Ms SCRYMGOUR - 2003-11-27
Can the minister please advise the House on programs to improve the literacy of Territory students - which we are very committed to and value the importance of, unlike the other side. What is working and what results are these programs showing?
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Arafura for her interest in this area of education. I know she is watching it closely as it rolls out. It will have application in her electorate, with rural and remote schools, as much as it will have in mine.
When it comes to teaching and teaching methodologies, I guess I am a bit of a traditionalist at heart. I was trained along fairly traditional lines at the old State College of Victoria at Geelong - the old Geelong Teachers College - and I would have, at heart, some misgivings over some of the traditional methods being lost over the years. I put the failing literacy and numeracy levels that we have, across the board, at the feet of some of those lost methods.
I am particularly struck with this accelerated literacy program. It is trialling in six schools as I speak, and I have seen it in four of them. I have been more impressed each time I have seen this method in operation. I will give you a little background on this. It is at Gillen Primary, ANZAC Hill High School, Dripstone High School, Ludmilla Primary, Nightcliff High School and Ngukurr Community Education Centre. The shadow minister for Education has an opportunity if he wanted to come through my office and see this in operation in these Alice Springs schools.
The outcomes: what they have been able to achieve to date is enormously exciting. On average, all of the students involved in this program have achieved a 1.8 year jump in literacy in one year in the program. That means, of course, some students are gaining two and three years leap in literacy against physical age in terms of reading age.
At lunch time, the member for Nightcliff and I were at Nightcliff High, where there is a class of 26 with a teacher who is an exponent of this accelerated literacy program. The strength of the program is this: it places the teacher right in the middle of the classroom. The method of teaching used puts an intensive workload on the teacher in the sense of engaging every student in that classroom. Equally, it puts an intensive load on the student. I believe this is one of the great strengths in this, because you have high-level, quality interaction between every single student and the teacher through this program.
It takes me back - and I spoke to the students about this. I am 52 this year, so I am talking 40 and more years ago when I was in primary school. I would be interested to know if the shadow minister for Education had this sort of approach when he was going through: you had a passage, and the teacher would go through and identify the verb, the noun, the adverb, the pronoun. I see you nodding, Madam Speaker, with recognition. What did that mean? It all got a bit boring, it all got a bit dry later on, but you understood the construct. You understood the construction of the language as it was put together, and you were able to break it down. You had to take the verb out; what does it mean? It all becomes a bit meaningless. Take the pronoun out, take the adjectival phrase, underline the adjectival phrase. We did all that.
When I finished teachers college and began to teach in 1979, 1980, 1981, they had left those methods behind. They walked away from those methods, which I believe, to this day, gave us, my generation, a great grounding in our own language not just in reading ability, but also comprehension, because you understood how it was all put together. Walking away from those tried and true traditional methods, I believe, are a part of the struggle we have today with literacy outcomes.
And this is what it does, and it does not do it in that traditional sense so much, but it still concentrates on one passage from a book. They are able to take that apart, pull it apart, put it back together, how does it work without it, does it work, and what does it mean.
I will give you some more detail on this. Obviously, at this stage with the pilots, the students that have been targeted to go into the program are those who are many years behind their physical age in reading age. At Gillen Primary, they were reading between transition and year 3 level, but way beyond that in years. Now, all but one of those students can read a year 5 text studied in class, and over two-thirds can pick up a text, read it and understand it, although it is a text they have not seen before.
At Ngukurr Community Eduction Centre - we are not just talking about great leaps forward in the urban situation but also the rural remote situation – secondary age students were reading at about year 2 level or were non-readers. The majority of these students at Ngukurr now read at their appropriate age level, and about one-third of them can read unseen text at age level after just 15 months in the program.
Members: Hear, hear!
Mr STIRLING: As traditional as I am, I am pretty taken with the outcomes here. Part of the reason I am taken with it is because I believe it is reaching back to a quality of teaching and a method of teaching, and I do not know if the member …
Dr Lim: I was a student of English.
Mr STIRLING: … understands. I think he understands and probably went through a similar process. There is close monitoring of this so that there is no deceit in the outcomes. We certainly do not want to be sucked in, I guess, to embracing something that looks good on the surface but is not sustainable. I am certain that is not the case. The literacy development is monitored very closely and tracked through regular assessments on the student’s ability to read texts to that level that they had not seen before.
There are about 570 on the program, as I said. They were identified as low performers in literacy, and that is why they are in there. Literacy and numeracy are key priorities for us. We have been relentless in driving that view through the department. There is a fair bit of further work to be done. We are talking about what has worked well in a pilot fashion in six schools. If we are going to pick this up and embrace it across the system, there are going to be enormous resource implications in terms of training, because you need some pretty high level instruction to be able to run these sorts of programs and, of course, resources across the board.
We will continue to monitor it, to make sure that effectiveness stays up there, and get a handle on what the resource implications and the funding needs would be to put it through our schools. This is a big call, but it is probably the most exciting development in teaching methodology that I have seen in my life.
