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Hi there, welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, it's Jocelyn here coming to you from Tasmania, the home of the Palawa people. At Jocelyn Seamer Education, we believe that every child has the right to be taught with evidence-informed instruction and that every teacher has the right to be supported to make that happen. It's a nice idea to always base instructional decisions on research. It would be wonderful to have certainty in this way,…

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Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, where we talk all things school and literacy.

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This episode was recorded on the lands of the Palawa people here in beautiful Pataway, Burnie in Tasmania. We discuss a wide variety of topics on the Structured Literacy Podcast, everything from phonics to morphology and text-based units, and this week I'd like to deviate from our usual content and talk about what is involved in working with a consultant. Now, …

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Introduction.
Hi there, it's Jocelyn here with the Structured Literacy Podcast. It's wonderful to welcome you to this episode recorded here in Pataway Burnie, Tasmania, the land of the Palawa people. Just now, I'm sharing a series of episodes focused on helping you build and refine your explicit teaching muscles. After all, it's wonderful to have an evidence-informed program or resource in your hands, but it's what you do with it that matters. 

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Th…

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00:00:00

Introduction
Hello. Hello, it's Jocelyn here with another episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast coming to you from the gorgeous Pataway, Burnie in Tasmania. I hope that wherever you are and whatever you are doing, life is good, and your confidence in building a structured approach to literacy is growing a little each day. You see, this teaching caper is not about doing one magical thing on one magical day and looking up to see that every problem has…

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Moving from a guided reading small group approach to reading instruction means embracing a whole new literacy block structure. We are moving to one that seeks to maximize adult-led instructions, time on task, and the number of successful learning trials. And we are not doing this simply because it's the next shiny thing or because that's what someone told us. We are making this move to a more explicit approach because that's what the research tells us is the mos…

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At one time or another, most teachers have gone rogue in their classrooms.  We have been asked to do something that we don't want to do and thought, 'nope'.  This doesn't impact things too badly when we've gone rogue about only 1 box of tissues from the office a time or not signing for that extra box of lead pencils, but it can have significant impacts when it comes to substantial areas of our teaching.  

There are many reasons that teachers go rogue. They could b…

Every classroom has students who hate writing and will avoid it at all costs. They might groan and moan when you say the word ‘writing’ or ask to go to the toilet the minute you need them to sit at their desk. When they do sit down, they take 500 years to write the date and then poke the person next to them or engage in some other off-task behaviour. Their antics mean that you can’t spend time supporting those who WILL engage but need some support or conference with those who are quite capable…

This post has previously been published, and has been republished on 27/11/2021

It is report time in Australia right now and tens of thousands of parents are either reading, or about to read about their child’s academic progress over the last two terms.  All schools in Australia are required to grade children’s academic results on a 5 point scale.  In many schools this is represented through A – E grades, with a C grade meaning that the student has learned to complete the skill or task reason…

Imagine going to the hardware store knowing you need to fix the mould in your bathroom. You look for ‘mould products’ and discover a wonderful looking bottle of mould killer that promises to eradicate all of your bathroom problems. You take it home, spray your bathroom liberally and regularly and the problem seems to clear up (you can forgive the bleached areas of paint on the untiled sections of your bathroom. After all, the mould is gone). Except, that it hasn’t. Your tiles look lovely and c…

We have all heard about decodable texts and the need to ditch 3 cueing.  It is now well established that children should only be given material to read in the early stage of learning to read that contains graphemes and high frequency words they have been taught and that 'sounding out' is the only strategy we should be teaching when children are lifting the words from the page.  However, even this switch to decodable texts does not mean that one size fits all. 

Before I talk about stud…