I've just come back from a quick trip to Sydney, where the light display, Vivid, opened.
While I enjoyed seeing the Opera House and Harbour Bridge illuminated, the purpose of my visit was to learn more about a language intervention called 'Story Champs'.

I'd heard whispers about this program and how effective it is, but I'd never seen it in action and was hesitant about the price of shipping it from the US. So when the opportunity arose to order it with free shipping and attend face-to-face PL on it, I jumped on the chance! 

I joined a room full of speech therapists, as one of a handful of teachers (and one grandparent who wanted to learn more about supporting her grandchild). We heard from Dr Trina Spencer and Dr Douglas Peterson who met as doctoral candidates and discovered they were both passionate about literacy development. Their research led to the creation of Story Champs and the CUBED assessment both of which are available from Language Dynamics.

The science of language and reading is becoming more mainstream. It is great that the skills needed for the word recognition side of the simple view of reading are becoming more common in Australian classrooms. It is important that we ensure we are also teaching language comprehension skills. The focus of my day yesterday was on how we can effectively and systematically teach these skills.

Oral language is the foundation for all our literacy skills. It needs to be taught first and continuously. The stronger our oral language skills, then the stronger our reading & writing will be. After all, if you can't understand something when it's oral, then you won't understand it when it's written.

There is a clear emphasis on developing oral language skills in the early years. However, how much of this development is done in a  systematic way? And how do we know? 

"Weighing a pig won't help it grow, but what gets tested gets taught."

The importance of assessing oral language so that we actually know what we need to teach our students led to the creation of CUBED.  This (free) assessment is broken into 2 subtests that address the 2 factors of the simple view of reading.

1. Dynamic Decoding Measures assesses the word recognition side through measuring phonemic awareness, word identification, and decoding.​
2. Narrative Language Measures (NLM) focuses on students ability to comprehend and retell stories. This assessment has a listening measure (NLM:Listening) and a reading measure (NLM:Reading).

There's a flashy data management system that would make administration and reviewing the data very easy and painless.

I used NLM:Listening for the first time last year. I was impressed that I could assess of a child's comprehension without the need for the student to decode anything. It let me lift the lid on what the child understood without their decoding being a potential barrier.

There is a third version of CUBED about to be released. This edition will extend CUBED beyond the current K-Grade 3 offering up to 8th Grade. I am excited about what this will mean for assessing the comprehension of our upper primary students.

Weighing a pig is one thing but you need to know what to feed it to fatten it. This is where Story Champs fits in. To develop systematically oral language skills Story Champs combines 3 active ingredients:

1. Visual materials: Stories are told with cards with simple illustrations. Icons are placed on the illustrations to assist with telling and retelling. The scaffold of the visuals is quickly faded as responsibility for the retell shifts to the student. 
2. Structured stories:  There are 24 stories included. However, each story is rewritten with varying complexity (depending on the teaching focus) resulting in 144 story exemplars. Each story is designed to make the structure obvious to students. 
3. Teaching procedures: There are clear lesson plans to follow, written for whole class, small groups and 1:1. They are prescriptive enough while allowing flexibility. Names can be changed to more familiar ones and terms like 'candy bar' can be easily swapped to 'chocolate bar'.  

Story Champs aims to make the patterns of stories obvious. I saw this firsthand this morning when I went through a story with my 4yo. He quickly picked up how to retell the story and was then able to generate a personal story following the same pattern. 
The 7yo saw what was happening and so I chose a slightly more complex story and she just as quickly picked up on the pattern. She also added to her vocabulary along the way (tentatively, resolved, radiant). The 7yo even wrote down her personal story.

This week I am planning to use the CUBED NLM:Listening assessment with my class. I am looking forward to start using Story Champs. It will probably be once a week, with our read-alouds the other four days focusing on building background knowledge. I can also see the huge potential benefits for students in our intervention program in both small groups and 1:1.

Recently I was listening to an audiobook. Thanks to a dodgy Bluetooth connection, every couple of minutes a word was skipped. Most of the time, I could work out what the word might have been. It was tedious, but I could still follow the story. Until it cut out as they mentioned “the myth of…”. I had no context for what that missing word might be. There were very few clues in what I had heard. I had even caught the initial sound of the word, but given that there are over 4000 words starting with ‘m’ (according to a scrabble dictionary), this was of little use. I was left frustrated and perplexed. It wasn’t until they later repeated the phrase that I knew they were discussing “the myth of measurement”.

As a fluent reader, I could fill in most of the blanks despite my dodgy Bluetooth connection. However, this is the complicated guessing game that occurs in many classrooms under the guise of reading instruction. Three cueing is the misguided belief that we need to consider the meaning, syntax, and visual information to decode words. Instead it promotes guessing based on context or using clues provided by pictures. This style of instruction is evident in the current Victorian Curriculum Foundation English elaboration, which has students “attempting to work out unknown words by combining contextual, semantic, grammatical and phonic knowledge”.

Of course, context is important in comprehending the text. However, the first step towards understanding must be accurate decoding. To create readers who are good decoders students need to be able to orthographically map words, through linking letters with the sounds they represent. To achieve this, we need to explicitly and systematically teach phonics. Decoding occurs when we focus on the letters in front of us and process them in order. If I am looking at anything other than the text on a page to decode, then I am just guessing. Of course, phonics is only one aspect of reading, but it is an essential skill. Students who can decode words have a much better chance at comprehending the text in front of them.

