In this episode, Brendan Lee speaks with Jessica Del Rio the government and public finance lead at Equity Economics. She has recently been involved in a couple of major reports that have highlighted the poor literacy standards across Australia.
- Raising the grade: How schools in the Australian Capital Territory can lift literacy outcomes for students and the economy, written for the ACT Alliance for Evidence-Based Education and funded by the Snow Foundation
- Saving Money by Spending: Solving Illiteracy in Australia, commissioned by Code Read Dyslexia Network Australia
In this conversation, Jess will tell us how bleak our current situation is, what needs to be done, what will happen if changes aren’t made and go through some examples of who is doing this well.
Resources mentioned:
- Rowe, K., & National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (Australia). (2005). Teaching Reading: Report and Recommendations. Department of Education, Science and Training. https://research.acer.edu.au/tll_misc/5
- Knowledge for Teachers Podcast
- 14 – Ross Fox on how Catalyst is transforming lives through learning (Catalyst Part 1)
- 15 – Patrick Ellis on considerations for change (Catalyst Part 2)
- 16 – St Bernard’s P.S. Transformational Change Through Catalyst (Catalyst Part 3)
- Nancy Young
- Code READ Dyslexia Network
- Fogarty Foundation
- Catalyst
- Think Forward Educators
- Sharing Best Practice
- Australian PISA reports and data files
- Grattan Institute: Widening gaps: what NAPLAN tells us about student progress
- Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast – Ep. 100 Trauma and Reading with Dr. Steven Dykstra
You can connect with Jess:
You can connect with Brendan:
Twitter: @learnwithmrlee
Facebook: @learningwithmrlee
Website: learnwithlee.net
Support the Knowledge for Teachers Podcast:
https://www.patreon.com/KnowledgeforTeachersPodcast
About Jessica Del Rio
Jessica is a social, fiscal, and public policy expert, providing advice grounded in a deep appreciation of government decision-making contexts and processes. She has extensive experience at senior executive levels in the federal government in the departments of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Social Services and Home Affairs. Her experience internationally includes as a senior executive in the Canadian Finance and Treasury departments. She has also worked in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and AusAID. Jessica has significant experience in public financial management as part of the leadership team for two deficit reduction processes, the Canadian Deficit Reduction Action Plan and the Australian Commission of Audit. Jessica worked in the Department of Finance over five years where she was responsible for overseeing whole-of-government budgeting on Indigenous affairs. Jessica has delivered significant social policy reforms through to implementation. She was responsible for improving service delivery for recently arrived migrants through her management of the $250m per annum Adult Migrant English Program. Jessica led a significant reform which means that migrants now have unlimited access to free English language tuition, while successfully steering the program through the financial and service delivery impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2 Responses
If your definition of reading is decoding text then explicit phonetic instruction will result in efficient decoders. If your definition of reading is gaining meaning from print then the strategies you use to teach reading will involve teaching children to use semantic, syntactic and grapho phonic cues. Have you taught children to read? I am a teacher who has taught young children to read. I have also taught illiterate adults to read. I have never used a nonsense approach to teaching reading as I believe reading is about gaining meaning from print.
Hi Val, I would agree with you that learning to decode is not reading. Phonics is about teaching students to recognise an understanding of the common grapheme phoneme correspondances, so that they can use them when engaging with a text. Gough and Tunmer’s simple view of reading does a good job of showing the relationship between word recognition and language comprehension.