S5 E11 Research to the Classroom - Connecting Reading and Writing Part 3

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Jocelyn: Hello there, welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I'm Jocelyn and I'm so pleased to be recording this episode with Rachael, here on the lands of the Palawa people of Tasmania. Well, Rachael's not here, she's at her house, but we are chatting today all about the practical aspects of connecting reading and writing.

In the last two episodes, I've shared a research summary about connecting reading and writing. In the last two episodes, I've shared a research summary about connecting reading and writing and instructions and some of the practical elements of the work. But we all know that we learn so much when we hear from real people in the field, and that's why Rachael is joining me today. Rachael, thank you so much for being here with us.

Rachael: It's an absolute pleasure. I am so excited. I have been a long-time fan of yours, Jocelyn, so super excited to be able to talk to you one-to-one today and share a little bit about what we've been up to.

Jocelyn: Fantastic. Tell us a little bit about your context and what's happening for your school.

Rachael: Well, I work in a pretty small public school in South Australia. We have around 170 students from preschool to school at my site and it's a category four school, so we sort of sit in the middle of the socioeconomic index here in South Australia. It's a wonderful school, fabulous staff, from support staff all the way up to leadership. Our teachers are fantastic, they always want to do the best for our students and we also have a wonderful school community. So I feel quite blessed to be where I am at the moment. I've been there since 2023 and enjoying the journey of supporting this school in their improvement journey.

Jocelyn: Wonderful and you know, when I hear about schools like yours, Rachael, it just consolidates for me that the idea that all schools are broken and every teacher doesn't like their job, it's just not true. There are tricky things about our profession, for sure, but there are so many leaders and teachers in schools who love their work, who are getting great outcomes for kids, and I think we need to celebrate that. So that's part of why we're here today to celebrate good work and also share some of the reality of doing this work in structured literacy in schools.

So we know that in the past we separated reading and writing quite a lot, both at word level and then at text level. Can you share a bit about your school's journey towards integrating reading and writing instruction and what prompted you to move in this direction?

Rachael: Absolutely so, as I said, I started working at my current school mid-2023 and at that time work in the structured literacy space was already underway. So we started by looking closely at what teachers were doing in the area of phonics, spelling, reading and writing to understand what was already in place, and we talked to teachers about what they felt was working and what needed to change going forward. A key part of our work was to begin using a universal screener to understand our readers and to ascertain which students were intensive or strategic literacy risk.

We already had some data which painted a pretty concerning picture. Our NAPLAN and PAT data were not great, and our Year One phonics screening check was also not where any of us would like it to be. So we wanted to dig deeper and understand where the specific weaknesses were with our readers so that we could get a start on this work. We collected our first DIBELS data at the start of 2024 and the results were pretty confronting, but they confirmed what we were hearing from our teachers and from what we were seeing when we were observing students working in their classrooms. The literacy levels for many students were very low. We saw reluctant readers, reluctant writers and students who lacked confidence in themselves in the classroom. So as a leadership team we knew that dramatic action was going to need to be required to set us on that path to a whole school approach to structured literacy.

Jocelyn: What I love about that, Rachael, is that you did a couple of things that I think sometimes we miss. The first one is you looked at what you were already doing, because there's no point reinventing wheels if we don't have to. It also adds significantly to cognitive load of the teachers and the students if we're making unnecessary changes. The second thing was you used your data as the prompt to make a change in what was happening. You didn't see such and such a school uses this program on social media, or someone came to the school and said oh, you should really try this out. You went from what is the need of the students here to help you build a sense of urgency and build that bigger why. I'm going to guess as well that data has been an important part of your evaluation process since that time, and I could be jumping ahead, so I'm really sorry if I am.

Rachael: No, absolutely. In Term One last year, we actually ran a data storytelling workshop with our teachers and I presented our Foundation to Year Six reading data from DIBELS so that we could begin to understand the scope of the work ahead.

I called it facing the data. I was really honest about that with staff. It was very red. So when we looked at our whole school data, it was really concerning and I think that we all needed to sort of be on board with how challenging the road ahead was going to be for us. So we began to have some honest and reflective conversations together about what we all needed to be doing if we were going to make some changes. So we all agreed that we needed an unapologetic focus on foundational skills and I actually quoted you in this session, Jocelyn, because I heard you say that at a conference I'd attended and I really do believe that as a site, we needed to go back to go forwards and we needed to give ourselves the permission to go back and work on those foundational reading and spelling skills before we could move forward in other areas of our improvement work. 

Jocelyn: 100%. If we don't make sure the foundational skills are there, nothing else is going to happen. So well done to you and the team for not being afraid to step back, even in the upper primary years, and say we need to work on this, because just giving students more multi-paragraph level text lessons isn't going to get them to the proficiency that we want. So what were some of the initial challenges you faced when approaching this work of integrating reading and writing, both from the phonics space but also in the text space?

