School Programmes

1. What are the differences between remedial classes after school and learning support services in Hong Kong?

Schools in Hong Kong often would offer remedial classes after school to support students who struggle in learning. Some schools also provide extra learning support for Hong Kong students with specific learning obstacles. However, these SEN support in Hong Kong are often run by school teachers that may not have received any professional dyslexia teacher training in Hong Kong to support students with such learning disorders. The teachers would help students consolidate their learning concepts by giving them drilling tasks such as extra worksheets and practice paper. The learning materials or teaching are not modified to accommodate the child’s actual ability nor learning needs. Despite taking remedial classes, students in these typical learning support Hong Kong programmes would continue to show difficulty in completing these tasks individually as their underlying difficulties have been overlooked. We believe that in order for the child to master a concept, their basic foundation of the subject must first be consolidated before applying the learnt skills on their own.

The learning support in Hong Kong that Boaz provides is different from the after school remedial classes. We help our children to consolidate their foundation before building up to more high level skills and concepts. Finding the learning needs of the child is always our first priority in teaching. We need to be able to know what the child is unable to do before identifying how many learning steps the child needs to achieve in order to reach their learning goal. When teaching a new topic, we always provide our children an overview of the concepts they need to learn. In this way, they know how many steps they need to achieve throughout the learning process in order to master the concept. We don’t drill our children but rather, we teach them strategies to learn and enable them to learn through experience. Our SEN support in Hong Kong consists of lessons with games and activities to help the child to understand a concept and engage in the lesson. We hope that by equipping our children with the learning skills, they are capable of learning independently.

2. What is the available SEN support in Hong Kong schools?

Students with learning disorders often struggle academically. It is common that these students have difficulty catching up on the school’s curriculum and would often perform poorly in class. Schools would often provide SEN support in Hong Kong and make certain arrangements having regard to the students’ learning conditions. Some schools have set up a Student Support Team (SST) to help monitor the learning progress of SEN students and draw up learning objectives as well as providing SEN support Hong Kong programmes to accommodate the learning needs of SEN children.

As many SEN students are taking the mainstream curriculum, schools can make different accommodations in terms of the teaching materials and learning objectives to help children with learning obstacles to make better progress in learning. In terms of support in class, schools would provide learning support to Hong Kong SEN students in accordance with the 3-Tier support model. For students who need Tier-1 support, teachers may employ a wider variety of teaching resources to help improve the students’ understanding of the concepts covered in class. Teachers can adjust the mode of assessment and assignments to accommodate the needs of students that require SEN support in Hong Kong. Whereas students who need additional support may adopt the Tier-2 learning support in Hong Kong. Schools would set up remedial classes after school or small learning groups for students with similar learning needs to enable teachers to be more attentive to the needs of SEN students. For students who need intensive individualised support would require Tier-3 support. This level of support would involve relevant professionals or those that have received dyslexia teacher training in Hong Kong with to draw out behavioural management and learning plans that can be implemented in classroom settings. Students would be invited to group training sessions for intensive learning support delivered by subject teachers.

Apart from curriculum accommodations, the school can also give learning support to Hong Kong students by making adjustments to the mode and content of the assessments. Students may be allowed to display their knowledge through oral questioning or projects. For exams, special arrangements can be made, such as adjusting the level of difficulty of the test paper and the layout of the exam for better reading. Extra time can also be provided to enable students that require SEN support in Hong Kong to have sufficient time to show their knowledge and express their ideas.

Schools not only emphasise on academic SEN support for Hong Kong students but also, support on social development. Schools would hold extra-curricular activity classes for students to develop their strengths and build their confidence. Apart from exploring their potential through these activities, they can learn social skills as well as communication skills when getting along with others.

3. How can parents support their children with dyslexia at home?

Although schools would provide SEN support in Hong Kong, the support from parents at home is equally important to the growth of children with dyslexia. Parents are encouraged to proactively engage in the communication with the school so as to provide appropriate learning support for the child that is in line with the interventions implemented in school.

