When we say we are following the Science of Reading, few of us are really following the original research, but rather the curricula and programs chosen by our school leaders. Unfortunately, the translation of research into practice is a hazardous route, and one that practitioners should navigate using our own in-depth knowledge of the research. Linnea Ehri is an American educational psychologist and expert on the development of reading who has empowered us teachers of reading. Her legacy of theory and research has given us remarkably accessible insight into how we learn to read. Her insights reflect a deceptively simple, but very powerful, theory of the development of our mental ‘lexicon’, and should form the working models of all reading teachers.

Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom. Inspired by Tom Sherrington’s Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain. The first blog post of the series comes from structured literacy specialist, Jocelyn Seamer. Phonological and phonemic awareness (PA) are the bridge between oral language and decoding (Kilpatrick, 2015).

Students who are paying attention are, by definition, on task, and more likely to attract teacher praise. This is why as teachers we find ourselves calling upon those with hands raised to get the lesson flowing smoothly. But if teachers only respond to volunteers, they are monitoring the understanding of about 20% of students, usually the higher-achievers. Randomisation ensures that the learning of a larger sample of students is being monitored. Sampling a larger proportion of students assesses the effectiveness of teaching much more accurately.

Hundreds of TFE members tuned into the NSW Branch Decodable Readers talk with SPELD NSW in 2021. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can catch up here. While many member questions were answered in the session, we couldn’t get to all of them!

Enjoy this blog of questions answered about decodable readers. If you have more questions feel free to add a comment to this blog post.

As a new year begins, with it is the promise and hope of uninterrupted learning in 2022. One of the findings from lockdown that has brought so much clarity to our writing instruction, is the understanding of what explicit teaching can actually achieve. Despite two years in and out of online learning we have made some important discoveries about the building blocks that boost learning in writing and the tools to measure it.

Hundreds of TFE members tuned into Reid Smith’s session on building a coherent curriculum in April 2021. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can catch up here. The content delivered in Reid’s talk, the Clarendon approach, should really be what graduate teachers are taught as they enter our profession.

This blog shares the content of the webinar on Clarendon’s improvement journey toward building a coherent curriculum.

Hundreds of TFE members tuned into Jenny Baker’s session in September 2021. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can catch up here. While Jenny tackled many member questions in the session, she couldn’t get to all of them!

Enjoy this blog of her responses to a few key questions from this talk. If you have more questions feel free to add a comment to this blog post.

Hundreds of TFE members tuned into Jack Neil’s session in August 2021. If you haven’t see it yet, you can catch up in the Members’ Area. While Jack tackled many member questions in the session, he couldn’t get to all of them.

Enjoy this blog of his responses to a few key questions from this talk. If you have more questions feel free to add a comment to this blog post.

First Question: What assessments do you use?

We use the following assessments.

• Sounds Write screener and segmenting and blending assessment

• Castles and Coltheart 2nd Edition (CC2)

• Phonological Awareness Skills Test (P.A.S.T)

• Morrison and McCall Spelling Scale

• DIBELS Data System that target sounds, letter ID, word accuracy, segmenting blending, fluency, comprehension among other things.

For writing we split our assessment into writing TRANSCRIPTION assessments and writing IDEATION assessments. We have established school wide level expectations on both as success criteria and working towards moderating these to refine accuracy and information to inform teaching.

One of the questions we have had from members of the TFE Writing Network has been related to genre teaching. Teaching writing in the context of genres is a common practice in Australia particularly due to our curriculum progressions that specify across several year levels: an expectation that students will be able to produce ‘imaginative, informative and persuasive’ texts. In Victoria this is first mentioned in Year 1.

This was highlighted when a friend recently called me during one of our lockdowns, frustrated at watching her Year 2 daughter cry during an online writing lesson where she was required to come up with a problem, solution and list of characters. Why was this so hard for her and why was I not surprised having seen this many times in an early years classroom? An understanding of genres is important. We know it makes a difference and students need to be able to write about different topics and create specific compositions. So perhaps the problem lies in the way we teach it.

I once had a student who loved rhinos. After all, what's not to love? During ‘free choice’ writing sessions (the opportunity for students to engage and communicate across genres of their choice), this student continued to write about rhinos in several formats. There was the narrative on rhinos, the persuasive, the poem – both Acrostic and Haiku.

His writing was engaging, passionate, showed an awareness of purpose and audience, but what niggled at me was that I wasn’t teaching him anything.

Actually, what I found was that my competent writers avoided authorial risks. They wrote texts where the topic was the focus, while writers who found writing challenging, continued to find it so. The struggle to engage was confronting.