Guild Gallery September 2018 | Teacher Training and Professional Development

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Dear Guild Member,

Welcome back to the start of a new term. We have worked hard over the summer to refresh and renew our membership offer. You can now find The Dyslexia Guild Policies under Guild Home once you are logged in to the members' area. You can find advice on the use of our logo, and our Code of Practice.

For those of you who have not used the Guild Forums, this is an excellent way to ask questions of your peers and experts within Dyslexia Action. You can find a guide to netiquette under the Guild Forums area.

We are developing many new cpd courses and some of them attract discounts for Guild members, see below. You MUST be logged in as a Guild member BEFORE you book for your discount to be applied.

Do not forget to visit the Dyslexia Action Shop Sale and grab some bargains!

Training Courses online in 2018

SASC accredited courses for qualified SpLD professionals

New! TOMAL-2 course

Examining the Test of Memory and Learning TOMAL2

This Level 7 Specialist Assessor course (SASC Approved) has been designed to enable you to explore the popular learning and memory assessment battery, TOMAL-2. It will enable practitioners to develop their knowledge of the test through a cycle of study, focused activity and reflection.

Guild members get a discount! Book before 28th September for the October course.

Professional Programme courses are accredited by Middlesex University and will give you a comprehensive academic basis to progress on to a Masters.

Continuing Professional Development

Looking for continuing professional development? Our courses start in September, November, January, March. A comprehensive list of our CPD courses are available here

For those working with Adults in the Further or Higher Education sector

Working with Adults? CPD courses are here

For those working with International learners in the UK or overseas

Working with International learners in the UK or overseas? See our courses here

CPD for qualified SpLD practitioners

New! Using Morphology to Enhance Reading Comprehension

For those who have been previously trained to use a multisensory literacy programme and who are looking to refresh and update their teaching practice. The materials provided in the Morphology course are designed to give specialist practitioners the knowledge, strategies and materials they need to conduct interactive word-building and word-exploration sessions. The approach and materials are suitable for learners of 12 years of age upwards and would also benefit many adult learners.

The course runs over a period of four weeks in November with a special offer to Guild members, find out more here

Coming Soon:

Developing Placement Processes to Effectively Target Specialist Support available November 2018
Developing Phonemic Awareness in Learners available January 2019
Promoting Word-building and Sentence Analysis Skills in Learners available March 2019
Working with Syllables – Using Syllable Patterns to support the reading and spelling of longer words available May 2019

Applying for and renewing an Assessment Practising Certificate

This specialist assessment CPD training course covers current best practice in report writing and preparation for those looking to gain or renew an Assessment Practising Certificate (APC). It will give you insight into the SASC requirements before you apply for your APC Certificate.

The course is recognised as fulfilling the five SASC Approved assessment cpd hours (of the 20 hours) required for renewal of APC. Book now or find out more about the APC online course

Dyslexia Awareness Week

Dyslexia Awareness Week starts on Monday 1st to Sunday 7th October this year, and many events are planned by different organisations. Dyslexia Action and Real Training will be exhibiting at the TES SEN Show during this time. The show runs from Friday 5th to Saturday 6th October at the Business Design Centre, London. Siobhan Mellor will be giving advice about gaining a Masters level qualification as part of the Exhibitor Workshop Theatre on Saturday 6th at 11.45 a.m. Dyslexia Action Shop, The Guild and Training will be there so do come along and find out more about our products and courses.

Dyslexia Scotland Conference - Dyslexia: my wider world

Dyslexia Action will be attending the conference on Saturday 27 October 2018 at the University of Strathclyde. Visit our exhibition stand and find out how our online courses can enable you to study around your existing commitments, all from the comfort of your own home or office. The Dyslexia Action Shop will also be there for all your purchasing needs. The conference is of interest to primary and secondary teachers, headteachers, and support for learning practitioners. Find out more here.

A new name for Children's Charity

Springboard for Children has changed its name to The Children's Literacy Charity. The charity can help set up a Literacy Lab within schools or community centres to provide one-to-one literacy interventions.