I recall a student who was reading chapter books. Whenever he got to a word he didn’t recognise, his eyes would jump to the small picture. This child was unfortunately an instructional casualty of three cueing. He had inadvertently been taught that he would understand the word if he looked somewhere other than the word. This is exactly the type of reading behaviour that leads to a ‘third-grade reading slump’.

Three cueing is often seen as a hallmark of ‘balanced literacy’. Although there is no clear definition of what balanced literacy actually is, it is nevertheless a popular term in Australian schools. It certainly featured prominently in my training as a primary teacher just over a decade ago. One of the texts we were referred to was Fountas & Pinnell’s chapter called ‘Guided Reading Within a Balanced Literacy Program’ (1996). So imagine my surprise when the same authors posted a blog last year distancing themselves from the term ‘balanced literacy’! Unfortunately, this shift away from the ‘balanced literacy’ label doesn’t seem to coincide with any substantive change in their approach to teaching reading.

Last year, social media erupted as a moderator for Fountas & Pinnell’s facebook group suggested that we should accept that 20% of students will be unable to read proficiently. I am not sure where this figure came from, and Fountas & Pinnell have since apologised. However, to claim that 1 in 5 was an acceptable rate of failure caused an understandable outburst. Imagine the outcry if 20% of students didn’t have lunch! This equates to over 800,000 current students in Australia. As educators, we should not accept this high number of instructional casualties.

Emily Hanford's latest podcast Sold a Story is shining a light on practices that are common in many classrooms. Well-meaning teachers are unintentionally teaching their students how to be poor readers. Instead of teaching students to effectively decode words, we are telling them to look at pictures or use cues other than the words themselves. This is leading to students becoming instructional casualties. Good readers decode words accurately and automatically. This is what we need to be teaching our students to do in order to avoid any more instructional casualties.

There are far too many stories of children who are instructional casualties of three cueing. The devastation, heartbreak and illiteracy that are perpetuated by the prevalence of this practice is shocking! Think about your family and friends. How many of them are you willing to allow to be instructional casualties? How can we possibly condemn such a large proportion of them to a life of struggling to read?
Three cueing, by its nature, leads students to guess at words. This creates instructional casualties who become poor readers. Our children deserve to be taught the skills they need to decode words accurately. Teaching phonics systematically and explicitly as part of our literacy instruction empowers every child to read.
 
A version of this article originally appeared at https://educationhq.com/news/heartbreak-and-illiteracy-three-curing-creates-instructional-casualties-108331/

There has been quite a buzz created by Emily Hanford’s latest podcast Sold a Story. If you haven’t listened to it yet then I strongly encourage you to do so. At the time of writing I am eagerly awaiting the third episode to be released.

Over the last five decades cognitive scientists, psychologists, and researchers have unveiled a lot about how we learn to read. Emily Hanford is exploring why this knowledge hasn’t made its way into our classrooms. There is a different idea about how students learn to read that is much more popular and prominent is schools and education faculties. 

This origin of this idea is the focus of the second episode of Sold a Story, particularly focusing on Dame Marie Clay’s work and the Reading Recovery program she founded. It should be acknowledged that Clay did some important work in advocating for early intervention and remediation for students with difficulties learning to read. However there are aspects of her work that do not hold up to scrutiny today.   
I was taught this idea that beginning readers need to use cues, such as a picture, or grammatical structure, to decode unfamiliar word at university just over a decade ago. My first school used Reading Recovery as its intervention program. I remember being gently rebuffed when I tried to work out what students in my class were doing in intervention so that I could better support them in the class. Little did I know how expensive this program was, both financially, and also in terms of costing children the chance for effective reading instruction.

Reading Recovery is an expensive intervention. It costs to train a teacher in Reading Recovery. According to their Australian website you must have at least 5 years’ experience teaching before embarking on a yearlong training course. These teachers work with students 1:1 for half an hour, five times a week for 10-20 weeks. In Victoria, this equates to a cost of over $2500 for every student who receives a 10-week Reading Recovery intervention. While expensive, it could be argued to be worth it if Reading Recovery was an effective intervention. However, numerous studies have indicated that any short-term positive impacts from this intervention are not sustained.

The real cost of Reading Recovery is that precious instructional time is spent teaching children to focus on words in inefficient ways. Clay was aware of different theories of how we read, claiming “On the one hand the traditional, older view sees reading as an exact process with an emphasis on letters and words, while on the other hand, a more recent set of theories sees reading as an inexact process, a search for meaning during which we only sample enough visual information to be satisfied that we have received the message of the text (Clay 1979, p.1- emphasis is mine).

This idea using just enough visual information alongside other cues is a recurring theme in Clay’s writings. She explores the idea that “text carries redundant information, more than the reader usually attends to (Clay 1991, p.331). This idea is explored through by blanking out a number of letters or words in passages to demonstrate how good readers supposedly ‘problem-solve’ or predict as we are reading. 

 I am not quite sure how these activities aren’t guessing. In fact Ken Goodman, who according to Clay was a leading authority on the reading process, refers to it as the ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’.

