Anyone got any opinions on the Michaela School?

[noblegiraffe]

My Twitter is currently full of talk about Michaela as the teachers there have released a book today and are holding a conference explaining what they do. It's a no-excuses school where kids walk the corridors either in silence or chanting Shakespeare, behaviour is expected to be perfect including no slouching. Everything possible is done to reduce workload of teachers - no marking in books, lessons are all joint planned and taught uniformly, no differentiation, they write their own textbooks.

Does anyone's kids go there? Anyone decide against sending their kids there? Does anyone know how it is viewed in the local community?

OK, sorry, I was only thinking of state schools.

I think no separate sciences at KS3 is fairly standard but would imagine, from my own experience, that humanities are usually taught discretely. Lack of practical and creative subjects is very unusual. It will be difficult to offer certain GCSE subjects if students have no experience of them in KS3.

A few schools I know offer a combined humanities programme for Y7 as a sort of introduction to secondary schooling. It's usually divided into topics like Myself and The World Around Me, and then there's history/geography/English literature within each topic.

Someone earlier mentioned giving all children the opportunity of a highly academic curriculum. At this stage it seems to me this is not at all a highly academic curriculum; highly academic isn't Gradgrindian fact feeding - it means debate, discussion and the forming of independent views.

I can see how this could possibly be the first step towards it though, so I'd be interested to know in the research etc that they're basing the approach upon at what stage fact regurgitation turns into assimilation, understanding, questioning and reformulating.

In the essay samples in one of the blog posts every child had answered exactly the same, using exactly the same quotations to support exactly the same points. And it's not surprising since their homework is to learn the vocabulary, the arguments and the quotes off by heart. So this is a fantastic foundation in terms of knowing stuff, but when do they debate and discuss it?

Has anyone else looked at the knowledge organisers? Imagine having to learn half an hour from one of those every night. It's Kumon writ large.

Has anyone mentioned on here that their SENCO doesn't believe dyslexia exists?

No, but we did touch on the fact that it's overdiagnosed earlier. There are a few specialist reading tutors with similar views.

IIRC, there was a slightly awkward moment earlier this year when one of the leading professors in dyslexia testing was asked how the tests distinguish between a child that hasn't been taught properly and one with dyslexia and he couldn't answer.

As kesstrel says we don't talk about it on here because it goes down like a ton of bricks.

Overdiagnosed isn't the same as doesn't exist though.

It'd be like me saying that dyscalculia doesn't exist, there's just bad maths teaching.

What's a specialist reading tutor and what specialist qualification is necessary for the role?

Even if we're talking about massive overdiagnosis.

The fact that it doesn't exist isn't an unheard of view among specialist reading teachers. And there are schools that seem to have eliminated it among their pupils, with every child reading and spelling above their chronological age by the age of 7.

Dyslexic doesn't mean 'can't read' though, so kids learning to read doesn't make them not dyslexic.

Only because they keep changing the criteria every time someone decides there's a problem with it. Which is why the label is problematic and not at all helpful.

We'd probably serve children much better if we got rid of the umbrella term and just focused on children's underlying issues. KA has it right on this one.

It's not just reading tutors that believe this, it's academic psychologists who study reading as well. This article discusses the subtleties of the issue, pro and con, and the usefulness or not of retaining the label, but also says:

"On the positive side, we'd get rid of the idea that we're dealing with a special condition that forms a distinct syndrome. Since few scientists would attempt to defend that notion, this would be a good thing."

deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/my-thoughts-on-dyslexia-debate.html

Our senco used to say that dyslexia itself is like the term for a stomachache. It's not the stomachache which is important it is looking for the root cause of it.

Ok I've read the article and now I think the SENCO is a) stupid and b) should keep her mouth shut on this issue.

I can't find anywhere in her blog or in the new book where the SENCO says dyslexia doesn't exist. In the book SENCO writes:

“When pupils find extended reading and writing difficult because of literacy difficulties such as dyslexia, there is a temptation to reduce the rigour in the context and tasks they are asked to do.”*

This post
tabularasaeducation.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/personalised-learning-harms-children/

is the only one that mentions the word dyslexia or dyslexic. (It's a good blog post about their approach to raising reading levels, by the way.)

She is very anti-label, though. My own belief is that labels can be good in preventing a child from thinking they are stupid (it helped my older daughter enormously to realise she was dyxpraxic), but damaging if they lower expectations.

She said it on Twitter.

Well, people do say a lot of things on twitter that lack subtlety, due to the 140 character format. I don't understand twitter terribly well: is there a way of finding that conversation?

It occurs to me I just missed an excellent opportunity to use strikethrough:

at all very well

Regarding the "humanities" curriculum, it may be that that is just a label used for timetabling. This blog describes a separate geography curriculum, how they start with the basics in Year 7, and refers to the plans for years 8 and 9 geography lessons.

Oops, forgot the link

tolearnistofollow.wordpress.com/2015/06/28/around-the-world-in-180-days/

I think the reality is that the Senco has bought into the school's methods because, well, she has to, otherwise she is out of a job. But that blog post on personalised learning does indeed demonstrate that she really shouldn't be dealing with children with learning difficulties. She extrapolates from one alleged child that personalised learning doesn't work and that instead schools should offer a process where "we choose to read the whole text together as a class, reading along line by line with a ruler, stopping to annotate new or unfamiliar vocabulary and practise new pronunciations as we go. In Michaela lessons, everybody reads and everybody writes. That’s it." We did something very similar with one English teacher at my school many, many years ago: frankly, I found it deadly dull and used to skip ahead to read on my own, or doodled, or read something else under the desk. The pupils who struggled continued to struggle, not least because they had no sense of the overall content of what they were reading.

The suggestion that dyslexia doesn't exist is a nonsense. Anyone who thinks it's limited to reading and writing demonstrates that they really don't know what they're talking about. Frankly, I would be suspicious of schools that claim to have eliminated it with all children reading at or above their chronological age by the age of 11: if that is true, these cannot be schools that have a genuinely comprehensive intake, and they cannot ever have had to deal with a seriously dyslexic child or indeed a child with other major learning difficulties. Or perhaps the reality is that they just ease them out.

She said 'by (sic) dyslexia isn't even a real thing'

twitter.com/katie_s_ashford/status/804402193113743360

She had plenty more space. She could have said 'dyslexia as an umbrella label is unhelpful' if that's what she really meant.

Having a look at the photos of the Michaela teachers, they do all seem rather young. I'm sure they're bright, but they're not very experienced.

Noble Fair enough. But how did you find it? Is there a search method?

Noble Funnily enough, as I was getting dressed, and thinking about why she might have said that on twitter, it did cross my mind that they are all very young .

if that is true, these cannot be schools that have a genuinely comprehensive intake, and they cannot ever have had to deal with a seriously dyslexic child or indeed a child with other major learning difficulties. Or perhaps the reality is that they just ease them out.

That's the argument that's always levelled at people when this comes up. Although I suppose you could be right in suggesting our intake wasn't very comprehensive. A comprehensive intake would probably have lower levels of SEN and a few more children would start at the school meeting age related expectations.

The term 'dyslexia' isn't helpful. Unlike most labels used it's become a catch all term that includes all sorts of things that probably aren't all the same thing. Not that it particularly matters too much since the solution is the same.

But saying dyslexia isn't real is pretty much saying reading problems aren't real, which is horseshit even more unhelpful.

Labels can in fact be very useful.