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A war on woke education that just might work · The Front

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  Speaker 1: From The Australian. Here is what's on the front. I'm
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  Speaker 1: Claire Harvey. It's Thursday November twenty twenty twenty five. What
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  Speaker 1: if we could lift a million Australians out of poverty
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  Speaker 1: and guarantee their kids a great education while helping ensure
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  Speaker 1: they save work and secure their own future. A new
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  Speaker 1: idea for a nationwide overhaul of welfare and responsibility that
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  Speaker 1: could actually work because the organization behind the idea has
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  Speaker 1: done it before. Today the Cape York Partnership's big dream
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  Speaker 1: of giving the bottom million a fair go.
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  Speaker 2: Account.
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  Speaker 1: It's the very northernmost tip of Australia, on the right
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  Speaker 1: hand side of the map, stretching from the Gulf of
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  Speaker 1: Carpenteria up into the warm waters of the Coral Sea
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  Speaker 1: is Cape York. It's your typical tropical paradise, white sand beaches,
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  Speaker 1: drenching monsoonal rains, lots of crocs, and it's also home
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  Speaker 1: to one of Australia's most interesting organizations, the Cape York Partnership.
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  Speaker 1: It's a nonprofit founded by Aboriginal lawyer and activist Noel
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  Speaker 1: Pearson and run by Chief executive Fiona Jos. They do
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  Speaker 1: a lot of things but one of them is running
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  Speaker 1: Jarragon College, a prep to year twelve high school that
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  Speaker 1: educates kids from Cape York and the Torres Strait. What
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  Speaker 1: you're hearing is the Jarragon kids singing their school song,
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  Speaker 1: all about hope, opportunity and responsibility.
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  Speaker 2: The spiritualness.
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  Speaker 1: Part of the school is the Cape York Girl Academy,
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  Speaker 1: a separate campus where young moms can board with their
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  Speaker 1: babies and learn how to be great parents while completing
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  Speaker 1: year twelve and getting ready for further education or work.
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  Speaker 1: The partnership also runs a Cape York Leaders Program, which
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  Speaker 1: is given more than six hundred young people secondary and
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  Speaker 1: tertiary scholarships to top tier boarding schools and universities around Australia.
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  Speaker 1: It all boils down to a philosophy about education that
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  Speaker 1: to lift themselves out of the poverty, endemic and remote Australia,
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  Speaker 1: young people need a first class education they simply cannot
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  Speaker 1: get at home.
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  Speaker 2: As Dagon move.
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  Speaker 1: Every year, kids from Cape York and the Torres Strait
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  Speaker 1: travel more than a thousand kilometers south to Cans so
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  Speaker 1: they can go to Jarragon College and the Girl Academy.
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  Speaker 1: They get an incredible education full of support and discipline.
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  Speaker 1: Kids lucky enough to get into the Cape York Leaders
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  Speaker 1: program go to the country's best boarding schools, But what
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  Speaker 1: about the rest.
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  Speaker 3: The quality of the high schools in remote communities is
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  Speaker 3: frankly not there.
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  Speaker 1: Page Taylor is The Australian's Indigenous Affairs editor.
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  Speaker 3: I don't think anyone would try to argue that you
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  Speaker 3: can get a top notch high school education at a
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  Speaker 3: very remote school. It's just not possible. Every year on
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  Speaker 3: Cape York there are three hundred and forty kids ready
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  Speaker 3: to go to high school. A really small number can
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  Speaker 3: go to boarding school, less than a quarter of that.
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  Speaker 3: So Cape York Partnership is saying the opportunity to go
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  Speaker 3: to a really good boarding school should be open to
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  Speaker 3: all of those children.
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  Speaker 1: The Cape York Partnership's been around for thirty years and
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  Speaker 1: they've enacted a series of really ambitious reforms in collaboration
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  Speaker 1: with government.
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  Speaker 3: I think probably the most headline grabbing reform is the
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  Speaker 3: Family Responsibilities Commission, which acts like a tribunal. These are
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  Speaker 3: local people who make decisions. Perhaps they get a tip
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  Speaker 3: off from their education department, a referral they call it.
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  Speaker 3: Mister Jones's kid has not been coming to school something
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  Speaker 3: like that, and they have a pretty thorough conversation about
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  Speaker 3: mister Jones's situation. They listen to mister Jones and they
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  Speaker 3: all make a decision. Does this person get a warning?
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  Speaker 3: Does this person need some support? Does this person actually
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  Speaker 3: need some welfare control so that their welfare can only
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  Speaker 3: be used for food and other essentials until they learn
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  Speaker 3: to manage a bit better. And that's been a system
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  Speaker 3: that has worked a lot better from what I understand,
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  Speaker 3: than the cashlist debit card, which was blanket reform. Didn't
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  Speaker 3: matter if you were managing yourself well or not. You're
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  Speaker 3: on it if you're in that region. And the other
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  Speaker 3: thing about the welfare reform in Cape York is that
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  Speaker 3: you can come off that welfare control if the Family
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  Speaker 3: Responsibility is commissioned decides that you've been traveling really well
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  Speaker 3: and that'll be lifted.
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  Speaker 1: On Tuesday in Sydney, Fiona Joe's, the boss of Cape
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  Speaker 1: Your Partnership, made a speech calling on politicians to support
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  Speaker 1: a bill in both the Commonwealth and Queensland parliaments. The
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  Speaker 1: bill would use these big ideas nationally to give the
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  Speaker 1: most impoverished families across Australia regardless of race, a big
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  Speaker 1: incentive and help to get out of the welfare trap.