Members: Hear, hear!
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Arafura for her interest in this area of education. I know she is watching it closely as it rolls out. It will have application in her electorate, with rural and remote schools, as much as it will have in mine.
When it comes to teaching and teaching methodologies, I guess I am a bit of a traditionalist at heart. I was trained along fairly traditional lines at the old State College of Victoria at Geelong - the old Geelong Teachers College - and I would have, at heart, some misgivings over some of the traditional methods being lost over the years. I put the failing literacy and numeracy levels that we have, across the board, at the feet of some of those lost methods.
I am particularly struck with this accelerated literacy program. It is trialling in six schools as I speak, and I have seen it in four of them. I have been more impressed each time I have seen this method in operation. I will give you a little background on this. It is at Gillen Primary, ANZAC Hill High School, Dripstone High School, Ludmilla Primary, Nightcliff High School and Ngukurr Community Education Centre. The shadow minister for Education has an opportunity if he wanted to come through my office and see this in operation in these Alice Springs schools.
The outcomes: what they have been able to achieve to date is enormously exciting. On average, all of the students involved in this program have achieved a 1.8 year jump in literacy in one year in the program. That means, of course, some students are gaining two and three years leap in literacy against physical age in terms of reading age.
At lunch time, the member for Nightcliff and I were at Nightcliff High, where there is a class of 26 with a teacher who is an exponent of this accelerated literacy program. The strength of the program is this: it places the teacher right in the middle of the classroom. The method of teaching used puts an intensive workload on the teacher in the sense of engaging every student in that classroom. Equally, it puts an intensive load on the student. I believe this is one of the great strengths in this, because you have high-level, quality interaction between every single student and the teacher through this program.
It takes me back - and I spoke to the students about this. I am 52 this year, so I am talking 40 and more years ago when I was in primary school. I would be interested to know if the shadow minister for Education had this sort of approach when he was going through: you had a passage, and the teacher would go through and identify the verb, the noun, the adverb, the pronoun. I see you nodding, Madam Speaker, with recognition. What did that mean? It all got a bit boring, it all got a bit dry later on, but you understood the construct. You understood the construction of the language as it was put together, and you were able to break it down. You had to take the verb out; what does it mean? It all becomes a bit meaningless. Take the pronoun out, take the adjectival phrase, underline the adjectival phrase. We did all that.
When I finished teachers college and began to teach in 1979, 1980, 1981, they had left those methods behind. They walked away from those methods, which I believe, to this day, gave us, my generation, a great grounding in our own language not just in reading ability, but also comprehension, because you understood how it was all put together. Walking away from those tried and true traditional methods, I believe, are a part of the struggle we have today with literacy outcomes.
And this is what it does, and it does not do it in that traditional sense so much, but it still concentrates on one passage from a book. They are able to take that apart, pull it apart, put it back together, how does it work without it, does it work, and what does it mean.
I will give you some more detail on this. Obviously, at this stage with the pilots, the students that have been targeted to go into the program are those who are many years behind their physical age in reading age. At Gillen Primary, they were reading between transition and year 3 level, but way beyond that in years. Now, all but one of those students can read a year 5 text studied in class, and over two-thirds can pick up a text, read it and understand it, although it is a text they have not seen before.
At Ngukurr Community Eduction Centre - we are not just talking about great leaps forward in the urban situation but also the rural remote situation – secondary age students were reading at about year 2 level or were non-readers. The majority of these students at Ngukurr now read at their appropriate age level, and about one-third of them can read unseen text at age level after just 15 months in the program.
Members: Hear, hear!
Mr STIRLING: As traditional as I am, I am pretty taken with the outcomes here. Part of the reason I am taken with it is because I believe it is reaching back to a quality of teaching and a method of teaching, and I do not know if the member …
Dr Lim: I was a student of English.
Mr STIRLING: … understands. I think he understands and probably went through a similar process. There is close monitoring of this so that there is no deceit in the outcomes. We certainly do not want to be sucked in, I guess, to embracing something that looks good on the surface but is not sustainable. I am certain that is not the case. The literacy development is monitored very closely and tracked through regular assessments on the student’s ability to read texts to that level that they had not seen before.
There are about 570 on the program, as I said. They were identified as low performers in literacy, and that is why they are in there. Literacy and numeracy are key priorities for us. We have been relentless in driving that view through the department. There is a fair bit of further work to be done. We are talking about what has worked well in a pilot fashion in six schools. If we are going to pick this up and embrace it across the system, there are going to be enormous resource implications in terms of training, because you need some pretty high level instruction to be able to run these sorts of programs and, of course, resources across the board.
We will continue to monitor it, to make sure that effectiveness stays up there, and get a handle on what the resource implications and the funding needs would be to put it through our schools. This is a big call, but it is probably the most exciting development in teaching methodology that I have seen in my life.
Members: Hear, hear!
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016