By Different Paths to Common Outcomes

Teacher-centered, practical and research-based, this collection of articles by Marie Clay draws on her lifelong passion for children’s literacy and teacher education. Key messages are that children walk on different paths towards literacy, what the child already knows is the essential starting for learning and effective teaching welcomes and accommodates diversity.

Marie Clay demonstrates how understanding what children know becomes the key to effective teaching, how teachers need to look at early literacy learning through children’s eyes, and to listen to children as they converse, as well as how writing should be the powerful partner of reading.

• Research evidence to raise their awareness of how young minds learn to work with the printed word, help to observe and build on what children already know before they first enter school.
• How to focus on and interact with what each child can do (not what they can’t).
• How to set each individual learner on his or her own pathway to literary success, so there need be no wasted time, no discouragement for teacher or student.
• Diversity is to be welcomed and accommodated, and independence fostered.