Jocelyn Seamer EducationPodcast and Blog
how to teach reading
S4 Ep17 - Summer Series - Research to the Classroom: Dyad Reading Part 2 (Practical Application)
Hi there and welcome to the Structured Literacy podcast recorded here in Pataway, Lutruwita or Burnie, Tasmania, the home of the Palawa people. I'm so lucky to live and work here in this beautiful place and also to bring you this week's podcast, which is the second episode in our current Research to the Classroom series about assisted reading. Our Research to the Classroom series are in three parts: part one, where we share a published research paper, part two, wh…
S4 Ep16 - Summer Series - Research to the Classroom: Dyad Reading Part 1 (The Research)
Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. It's Jocelyn here, and I am so pleased to welcome you this week.
One of the things I remember so vividly is being in school as a teacher and then leader, really wanting to keep up with readings and research and just not having the bandwidth to be able to do it. So we've started a brand new series for you, called Research to the Classroom. It's a series of three episodes on a topic, the first episode being dis…
S4 Ep15 - Summer Series - Five Ways to Get Ready for the Coming Change
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…
Research to the Classroom - Dyad Reading Part 2
Transcript
00:00:00
Introduction
Hi there, and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Pataway Lutruwita or Burnie, Tasmania, the home of the Palawa people. I'm so lucky to live and work here in this beautiful place and also to bring you this week's podcast, which is the second episode in our current Research to the Classroom series about assisted reading. Our Research to the Classroom series is in three parts: part one, where we share a publ…
Research to the Classroom - Dyad Reading - Part 1
00:00:00
Introduction
Hi there. Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. It's Jocelyn here, and I am so pleased to welcome you this week because we have a brand new series for you. One of the things I remember so vividly is being in school as a teacher and then leader, really wanting to keep up with readings and research and just not having the bandwidth to be able to do it. So we've started a brand new series for you called Research to the Classroom. It's a se…
“Watch out!” – Avoiding the pitfalls of shifting practice
With all that we hear about the science of reading, we can get caught up in the idea of ‘one big thing’ that will make our reading instruction the best in the universe. If only it was so! The reality is that creating a really strong, systematic reading approach in our classrooms comes from an infinity of small things (that might seem massive as we make the leap) that we will never finish learning about. Now, before you log off and reach for the ice-cream, know that I am not saying the task of l…
Harnessing the 4 Pillars in Phonics Instruction
In last week’s post, ‘Phonics without the Froo Froo’, I wrote about the need for phoneme grapheme instruction to be direct, simple and explicit. If you haven’t read that post, you can find it here. In this post I also outlined Stanislas Dehaene’s 4 pillars of learning. You can learn more about these pillars in his book, ‘How We Learn’.
This week, I’d like to take the discussion even further and evaluate some common classroom practices against Dr Dehaene’s 4 pillars to help you maximise the i…
Effective reading instruction may be closer than it appears
We hear ‘Science of Reading’ and ‘evidence-based practice’ so often that it can start to feel like living up to the ideal is some kind of unattainable goal that we will never achieve in our classrooms. After all, we are hard pressed to get to the toilet without having to move at superhero speed. How are we supposed to have the head space and time to completely change the way we teach? You might be thinking, “Isn’t it unrealistic to expect the super-human effort necessary to be a 6/6 in eviden…
Top 5 Tips to Maximise Reading Success – Part 4
Tip No. 4 - Ditch the Sight Words
In a previous post I challenged the popular practice of giving beginning readers predictable texts. This week I’m REALLY asking you to go against everything you know and ditch the sight words. Yes, that’s right. I said it. DITCH THE SIGHT WORDS. Why? Basically, because they are not a thing.
For years and years we have been attempting to teach children to read using flawed methodology based on misunderstandings of how our brains process words. Personal…