S5 E1 - 5 Ways To Get The Best Out Of The New School Year

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to our very first episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast for 2025. I'm Jocelyn and I'm so pleased that you've joined me. As we head into a new school year here in Australia and New Zealand, the Structured Literacy Podcast is heading into its third year of being. If you've been with me since the start, well, thank you. So many people have contacted me to say that this podcast has been useful in decision-making, supporting teams and students and generally keeping it real about what it's like to bring structured literacy to life in a rigorous yet realistic way. If you're a new listener, welcome. You have 89 episodes of common sense, evidence-informed, non-judgmental support waiting for you. This current episode makes number 90.

The New Year

This year will be like every other one. It will be demanding. It will have moments of excitement and success and laughter. It will also come with a fair amount of, "we didn't get where we wanted to go in this". Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It's just what happens.

We start the year with big plans and goals, determined that this will be the year that we finally nail using data well, repurposing all of those leveled texts in a meaningful way, keeping the storeroom tidy, streamlining assessment, finishing the playbook or massive scope and sequence document that every school has been told they have to have.

If you're a classroom teacher, you'll probably be focused on keeping up with things like regular communication with parents, keeping all your NCCD notes up to date, assessing throughout the year that makes report writing easier and sorting through the years of stuff that you've accumulated to make sure that you only have what you need.

Leaders, in this time of monumental change in education, you'll be focusing on meeting system requirements while protecting the cognitive load and well-being of your team. Knowing the importance of coaching and close support for your team, you'll be determined to do those walkthroughs, spend time in classrooms, team teaching and support PLCs in their planning. You'll also be planning for a year of rigorous, yet meaningful and responsive professional learning, all while knowing with every fibre of your being that your best laid plans about that PL schedule you wrote at the end of last year are guaranteed to be interrupted by some last minute urgent meeting or session you'll be required to have, even though you assured that this year we weren't going to do that.

And if you're in an F to 12 school, that is even more likely.

Our Old Friend, Mildred

Oh, and let's not forget every one of us, every teacher, classroom assistant, deputy, curriculum leader and principal is trying to manage all of this magic while fighting our old friend Mildred. If you haven't heard me talk about Mildred before, well, she's that voice in your head that whispers to you that you aren't quite as clever as you thought, that people are smiling to your face but not really buying into your vision. She's the voice that tells you stories in your head about how everyone else has this stuff sorted out and you, my friend, are lagging behind. Guess what? Mildred's other name is Imposter Syndrome, and we all have it. And those stories in your head? Fiction, nothing but fiction and nonsense. So don't listen.

Five Ways to Achieve Your Goals

Those goals you set for yourself are completely achievable, but not all at once and not if you aim for perfection in everything. So in this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, I'd like to share five practical ways that you can get closer and maybe even achieve the goals you have set out for yourself, so that you don't reach the end of the year with a sense of regret for what hasn't been done. Here we go.

Goal Number One

The first thing to do is make sure that you're starting from a place of strength and celebration. No difficult goal was ever achieved from a place of deficit. People who feel good about themselves get great results and people who get great results feel good about themselves. It's a self-propelling cycle. So before you begin to plan your strategy for achieving something, reflect on the strengths that you bring. If there are key strengths needed that you or the team doesn't have, make a plan to account for that. But seriously, nobody is coming to this work from zero, nobody. Everyone has strengths to build on, despite what Mildred says to us. As a team, identify what you have successfully implemented that has led to improved student outcomes. Ask yourself,

What did we do in that focus that we can copy and use this time around?

What was the process and system that works so well for us?

What did we not do, and we thought uh-oh and had to go back and adjust?

How can we plan to avoid that same mistake this time?

Goal Number Two

Number two in my list of ways that you can get the most out of this school year is to look at the number of things on that list of goals and requirements. Let's think about this. Various research in the business world suggests that between three and five projects is the optimum for any one person to be working on. A general rule of thumb in educational literature and advice reflects this number, with the suggestion of around three core things to focus on at any given time. Fewer than that and productivity drops, more than that and we all get overwhelmed.

So you can think of the graph of productivity like an inverted U shape, with the X axis representing the number of projects and the Y axis the level of productivity achieved. At the lower and higher end of the X axis, productivity is lowest. In the middle is the sweet spot. If we think about it, this harks back to what we know about cognitive load. When it comes to intrinsic load, if something is too easy, well there's no attention paid and there's little learning. If something is too hard, working memory and processing are overwhelmed and there is little learning.

Even with three areas of focus, I wouldn't suggest having three brand new things going on at the same time. In order to get good results from an improvement effort, we need to provide robust professional learning, ensure that we have properly prepared resources and cleared time. We have to provide loads of direction and support at the start and not drop that off because we've been at it for a while. You can really only do this for one thing at a time. However, perhaps you implement something in Semester One and another thing in Semester Two. While you're putting all that energy, time and headspace into the new Semester Two project, you're maintaining and refining the Semester One focus. Do an evaluation of all the things you have on your plate and think critically about exactly where teachers are sitting. If you have seven new things in the works this year and your team needs to give large amounts of conscious effort to doing five of them, well that's a recipe for disaster. Yes, provided resourcing and teaching materials can help, but it still takes time to get used to something new. We need time to get our heads around how something works and do it well enough for those routines to become automatic and decisions to become fluent.

