Curios of the week #122

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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This week started at Yuulong, our tiny campus on the Great Ocean Road where Year 9 students spend a term. I was not there in a professional capacity: I was there as a parent. My youngest daughter was coming to the end of her time there and arrived home on Wednesday. It has been lovely to see her again and cook her the chilli con carne she asked for. She has been sorely missed.

Times are rolling along quickly. In turn, my eldest daughter received the first of her VCE study scores. She is in Year 11 and students usually take their VCE exams at the end of Year 12. However, it is possible to accelerate and one VCE option is to take some subjects mid-year on a Northern Hemisphere timetable. That’s what she chose to do with a maths course. However, the Northern Hemisphere option is soon ending so my daughter will be one of the last students to complete it this way.

This week’s Curios include sneaky suspensions, measuring progress, some freaky brain research and much more.

Special educational needs of the week

In Australia, we talk of disabilities and disorders. In the UK, they discuss Special Educational Needs and Disabilities which they have given the acronym, SEND. However you describe students who have additional needs in the classroom, catering to those needs is a cause of ongoing discussion and concern.

I have written before that when we look at the literature on Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the evidence suggests the effectiveness of routines, structure and explicit teaching. These do not require tailoring to individual students and here lies the problem. The bureaucratic-legal complex envisages individual interventions tailored to specific students and does not anticipate the use of whole-class approaches. We are designing out best practice.

I have not read an article in Britain’s TES magazine that has caught my attention for quite some time. I’m not sure it has even featured in Curios. However, a new piece by Zofia Niemtus comes close to making a similar point and backing it up with quotes from experts in the field. Niemtus quotes Rob Webster of the University of Greenwich as claiming:

“There have been a few systematic reviews and large-scale research pieces on SEND pedagogy, and one of the striking things that emerges is that the characteristics of good pedagogy for kids with SEND aren’t all that different from good pedagogy, full stop.”

Niemtus never quite reaches the point of explaining what ‘good pedagogy’ is, but her interviewees go on to make some strong, pragmatic points. Echoing Response to Intervention, they suggest we should focus first on whole class approaches before, “employ more targeted approaches when a child’s needs are not being met by just delivering a universal design.”

This is a strong message but not one that will be welcomed by some in the UK’s SEND sector.

Survey of the week

I know—the last thing you need right now is a survey to fill out, but this one is relatively short and extremely important.

KPMG are conducting an evaluation of the excellent Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) and as part of that evaluation, they are asking members of the education community to complete this survey.

I say, ‘asking,’ but I was not aware of this survey until a source pointed it out to me and I think I am pretty switched on to events in Australian education. How did I not know about it directly? I’m not sure.

Regardless, you can bet the ideological enemies of AERO—such as the AARE who have been blogging in furious opposition—know all about the survey, so please have your say.

Sneaky suspensions of the week

This week saw a classic example of a newspaper perpetuating a deeply misleading narrative.