Literacy Impact Educational Services

12/12/2025

🏝️Holiday reading anybody?! It is for the lovely staff of Carey Baptist College Forrestdale! I’m organising the books for a pick up today. If there are any last minure requests today, I’ll get them out to you tomorrow, otherwise, go to Amba Press or anywhere you get your book fixes. Happy Friday everyone! 🫶🏻

05/12/2025

What a beautiful message to receive today…although absolutely not my credit to take. Its Camilla Gaff - whose tireless, inspirational leadership up until early this year in the Junior School paved the foundation of this incredible transformation.
Best NAPLAN results in Bayside area of Victoria! Congratulations to the staff and girls of Mentone Girls Grammar.

23/11/2025

Feeling out of your depth with ADHD as an educator or parent? You are not alone.

It is far more complex than the stereotypical mainstream understanding of ‘lack of focus, attention or bouncing off walls’. In fact, people with ADHD can focus extremely well (hyper focus even), given the right conditions.

🌟If you are seeking a coach to work with your child, teen or school team, I cannot recommend highly enough my friend, Dr Barbara Shiels at Happy Hippocampus. See her bio and contacts below to get in touch, follow and book a time with her.

🌟If you would like to listen and learn in the car, the ADDitude podcast is exceptional, as is the ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Podcast. Links in comments.

Unlock Your Child’s Potential with Happy Hippocampus!

Dr Barbara Sheil, is an expert ADHD coach helping children, teens, and adults reach their true potential. Many kids with ADHD underperform — not because they aren’t capable, but because executive functioning challenges and years of critical feedback can hold them back. When ADHD occurs alongside other challenges such as anxiety, depression, learning difficulties or autism traits, life can become even more stressful and overwhelming.

Dr Barbara Sheil’s ADHD coaching helps children and teens build focus, organisation, emotional regulation, confidence, and social skills —giving them the tools to thrive at school, at home, and with friends - just like their peers.

Give your child or students the support they need to grow, succeed, and feel capable in their own skin.

Book your session today!

www.happyhippocampus.com.au

[email protected]

0449 777 525

Barbara Sheil Gallagher Happy Hippocampus Health & ADHD Coach Consultancy

Empowering minds, inspiring possibilities. Online and In person ADHD & Health Coaching sessions for everyone through Happy Hippocampus.

14/11/2025

Looking forward to jumping online in a few minutes with the wonderful leaders of the Top End region of schools in the NT. Just reflecting on the inspiring partnership with them twice termly over the past 3 years. There are so many great things happening in this directorate including a shared Annual School Improvement Plan with shared professional learning. Collective efficacy at its best.

13/11/2025

Can we talk about dictation for a moment?

Dictation is one of the most underutilised tools we have for teaching phonics, spelling and morphology — yet without it, we risk students never reaching the fourth stage of the instructional hierarchy: learning mastery.

Done well, dictation helps students consolidate the code, generalise skills, and build transcription fluency. But how we teach it matters.

Are we modelling correct sentences? Providing immediate, useful feedback? Tracking student accuracy to know who has achieved mastery — and what we’re doing next to close gaps? Are students getting effective next steps, or just circles and crosses?

This is an area I work on with teachers constantly, because when dictation is implemented well, we see rapid improvement.

In 2026, I’m turning this advice into bite-sized school improvement cycles, offered as short, high-impact staff-meeting PL across a term. After years of resisting 1-hour sessions (because deep learning matters), I’ve listened, adapted, and found a way to make these sessions truly effective — starting with dictation.

With a focus on collective efficacy, each cycle includes action learning between sessions to ensure transfer to classroom practice.

Term-long Action Learning PL (3 × 1-hour sessions):
🔸 Effective dictation & tracking — from instruction to using data well
🔸 Effective feedback & error correction across the literacy block
🔸 Evidence-based reading comprehension aligned with cross-curricular units
🔸 From sentence to paragraph writing linked to genre instruction

These will be facilitated by the incredible Margie Backhouse — learning difficulties specialist and all-round exceptional human ✨

What other topics would you like to see in school improvement cycle sessions? We will be adding to the list next year so would love to hear your insights.