It’s interesting to note that Clay suggests that we should observe eye movements, as this is exactly what scientists started to research in the 70s. It became really clear that, instead of just sampling the letters in a word, proficient readers track every letter in each word in order. The idea that readers just need to get an approximate shape of a word was clearly debunked in the 80s (Ehri & Wilce 1985). It was demonstrated that proficient readers use their knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences to decode words accurately and seemingly automatically. Clay appears to be aware of this research, having referenced Ehri in 2005.

Unfortunately, systematic phonics is not something that Clay advocated for. A trusted colleague has told me that when they were trained in Reading Recovery they were told to never use the prompt “sound it out” to a child came to a word they had difficulty with.

By 2005 there was an acknowledgement that some phonics instruction was needed within Reading Recovery, it appears to be analytical, where the focus is on breaking a word gradually into smaller parts. There does not appear to be a clear scope and sequence to this approach. In fact they appear to be discouraged as Clay states “teaching sequences of a standard kind are unlikely to meet the needs of struggling students”. The resulting ‘word-work’ (avoiding the term phonics) activities are somewhat baffling. Clay suggests that no more than 2-3 minutes per half-hour session is spent ‘taking words apart’. This limits the crucial phonic knowledge that struggling readers need in order to be able to gain meaning from a written text. There is also a big focus on separating words into onset & rime, which is a less efficient strategy than teaching how to blend individual phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

There is a more subtle yet equally worrying argument that emerges throughout Clay’s work. The idea that “well-prepared children seldom fail to learn to read” (Butler & Clay, 1987, p37) implies that if a child doesn’t learn then blame can be placed with their home background. I believe that this is a dangerous idea. It creates division between educators and families. Of course, students come from a wide variety of experiences before school. However, educators should take ownership of the things within our control. Ensuring that every child receives quality literacy instruction is the core work of teachers.  

I don’t understand why people continue to defend Clay’s work as the basis for effective intervention. It is costly and doesn’t have long term positive effects. Struggling readers are taught to use cues other than the word when reading. The limited, unsystematic approach to phonics further compounds the disadvantage that struggling readers. Readers who struggle must be taught how to decode in order to gain any message from a written text.

I wonder how many more people would be able to read today if Clay had heeded her own words. 

References:
Butler, D. & Clay, M. (1987). Reading begins at home. Heinemann Publishers
Clay, M. (1979). Reading: The Patterning of Complex Behaviour. Heinemann Education Books
Clay, M. (1991). Becoming literate: the construction of inner control. Heinemann Education
Clay, M. (2005). Literacy lessons: designed for individuals, Part 1 & 2. Heinemann Education
Ehri, L. C., & Wilce, L. S. (1985). Movement into Reading: Is the First Stage of Printed Word Learning Visual or Phonetic? Reading Research Quarterly, 20(2), 163–179. https://doi.org/10.2307/747753

It's a bit of a weird thing for a teacher to spend their Sunday at a professional learning. But I'm not the only weird one and I joined hundreds of other people passionate about education in Melbourne today at LDA's event 'A Day with Linnea and Friends'. 

LDA (Learning Difficulties Australia) somehow managed to lure the Professor Linnea Ehri to Australia to receive the 2022 AJLD Eminent Researcher Award. When I heard that she was presenting in Melbourne I booked a ticket before I had even consulted my wife!

Alison Clarke (founder of Spelfabet) had the MCing duties and introduced each speaker wonderfully, as well as hosting the panel discussion brilliantly ( and had the dubious privilege of sorting out the initial tech issues).

Professor Ehri spoke eloquently about the research she has done about how children learn to read. Her work on orthographic mapping is something that all teachers of English and literacy should understand. Orthographic mapping is reliant on children having the knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences to be able to decode and encode written words. This is the process that enables us to recognise words almost instantaneously. 
I'm not going to go in too much detail as Professor Ehri will be presenting with more of her friends in Sydney on Tuesday, but I found the level of detail her studies on the Four Phases of Word Reading and Development went into fascinating. I was particularly intrigued by her findings when she compared instruction of syllable units against grapheme-phoneme units (in Portuguese). I believe that this level of intricacy is exactly what we need to disseminate further to help inform our teaching practice. 

After a morning tea break full of discussion we were back to listen to Emina McLean. Emina is the Head of English and Literacy at Docklands Primary School, trains pre-service teachers and student speech pathologists, provides professional learning, consults and is a guru on education.  She is also the co-recipient of the Mona Tobias Award. Emina spoke about excellence and equity in Australian education and how Docklands PS is trying to achieve both of these.  My hastily scribbled notes say:
excellence = finding success for our students
equity = ensuring ALL students are successful
Emina unpacked four ways that Docklands PS does that help build excellence and equity.

1.  Specify the knowledge. What will be taught? When will it be taught?
2. Allocate sufficient time. Make sure that there is time to teach, and important things are being prioritised.
3. Explicit and responsive teaching. Teach first. Provide repetition, feedback, reviews, scaffolds. Which students need additional support? How are teachers being supported?
4. Align assessment, curriculum and instruction. Is their cohesion in what is being taught and what is being assessed? Are assessments reliable and valid? 

