Tim Hall, Principal, Mansfield Secondary College
We know that 1 in 5 students at this school has a learning difficulty of some sort. That means they need reasonable adjustments to engage with the curriculum.
It’s really important for staff to adjust their teaching. They key target for kids is to make sure they can engage with the curriculum, so teachers do need to support their students by changing things in the way they deliver the curriculum and the way they assess and improve student learning outcomes.
We know that learning difficulties, such as dyslexia and dyscalculia are for life; they don’t go away.
With the right support, these young people can absolutely make their contribution to society. They are successful young people. Our job is just to help them show their capabilities.
We know that the evidence-based teaching practices that we put in place for these young people are beneficial for all students in the classroom.
Zach, Student, Mansfield Secondary College
My learning disability is dyslexia. From a young age, like prep, I would be like everyone else, couldn’t read. But as I got up through Year 6 and Year 7, it never clicked.”
I can understand the content, but if someone just points out that this is the question, now I’ve got technology to help me out like Google Docs, voice-to-text, I use scribes. So, I’m pretty much doing what everyone else is doing, just with a couple of extra steps.
If you don’t own it, you’ll always be wondering could I do it, and you always double guess yourself. One of the hardest things I’ve always found is proving to yourself you can do it. And once you’ve got over your own hurdles, it should start coming.
And I’m still in that stage, still proving to myself I’m not stupid, and I will be able to do it. It’s just going to take a little bit longer or I’m just going to have to figure out another way to get to it.
Some people just go over the hurdles, we go around them and we all end up in the same spot.
Courtney O’Loughlan, Disability Inclusion Leading Teacher
So, the role we’ve created at Mansfield Secondary College has been around being somebody at the school that can connect staff with different evidence-based practices to support different learners.
So, classroom strategies that teachers can implement to support diverse learners can range from the way that teachers are able to change their pedagogies to support that and the content of what they’re delivering in their classes.
So, one of the things that lots of teachers will use is assistive technology. So, for instance, text to speech. We also really encourage, particularly in some of our literacy and numeracy intervention classes, the use of physical materials.
Other just really great pedagogies that teachers employ are around explicit, and direct instruction, repeated exposures to information, using modelling.
And we’re also, you know, keen to provide scaffolded and gradual releases of control to students. So it’s just been probably the biggest privilege of my year to sort of watch some of those adjustments that teachers are making to support students, such as Zach, to be able to work with that phenomenal memory that he’s got and the flexibility of thinking that he displays and to be able to participate and showcase his knowledge verbally whilst I was acting as a scribe was quite a moving experience for me. It was absolutely enabling him to shine and show what he knew.
So that was a real honour.
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