In Boaz, we also provide support for parents of children with dyslexia. We have regular dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong to provide an insight to parents of the needs of SEN children. Homework assistance is one of the challenging issues that parents of SEN children face. We often would advise parents to first understand the actual ability and needs of their child. Parents could then think about the purpose of each task and what the child is expected to do. By assessing the difficulty of each task, they can determine to what extent the child can manage the task on their own and decide where they should intervene. For more difficult tasks, parents should break them down to smaller achievable steps to ensure that the child can complete the task.

Apart from homework, parents often struggle to find the right way to help their child to do revision. Dyslexia children often have difficulty structuring the knowledge they learn in their mind and concepts are scattered which makes retrieval of the knowledge extra hard. Therefore, it is important that the parent can first provide an overview of the topics that need to be revised. By giving children with dyslexia the big picture, they can have a better understanding of the linkage between concepts. When revising each topic in depth, the parent should first understand the prior knowledge of the child and what concepts need to be consolidated.

Our dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong shares different learning strategies to parents that enable them to help their child with such a disorder to learn more effectively such as using pictures or body movements to spell words. Boaz’s dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong also offers a range of topics for parents to better support their SEN child, like how to analyse children’s learning needs, how to deal with behavioural issues and communicate with children with learning obstacles. Through such dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong, we hope to empower parents of dyslexic children to better support them at home.

4. Is Boaz’s dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong only available at school?

Boaz has provided dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong to many schools to help parents of children with learning disabilities yet, our service is not only limited to schools. We also deliver dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong to many public or private sectors such as NGOs. The dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong that we offer covers a range of topics like homework guidance, revision skills and behavioural issues that suit the needs of parents of children with learning disorders.

In Boaz, we also offer regular dyslexia parent training at our Hong Kong centre. We cover different topics that cater for the needs of parents of children with dyslexia such as needs analysis, behavioural issues, and parent-child communication. One of the reasons why our specific training stands out from other dyslexia parent training in Hong Kong is that we believe that it is important to educate parents how to identify the learning needs of their child before providing any intervention to their children with dyslexia. The ability to find each dyslexic child’s underlying problem in learning is the first step that parents must acquire in order to help their child overcome learning obstacles.

Our dyslexia parent training also involves different learning strategies that parents can help dyslexic children to learn better such as using picture cues or small words to memorise how to spell a new vocabulary. Parents can also pick up skills such as how to train dyslexic children’s organisational skills, setting learning goals and reward systems. Behavioural problems can be a challenging issue in everyday life of parents of children with learning disorders and so, behavioural management is also an important topic in our dyslexia parents training in Hong Kong. We teach parents how to identify the underlying cause of their behaviour before taking any further action. We believe that there is always a need behind every child’s behaviour, and it is important that parents can acknowledge and respond to that need through adequate learning support in Hong Kong.

Our training is mostly delivered face-to-face to facilitate communication and discussion however, we currently offer online dyslexia parents training. Our online dyslexia parents training in Hong Kong are interactive and engaging as we often encourage parents to express opinions or concerns openly to facilitate discussion. Moreover, our online training can accommodate a larger capacity of parents and be able to serve more parents of SEN children.

5. Why is dyslexia teacher training in Hong Kong necessary?

Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty among students. One out of ten students in class are diagnosed with it. Since the prevalence rate of this condition is high, there is a higher need for relevant dyslexia teacher training in Hong Kong to enhance their awareness of the learning needs of such children.

The way that children with this type of disorder learn is different from children without it. Dyslexic children consistently show difficulty in language learning. They have poorer literacy skills especially in reading and writing. As an example, a typical dyslexic child may exhibit behaviours like mispronouncing words or reverse order of letters when spelling. Children with dyslexia perceive words differently which made it extremely difficult and needed extra effort to read and write. As a result, dyslexic children need to rely on SEN support in Hong Kong or other learning approaches to help them to learn.