Rachael: So we were taking on a new approach at the time as a school and that actually was an opportunity for us as leaders, because we framed ourselves as leaders alongside our teachers and we were actually learning this new approach together. So part of that work meant that our Principal and myself as Deputy at the time, we actually taught the phonics, spelling, morphology lessons regularly, and for me it was daily, and we were also observed as part of that practice as well. So we were actually really vulnerable and allowed our literacy coach at the time, but also each other, to come and observe our practice and provide feedback on what we were doing well and what we needed to improve on. So I really felt like that was an important part of our journey. We were really willing to learn and grow alongside of our teachers, and so basically from there, it was about building knowledge and understanding within our teachers. So we worked with our literacy coach from the department and I actually developed an instructional coaching plan for every term of the year. Our objectives stayed the same the whole year, which was: our leaders, teachers and support staff will work collaboratively towards a consistent, structured literacy block for all learners in 2024. And the success criteria changed each term in response to what we were actually observing in classrooms and what our teachers were telling us about what was working and what wasn't working well for their students. So this helped us to find the next steps that we could work towards as a site.

So we did things like we implemented decodable readers across the site, we conducted ongoing professional learning with teachers and support staff, we used teaching sprints, we conducted ongoing walkthroughs and observations with feedback to staff, we refined our intervention groups and our approach in that space, and then we also started to work in the fluency space. So I actually used your three-part podcast series on Dyad Reading with our three to six staff and we designed teaching sprints to begin to implement fluency pairs in our classrooms. This was a sort of a challenge at the beginning because we were moving teachers away from the practices of independent silent reading towards fluency pairs, and this was a really big change for our teachers. But I was just so impressed by everyone's willingness to try something new and to learn from each other. So, being such a small school, we were able to really kind of collaborate closely in that space.

Jocelyn: I'd like to dig into that a little bit, because we all know that change is difficult, and that trying to adjust our conceptual understanding of what teaching looks like is massive, because we all bring ourselves to our work and we take our work personally, because we want to make a big impact in the world. So when someone comes along and says, oh, by the way, we're going to change that, that can throw up all of the feelings and it's understandable that it does so. That challenging moment, well, one of those challenging moments, because, let's be honest, in any change journey there's lots of them. But, drilling down into that work on the fluency pairs, what made it successful? What did you as a leadership team do to help your teachers hop on board the bus of fluency paired reading, or just paired reading as a protocol? What got them there?

Rachael: I think hearing from a teacher through the podcast was a really big, important piece for us around, you know, there are teachers trying these new practices across other sites and it is okay to give ourselves permission to try something new and just to see how it goes and using our DIBELS data to sort of pair students up the way that Kirby described in her podcast with you, I think that really resonated with a lot of teachers who were thinking about how best to accommodate learners across a very broad spectrum of reading skills from in, their, say, 5-6 class or their Year 3-4 class. So that was really helpful.

I think it was about for us, you know, sourcing high quality resources for teachers to use and investing in that. So in terms of using, you know, high quality texts and passages, we ended up, you know, purchasing a lot of that as a leadership team so that our teachers had high quality resources and materials to use. And also that instructional coaching piece as well, like, I'll come into your class and help you while you're working with some of your kids, I can walk around and support you with your behaviour management or I can, you know, give you some feedback about what you're doing. I think that was a really important piece as well.

Jocelyn: Rachael, I can almost hear people, leaders, who work in smaller schools, going where did you find the time for that? How on earth did you fit that in? Because I'm struggling.

Rachael: I feel like the best part of being a leader is being out in classrooms working with kids. So, like, even if I was having like a really boring admin day where, you know, I had to do something really administrative, I would force myself out into classrooms and actually do, like, be present and get out into classrooms and see what was happening and make the time intentionally, even if it was blocking time out in my calendar. But we were also really creative. We have, you know, three leaders at my site and our wellbeing leader and my Principal would literally do some of my work to enable me to do the instructional coaching work. Like we worked really collaboratively as a team because it was something that was really important to all of us and so we were creative, we were resourceful to make that time and it is really easy just to get bogged down as a leader in all of the administrative functions of your job, but the best part is going out and working with the kids. So make the time, even if it means something else has to give.

Jocelyn: Yeah, great advice. So change takes time. So can you describe a moment for us when you realised this is working and when teachers were giving you feedback that they could see the benefits of connecting reading and writing, either in that foundational skills space or in the text-based space? We're going to talk about that in quite a bit more detail, that text-based learning space. But where did the teachers go, hey, this was a good idea?

