It was never a deep ambition of mine to be a teacher. But having three young children, I found the school holidays compelling. Studying and then teaching (albeit contract for the first 7 years) transformed me into an obsessive chalky. Very early, my intense interest in pedagogy was established.
In my early days of teaching, classrooms were transformed into other worlds. I believed in literature based learning so would begin with a terrific story, in this case that I am about to relate, about a dinosaur that walked out of the museum and frightened all the people who saw him except a little boy who eventually took him back to the museum. I made an enormous stuffed paper dinosaur and hung it in the classroom with lots of children’s arty creations. The amount of staples I used to join the two sides of the dinosaur must have numbered in the thousands! I glued, what I thought was a dead snail, to the dinosaur so children could perceive a size difference (integrating our maths learning). Unfortunately, the snail was not dead and later in the day I saw a long white line and at the end of the line the sliding snail was about to drop off the three-dimensional figure, but the hermaphrodite was saved.
When I became a permanent teacher at Elizabeth Downs (South Australia) I experienced three significant happenings.
The principal, Angela and Deputy Liz invited me to accompany them to a workshop conducted by N.S.W. educator, John Walsh. His message was directed at high school teachers assisting ESL students with their writing. When John talked, most of his language and the concepts caused me to affect a dumb demeanour for most of the day. But a weak light bulb began to shine in my brain and I realized he was talking about the pedagogy of explicitly teaching children the organizational structures and language structures and features of different writing genres. Back at school I began to plan, and then trialled for a year, diarized and finally wrote about children in my classroom learning to write particular written structures. This was my first published book (now o.p.). Then within another year I planned, trialled, diarized, wrote and published a Critical Literacy programme (now o.p.). I felt animated when doing something absolutely new in my classroom and this entree into writing genres and critical literacy, at the time, was fairly innovative.
The wonderful principal and Deputy at Elizabeth Downs allowed me to be one of the first government teachers in S.A to be trained in Reading Recovery. I learned teaching practices that helped delayed readers learn to read independently. Initially, in the course there were many aspects I questioned (I must have driven the tutor mad), but once I realized how effective the methods were my practices changed; no more jumping from one idea to another, instead I kept focused on the planned learning point. Before this I must have been confusing kids with different messages that flew out in space and were never captured.
Also the staff at this northern school nominated me for a Teacher Excellence Award. I was on a high.
Not for long! My husband was made Deputy Director of Commonwealth Universities in London and we moved to this fantastic place. But, initially, I had a demoralizing teaching job in the East End where for a whole year leadership made me so unhappy, “We don’t want this smart-arsed Australian being a smart-arsed Australian.” But the light did shine for the rest of my teaching experiences in London. A productive, Reading Recovery/Staff Training position in a small Anglican school, with a bright, knowledgeable and humane principal lifted my spirits.
Returning to Australia my daughter Alicia (now, also a teacher) and I were asked to write teacher notes, thirty-one in all. Rod, the publisher, wanted every aspect of grammatical forms to be covered… what is this? Teach grammar! That had not been an emphasis for many years. We created Black line masters that had one learning point per sheet instead of the usual varied tasks on the ‘busy’ sheets. We viewed that the children would be pre taught the concept from the model in the big book (literacy based learning) and black line masters would be used to reinforce learning in independent learning centres.
Serendipity, chance, or was it just good fortune that led to, what was to become almost five years working in America. The driving force was most definitely the work and the upshot for me, was lapping up the experience. It was just the sort of work that I loved doing – working with teachers to implement effective practices.
Our first night in N.Y. was in a run-down apartment on 72nd Street. It was abominable. Traffic noise, sirens and honk, honk’s, bombarded us for twelve hours (the city that never sleeps). The continual noise seeped through the windows and I lay wakeful thinking and thinking. You know what it is like, you say to yourself, “I have thought about this so stop thinking about it” but inevitably my mind kept churning. Two weeks of ‘.....’ and we moved to a modern, double glazed apartment on 27th Street.
