We had heard that this was a valuable resource, but there were mutterings in our smell-of-an-oily-rag office. Was it really worth the $70 we paid?

Having watched all three DVDs, I can say without a doubt that it was money well spent, a revelation indeed, to me anyway.

The production of the DVDs was community driven by dyslexia support groups across the country, interestingly using crowd-source funding. Further funding was provided by the Australian Government Department of Education and Training and Minister Pyne gives an introduction to the first video. He is the father of two children with dyslexia and clearly has a genuine interest in the subject.

Understanding dyslexia

If you just want a better understanding of dyslexia I recommend you watch the 43 minutes of disk one (called 'Understanding and identifying dyslexia'), rather than the more specialised material on disks two and three. You will learn that dyslexia is difficulty with words and is due to a difference in the way the brains of those with dyslexia learn. It is not related to visual processing, can range from mild to severe, cannot be cured and does not disappear with age. Dyslexia needs to be identified early because reading affects all aspects of education and because early identification enables the necessary compensation mechanisms to be put in place.

Disk one is a pleasure to watch because some delightful dyslexic children of varying ages present it and they speak from their own experience. These are bright and capable kids, who just happen to have a problem with words.

Possibly ten per cent of us have dyslexia, which means there are usually two or three affected students in each class. The video claims teachers are generally not well informed about dyslexia.

Badly handled, dyslexia can lead to anxiety, depression, higher rates of incarceration and unemployment, not because of the condition itself, but because of its affects on the ability of the person with dyslexia to formally learn and the subsequent loss of self-esteem. By grade nine many dyslexic children want to leave school.

The DVDs tell that people with dyslexia have a lot to offer society because they can generate new ideas and 'think outside the square', hence the title of the series.

The second DVD is titled 'Targeted teaching for students with dyslexia' and is really oriented towards teachers but would also be of great interest to parents with dyslexic children. The themes are giving extra time with a gap between each instruction, and multisensory work using as many senses as possible (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic). This latter teaching strategy is also valuable for children who do not have dyslexia. Assessments for students with dyslexia can be oral rather than print based, and assistive technology (software enabling speech to text and text to speech) has a big role to play.

Self esteem is key

The main issue, according to the producers, is building self-esteem and developing resilience. The argument is once again made that the emotional impact of dyslexia is more important than the limitations the condition itself presents.

I found the material on dealing with negative self-talk and working out what you want for your life (and who of us has done that?) really interesting.

Teaching for dyslexia

Curiously, dyslexia seems to disappear entirely from the third disk ('Explicit teaching of language and literacy'). Claims made include that the way we are teaching literacy is at odds with the research: Australia has good researchers but the research is not getting through to teachers in their teaching training, in which very little time is given to the teaching of reading.

Humans are hard-wired to talk and it comes easily to us, but we are not hard-wired to read and it has to be taught explicitly and systematically. Learning to read is not a natural activity. The program points out that the first three years of school need to be devoted to learning to read, but from then on we read to learn. Clearly a student who hasn't mastered reading in the first three years is going to have a hard time from then on.

This video comprehensively pans the 'whole language' approach to learning to read, disparagingly referring to it as 'the glance and catch method', even pointing out that it is loosely associated with the left wing of politics. On the right wing however we have 'phonics' where the component parts of words are spelt out. I confess to being astounded at seeing a grade one class being taught that we spell 'funny' with two 'n's because the 'u' in funny is short and 'y' makes vowels long but is unable to jump more than one consonant so the two 'n's protect the short 'u' from the pernicious 'y'. It was news to me. They did seem to understand it however.

At this point I would like to add that what I hear from people is that there are many different opinions amongst educators as to the respective merits of phonics and whole language learning. For this reason, the third video is probably far too supportive of phonics, and the appropriate balance lies somewhere in the middle. A range of learning to read approaches is needed, with some students taking to reading easily and others needing the structure and rules of a phonics approach. This area is my only significant reservation with the three DVDs.

Some useful things in this disk, however, are one school principal saying our expectations of students in Australia are too low and for many years much learning has been 'play-based' and this has to change.

A tip for parents with really young children is that letter knowledge is a strong predictor of how they will go on to read – teach your children the alphabet before they go to school.

The message of this last DVD is that if kids are not learning, it's the teacher's fault. "A lot of kids take a lot of blame for poor teaching."

John Haydon — Council President

The three-disk series is available to borrow by contacting Council's office or for purchase from www.outsidesquare.net.

This article appeared in ParentACTion, Term 3, 2015. See other past editions of our quarterly magazine.