Rachael: Our phonics, spellings morphology work last year, we grouped and regrouped students for 50 minutes every day. So we had students working in groups, and it wasn't necessarily their role class teacher that was teaching them for this lesson. And we decided that we would have some connection time first thing in the morning where we did the role and connected and then we would all move off to our groups at 9:10 every morning. And teachers were really reluctant about that because they wanted to spend more time with their children first thing in the morning or they were worried about how students would transition so quickly in the morning to an unfamiliar room or teacher. But that ended up being the best part of what we were doing, was that we ended up having really settled children who, at 9:10, moved off to their groups, got on with their learning and we found we had the least amount of behaviour issues throughout the day because they were highly engaged in the lesson for that first 50 minutes and that was a really pleasant surprise, I think, for our teachers that it was going to work so well and that also we were going to still be able to be connected to children who weren't in our phonics, spelling, morphology group, because we would meet and collaborate and share what was going on in classrooms. So it felt like there was a level of trust there that the children you were sending off to that group were able to get what they needed. And that was what it was all about. Was every student getting what they need at the point in time that they need it. So you know, if we have students in Year Two who need to go back and work on basic code, well that's what they need to do, because they can't possibly go forward without that piece.

Jocelyn: Music to my ears, and it's not to say that every school would have to do it the way you did it. But at the end of the day, if we're not providing instruction that meets the needs of the students, what business are we in? We're just going through the motions.

Rachael: Yeah, like, I think that is the key buy-in point for our staff was seeing how well that worked and how quickly it worked as well. It wasn't like we needed a few weeks to sort of settle into our new routines. I mean, it was instant and children were coming back to class at 10 o'clock ready for their fruit and their teacher's story and it was sort of like a seamless process in the mornings and I think that gave teachers a lot of confidence. And as we started to see the improvements in students throughout the year, we were obviously tracking and monitoring that very carefully, that also buoyed us. It gave us so much more confidence that what we were doing was working and that we could continue in this space. We knew what we were doing was having an impact on our children.

Jocelyn: Great. And so that's in that foundational skills and the work that you're using to resource that comes from your state's department and includes both reading and spelling in the lesson. So that's there.

Talk to me about the text-based space, because it's one thing to teach a phonics, spelling, morphology lesson with students who are all at the same point, and it's another thing to have your class back with that range of students that you've described, where you've got some children who can do pretty much everything and some children who can't do much at all, even in upper primary space. So where did the- there's a couple of things to unpack here. There's adjustment how we support those students? But how did you help the teachers? Let's talk about that first. How did you help the teachers transition to whole class teaching with integrated reading and writing, as opposed to having separate reading writing time?

Rachael: For many teachers who pick up a text-based unit for the first time, and this is not just teachers at my site, this is something I've heard from colleagues at other schools or people that have connected with me through social media, there's a bit of a misconception that a text-based unit focuses mostly on reading and reading comprehension and it doesn't have that heavy focus on developing writing skills as well. So we needed to have that shift away from thinking that standalone writing lessons and genre-based writing lessons were going to be the key, because what I would hear from teachers was, but what about writing? And I would also hear, but when am I going to fit all of this in? Like there's too many things that I'm going to need to do for literacy, I'm not going to be able to get all of that done and teach writing as well. So that was a common sort of misconception that I think we faced in the early stages. So we had to have that shift in thinking away from standalone writing, and that is a big change of mindset for many teachers. So teachers have found that they needed to go deeper with certain elements of writing when they started using the text-based units. There were, you know, there are lessons in there about writing sentences and, you know, moving from simple to compound and compound to complex and verbs and all the parts of speech. And I can think of one teacher, for example, who actually ended up using additional Resource Room lessons from the sentence structure part of The Resource Room because he identified there were some real gaps in student knowledge and understanding of verbs at Year 4-5. So it is really helpful to have like a bank of lessons that we can go into and if we're responsive in our teaching, we can use those text-based units as a vehicle, but we might need to change course and go back and build some of those earlier foundational sentence writing skills in order to be able to move forward and attack those units with the rigour that's needed. So yeah that was an interesting learning for us.

Jocelyn: And what I'm hearing is that the units and, to be clear, we're talking about units from The Resource Room, although your school does draw on a range of different things, but when we're talking about the units from The Resource Room, what your teachers have recognised is that responding to student need isn't necessarily about deconstructing the whole thing and picking out the bits that they think will be the easiest. They've looked at what are the prerequisite skills, and that's the land, for me, of high expectations. So we have a grade appropriate unit that is going to have a grade appropriate summative task and instead of dumbing down the task, and that's different from adjustment, which we'll get to, instead of dumbing down the task, they're saying how can we build the skills and knowledge to enable the students to get there, which I think is a really lovely way to to approach it.

Rachael: I mean, we've already had some experience in South Australia using units of work through our department and I think, as lots of states are moving in this direction, it's really important to remember that these are not a grab and go resource. You need to adapt a text-based unit to suit the needs of your students, and that doesn't mean dumbing it down. I always believe in teaching up where you can, and I think that it involves actually spending some time going through and unpacking a unit before you go away and start delivering it, because there are going to be things in there that you might need to learn yourself, but also you might need to adjust the delivery or the output for your learners, and you need to be okay with doing that so they're not a one-size-fits-all approach. You need to be able to give yourself permission to spend some time unpacking them, and we did that through our professional learning. When we looked at the text-based units initially, we looked at well, what is actually in there from a vocab perspective? What is in there from a sentence writing perspective? What are all the elements that it's trying to bring together here and how well are your students, at this point in time, going to be able to attend to that learning, and if they can't, you're going to need to adjust, and that's where your differentiation comes in.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and I will share a photo in the podcast show notes on our website of that you had shared on social media, Rachael, so people can see you know what that might look like from a documentation perspective. The heart of what you're talking about is supporting students' working memory and supporting students' cognitive load. So in asking, do my students and I know them do they have the prerequisite, knowledge and skills to participate in this lesson as written? If the answer is no and we just barrel ahead, we are pretty much guaranteeing that we're going to overload working memory, overload their cognitive load, and then we're going to see things like behaviours, complaining, running off to the toilet for 45 minutes and then coming back at the end of the lesson; all of those things that we know can happen when we feel overwhelmed.