Goal Number Three

The third thing you can do to help your goals become reality is to create efficiencies while you deepen understanding. To do this, you can think of your improvement journey in terms of learning about general principles that are explored through the lens of various school undertakings. That's how our new professional learning program, Leading Learning Success, works. The whole staff learns about explicit teaching and the principles of instruction that we have from the cognitive sciences and connects that to the specific work they are doing now. That could involve teaching with a program or instruction they plan for themselves. This is not focused on the programs themselves, we're looking at the how of instruction. In this way, we can help our team go beyond the program and build capacity. The core learning is done together as a team, but the literacy-specific aspects happen with a PLC focus. This means that all professional learning is relevant to every member of staff. We are much more likely to get results if we focus on the conditions that make instruction impactful and then work in a targeted way to focus on creating instruction where the conditions help students thrive.

Goal Number Four

The fourth way to make sure that you achieve your goals this year is to be ultra clear about what you want, why it matters and how it connects to what you already have going on, how you're going to get there, what the potential roadblocks might be and how you're going to prevent that.

So here's a list of questions to work through with your team to help you gain the clarity you'll need for great outcomes.

1. What is it that we want to be happening that isn't happening now? An example of this is students reading with greater accuracy.

2. Why does this matter? The answer there is, accuracy is a key part of reading fluency that supports reading comprehension. By the way, if you can't answer this question, why does this matter, don't take another step until you can.

3. Where are our students up to in this work? Well, when it comes to reading accuracy, they might be accurate in common single-syllable words with common spelling patterns, but struggle with multi-morphemic words and less common patterns.

4. Where do we want them to be? We need students to be able to sound out multi-morphemic words accurately.

5. What does research tell us about how to make this instruction strong? But keep in mind that we don't have instructional focused research on every question we have. So we're looking at what is the available research that can help us here, knowing that we may not have the specific research we hope for.

6. What do we know from our experience of moving the needle on data?

7. What do we know about how our students learn best? And in brackets, (and we know it makes a difference to outcomes). This is not about individual teachers' philosophy. This is about how do we really know when students have learned and what levers have we been pulling to help them get there.

8. What strengths do we have at our disposal that we can leverage? For example, Resource Room members have everything they need for this instruction.

9. What is missing in this picture? Well, perhaps we haven't taught this with rigor before.

10. What will we need to make this instruction impactful? A suggestion is you can consider the what of instruction, the how of instruction and how much time to spend on it as three separate measures and reflect on how you can improve each of these.

11. How will we know that we're achieving success in addressing this issue? What metrics will we use?

12. What time frames will we have for implementation?

Now, you don't have to remember all of these 12 questions, because they're in the show notes on the website, so you can go through to jocelynseamereducation.com and you can find a link in the description of this episode wherever you happen to be listening. These questions can be applied to any problem of practice that you're working through. Whether you're considering an issue as a classroom teacher, a PLC or a school, they work.

Goal Number Five

My final tip in helping make your instructional magic happen this year is to hold space for the work. Every school has competing priorities and simply can't do everything at once. It's important, therefore, to identify the improvement activities that are most likely to lead to the outcomes you want and schedule them. We're not talking about the things that sort of kind of make a difference. We're talking about the things that give you the biggest bang for the buck. Identify them and schedule them. If you don't schedule it, it won't happen. So if you want teachers to have time to work on the code and word knowledge that will address that goal of accurate reading of multi-morphemic words and less common words, get out the timetables and write it in. Yes, it will mean less time on something else, but there will be huge payoffs for students when you achieve this focus.

If your plan calls for team teaching and observation, put it in the timetable and don't budge from it unless a meteor is heading for the school. Sometimes that means that senior leadership takes a class to help teachers have the time for professional learning and coaching. Other times that means saying no to something that would be nice in an after-school meeting so that you can do the thing that will get you where you want to go. Every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else. Every time you hold your ground and your boundaries and you say no to something that isn't really necessary and isn't going to get you where you want to go, you're freeing up space for wonderful things to happen. The last point here about holding space is around scheduling when you're going to check and recheck that plan you made. By keeping the goals and the strategy top of mind, you will give what is most important the attention it needs so that it can come to fruition.

We often say, "I don't have time for that". The reality is that you have time for what you value, and this is a bit of tough love via my mate, Jenny Cole. Did you not have time or did you not prioritise it?

Working in schools is a busy, demanding job, but that doesn't mean you can't do great things.

At the start of the episode, I said that you can do the things you want. You might just not be able to do them all at once or to the complete point of perfection that you're looking for.

I'm going to say it plainly now, you won't be able to do everything to perfection, but you will be able to do them well enough to get the result you're aiming for, and that's actually all you need to do.

I wish for all of our listeners an absolutely fantastic start to the year. I want you to hear me when I say that you are already good enough, smart enough, good looking enough and resilient enough to do what you need to. You don't have to be Wonder Woman or Superman to make it happen. Just be you.

Let your sense of service and focus on the broader vision of every child reading and writing propel you to set the boundaries you need to. Let your drive for equitable outcomes make you brave enough to challenge the status quo.

And remember, if you keep an eye on the research, an eye on the data and an eye on the well-being of everyone around you, you will not break the children. I can't wait to bring you more episodes of the Structured Literacy podcast throughout the year. Until next time, happy teaching, bye.

Show Notes:

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