Let’s Use Our ABCs and the 10 Changes

In doing research that builds necessary knowledge towards improvement, let’s please keep our ABCs of improving education front and centre. They really are very important:

Using those ABCs, let’s build useful knowledge quickly, using collaborative school-centred research:

Change 1: Let’s build widespread understanding of how orthography matters, and how English spelling currently drags us down.

Change 2: Let’s build awareness and ownership of our struggling reader woes, the meagre supports our kids receive, and the hypocrisy and pretence that we live with, as regards the school and allied-health supports we currently provide.

Change 3: Let’s weigh and compare child and teacher workload and stress-levels, here and in regular-orthography nations.

Change 4: Let’s build strong understanding of upper and lower-third readers’ very different skill levels, and the differences in tailoring of instruction that are needed for us to meet our teaching challenges effectively for all our cute koala kids.

Change 5: Let’s build comprehensive knowledge on Aussie kids’ word-reading levels, word-reading’s role in literacy development and difficulties, and optimising of word-reading instruction.

Change 6: Let’s build thorough knowledge on how we can achieve enriched tailored education and mentoring efficiently and effectively for each and every Aussie child.

Change 7: Let’s build useful knowledge on

• The ethics of our children’s so much slower, and more arduous word-reading and literacy development, and their higher likelihood of major literacy difficulties.

• The mechanisms and changes needed for us to achieve literacy development as easy and rapid as regular-orthography nations routinely achieve.

Change 8: Let’s build knowledge on the potential of using an initial fully-regular English beginners’ orthography when our kids first learn to read and write.

Change 9: Let’s build knowledge towards achieving highly effective play-based language and learning enrichment for our first 2.5 years of schooling.

Change 10: Let’s generate needed knowledge quickly and efficiently.

In doing so, let’s keep our 2035 goal very much in mind:

By 2035, Australian education will be
routinely, efficiently, gently and easily
achieving highly effective, rapid development of
children’s word-reading, spelling, writing and early-literacy skills,
in GENTLE manner,
in every early-years classroom,
in all schools across our nation,
as efficiently as is achieved routinely
across schools in regular-orthography nations
such as Taiwan, Japan and China
with at least 98% of Australian school children
being confident, independent readers and writers,
able to read 95% of the 10,000 most-frequent words,
by age 8.5 years, or within 18 months of starting formal word-reading instruction.