So, fundamentally, what you've enabled your teachers to do is support the working memory and cognitive load of the students in the class and then thought carefully about, if we're pretty much in the ballpark, what are the individual differences between students that I need to cater for. Because many leaders comment to me that they feel at times that their teachers pick up the units and then they don't look at it, and then Lesson One with the children is sometimes the same time that the teacher is seeing the presentation or the teacher guide notes and, as you said, it's not take and teach.

So how did you shift your teacher's focus from, Ok, I'm just going to do what's on the page to, I'm going to walk that fine line between being responsive to the needs of the students and taking this unit too far away from its intent. How did you get the balance there?

Rachael: I don't think we have yet, I think that's our work for this year. I think our first step is really around just playing in the space of the tech space unit, having a go in Term One, and that's what we're working towards is just trying them, give it a go. The next step for us is really to come back together and reflect on the effectiveness of our delivery and how well the text-based units suited the needs of our children and what we need to do differently, and I'm hoping that then, through those conversations, we can start to talk about adjustments, adaptations of the units, differentiation, all of those really important parts that teachers often are too time poor to consider, and sometimes teachers don't know how to do those things, they don't know how to adjust. It might be a background knowledge text it might be too difficult for your students to attend to. How can we find ways to use the same text so that everyone can understand or hear it, but it might be delivered in a different way. So, for example, you might need to record yourself reading part of the text. You might need to adapt the text to be shorter for some students or to reduce the complexity of the vocab in there, and it's okay to do those things if your children really need that.

Jocelyn: Talk us through some of the adjustments that you have used in your own classroom and how you've harnessed assistive technology to support their full engagement in this age-appropriate learning.

Rachael: Jocelyn, if there is one thing that drives me as a teacher, it's this. This is the exact point for me where the rubber hits the road with a lot of teachers. So I've worked mostly at leafy green schools in high socioeconomic areas and for most of my career, and every single year, I would have a handful of children in my class in upper primary who were struggling, and they were struggling with their spelling, they were struggling with their reading, they were struggling with their writing. So as an upper primary teacher, I often felt really lost, helpless and I didn't understand enough about how children learn to read and write to be able to help them. And it was a really yucky space to be in as a teacher. I didn't know about phonics and structured literacy and learning difficulties, but I was really desperate to help my students before they moved off to high school and I'm really passionate about supporting children with learning difficulties and also to support teachers to develop their skills and strategies as well in this space.

If I knew what I know now, you know, as they say, when we know better, we do better. And so the explicit and structured nature of my current approaches as a teacher in my classroom, trying to be really responsive to the needs of our most vulnerable learners, but also making sure that the needs of our learners who are at the other end of the spectrum are also getting that extension and challenge. So for me, it's about repetition and consistency and predictability, which is what I love about the text-based units. It's about being really relentless. Every single time I have a few minutes where the class is settled, I'm reading with a decodable reader with a child, or I'm using my graphene flashcards. We are making every minute count to make sure that students who are at the most vulnerable end of the spectrum are getting what they need. For me, it's about scaffolding and, like, if you need to work on the carpet with a small group while those who are independently working on a consolidation task are doing that, then that's what you need to do. And also using sentence stems and closed passages and assistive technology to be able to let all of your learners access the learning is so crucial.

So for me, I've been using Seesaw. I've been a long-time Seesaw user and I love using the talk-to-text and the voice recording tool on Seesaw for this very reason. In the Fox text-based unit that I recently finished with my 3-4 students, we used Seesaw across the class and those students who are unable to type or unable to construct words and sentences, and I have some of those students, they were able to respond to the comprehension questions orally using a voice recording tool, and we also use the talk to text, which is like literally unlocking the most amazing light bulb in their heads, I absolutely love using it because finally they can share their thinking appropriately. They don't have to be worrying. I mean, they can't even really discern the capital letters on a keyboard to be able to type. They're not there with their code switching yet. So it's so important to be able to give students an opportunity to respond in their own way. And for me it's about building confidence in those children. They already have such a low self-concept of themselves, so supporting children to understand that they can still share their connections with a rich text, and they can demonstrate their understanding orally, is just a game changer for us. So some of my most vulnerable learners are the ones that are actually the most engaged with my teacher read-alouds. They love hearing the stories and sharing their ideas about a text, and it's often just the output of their ideas that we might need to reconsider as teachers so that all students can demonstrate success in a classroom.

