About me

More than twenty years with primary-age children

I’ve spent most of my working life in primary schools. Not in an office, not in a clinic — in classrooms, with children, aged between five and eleven.

Several hundred children in Derby have called me Mrs Fishwick. You can call me Joanne.

I have a degree in child psychology, which I’ve found useful roughly a thousand times and almost never in the way the textbook suggested. What it really gave me was a habit: before you decide what a child can’t do, work out what’s happening for them.

More recently, I studied with the British Dyslexia Association in Dyslexia and Literacy Support, and I hold Accredited Practitioner Status with them. That means I’m recognised to carry out informal, curriculum-based assessment and to deliver specialist teaching programmes to children with dyslexia and related difficulties.

What I’ve learned from being the person who notices

In school, I’m the one the teachers go to when they notice a child who is having difficulties. A child who is quick and funny and completely stuck on the page. A child who has got very, very good at hiding it — copying from a neighbour, volunteering to hand out the books at exactly the wrong moment, being the class clown for ten minutes so nobody asks them to read aloud.

I share what I find after screening the child. The family may then go for a formal assessment. And then, afterwards, I’m the one working with that child every week — which is the part that actually changes anything.

A diagnosis is a piece of paper. What a child needs is somebody who turns up every week and believes they’ll get there.

How I teach?

One to one, always. Dyslexia isn’t one thing — two children with very similar reports need quite different lessons — and you can only do that properly with one child in front of you.

Sessions are structured and multisensory. That’s the technical description. In practice it means we do things in a deliberate order, building each step on from the one before, and we get the sounds into the hand and the ear and the eye rather than just asking a child to stare harder at a word.

I aim to give children something they can carry back into the classroom on Monday. Not tricks for my sessions — strategies that work when I’m not there.

What does a session actually look like?

We start with something they can do, so the first five minutes aren’t a reminder of everything that’s hard. Then a stretch of genuine work, broken up. Then something they enjoy. Children work far harder when they aren’t braced for failure.

If a child shuts down — and they do — we don’t push through it. We change what we’re doing. Nothing is learned by a child who has decided they’re stupid, so getting them off that thought is the work, not a distraction from it.

Why am I doing this now?

I’m coming towards the end of a long career in school. I’m not ready to stop doing the part I love, which is sitting beside one child and finding the way in.