📝Term one is already getting busy so reach out asap if you’d like to book some dates.

Email: [email protected]

07/11/2025

💬 It’s so exciting to see so much evidence based research being translated into schools seeking real change in literacy approaches. Often one of the first actions is to invest in a program or teacher training.

What regularly follows is an assumption that teachers have been trained in the ‘thing’ and we will see that learning transfer to classroom practice, and then into a significant change in student learning.

If only it were that simple. I know teachers are good (amazing even) but they are not super heroes.

That’s like expecting a surgeon to be shown how to do a surgical procedure once and expecting miracles from then on.. yikes.

A program or approach might have the highest effect size in the research … but teacher professional learning alone doesn’t guarantee results.

🚨 What really matters:
• A solid change-plan before launch – with the “why” for change, a timeline, clarity on roles, routines, expectations.
• Shared clarity: dosage, frequency, lesson structure, non-negotiables.
• Quality teaching every day inside the approach – checks for understanding, error correction, reteaching, modelling and demonstration with think-aloud, worked examples
• Leadership support and monitoring – fidelity matters, support matters, coaching matters. Being in the classrooms every day, acknowledging the positives, asking: how can I support you in this change?
• Culture and pre-conditions – belief that all children can improve, strong routines, engagement norms, banning all low expectations language.

If you’re leading change in a school, be mindful that ‘introducing the new approach’ is only the beginning. The real work is ongoing support, monitoring, coaching and sustaining the change.

A bit like the iceberg analogy: what you see (the new initiative) is only 10% of the work; the rest is what’s under the surface.. and that’s leading the implementation well. That’s when the students win.

💡 Let’s chat about leading change that lasts!

Full blog on 13 essential considerstions on the program/approach not being enough.. http://eepurl.com/jriPag

03/11/2025

Children rise to the belief we hold of them

This was one of the powerful reflections from a high-expectations workshop with Parkerville and Helena Valley Primary Schools last week — and it stuck with me.

High expectations are not simply an idea we talk about. They are a culture, a mindset, and a set of daily habits that can be seen, that shape student identity, learning and long-term success. Yet, despite the evidence, this remains one of the most overlooked levers in school improvement.

When we have agreed understandings about high expectations, we:
✅ Design more rigorous curriculum scopes, units and lessons
✅ Teach with clarity and precision, using year level curriculum, to mastery
✅ Plan targeted questioning, followed by think-time and turn and talk or cold calling to check for understanding
✅ Provide feedback that praises the process with fine grained next steps
✅Maximise response-opportunity and embed a ‘no opt out’ motto
✅We don’t settle for C or mediocrity- we strive for excellence for every student
✅ Create consistent routines for learning and behaviour
✅ Build student self-efficacy — because they start to believe what we believe

During our session, staff learnt the research and specific examples, and then in teams agreed upon, not just why high expectations matter, but what they look like in action:
• High-expectation questioning
• Precise entry and exit routines
• Respectful greetings and tone
• Feedback that challenges and supports
• Avoiding grouping practices that limit opportunity
• Ensuring accountability systems where every student thinks, responds and participates

On being asked what is a shift you will make tomorrow in the classroom, three different teachers shared a simple but powerful takeaway:

“From now on, I will always 1. ask the question, 2. give think time, 3. then choose a student — (instead of naming a student first then asking the question) so that everyone is accountable for thinking”

A small shift, but transformative.
It raises cognitive engagement for every learner, not just the one called on.

These are the moments that remind me why I love this work. Watching schools begin the process of commiting to collective agreements around high expectations is inspiring.

✨ To every school and education system: may high expectations be the norm, not the exception.

Parkerville Primary School staff — your journey ahead is going to be exciting to watch. Thank you for your openness, collaboration and commitment to excellence.