Jocelyn: Yeah, absolutely, and I think the engaging with the text in terms of reading it or hearing it is probably one of the easier things to solve. Even with one of our short story units, you can adjust whether it's you reading it aloud, whether people are reading with partners. When I've gone into work with schools on their strategy, one of the things I've had them do is pair a stronger and a weaker reader where there's a good social fit. So while everyone else is reading with a partner and they're taking turns, for that particular pair, the weaker reader is doing all the pointing, one text between two, and the stronger reader is doing all the reading and nobody would know the difference because everybody's verbalising in the classroom and reading, and it protects the dignity of those students. And if we want students to feel safe, secure and that they belong, we need to support their wellbeing, and not in a pat them on the head kind of way, but in a real way that says we see you and we value what you have to offer and what you can learn and at the same time we're going to help you boost those skills that you don't have. So we're not assuming that they can't learn the code now, because they absolutely can, but we also can't wait until they've done so before we engage them in rich text work.

What about those learners at the other end, the ones who you mentioned might be needing more stretch. How have you responded to them this term?

Rachael: For fluency pairs, I've sort of mulled over different ways of grouping, and in Term One you're still getting to know your dynamics, of your children in your classroom. So I've chosen to pair my higher readers with themselves. So rather than putting my higher, sort of, my better decoders with my lower decoders, I've actually given them sort of a completely separate text with a lot more stretch and challenge in it, and I'm giving them some scope to work more at their level at this point. I hate using the word level, I know it's not the right word.

Jocelyn: We all know what we mean, and I think what I really like about what I'm hearing there is that we're recognising that different sorts of reading have different purposes. So if the purpose was to have everyone in the class engage with the same text, then pairing a stronger and a weaker reader is a strategy to provide support. But when it comes to fluency, the stronger readers, they need a text that sits at the level of complexity that will provide them with stretch, and we're also, with those students, not going to be focused so much on repeated reading, but wide reading. So, just by necessity, the text that those students read will be different from the text that the other students are reading. So what you're saying responds very nicely with what we hear in the research and what the clever people who help us figure out what to do here are saying in terms of practice.

Rachael: And it's giving, again, goes back to giving students what it is that they need, and I don't like using the stronger readers to support the weaker readers all the time. I don't think it's fair on our learners. So I actually have five different groups for my fluency pairs. I've got, you know, some children working back at basic code and I've got children that are working with authentic, non-decodable texts at the other end and then some other pieces in the middle and I think the really important thing as a teacher is to sort of be able to set up the right processes to be able to enable that to happen really smoothly. Because initially I was thinking, oh, how am I going to manage this? You know all these different types of texts and different, so I've set up tabs and I've set up group names and we're sort of building those routines into our fluency pairs so that it's seamless, so we don't waste time getting the right book for the right group and getting your pointer and sitting in your spot and all of those sorts of things. Developing those routines and procedures, I guess, in the classroom has been really helpful. And then I can go, ok, well, who do I need to support in these pairs, whether it's from a behaviour perspective, or I need to listen to certain children read, so then I kind of monitor and move around the groups in that way. So there's lots to consider when it comes to fluency pairs, and I think it's been really great for me to step from a leadership role into the teaching space and to sort of be in that space myself of how it all could work.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and because you can appreciate the challenges that teachers are talking about. So when they say, hey, this is really difficult, because I've got all these kids at different points of their reading development, you know exactly what that feels like and have things to share. What about in the text-based space in terms of stretching students in the writing?

Rachael: So we're moving into writing goals now. So you know, taking things from the units where there might be an opportunity to add certain time connectives, for example, or conjunctions and supporting individual, like even little groups of students who are at that higher level, you know, giving them a reading goal that's appropriate to their point in time. So we've got students who have writing goals right back around full stops and punctuation and capital letters and things like that. We've got students working on having a who and a do in a sentence, but we've also got students working on using subordinating conjunctions in their sentences.

So everyone's sort of getting what they need through their goal setting and I think that's really important. And what that comes down to is really looking at your students as writers, looking at their writing samples. What are some common things you're seeing in what they're doing? And then finding ways to move groups of students forward, even if the rest of the class isn't ready for it. You can do a little mini-lesson or you can work with a group of children who need a bit of stretch and some extension and give them what they need so that they can progress and move to the next level in their writing as well.

Jocelyn: Yeah, absolutely, and there are different ways to build complexity for those students. Some of it is that you expect more of those conventions, as you said, in their summative task. So, knowing that previously you've taught about a particular subordinated conjunction or particular text feature, the rest of the class you might not be expecting them to independently use that yet. But your expectations or your success criteria for the summative task can be adjusted because you're saying well, I know I've already taught you this, so I can expect you to use it.

