage from them to actually knuckle down at this age and and get stuck in and do the learning after what they've been through, because it can be quite traumatic.

Hrisanthi 12:49

Tanya, why do you do this job? It must be so hard every day coming in and doing this. Why? Why?

Tanya 12:57

Thank you. I just absolutely love it. I love seeing those kids faces turn into bright, happy faces, and that just makes my day. It's just fantastic see them learn it's a low, low socio economic area. It's, you know, there's a lot of kids here with trauma and and I get a little bit protective over over them, and I think they know that so. And we also have a bit of fun. Got to have a good sense of hum with them. So I love it. I wouldn't have it any other way, not at all.

(MUSIC THEME)

?Host 13:31

We acknowledge the traditional owners of this land that we recorded this podcast on, the [?Padua] and [?Pakna] peoples in Lutruwita, Tasmania. We also acknowledge disabled First Nations people. Literacy Legends is hosted by [names], and produced by Honor Marino. It was developed in cooperation with Powerd Media and Print Radio Tasmania.