writing instruction

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Getting your team on the bus of consistent, explicit teaching in the early years is no easy task. A few years ago, I developed a course called Reading Success in the Early Primary Years and a little while later, published a book with the same name through Routledge, a well-known academic publisher. I am so pleased to announce that I'm running this highly practical online course again in 2025, to help your team build a more robust understanding of what structured l…

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss how shifting from focusing on "doing" to emphasising what students are actually learning can make your instruction more impactful.

Video Transcript

Hi, everyone. It's Tuesday, so it's time for a tip.

In their 2006 paper, Kirschner, Sweller and Clark stated, "learning is a change to long term memory."

In our schools, there is way too much doing and often not enough learning. Try and eliminate that language of doing from your conversations…

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Hi there and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. I'm Jocelyn and in this episode, recorded on the lands of the Palawa people here in Tasmania, I'm going to share my thoughts on an issue that many people have many viewpoints about: scripted teaching. Specifically, can great teaching be scripted?

Now, full disclosure, I don't have research to share with you that will definitively answer this question. A review of the literature on this issue yields a numbe…

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss that for better student outcomes, teachers should align Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction so that all students, including those struggling, receive additional repetitions of the same content rather than different material.

Video Transcript

Hi there everyone, it's Tuesday and it's time for a tip. My tip this week is about aligning tier one and tier two instruction for better outcomes for students. Tier 1 instruction is that really r…

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…

Over the past several weeks I have brought you a series of posts about writing instruction. This area of our teaching is one that can leave, even the most confident teacher, feeling adrift.   There is so much research and solid information about reading instruction and yet when it comes to writing, there is scant reliable information and guidance out there.  In my quest to support you all and your students I spoke with a number of teachers to ask them about their experiences of teaching writing …

In preparation for my new Teach Along – Writing Success in the Early Primary Years – I talked to quite a few teachers to really understand what it is they experienced when teaching writing.  There were many things they had in common, and one of them was this statement:

“I am expected to get all children writing full texts, when some of them can’t even write a sentence. It just doesn’t make sense!

As I spoke with them, I could hear the frustration and worry in their voices.  Frustration that th…

Last week’s post talked about some of the finer points of language selection to support our students' writing development and suggested that there really isn't a need to have small group instruction in order to reach every child.   What I didn’t get time to do was to explain exactly what this might look like in your classroom.  So gather round as I tell you a story. 

There was once a teacher who tried her very best every day to help her students learn to write.  She modelled using the struc…

I have said it many times and I’ll say it again.

 The simple fact is that our children don’t have enough time focusing on language at school.  Now I know that they talk to each other in the playground and that they talk in the classroom when you don’t want them to. I know that you are likely already doing some ‘talk to your partner’ in your classroom (if you aren’t, please do start) and that you are possibly engaging children in oral sentence level instruction.

Even with all these things goi…

One of the things we can all agree on is that our curriculum is a crowded document. The expectations of what we are supposed to be able to teach, assess and track are, frankly, ridiculous.  Before I decided to ‘just keep things simple’ I felt incredibly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ‘stuff’ I was supposed to get my little people students to know and do. It was as if I was being asked to be on some kind of teaching game show where I was put in a booth and had to quickly stuff as many marshma…