Another point is around giving them more choice. So to support working memory and cognitive load for the rest of the class you might have a reasonably narrow focus for the summative task, but for your high-flying learners, in terms of your fast lane learners, they might want to step outside the bounds of the standard structured task that exists. So there's lots of different ways, and sometimes as a teacher that's the hardest thing, because you go, there's lots of different ways but I don't really know which one to choose. And then that comes back to the issue of coaching that you mentioned before and how critical that is.

Talk to me about what you've seen in, and I know it's early days in the text-based space, 2025 and Term One is when you've really gotten into it, but what are you seeing in the classroom from this integrated approach and what are the other teachers saying to you that they are beginning to recognise as benefit?

Rachael: So I think that one of the big successes I'm hearing from teachers is that there is writing. So that relief that, oh, actually we are doing writing, we're not just spending 100 minutes a day on a literacy block and the students aren't writing anything. So I think the pleasant surprise about how the explicit and structured nature of those writing lessons have been developed, and also that building of skills throughout one unit and the revision and the reviewing of certain concepts all of that really lends itself to high quality instructional design and our teachers are really enjoying that and playing in that space. So for my context in particular, the predictability and the consistency of those instructional routines have been really impactful. Behaviour is better in these lessons because students know what to expect, and the content and the approach is consistent. As long as the delivery is consistent, then that really supports what we know about students' cognitive load and being able to attend to that instruction.

For me, I think the big wins are that students love using their mini boards to respond in the lessons so that I Do, We Do, You Do that's embedded into the text-based units allows for students to be doing more of the responding and we know that that helps our students to be more engaged. They love seeing the visuals, like the photos that match the vocabulary words and things like that, and having some great discussions around that, because I find our students can sometimes not have a great deal of life experience around certain topics. So building that background knowledge and having some discussions about that has been really valuable. In the Fox unit we loved doing the background knowledge text around bushfires, introduced species and also the Australian bush. They actually, we spent a little bit longer on each of those lessons than is intended in the plan because they were really engaged in it and we watched videos, we watched BTN, we listened to the sound of a bushfire and we looked at different introduced species to Australia, and so we really got a lot out of the background knowledge part of the text, sort of that incidental teaching, which was really great.

Jocelyn: Rachael, I would actually say it's not incidental, because you thought long and hard about how you were going to engage the students and what I'm hearing from you is that the unit itself and the presentations is, the presentation particularly, is the stimulus for the presentation particularly is the stimulus for the teaching. It's not the entirety of the teaching, and I think we're in a bit of a danger zone in where we're sitting in education explicit teaching at the moment, because when we say explicit teaching, people are developing this impression of highly scripted, don't say anything that's not on the page teaching, which is not what we know leads to the best outcomes. It's doing what you've done and having a think about, am I going to go deeper in this bit, or do I think that my students have this and we can just continue on? So making those instructional decisions based on what you see in the students, without deviating and distracting the students from the learning at hand, is the key. So you've gone deeper. You've gone a little broader, but not so broad that we're now not even focused on the thing that we need to be learning. So everybody, listen up to what Rachael's doing. She's using the units as they're intended, but adjusting and enriching and enabling as needed by her students. That's what we want to see. We're not cherry picking steps because we don't really understand them and we don't know what's going to happen so we'll just skip those bits. Trust the process and then you'll be able to see where those adjustments can be made.

Rachael: Absolutely. We don't want to go off on a big tangent about bushfires because that's not what we're learning about, but from having done the background knowledge part of the text-based unit really well, when it came to looking at the illustrations in the book, Fox, and asking questions around, well, how do you know there's been a bushfire, what can you see? And they could make those connections more closely. And our students haven't lived through a bushfire they might not have even been into the Australian bush, so we need to spend that time building that background knowledge and that's been probably one of the biggest wins for us and that engagement was really high as well. So, yeah, in seven weeks I've already seen a lot of improvements in their sentence level writing and, as I said, I'm introducing some writing goals, which has been something that's worked really well for me in the past. But I'm really looking forward to seeing how they progress through the year, and I guess that's one of the best things about teaching, isn't it? It's about sort of seeing your learners at the beginning of the year and then building and building and building upon all of those wonderful elements of literacy and seeing how they end up at the end of the year. It's pretty exciting.

Jocelyn: Absolutely, and because if we're not seeing that growth, if we're not seeing the development, if we're not able to measure progress, then how do we know we've been successful? We simply don't. And writing and spelling are two areas where we all want more clarity around assessment, and we don't have beautiful tools to rely on, like universal screeners that are normed on thousands of children that have been rigorously studied in the spelling and the writing space, and there's a number of different ideas out there. So what does it look like for you and your team to be monitoring student growth and progress in, when we're looking at what happens when we connect reading and writing? The research tells us that it should be more effective, but how do we know that it is? What are, and I'm not expecting you to have a definitive answer here, because I actually don't think there is one solid answer, but what are your leadership, spidey senses and your experience telling you you're looking out for let's start with those writing goals and where they come from.