The visit to my first school in the Bronx entailed a one sided conversation where the teacher informed me that her opinion of ‘Balanced Literacy’ (the pedagogy we were promoting) was the same as their current practice of using basal readers (manuals that contained the story and what the teacher taught for each day of the week and a text book for the students). So why does she have to plan or differentiate learning or give children open ended tasks when everything is set in one book? What could I say?
In Jersey City I could not help but give sobriquets to groups of teachers. ‘Will Ling’ teachers came in different garbs, not necessarily wanting change, but willing to try new ways, “Come and help me as much as you like.” ‘Lazybones’ and ‘Schizo’ (the latter socially acceptable but mention change and ‘woooof’), the ‘Artful Dodger’ and ’Shirker’ or the ‘Quitter’ who said, “I tried it last week and it didn’t work.” What! A judgement made after only one week of trying the new practice! There were ‘Miss Interpreters’, whose hearts were in the right place; they forwarded their new found knowledge to another teacher but it would come out a little wonky.
There was a large school that was a particular challenge, but when, after three years of working with classroom teachers K-3 there, I looked back at those teachers who eventually had child centred classrooms, who spoke to their children in respectful ways, who had greatly improved the literacy skills of the children, and I thought, “You surmounted what you thought was the insurmountable … you, you, painful, lovable lot!”
RESUME
Elizabeth
(Liz) Simon
Professional
Summary
Liz Simon has been
practising as a literacy consultant for twenty-two years (in
all, practicing educator for 34 years). In summary:
Current
education employment:
· Sessional tutor/lecturer/supervisor at Flinders
University of South Australia, 2006, 2008-2017. Two topics, Literacies across
the curriculum in the Middle and Secondary Years and Philosophy and Pedagogy in
Middle School.
Lectures: Writing genres – Middle
School. 2015, 2016 Functional grammar and Running Records – Early Childhood
Consultantcies:
· Worked as a literacy consultant in Jersey City,
USA. 2002-2005, 2006-2007 (grades1-5).
(systemic change
analysis and solutions; assisting leadership to effect change in management including day-to-day operations and changing teacher’s practices
from teacher directed to structured, child-centred practices)
Consultancies
in USA, have involved analysis and solutions; training and working directly
with districts, schools, and teachers to direct systematic change
in management, teaching practices, advice about resources,
·
Worked as a literacy consultant in New York City,
USA, 2002
·
Worked as a literacy consultant in South Australia
2008 – 2011, 2017
·
Worked as a literacy consultant UK 1996
·
Managed own literacy consultancy business in
Australia (worked in South Australia and New South Wales) 1994-2001
Author:
·
Author of teacher materials in Australia
(Macmillan, Era Publications, Eleanor Curtain, Hawker Brownlow) and Heinemann (USA). Book topics include:
-
Truly
Guided Reading (LAS, Adelaide, hard and e-book forms)
-
Critical Thinking
-
Strategic Spelling
-
Critical Literacy and Thinking (2 books)
-
Writing Genres (2 books)
-
Literacy Activities for Small groups
-
Tricky Truck Track Teacher Resource
-
Seashores, Universe Teacher Notes – writing genre,
report
·
Worked for various publishers writing approx. 32
teacher resources that complemented Big Books; been a reader / editor for two
publishers
Conference, workshop
experience:
·
Given presentations / workshops at conferences in
Adelaide, Melbourne, United Kingdom, NY City and State, Ohio, Virginia and New
Jersey City and State (latter, International Reading Association, North Jersey)
Other:
·
Received Teacher Excellence Award (Australia) 1995
·
Worked for CfBT Education
Services (UK) analysing
OFSTED officers’ reports,1995
·
Reading Recovery teacher for 9 years
·
Varied leadership positions at the school level
·
Varied Teaching experiences
·
Past member of U.K.L.A. (United Kingdom Literacy
(formerly Reading) Association); Reading Recovery Association USA;
International Reading Association, USA; e:lit (PETA) (Australia).
Current
member of Australian Literacy Educator’s Association, 2015-2018.