Visual function and dyslexia study

Children with dyslexia had more difficulties with visual function when compared with typically developing readers, a study has found. The research, published in JAMA Ophthalmology, suggests deficits in visual function such as ocular motor tracking, are more prevalent in school-aged children with dyslexia. However, they have also stated that further study is needed to determine the extent to which treating deficits can improve visual symptoms and/or reading parameters. Read more here

Dyslexia and Decoding

A new joint study identifies the brain mechanism that accounts for the discrepancy between low decoding skills and high reading comprehension in some children with dyslexia. The research was recently published in PLOS One. The research points to a larger volume of grey matter in resilient readers in the part of the brain responsible for executive functions and working memory. Read more here

A Mature Student with dyslexia gains her Master's degree

Alexandra Pyle found out she had dyslexia while studying at Plymouth University but did not let it affect her studies. She moved to Cardiff to work at the hospital there and decided to begin her masters, after discovering a gap in knowledge about a rare ulcerative condition. Read her story here

Maths Struggles and Dyscalculia

Those that struggle with maths may have dyscalculia, new research has discovered.

The Queen's University study found about one in 20 Northern Ireland primary school pupils had symptoms of dyscalculia. Dyscalculia is a learning disorder characterised by struggles with arithmetic.

The study tracked the maths performance of 2,421 primary school children over a number of school years. Only one of the children had a formal diagnosis of dyscalculia, but the researchers identified 112 others likely to have the condition.

But it can be argued that these children have basic numeracy difficulties...

Dr Morsanyi from the School of Psychology at Queen's said that dyscalculia was much more than that.

"What we are talking about is the extreme end of not being good at maths," she said. "It is when you really struggle with basic things."

"We found in a related study that these children often have difficulties in other contexts such as remembering how to get to a place, remembering the route and where you turn right or left."

Dyscalculia can also lead to people struggling to tell the time, work out prices in shops or how fast something is going. You can read more here.

Why not broaden your knowledge and understanding of numeracy difficulties with the Dyslexia Action cpd course Level 4 Developing Numeracy Skills in Learners with Dyslexia and Dyscalculia (DACPD99)

Can Apps improve Literacy?

Earlier this month, education secretary Damian Hinds announced his plan to halve the number of children starting school with inadequate speaking and reading skills.

Figures collected by the Department for Education (DfE) show that 28 per cent of four and five-year-olds do not meet the basic communication and literacy levels. A recent survey of teachers by Oxford University Press suggests that the problem is getting worse.

DfE research shows that children who have a limited command of vocabulary at age five are twice as likely to be unemployed at age 34 as their more articulate peers. “When you’re behind from the start, you rarely catch up: your peers don’t wait, the gap just widens. This has a huge impact on social mobility,” Hinds said in a speech at the Resolution Foundation. “That is why the department will be launching a competition to identify high-quality apps, with the aim of making these free and easily accessible, making sure that disadvantaged families don’t miss out.”

Lisa Guernsey, director of the Learning Technologies Project at New America, worked as part of a research team to examine the packaging of literacy apps in the app store. She remains guarded about the potential benefits of smartphone apps.

“Based on studies and evidence that I have reviewed, it is incorrect to make a blanket statement that apps can improve literacy skills,” she says. According to her research, the most popular apps were not designed to support a full range of literacy skills, focusing instead on basic skills such as letter identification or the association between letters and sounds.

“Many apps do not divulge any information about their developers, and among those that do, very few of them stated that their development team included a literacy expert,” she says. “Developers may be focusing on just a few of the skills that children must master to learn to read."

“Reading with an adult and practising these skills with a parent at home will always be the ideal scenario,” says Colleen Russo Johnson, co-director of the Children’s Media Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. “But we know this is not always the case, and it’s better to supplement with something rather than nothing,” she says. “Technology needs to be meaningfully implemented into libraries and schools, and thus in children’s lives,” Russo Johnson says. “It doesn’t matter how amazing an app is, we can’t simply hand a tablet off to a parent and expect it to be used in the intended way.” Read more at Wired

National Accessible Library

This library is for people who are unable to enjoy reading a printed book because they are blind, visually impaired, have print blindness due to dyslexia or are physically impaired.

All the books are available in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word, plain text and Braille. The books in Microsoft Word format are marked up in order to make it as easy as possible to customise the book to suit the way you want to read them. They continue to add books to the library all the time, on every subject. Sign up here

Next Issue

Next issue of Guild Gallery will be sent out in December 2018

Next issue of Dyslexia Review is Autumn/Winter 2018 and will be published Nov/Dec

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