Rachael: So I think I have used writing assessment platforms in the past and we don't have one in place at my current site, but I think we do have a lot of work to do at my particular site around understanding student writing a little bit more closely. So I think they're going to be a big part of our work in the future at this particular school. So for me, assessment and using the assessment ideas in the text-based units teacher guide I think the real work we have ahead of us is about making meaning with those and thinking about taking some of those ideas and doing some deep thinking and planning around developing an assessment, you know, task that students will be really engaged with, but it'll also give us that information against the achievement standards of the curriculum in terms of what it is our students can and can't do. I think that there's a misconception with some of our teachers around what our students can and can't do and we need to understand and link that more closely to the curriculum.

So we need to sort of bring everything all together now and that's our work going forward. So, once we've spent some time reflecting on our first text-based units in Term One of 2025, our next step is well, where are our points for improvement? Did you get to the assessment task? A lot of teachers spend, you know, a little bit too much time and their units aren't paced out in a way that they actually even get to that assessment piece, and that can be a concern, and I've seen that happen at lots of different schools in my work as a curriculum lead. You know, there's all the good intentions, but we run out of time because we spent too much time on one thing and so we miss that summative assessment task and we miss that really crucial part where we actually are checking for understanding and that's a real, you know, room for improvement piece going forward.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and you said some really important things. The first one is that we need to link back to the curriculum, because we don't write reports based on a platform's determination of our students' skill. We don't write reports based on a scope and sequence that comes from another place or that's included in a particular book. We write reports based on what is in the achievement standard for our state or territory. Most states and territories across Australia use the Australian Curriculum, so our units are all written to reflect that. So we reflect the Australian Curriculum. However, it's not the end of the story, because we have to understand all those other goals that come with it. So if students don't have automatic handwriting and automatic spelling and fluent sentence level writing, you're never going to get to that high level multi-paragraph text piece that reflects the conventions of particular genres in a way that truly demonstrates what they can do. So there's so much to unpack in this assessment piece and I really like that you just named up one of the common challenges in that we don't get to the assessment task or we get there, but we get there by rushing the last few steps, which means we miss the scaffolded, gradual release into the assessment task and we basically went the I Do, We Do together, now do it on your own, and we miss the You Do with support, with repetition, to build confidence so that when they complete their summative task, they can actually be successful. So how do we, this is a rhetorical question, how on earth do we measure the effectiveness of instruction if we never get to the summative task and pacing is important. So part of the work that you've been doing with your school is unpacking the units. Has that included looking at how long you think each part will take for your students, or is that one of the next steps? Now that they've got one under their belt, they can come back and have a bit more of an idea of what's realistic.

Rachael: So I have worked with individual teachers around pacing out text-based units late last year for some teachers that were in that space. In terms of you know there's a lot in here, how are we going to plan and map this out so we spend enough time on the really important parts, we don't miss the assessment part at the end, but we also don't rush, we get everything that we need to get done in a timely way. And sometimes that means we have to cut out parts of our practice during the day that aren't serving our students. And it even goes back to looking at a timetable and saying where can we cut the fat here? Because if you're telling me you don't have enough time, I want to know why there's, you know, a double lesson of art every week and you know whatever it is. I'm not saying art's not important, obviously, but you know we need to be thinking about where can we cut the fat in our timetable? Where are we wasting instructional minutes when we could be doing some work in this space, and that's what our kids need. So that's what we need to prioritise.

Jocelyn: That's that unapologetic pursuit of learning. And again, I'm like you. I'm not saying please don't write us emails saying why do you hate art? We don't hate art at all, but we need to maximise every minute. And one of the techniques that can be really helpful is teaching to the clock and literally setting a timer. Ok, everyone, we've got nine minutes for this particular thing, let's go. And that helps keep us on track. It stops us going off on those tangents and those journeys of discovery because we encountered an interesting word and then we tell a story about last year when I went to the museum and then I, you know if I think we're honest, we all have moments where we just rabbit on too much. But it also builds a sense of urgency in the students and helps to focus them by working to the clock. But there's lots of different ways, but what I'm hearing from you is, we take that available time how many lessons we have, look at the steps and think about where might we need to spend more time and where will this one be a quick one, and then get an approximation of the time rather than, it's like starting a holiday and saying oh well, we know, we've got three weeks for our holiday. We didn't really plan the dates on any of our itinerary elements, we've just listed them and then we'll just get as far as we get and that'll be okay. We wouldn't do that. We know where we want to be on certain dates and so having that same approach with our instruction can be helpful, and allowing ourselves the grace to get it wrong and learn from that experience and come back.

If you could give yourself and your team any advice when you were right at the beginning of your structured literacy journey in general, but particularly when we're talking in this connection of reading and writing, what would you say to yourself and your team and what do you wish, looking back, you'd done differently?