The other co-recipient of the Mona Tobias Award was Dr Nathaniel Swain. He is the founder of Think Forward Educators, a teacher, instructional coach and researcher. Nathaniel encouraged us to reflect on our literacy instruction so that we can more effectively teach. He encourage us to teach the basics well, not so that we can go 'back to basics' but so we can move beyond the basics. A whirlwind tour of word instruction at Brandon Park Primary School, saw us looking at graphemes, words, morphemes, sentences, and extended texts through PhOrMeS and Read2Learn. The tinkling bell came all too soon to signal time was up.

Jocelyn Seamer was the recipient of the Bruce Wicking Award. Jocelyn is an educational consultant with many (and varied) years of experience as a teacher and school leader. She talked about how we need to help support our colleagues as we embrace educational change. Jocelyn unpacked the value of working with our colleagues and how, like we do with our students, we need to meet them at their point of need. At times this involves coaching, supporting, directing and delegating. We need to be as intentional with mentoring as we are with our teaching. 

Lunch was another golden opportunity for discussions with others. It was nice to put faces to people I've previously only met online. And all too soon we were heading back into the theatre for the next session.

Dr Jennifer Buckingham is the founder of Five from Five and is an expert on educational policy. She led us on an exploration of the policies in literacy education over the last twenty years. The messages from the Boys' education inquiry in 2002, the Rowe report (2005), and Dyslexia Working Party report (2010) all seemed very consistent that schools need to be teaching "a strong element of explicit, intensive, systematic phonics instruction” (Boys' education inquiry, 2002). And while it might feel like no progress is being made, Jennifer shared positive examples in the changes in the Australian Curriculum, the increased uptake of a Year 1 Phonics check, the SA Literacy Guarantee unit, and the Catalyst project of Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn.

It was time for the panel discussion, which saw all our presenters gather and answer questions that had been submitted throughout the day.  There was talk about whether graphemes should be incorporated into phonemic awareness instruction, the usefulness of spelling tricky words, the importance of primary schools getting literacy instruction right, the need for secondary schools to have a consistent approach to supporting their students. And Emina gave me a new motto for school change "Less, done well, is more."

Then it was time for us all to go home (after a bit more chatting and navigating the Greek Festival), and more importantly to our schools and communities to keep improving our literacy instruction so that all children can achieve their success.

I got into teaching because I love mathematics. My first foray into teaching was as a year 11 student tutoring a friend in year 8. I managed to help them get their grade from an E to a B and this sparked a fire in me. I wanted to help others learn about this wonderful world of numbers.

When I graduated from uni I somehow believed that in order to effectively teach Maths I needed to get my students to discover it for themselves. I felt like a magician, planning experiences that would reveal a deeper understanding of all things mathematical.

If only I knew then what I know now...
I was busy providing activities that I hoped would allow students to unearth the enigma of mathematics. I should have been actively teaching them the things I hoped they would discover. After all, I was the expert in the room.

Like many educators, I strive to improve.

The last few years I have been considering how to best teach students Maths. I've finally settled on a framework that is supporting my students to achieve some amazing outcomes. This model is heavily influenced by Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. It also ensures that due attention is given to each of the proficiencies of understanding, fluency, problem solving and reasoning. You will notice though that the prerequisite skills required for these proficiencies are explicitly taught to students.
​
For want of a better phrase, I call it Revise-Learn-Apply.

1. Revise
In my first year of teaching I observed a colleague run a Maths lesson. He started it off with students answering 10 questions from the board. These questions covered a range of topics previously covered in his class. 
When I started using Direct Instruction programs I noticed that everything that students learnt was revisited. Rosenshine talks about the importance of daily, weekly and monthly reviews. Others frame it as retrieval practice. Whatever you call it, it is essential that we give our students the opportunity to revisit and build on their prior learning.

Inspired by the practice of Bentleigh West PS, as demonstrated in this video by David Morkunas, I spend about 20 minutes in a revise phase reviewing things I have previously taught. This part tends to be paced pretty quickly, with students' understanding being regularly checked.

One revise phase might cover the following:

• Counting by ones from different starting points.
• Counting backwards by ones.
• Subitising.
• Skip counting by 2s, 5s or 10s.
• Recalling the days of the week and saying which day comes next.
• Reading two-digit numbers and saying which of a pair is larger/smaller.
• Naming 2D shapes.
• Identifying which object is bigger/smaller.
• Addition and/or subtraction to 10.

Given the number of topics we touch on, it has to be paced quickly, and mathematical fluency is developed throughout. Students are constantly responding to questions in different ways and I am able to provide immediate feedback whenever an error occurs. I am also able to be responsive and anything that gets a high number of errors will be revisited and retaught. Any students who struggle are easily identified and provide additional support. Having said that, the success rate as we revise tends to be pretty high. 

2. Learn
The middle part of my Maths lesson (again about 20 minutes) is where the students learn because I am explicitly teaching. At the start of the year many of my foundation students didn't know how to count to 20. All of the concepts that now feature in our revise phase have been explicitly taught. During the learn phase new material is explicitly taught in small steps. Students are actively engaged as they build their knowledge about the concepts, procedures and strategies that are critical for being numerate. 

