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Empowering the 10%
Dyslexia ActionSummer Conference
Thursday 28th June 2012
Tina HorsmanVictoria Matthews-Patel
“If Britain is to recover economically it has to invest in the whole of its workforce not
just the young”Alan Tuckett, NIACE Chief Executive
".... so, teaching adults is dead easy. All you have to be is an empathetic, sympathetic, highly organised, well-planned, praising, praiseworthy, encouraging, knowledgeable, comedic manager with decent presentation skills. It’s a piece of cake....“
(Corder, 2002, p. 27)
“In the UK, a selective difficulty in
acquiring a skill is referred to as a
“specific learning difficulty.” The
term learning difficulty makes it
clear that the skills must be learnt,
specific means that the difficulty
occurs in a restricted domain.
Dyslexia is one of the best known
and best understood examples of a
specific learning difficulty…”
(Hulme & Snowling, 2009, p. 2)
“Slow reading acquisition has
cognitive, behavioral, and
motivational consequences that
slow the development of other
cognitive skills and inhibit
performance on many academic
tasks. In short, as reading
develops, other cognitive
processes linked to it track the
level of reading skill… Reading
affects everything you do.” (Stanovich, 1986, p. 390)
1. Why is John having such problems using spread-sheets?
2. Is John experiencing any difficulties with his computer screen?
3. Is his transposition of numbers symptomatic of a deeper problem?
4. Should I talk to John to see how things are from his perspective?
5. Am I part of the problem or part of the solution?
If we take a ‘widely realised’ view (Wilson 2001), we look at the attributes of a person, the details of performance and the operating environment. Such appraisals should get us much closer to a true understanding of the situation and the person in that situation.
“I find that my early educational
experience comes back to
haunt me on bad days. When
experiencing a problem
especially if comments are
made by observers I can at
times experience a kind of
emotional flashback of
particularly painful and fearful
classroom experiences....”(Miles & Varma, 1995, p.112)
“To a person with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
(Reason, 2007, p. 78)
