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(Name withheld) July 3, 2011 To Whom It May Concern: I am writing in support of John Callahan’s proposal: Ka Puu te Ruuhaa. Ka Hao Te Rangatahi, which draws on internationally lauded developments at Richmond Road School in Auckland, under the principalship of the late Jim Laughton.
Jim Laughton developed an approach to teaching and learning at Richmond Road School which resulted in high educational achievement for the predominantly Maori, Pasifika and low socioeconomic students at the school.
A key aspect of his approach was the reorganisation of the school from age-based classrooms to vertical röpu groupings (encompassing Years 1 – 8). This change in social organisation facilitated a key aspect of the school’s success – tuakana/teina peer group tutoring, where older and/or more able students tutored younger and/or less able students. This template was subsequently to be adopted by many other New Zealand schools, but Richmond Road was the first urban primary school in New Zealand to develop and implement such a programme. As a result, it garnered widespread national and international attention at the time.
The Harvard University Professor of Education, Courtney Cazden, published on the school’s radical and highly successful approach. David Corson also published internationally on the school’s approach, as did I. My book, Making Multicultural Education Work (1994: Multilngual Matters) provides a comprehensive account of Jim Laughton’s approach and its strongly positive impact on students who might otherwise have not succeeded educationally to the degree that they did.
As such, I strongly support John Callahan’s proposal, given that he has developed and extended it from the Richmond Road School model under Jim Laughton. An added advantage of the proposed model is that, while focused on English language acquistion, it can also be readily applied to the learning of other languages, such as te reo Mäori. Heoi anö Näku noa, nä
30 June, 2011-07-11 To whom it may concern, John Callahan has been home tutoring our seven year old son, Br_______, 3 hours per week since January, 2011, until now. Brydon is currently attending Kings School in Remuera.
We have been impressed with his teaching methodology resulting in B_____ having a marked improvement in his overall reading skills. John uses a combination of memory, listening, speaking and reading techniques which has greatly enhanced B_____ ability to grasp the English language. English has been challenging for B______ as his first language is Chinese. We highly recommend John and his teaching method for teaching others to comprehensively grasp English language. Yours sincerely, (Name withheld)
R__'s dyslexia was so bad when I first assessed him that he could only remember and read two words out of five of the simplest sentences. In 10 two hour sessions R__ was reading at a 10 year reading age.
Hi my names Rikki i an im New Zealand Maori from Ngahti Kahungungu tribe.
Im wrighting this leter to say abit about this reading program that john Collahan did with me.
I use to find it hard to read and understand what i was reading about
After about 20 hours with john i was finding that i was understanding everything i was reading witch made reading alot more injoyable.
Also since i have done this reading program with john me an my two girls j____whos 12 years an l___ whos 7 years read to eatch other five nights aweek an it makes me feel beter about my self when i can sit down an read with them as i couldnt do that befor.
I would like to thank you john for helping me with my reading as you know how i was finding it so hard
