A literacy specialist has called for an overhaul of teacher training, warning that hundreds of children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities are being failed by the school system, due to widespread stigma and a lack of specialist support.
“They need training, and they need extensive training,” said Joy Sharon, who recently received the Literacy Excellence Award at the Caribbean Global Awards. Sharon says her years of teaching children to read have shown that students with learning disabilities are persistently left behind by the education system.
This, she told Barbados TODAY, is due largely to a shortage of teachers able to identify and work with children with certain disabilities.
“There’s a comorbidity with ADHD, and so it’s about being able to recognise that in tandem, sometimes with dyslexia… and that just looks like not being able to sit still, being a bit more active, needing to fidget, move around, and the traditional classroom here doesn’t necessarily allow for that. It might be seen as disruptive behaviour.”
She said the responsibility is on the government to ensure teachers receive proper training. “There is little that can be done in the mainstream classroom until the ministry recognises the importance of dyslexia.”
Sharon explained that children with dyslexia require a very specific type of instruction to learn successfully. “The biggest difference for students with dyslexia is that they need many more repetitions of the skill they’re learning.”
She added: “Sometimes the difficulties relate to the area of the brain responsible for memory, and specifically memory of letters and symbols, because there’s a lot of confusion around the symbols and how they appear to a child with dyslexia. They need many more repetitions, but instruction also needs to be explicit.”
Because of this, she said, teachers need to adapt their methods. “You need to give them visual representations, because auditory input alone is insufficient for students with dyslexia and particularly language learning difficulties… lots of repetition is what makes a difference.”
Even older students, she noted, struggle despite developing coping strategies. “Sometimes an older student may have managed to navigate learning in different ways and found their own ways to help themselves, but they still need support to work out what sound a letter represents and how to put those sounds together to read words.”
Sharon stressed that dyslexia must be taken seriously at a national level. “When you think there’s up to 50 per cent of children that will have it and it affects reading, writing and spelling – which are fundamental to every subject – and then not factor it in, it’s crazy.”
She pointed out that stigma often prevents families from seeking help. “Sometimes in the school, but also for families, they don’t want to admit that their child has a learning difficulty even though, you know, you’re born with it. Dyslexics are very creative.”
As a literacy specialist, she said her introductory training in dyslexia allows her to recognise when a child is showing signs of the condition. “At the first sign, I do speak to the parents and say you need to get your child assessed… generally speaking, those children I have asked to be assessed have been diagnosed with dyslexia, and that means they should have additional support at exam time, such as extra time and, sometimes, a reader for non-reading related questions.”
To help fill the gaps in the system, Sharon has taken it upon herself to train educators. She has trained more than 100 teachers in Barbados. “Initially, I was tutoring children in Barbados, but realised I couldn’t reach as many as I wanted to, given the level of need, so I began training teachers to teach children to read and write effectively.”
Her work has extended across the region. “I worked with ministries of education in Saint Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda, and I think I’ve trained around 400 teachers since 2018.”
bouriannegraham@barbadostoday.bb
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