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The Tracks Story
The MLD School and Mainstream
'You can have a corner of the library, a position on the senior management team, £200 and
complete freedom to organise your timetable.'
- the headteacher of an MLD School 1972
The brief: raise literacy standards in a 130 place all-age school for pupils with moderate learning difficulties.
Seventeen years later every pupil in the school
was following the approaches that had been developed - the beginning of Tracks. During that period development had also taken place in mainstream infant and junior schools.
In the MLD school the corner of the library had been replaced by the largest classroom with all the technology then available. The methods were presented at courses for the LA and sponsored by the Institute of Education in London. An HMI Inspection
reported 'the children read'.
The Action Research
Prior to that, work in SLD schools, and diagnostic units had laid foundations for the development of Tracks, primarily in terms of the need for direct teaching, and the
necessity of starting exactly at the point at which the individual pupil was capable of operating successfully. Further experience in advisory positions and educational psychology
added to the development of Tracks, in almost every educational setting.
The design of Tracks was the result of a minute by minute process of trial and error. If a pupil found something difficult the challenge
was to find something to do/say/reorganise, which, at that precise point, would move the pupil nearer to success. The techniques
that appeared to be valid next steps, were tested out on other pupils and the methods recorded so that they could be refined in the light of further experience.
Essentially we were moving towards constructing continua (the Tracks) of effortless learning. The multi-track approach emerged and new techniques were built into this framework
as the need for them became clear.
The links to the tracks give detail about the rationale for the individual techniques.
The National Scene
There was growing demand for courses as Tracks spread simply by word of mouth: courses had only started after pressure
from teachers.
Tracks then came to national attention. There was a meeting with John Stannard, Director of the NLS. The Basic Skills Agency sent a recommendation
to the NLS. A TES article followed, recommendations by Jean Gross, then Director of Inclusion, references in the educational department's literature and in May 2005, a prominent place in their training CD Rom: Learning and teaching for
dyslexic children. Additionally, in the words of the review team 'an outstanding number of positive submissions' to the Jim Rose review into early reading lead to a session with Sir Jim.
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