Rachael: I would remind myself that change can be really hard and it won't always be easy. There's going to be times when you need to take your foot off the accelerator and there are times when you need to actually put the brakes on and have a stop and a pause. So for us, that looked like, you know, sometimes we cancelled teacher meeting because our staff were not in the right space to be able to take on new professional learning. If people are struggling, you need to read the room and you need to stop and pull back and be respectful of how complex a teacher's role is in a classroom. And, you know, sometimes that allows you to develop that, really that piece of goodwill with your staff, because they you're acknowledging how difficult it is to be a teacher in a classroom in 2025. So don't be afraid to cancel the professional learning in the meeting. Do it another time. Just, you know, read the room.

Another thing I think it's really important to differentiate your support of your staff. Not everyone is at the same place, and that's okay. You want to make site-wide changes, which is all well and good, but sometimes people need different things at different times. And if you want that collective change to happen, you sometimes need to adjust your approach. You need to adjust your timeframe or your level of support for individuals at your school, and that's what they need. So you just need to be really responsive to that, like we would with our students in the classroom. We need to differentiate our support for our teachers and our support staff. And I think also don't assume that everyone has the same knowledge and understanding of structured literacy as you do. So I've spent a lot of time working on my own professional learning in this space. I listen to your podcast every week, I do the readings, I go to the webinars and the conferences, but not everyone is as passionate or as engaged in this space as you are, and that's okay. I think you want to spend time with your staff to build that deep understanding of structured literacy and you do that through your professional learning. And it's not about just putting up another, yet another visual of Scarborough's Reading Rope and, you know, everyone, this is the reading rope, Move on. You actually need to unpack the components of the Reading Rope, for example, or engage in a professional reading or listen to a podcast together, so that everyone can have a chance to develop their own understanding.

And if you don't feel 100% confident in your knowledge and understanding, if you can't be the expert in the room, that's okay, own it. Learn alongside your colleagues. You can use podcasts like this one to develop your collective understanding as a staff. If you can't afford the consultants or the coaches or the professionals or the experts to come in and lead your staff in this work, you could become the expert yourself, and you just need to be really creative and resourceful. There's so many free resources that exist in this space, so you know there's things out there that you can use to support your own understanding and the understanding of your staff. So acknowledge that it's ok to not know everything about everything. Frame yourself as a learner and it's ok, we're learning together. 

Jocelyn: And the other thing I'd add to that, and yet this is a yes and, so yes to everything you just said, Rachael, and while you're feeling uncertain, don't jump in and spend all your money and put all your eggs in one basket with programs, because if we're choosing programs because other people are using them and it seems like the popular choice, that may work out or it may not. And if it doesn't, if it doesn't actually suit your school, if it doesn't suit your context and where your team is up to, or you think no, that's not actually where our instructional model that we've unpacked in our school sits then you've spent all of your money and your choices are really limited afterwards. So take things gently, introduce very small things, not everything at once, and just recognise that you will be serving your school community better by going slower and taking very small steps. And, as Rachael said, she heard a podcast series from me around Dyad Reading, which was about paired reading, and then just used what was available to her to implement that, and so it's not about going in and spending a bucket of money. It's ok to take things slowly.

Because where we're sitting at the moment is we've got people like you, Rachael, who have been on this journey for a while and over the last few years, really built your knowledge up, and then we've got a whole bunch of people who are new into the space and we have to be supportive and respectful of everybody and help everybody come onto the bus.

So I want to thank you for your time today, Rachael, to discuss this, and I think our conversation today will share some reassurance with people who are on the journey as well that you don't have to be an expert, you don't have to be perfect in everything, but you do need to be unapologetic about student outcomes and relentless in the pursuit of them, but not in a way that alienates everyone around you, in a way that's collegial and supportive, creative and has an eye on the data and you don't need a heap of it, but the quality data that's going to really help us measure our impact.

Rachael, do you have any parting words for anyone who is starting on this journey with their staff to move from that hour of reading, hour of writing, quite decontextualised space into something that's more cohesive?

Rachael: You won't break the children. If you just give it a go and get in the sandpit and have a try of some of these resources. I mean for us this term we are all doing text-based units from lots of different places. We're going to come back together and talk about what went well and what didn't. I think don't expect everyone to know all the answers and you don't have to have them either. And reach out to the experts. Reach out to you, Jocelyn, if you've got questions, or other colleagues at other sites that are doing similar things to you, and build a network around yourself of like-minded people that can support you in your journey, because, at the end of the day, doing what's best for your children, you know your children in your classroom better than anybody and even by listening to this today, you are somebody who wants to do what's best for the children in your class, and that is huge. So keep doing what you're doing to improve outcomes for your learners. They will be all the better for it.

Jocelyn: Fantastic, and if you're an experienced teacher but new to structured literacy, please know that not everything you've done in the past is now out of fashion. There's a lot of quality skills and knowledge that you've developed and now you're going to use them in a slightly different way.

Rachael, thank you again for your time. I can't wait to hear about what happens in your school in this space of connected reading and writing over the next three terms. Term One is nearly done. Over the next three terms and we'll look forward to having you back on the podcast another time. Until our next episode, everyone happy teaching.

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S5 E4 - Help! My Students Aren't Writing Enough!

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