Willans Hill One Year On - still providing literacy for ALL students

Last year I wrote about the exciting literacy project I was involved with at Willans Hill School in Wagga Wagga on the Spectronics blog.  The inspiration for my original blog (apart from overwhelming excitement about the changes we were seeing) was an interview with Prime Television.  Last week, the school was visited by the television cameras once again, so I thought it was time for a review of the first year.

For those of you who haven't read about the project previously, Willans Hill is a Special School in country New South Wales, Australia with around 70 students, all with moderate to severe intellectual disability and many with multiple disabilities.

In 2011 the school executive, led by their fabulous principal Chris Lennon, decided to adopt the Four Blocks approach to literacy instruction throughout the whole school.  Each classroom committed to spending a minimum of 2 hours per day on literacy instruction and to provide differentiated instruction for all the students in each classroom.  I was lucky enough to be heavily involved in this process - doing the pre and post data collection and also providing monthly visits for support and training for the school staff.

The results from 2011 have shown the project was an unequivocal success and the school has committed to continue using the Four Blocks approach to literacy.  In the video below, which was aired on WIN Television last week, you can get a taste of the results.

(Video has been removed from WIN Television website)

Chris Lennon and myself will be presenting the full results of this project at upcoming conferences, including the Inclusive Learning Technologies conference in May and at the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication conference in July. Hope to see you at one of those great events as we share more information about the educational and systemic changes brought about as a result of this project.