3. Apply
Once students have been taught a new concept, they need to be supported as they practice it. The apply phase provides dedicated time for students to apply their new knowledge in different situations. It is here, in the final third of our lesson, that students are supported as they solve problems and share their reasoning. It is important to note that this phase occurs after the explicit instruction. My students have been set up to succeed because they have been taught the skills they need to be successful.
​And because my students are successful at Maths, they love Maths!

Keen to learn more?
I am presenting about my experience teaching Maths at Sharing Best Practice Ballarat on October 1. Tickets have sold out but if you're attending then I'd love it if you chose to come to my session.

Think Forward Educators have set up a Maths Network and the inaugural meeting on September 14 features non other than David Morkunas! Details can be found here.

It is Education Week in Victoria. Many schools have Open Days to try and attract prospective students for next year.  As a smaller school, we need to be mindful of how we are appealing to future families.  I want families to select our school because I know how hard we work to support their child. More importantly, I  want families to be able to make an informed decision about the education they are choosing for their child. 

When my brother was looking for a school for his daughter, I remember him raving about the Music, Drama and Art programs schools offered, as well as the camps and excursions. When I asked him about how the school would teach Reading or Mathematics he vaguely replied, "I suppose they teach those too." 

It is easy to focus on the shiny and attractive things, but something should alarm us when after a school tour prospective families understand more about the half hour music class than about the 15 hours/week their child will spend receiving literacy (reading & writing) and numeracy (mathematics) instruction. You need to make sure that the cake is good before worrying about the decorative icing.

Unfortunately, we can't just assume that schools will teach your child to read, write and do maths. I know that they will try to do so, but there are schools that use ineffective programs. You need to ask questions to make sure that your child will get the best education that they can. This post outlines the process that I followed to choose a school for my daughter. I am aware of the privilege I have that allowed me to select a school for her, and of the inside-knowledge that I have as a teacher to help me make that decision. 

1. Do the background research
This is your chance to live out any spy fantasy you might have. Take your time to research the school and find out any and all information about it that you can.

• Check out the school's website. What feel do you get from it? Look at the language that the school uses to describe itself. You can download Annual Reports from Victorian Government schools and see what successes they have had. Look for any policies or statements about teaching and learning. Do you agree with these policies? If you choose to send your child to the school, you will be supporting them.
• Talk to other parents/carers. Ask them about what they like and they don't like about the school. Other parents/carers will be honest, very honest. Take criticisms with a grain of salt, remembering there are always two sides to a story.
• Go to fetes and other events. Last weekend's election was a great chance to check out many schools. Keep an eye out for any opportunities you might get to visit the school: playgroups, concerts, fetes/fairs. What is the vibe of these events? Are they relaxed affairs with lots of people chatting?

2. Get a school tour
Your child is going to be spending about 30 hours/week at school. This environment will mould and shape them. It is important that you visit to get an understanding of the school environment. I strongly recommend organising the tour during school hours. If the school is unwilling to show you around while they have students present, then alarm bells should start ringing.
Some things to consider about the school environment as you tour:

• What is the vibe of the school? A gut feeling is a pretty powerful thing. If something feels off it is worthwhile thinking about why it doesn't feel right.
• Do students seem to be learning in every class? Are students engaged in tasks? Do they seem focused on activities? Are they listening to their teacher? Consider how the classroom is set up to focus students on their learning. It is easy to be distracted, how does the teacher minimise this? Look at what the students are doing because these are the things that your child will be probably also be doing. Also think about how the students are acting towards each other. How do you want students to act towards your child?
• Do the classrooms feel welcoming? We greet everyone who enters our classroom. Does this happen in most classrooms, or does it feel like you are intruding? Can you see how children are made to feel comfortable in the classroom? When I visited my daughter's future school I noticed some consistency between the posters in each class. This told me that the teachers were working together. You want your child's journey through classes to be as seamless as possible, therefore look to see if the teachers seem to be following a consistent train of thought. You want to see practical displays. I once had a pretty castle that I had painstakingly cut out and displayed in my room. It had no positive impact on the learning of a single child. Don't be afraid to ask why displays are up there. Hopefully the answer has something to do with the students' learning.
• Are the grounds well kept and tidy? An abundance of rubbish in the yard could indicate that there is an absence of respect. Does this extend beyond the playground?  An absence of rubbish could indicate that students and teachers take pride in their school.
• What resources can you see? Are there plenty of books? Do they seem to be well organised? Is there a library? How much technology do you see? I use a large screen in my classroom and also have a document camera that I use to project and display many, many things. Can you see students using mini whiteboards? This is a sign that teachers at the school are trying to check whether all their students are engaged and learning. 
• Can you talk to students? Our school has Grade 6 students conduct the tours. This allows families a chance to get to know some of our students and ask them all sorts of questions. Our Grade 6s provide frank answers. And most families enroll their child!

3. Ask questions
Ideally you will meet with the principal or another member of the leadership team. They should be able to answer most of your questions in detail, not just in fluffy grandiose statements.