30/10/2025

It’s a privilege to be the recipient of the Bruce Wicking Award from Difficulties Australia. Thank you to the Wicking family, LDA Council and General Manager, Hema for the nomination 🫶🏻
https://lnkd.in/g23Sqb3B
https://ldaustralia.org/about/awards/current-award-recipients/

29/10/2025

New for 2026! 📚

Literacy Impact™ is helping schools make every staff meeting or PLC count. Based on requests and school based constraints, we have listened and added a new layer to our support for schools.

Our One-Hour Staff Meeting Sessions bring high-impact, evidence-based professional learning straight to your weekly meeting—perfect for time-poor teachers.

Choose between Information Sessions for schools in the building awareness phase, or our Action Learning Series for teams ready to apply and see change in classrooms in a specific school improvement focus.

Topics include structured literacy, the science of writing, Vocabulary Instruction, Cognitive Load Theory, and more.

Includes access to the free literacy teaching health check survey to identify your literacy teaching strength zones.
Reserve your dates! → [email protected]

More info in the brochure below!

15/10/2025

Three spelling groups with different spelling lists each week is common in many schools but even if we think it’s a good thing to do, here is why it’s time for a rethink.

Dividing students into three “ability groups” might seem like differentiation — but it actually reduces teaching time, lowers expectations, and limits mastery and transfer to writing.

So what is effective and backed by research?

✅ Whole-class explicit teaching
✅ Differentiation through support and outcome
✅ Twice weekly dictation, with immediate modeling and corrective feedback where students are self assessing their spelling in context
✅ Moving from memorising to mastering words

When we teach morphology, phonology and meaning together, every child gets the opportunity to succeed — not just those in the “top group.”

💡 For schools ready to make spelling instruction evidence-based and equitable, access the article through the QR code and PDF link below.

“Why Three Spelling Lists Don’t Work — and What to Do Instead.”

I’d love to hear your impact case studies if you’ve already made the shift! Several WA, Vic and NSW schools have already who are having incredible transformations for their students 🙌🏼

07/10/2025

Getting the Gist — A High-Impact Reading Comprehension Practice

Helping students identify the gist — the main idea in a single statement — strengthens comprehension and lays the groundwork for summarisation.

How to Teach This in a Routine:

1️⃣ Choral read paragraph or chapter with interspersed open ended queries (comprehension checks).
2️⃣ Students read independently or in pairs.
3️⃣ Step 1: Identify WHO/WHAT the text is about.
4️⃣ Step 2: Identify the MOST IMPORTANT detail/s.
5️⃣ Step 3: Combine into one gist statement.
6️⃣ Share with a partner, then whole class feedback.

Teacher Demo (I Do):
Excerpt — eg. from Storm Boy (p.31):
“Before long the three pelicans were big and strong… They landed heavily beside the humpy… waiting for breakfast.”
👉 Teacher gist: “Over time, the three pelicans developed a routine to get food from Hide-Away and Storm Boy.”

Guided Practice (We Do):
Repeat with the next paragraph but support students to do so (this may require many repetitions immediate corrective feedback before releasing to independent level gist statements)

Independent Practice (You Do)
Repeat with the 3rd paragraph or chapter and reduce the support again but provide ongoing immediate corrective feedback.

Once they have the skill, reduce the support and use across learning areas as a way to check for understanding.

Teacher Tips:
✔ Use sentence stems: “This text is about ___.” / “The most important thing is ___ because ___.”
✔ Address common errors: if too vague → ask “Who/what exactly?”; if copied → prompt “Can you shorten it in your own words?”
✔ Scaffold: sentence starters for struggling readers; word banks for EAL; oral gists before writing.

✨ Want more evidence-based classroom routines?
Find practical, ready-to-use strategies in my book:
High Impact Writing Instruction and Intervention in the Primary Years!

26/09/2025

Since its a Victorian kind of weekend with the GF tomorrow.. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the incredible growth in student data at three fantastic schools in Frankston, Victoria, over the past few months.

In September we met in person! Since April this year, Mahogany Rise PS, Aldercourt PS and Monterey Secondary College have all engaged in the ‘Leading Literacy Impact’ School Improvement Program.

I’m excited for the Frankston North community with the incredible commitment, passion and evidence based change in such a short period of time.

Watch this space!!