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  Speaker 1: It's based on a piece of legislation introduced in the
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  Speaker 1: US towards the end of World War II, the GI Bill,
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  Speaker 1: which offered returning veterans, subsidized education and mortgages to get
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  Speaker 1: into housing, low interest loans to start businesses, and opportunities
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  Speaker 1: to get vocational training and a job. The partnership's idea
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  Speaker 1: is for the Personal Responsibility and Opportunity Act to make
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  Speaker 1: that idea page just explained national, each family and child
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  Speaker 1: gets a plan to stay in school, manage their money effectively,
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  Speaker 1: and save for home ownership.
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  Speaker 3: Cape York Partnership is talking about responsibility and opportunity. It
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  Speaker 3: sounds like an abstract kind of thing to say, but
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  Speaker 3: their point is when a parent commits to the responsibility
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  Speaker 3: of sending their child to school, the government then has
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  Speaker 3: an obligation to make sure that the child is taught
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  Speaker 3: and that the quality of their education is really a
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  Speaker 3: good one. What Cape YOURK Partnership is saying is this
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  Speaker 3: idea has very wide application. Parents have a duty and
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  Speaker 3: a responsibility to raise their children well, to look after
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  Speaker 3: their health from a very early age to take care
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  Speaker 3: of their children from conception so that they are developmentally
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  Speaker 3: on track. And when they meet those obligations, the state
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  Speaker 3: then has an obligation to teach them well, to give
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  Speaker 3: them a quality education, and to help them graduate from
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  Speaker 3: year twelve with an actual outcome like a leaving certificate
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  Speaker 3: or equivalent, not just you attended until year twelve.
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  Speaker 1: Coming up, why common sense ideas about education are actually
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  Speaker 1: pretty radical. Education is call to Noel Pearson's philosophy about
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  Speaker 1: lifting people out of poverty. What does he say is
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  Speaker 1: the kind of education that people who are at risk
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  Speaker 1: of ending up on welfare need.
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  Speaker 3: Noel Pearson's very clear, and so is everyone at the CAPE.
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  Speaker 3: Your partnership that year twelve graduation is the powerhouse. And
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  Speaker 3: that doesn't mean you stayed at school enrolled until year
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  Speaker 3: twelve was finished. I think there is a big difference.
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  Speaker 3: It means graduating with it what they call an education outcome.
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  Speaker 3: You get a certificate that is recognized and useful. And
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  Speaker 3: what they've done through the CAPE, your leader's program is
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  Speaker 3: track the kids who've been through year twelve and got
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  Speaker 3: a graduation, and it really does change the life trajectory now.
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  Speaker 1: Noel Pearson as an individual has kind of been fighting
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  Speaker 1: the trends that go through education for years.
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  Speaker 4: There is still a resident elude resistance and obscurantism in
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  Speaker 4: relation to the teaching of letter sound relationships in English.
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  Speaker 1: He famously delivered the boy A Lectures a few years
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  Speaker 1: ago explaining why direct instruction, which is where a teacher
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  Speaker 1: tells the class something that the teacher knows and the
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  Speaker 1: class doesn't know, or teaches something like reading with a
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  Speaker 1: simple system like phonics, why those traditional forms of education
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  Speaker 1: need to come back, as opposed to the kind of
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  Speaker 1: child led learning that became very fashionable in the eighties
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  Speaker 1: and nineties.
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  Speaker 4: One of my ancestral languages is Google Yamada. If you
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  Speaker 4: were to learn my language, I would need to explicitly
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  Speaker 4: teach you a number of phonemes that are sounds of
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  Speaker 4: the gurgle emadad alphabet, unfamiliar to English speakers. One of
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  Speaker 4: them is the phoneme nah written n H. It is
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  Speaker 4: formed by putting your tongue at the back of your
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  Speaker 4: top teeth. The grope of fish is called ninini. Another
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  Speaker 4: phoneme common to Australian Aboriginal languages is spelt ng. English
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  Speaker 4: speakers know this phoneme at the end of words like
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  Speaker 4: bring and sing, but would have to explicitly learn it
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  Speaker 4: because numerous Google imi the words start with such as nulli,
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  Speaker 4: you and i and nandan us. They would also need
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  Speaker 4: to learn the trilled r, such as in muara bad
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  Speaker 4: and kangaroo. Kangaroo is common to Australian languages that undo English,
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  Speaker 4: so I would need to explicitly teach you these phonemes.
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  Speaker 1: Not Peason's ideas if you don't know much about the topic,
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  Speaker 1: seem extremely common sense and kind of ordinary. But actually
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  Speaker 1: they're quite radical, aren't they.
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  Speaker 3: I think it is radical to some people. And there
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  Speaker 3: is a whole generation of teachers who went through university
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  Speaker 3: being taught about child led learning, where you follow the
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  Speaker 3: child's interests and intuition, and so having a situation where
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  Speaker 3: the teacher calls out a word and the children spell
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  Speaker 3: it back to them again and again. That's quite a
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  Speaker 3: big difference in techniques. I've been in classrooms where people
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  Speaker 3: have been teaching using that direct instruction method and versions
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  Speaker 3: of it that. There's another one called explicit instruction, and
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  Speaker 3: it does sound very dogmatic and staccato, but the results
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  Speaker 3: are there, and you can see the kids learning the
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  Speaker 3: deep structure of language. As the lesson goes on, no
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  Speaker 3: one's left behind. They don't move on until everyone's got it.
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  Speaker 1: Page Taylor is The Australian's Indigenous Affairs editor. You can
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  Speaker 1: check out all her journalism right now at the Australian
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  Speaker 1: dot com dot a yu