• How are you going to teach my child to read? I wrote a post about the exact steps I take to start teaching students to read. The school should be able to say how they teach your child to unlock the code of written language through teaching 'phonics'. Every school wants their students to 'love reading' and 'make meaning' from what they read but your child will need to be taught how to decode to achieve this. If the school sends home 'decodable books' then this is a good way for your child to practice the skills they are learning in class. The school should also be able to tell you how they teach 'comprehension' and how they support your child to become 'fluent'. If the school is able to tell you about 'phonemic awareness' than this is a reasonable indicator that they have a strong reading program. Be wary of a school that claims reading is 'natural'. Reading is actually a biologically secondary tasks which means we haven't been reading for long enough for evolution to make it natural (unlike walking or talking). Reading is a skill that needs to be taught, not caught.
• How are you going to teach my child to write? Hopefully the school links reading and writing as they are two sides of the same coin. The school should mention how they teach spelling. Big ticks for a school that talks about doing lots of short writing tasks as this indicates that they are focused on teaching (and providing feedback on) specific skills. Writing is one of the hardest tasks to do. Schools should break this task into achievable steps.
• How are you going to teach my child maths? Maths is tricky as we need to make the abstract (numbers, algebra, etc.) very concrete. We do this by using materials like cubes or counters. We need our students to be automatic with numbers and I spend a lot of my maths time helping students practise their counting, adding and subtracting. In our later years we teach multiplication and then students review this regularly so that they know it automatically.
• How do you know if my child needs extra support? How will I know if there is some difficulty with their learning? The school should be able to tell you how they assess students and how regularly they do this. The school should be able to tell you about their intervention program. Ask how the intervention teachers work with the classroom teachers. It may shock you, but unfortunately many intervention programs do not work in tangent with classroom instruction. This could be a warning sign that there is something wrong with either the classroom program or the intervention program. Teachers and the school should also be in regular communication with you and open to talk about any concern you might have. Make sure that you remain open to their concerns as well because most teachers work in education because they want the best for YOUR child too.

I would love to hear your stories of why you chose the school you did for your child. Please tell me in the comments below. I have also chosen not to mention particular commercial programs but if you want my point of view, please reach out via the contact page or on twitter.

​As I was scrolling through Facebook I had the surreal experience of seeing a tweet of mine being shared. I am still getting used to the idea that my comments are able to provoke discussion about how we can provide our children with a great education. The tweet focused on how our school’s data is indicating that our reading intervention program is effective.

One response that I glimpsed challenged me to share how we are using data to come to this conclusion. This is an important question given that education seems to be a world where everything is claiming to be ‘evidence-based’.

I will start with NAPLAN, the national assessment program for grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. After a hiatus in 2020, it returned in 2021. Our students in grade 3 & 5 participated and I was eager to see the results. I see NAPLAN as a snapshot that allows schools to keep the finger on the pulse of how we are tracking. It certainly has limits (the turnaround time of three months before getting results has been one). A smaller school like mine also acknowledges that the results can be cohort driven.

Why was I keen for results? Well, the Grade 3 cohort were all students of mine when they were in Grade 1. I taught half of them again when they were in Grade 2, while the other half were being taught by a Graduate Teacher whom I was mentoring. 

A common misconception is that NAPLAN is a reflection on the Grade 3 & 5 teachers. The reality is that NAPLAN is much more an assessment of the learning in the years prior. Therefore the results of our Grade 3 students were going to be a pretty clear measure of the impact of my teaching.

One way to view students’ results is through the band they are in. At Grade 3 there are 6 bands. If a student is in the bottom band then they are below the national minimum standard. If a student is in the second band then they are at the national minimum standard. Students in the middle 2 and top 2 bands are above the national minimum standard.

In 2021, 100% of our Grade 3 students were above the national minimum standard for Reading.
In 2021, 82% of our Grade 3 students achieved results in the top 2 bands for Reading.
These results are worth celebrating!

The joy of teaching is that there are always ways to improve. In 2021 we started using DIBELS 8th Edition to assess our students in reading. Prior to NAPLAN, DIBELS had identified the 18% who achieved results in the middle 2 bands as ‘at some risk’ in reading. Two of these students had not previously been picked up through our previous formal assessments. Our NAPLAN results validated that DIBELS was providing more accurate data.

Not only was DIBELS providing more accurate data, it was meaningful. In the middle of last year I assessed my Foundation students. One area of initial concern was Letter Naming Fluency (LNF). LNF assesses how many letters students can name in one minute. The letters are jumbled up and are (seemingly) randomly capitals or lowercase. The criteria determined that if students name less than 31 letters in a minute then they are at risk (marked in red), if they name between 31 and 36 then they are at some risk (denoted in yellow), if they name more than 36 words per minute then they are at minimal risk (green and blue).

In May, half of my students were at risk in the LNF! Only four were at minimal risk. This was somewhat alarming. I recognised that these results were due to my instruction. I had been emphasising the sound letters can represent over the name of the letters. This approach had been having a tremendous impact on students ability to read and can be seen by the vast number of students with negligible risk (denoted in blue) for identifying the Correct Letter Sounds in the Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) assessment. However, clearly there was still a gap in my teaching that needed to be addressed.

Over the next 4 weeks I introduced daily explicit instruction in the names of letters. This took a maximum of 5 minutes per day, and was often closer to 2 minutes. I retested students on LNF after 4 weeks and the results were staggering. Because students had a strong knowledge of each grapheme, they were quickly able to attach a name to each one.
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What made these results even more impressive is that over this 4 week period we lost a number of instructional days due to Covid-19 lockdowns, a public holiday, the school closed for storms and I was absent for a number of days. In total, the improvement is a result of just 10 brief lessons on the names of letters.  I have also included our LNF results from the end of 2021 to demonstrate that this remarkable improvement was maintained.