In Boaz, our dyslexia teacher training in Hong Kong developed spelling strategies like picture spelling to encourage children with dyslexia to use pictures to help them learn the spelling of words or the position of strokes for Chinese characters instead of learning words by rote. Apart from difficulty in learning language, dyslexia can also affect executive functioning, organisational skills and memory. Therefore, children with dyslexia have difficulty understanding and retrieving concepts taught in class as the knowledge they have learnt are unstructured and scattered in their mind. Despite repetitive teaching and drilling, children with dyslexia may continue to struggle comprehending the lesson materials and therefore, a different teaching approach is needed to help such students organise the concepts to enhance their learning motivation.

The dyslexia teacher training in Boaz emphasises the importance of presenting to our students the overview of the topic they need to learn so as to enable them to keep track of their learning and help them structure the learnt concepts. Not only children with dyslexia but also, students without learning obstacles may also struggle in learning. In mainstream schools, teachers often adopt the drilling method to help students consolidate the concepts. However, the foundation of the topic is still unclear to the students and so, they find it difficult to move up to acquire more advanced concepts. Boaz believes that the basic foundation of a topic must first be consolidated and gradually build up to higher level concepts based on that foundation. Therefore, we believe that by offering dyslexia teacher training in Hong Kong to use a more differentiated teaching approach does not solely benefit children of dyslexia but also, children who struggle in learning as well.

6. What are the differences between the dyslexia teacher training by Boaz and outside?

The dyslexia teacher training in Hong Kong provided from other sectors usually provides an overview and background of different types of children with diverse learning needs. It also involves teaching strategies and how to implement accommodations in terms of classroom settings, homework and assessment. Although these trainings can help teachers gain a better understanding and awareness of the needs of children with diverse learning needs, the effectiveness of these interventions is limited as teachers are only trained to implement interventions but not the skills to identify the underlying learning needs of children with learning disorders.

Boaz believes that if children do not learn the way we teach, we teach the way they learn. Children with dyslexia learn differently and so, the learning approach and learning support in Hong Kong should be adapted to their needs in order for them to succeed. In Boaz, we insist on training our teachers to look for the needs of the children before providing any learning interventions to the children. The dyslexia teacher training in Hong Kong that we provide also provides teachers with different learning strategies that cater for the learning needs of dyslexic children. We expect our teachers to be able to differentiate the ability and needs of each child when teaching, and equip them with the learning skills to improve their learning. Some teacher training offers outside emphasis on the drilling method and would encourage teachers to consolidate concepts in children with dyslexia by giving extra homework or practice papers. Whereas in Boaz, we encourage our teachers to teach through games and hands-on activities as we believe that students learn better when they are able to experience instead of repetitive drilling on work tasks.

7. What teacher training can Boaz provide? (for school program)

Boaz has been invited to many schools to deliver dyslexia teacher training Hong Kong programs. Our training consists of different topics like how to analyse the learning needs of children with learning disorders, teaching strategies and behavioural management.

Teachers in mainstream schools often struggle in accommodating students with dyslexia in the classroom setting and so, we would share strategies that make use of the students’ strength to help them learn more effectively. Besides strategies, we train teachers to learn to identify students’ learning needs through their presenting work before determining where their intervention point should be. Teachers should also be able to break down concepts into smaller achievable steps for students that enable them to attain the expected goal. Behavioural management is a challenging aspect for teachers and so, our teacher training provides an insight to teachers of the reasons behind common students’ behaviours in class. We believe that there must be a cause for every behaviour the students exhibit and the key is to delve further into the cause and be attentive to the needs of the student. The methods and skills we share in our training are down-to-earth and applicable to the mainstream curriculum.

8. How can we apply for your dyslexia teacher training Hong Kong program?

Our teacher training services are available all year round. Feel free to send us your interested topics and information. Our friendly staff will get in touch with you shortly.