At the start of this year we assessed students using DIBELS. My tweet above was a reflection of our current Grade 2 students. A number of these students received intervention throughout 2021.  You might be tempted to think that the nine students who received intervention were the bottom nine. You would be wrong. What is pleasing is that it is impossible to tell from this assessment who had intervention. This assessment helps signal to us the students who currently need intervention. Our intervention program is successful because we are able to bring our students who are at significant risk up to the level of their peers. This allows us to then provide intervention to other students who need additional support now.

​I am proud of my students and their learning. I am also proud of my colleagues’ efforts in teaching. Our data provides an important reflection of what is actually happening in our school. Our data is not perfect but we need to pause and appreciate the amazing teaching and learning that is occurring. As we celebrate we begin to roll up our sleeves and get to work on all the things that we still need to do. We may never arrive at perfect results, but we can still strive for excellence.

I pledged to run 100km over the month of March to help raise awareness about dyslexia through the Code Read Network. I didn’t think it would be too difficult- I’d throw my red cap on and rock up to a few parkruns along with my normal morning runs. I didn’t realise how busy the month of March would get. I also didn’t factor in the week I took off because I was sick.

When I woke up on the morning of the 28th I had only completed 69km. My longest run for the month has only been 7km. I was overwhelmed with the number of kilometres I had left to run and was tempted to let the challenge quietly slip away. Why did I need to add extra stress to my life when I was already busy enough?
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For too many students this is the reality they face when confronted with the reading. They feel stressed and overwhelmed. It can be much easier for them to find excuses to avoid having to read. This is particularly true for many children with dyslexia.

About 20% of the population are estimated to have learning difficulties and 80% of diagnosed learning disorders are assessed as having a reading disorder (or dyslexia). This means that in almost every classroom across Australia there is at least one child with dyslexia.

As a graduate teacher I thought dyslexia was a bit like a unicorn: it didn’t exist. I was taught that when students didn’t learn to read it was perhaps due to the child's a lack of interest, laziness, or maybe the parents weren’t reading to them enough. In short: it was everyone’s fault except the teachers.

I now know that this perception was not only naïve, it was damaging to students and their families. Dyslexia is nobody’s fault. If a child needs to use a wheelchair, we don’t blame the child or their family. Likewise we ensure that they have access to ramps. We need to make sure that we have similar provisions for students with learning disabilities.

Ignoring dyslexia is a fault in many educational institutions. We need to identify students who possibly have dyslexia and provide them with the instruction and intervention that they need. When I look at my 5-year-old students at the start of the year, I have very little idea who amongst them may have dyslexia. The good news is that the initial literacy instruction that children with dyslexia need is beneficial to all children. Ensuring quality teaching of systematic and synthetic phonics not only supports students with dyslexia, it lays a solid foundation for all our students.
 
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This morning I completed my third run in four days. Each run was over 10km and completed in the dark before sunrise. It seemed a fitting end to a challenge that raises awareness of students who are too often kept in the dark. Let’s make it possible for them to see the sunrise. 

​Want to know more?
Check out AUSPELD and find your state branch for support. 
The CODE READ Network does some great advocacy.
Learning Difficulties Australia is an association of teachers and other professionals dedicated to supporting students with learning difficulties.
The Victorian Department of Education and Training has a helpful Learning Difficulties Information Guide for Literacy.

Below is a video I recently made for the families of my students about the early stages of phonics that may be useful.

Recently two graduate teachers confided in me their feelings of guilt over using pre-prepared materials in their classrooms. They both really enjoyed teaching these programs, their students are doing some wonderful learning, and they are not wasting time creating something that already exists. Their guilt emerged because they have been led to believe that teachers need to create the content for their students’ unique needs. While catering for our students’ needs is a crucial aspect often education, we can easily forget that the ways that we learn are generally very similar. ​

When I go to the doctor, I don't expect them to create the medicine. When I order a meal, I don't expect the chef to have grown the ingredients in their own garden. And when I go to the mechanic, they will order a part rather than make it themselves. So why do we expect all teachers to do the dual tasks of creating a curriculum and teaching the curriculum?

Don't get me wrong: it is important that teachers have the knowledge to create curriculum. It is a waste of time for thousands of teachers to be creating similar curricula in parallel. It is an unreasonable expectation that all teachers are able to produce programs of exceptional quality from scratch.

If you mention that your school uses a program*, you are likely to hear the phrase "programs don't teach students, teachers teach students." There seems to be an adverse reaction anytime someone mentions that they use a program within education. This is a little bit strange given that program is defined as "a set of related measures or activities with a particular long-term aim". That definition could just about sit next to the word school.

Why are people hesitant about using the term program when discussing what they do in their classroom?

It is possible that it is because the term program is often synonymous with commercial program. I know I used to hold to the myth that commercial programs were something to avoid in educating our children.  However, I now realise that some commercial programs can benefit schools.

P= Price
A key reason educators give for avoiding commercial programs is that somebody profits from them. There is an understandable scepticism about anyone making a profit from the education of our children. Of course, we need to be wary and avoid any snake-oil salespeople. However, when you look at the actual costs of many good programs you might be surprised. The actual cost is often not much more than the materials would cost.

The real question we should be asking is "what is the price of creating our own programs?" When we start to add up the late nights that teachers spend creating, printing and laminating our resources, we start to see the real cost of expecting every school to come up with unique programs. This cost is so significant that 'workload' has become the prime issue in schools in many juridictions including Victoria. The cost of creating your own program is often much more expensive than purchasing one.

R= Ready to Roll
One key advantage of using an appropriate commercial program is that they are often packaged to be easily implementable. This means that we have more time for planning other learning experiences. It also means that we are able to focus on how we deliver the program, rather than creating what we need to deliver. 
Recently we implemented a new spelling program. After an initial half-day session our staff were ready to start teaching with the program. There wasn't much for them to create, to print, or laminate. Instead they could shift their focus to reflecting on what worked in each lesson and how to fine-tune their practice to improve the learning of their students.

O= Organised
A commercial program organises the learning. A good commercial program organises the learning well. A good teacher can organise learning well too, but good teachers also have a myriad of extra responsibilities that keep creeping in the way. It takes time to sequence learning. It takes a lot of time to sequence learning well. Teachers often don't have that time. It also takes expertise to sequence learning well. Many teachers are experts, but it is difficult to be an expert in every area that we are expected to teach.

A good program is well sequenced. The skills students learn are built on each lesson and this continues throughout the multiple years of the program. There is consistency between classes and the material that students are learning is delivered in a cohesive way. With a well-sequenced program the teaching is organised and the learning is also better consolidated.

G= Graduates
When I was a graduate teacher, I was provided with a folder of photocopied literacy worksheets for each week of the term. From this I was expected to craft a complete term of reading and writing learning. I was also busy working out how to manage student behaviours, communicate with parents, juggle teaching in an art room as we awaited new buildings, teach maths, science, history, do yard duties, participate in staff meetings…

Phew! I am exhausted just remembering this experience. It's little wonder that so many teachers leave the profession in the first few years. We are losing people who have the potential to be amazing educators because they are not well-supported. One way that we can support them is to provide them with quality-teaching materials.

Why was there an expectation that I could turn the folder of photocopied material into a curriculum of anything near the quality of the experienced teacher next door?
I am not pretending that even with a quality program I would have been as good as those with more experience. But I think I would have been able to focus more on what really matters: my students' learning. I also think that I would have spent fewer weekends planning and preparing.

Graduate teachers need to stand on the shoulders of the giants who have worked before them in education. This may be the experienced mentor next door, but we should also leverage the experience of those external to our school. Many programs have been created by experts who have worked tirelessly on them. Let's not ignore this expertise.

R= Research
I would love for more people to see what is happening in my classroom. This blog is partly an attempt to document my teaching so that others can learn from it (and I can learn from others). I want to know more about what makes teaching effective. This is tricky to discern when there are so many factors in a classroom. Is it the way I greet students? Is it how I frame questions? Is it the way that I manage behaviour? Is it the culture of participation that I build? Is it the explicit teaching? Is it a sense of wonder in my students?

There are so many moving parts in one single classroom that it is difficult to work out what elements are essential for effective learning. However, if a number of different classes are implementing a particular program and all are achieving similar results, then the program is likely to be a factor. In this instance we can begin to examine the program, rather than trying to consider all of the aspects of all the different classes.

Many commercial programs claim to be 'research-based'. We need to scrutinise these claims so that we can continue to learn what contributes to effective teaching and learning.

A= Artistry
A funny thing happened when I started to use a commercial program in my classroom. I became a better teacher. I no longer wasted countless hours planning. My teaching became more targeted. I was able to pay closer attention to my students. Instead of trying to create an entire unit, I was focused on small tweaks that made significant impact on my students' learning. In short, I was work on the art of teaching because the program dealt with the science of teaching.

Another myth is that programs turn teachers into automatons. This couldn't be further from the truth in my experience. I have had the privilege of observing many teachers. Even if they are delivering the same program, their artistry always shines through.

M= Miracles
Another line that does the rounds when programs get mentioned is "there’s no such thing as a silver bullet.” You will get no argument from me. Teaching is complex and to pretend otherwise devalues teaching as a profession. We don’t need to complicate it further and to dismiss programs because somebody else created them. A program is not a silver bullet. Despite many programs being ‘ready-to-roll’ this does not equate to a ‘plug and play’ situation where anybody with a heartbeat could do the work of a teacher.

Teachers often work miracles. Let’s employ every tool that we have at our disposal so that we can make more miracles happen.

S= Students' Success
The most important aspect of determining whether to use a program comes down to the very reason schools exist: our students. Their success should be the factor that sways whether a program is appropriate.

If you do not use any commercial programs and your students are achieving wonderful success: congratulations! Thank you for taking the time to read this post and keep doing what you are doing.

Many of us are not in this position and believe that there is room to improve our students’ learning outcomes. Perhaps someone has already done the hard work of creating a program that meets the particular long-term aims you are striving for. Perhaps a program that is suitable for your situation exists.
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Not all commercial programs are created equal. Some are much better than others. And some are definitely not worth investing in. However, to habitually dismiss the use of all commercial programs increases teachers’ workloads, and potentially disadvantages our students.