Literacy Impact Educational Services

02/08/2025

🌟 Happy World Principals’ Day 🌟

A belated celebration and knowledgement of the incredible impact of school Principals—and Deputy Principals- the heart of every school community.

Behind every thriving classroom is a principal/DP who wears a hundred hats:

✅ Instructional leader
✅ Student champion
✅ Family connector
✅ Staff coach
✅ Curriculum guide
✅ Crisis manager
✅ Community builder

And beyond the role, they are often:
✨ Answering calls after hours
✨ Stepping in for teachers due to relief shortages
✨ Mentoring new staff
✨ Navigating complex parent conversations
✨ Keeping the school culture strong
✨ Leading school improvement—one conversation, one classroom, one strategy at a time, following evidence based research with a sense of urgency to make a difference for students

To all the principals and deputy principals who go above and beyond—not just in timetables and analysis of student data with strategic action, but in the quiet, courageous decisions made daily for the wellbeing, learning, and futures of children—thank you.

Your dedication, leadership, and heart matter more than you may ever know. 💙

It’s a privilege to work with so many school leaders of this calibre every single week. You are doing life changing work.

Aaron Johnston from Mr J’s Learning Space shares a fun (but real!) take on the life of a teacher/DP/Principal: https://www.instagram.com/stories/mr.j.learning.space/3689454065064327282?utm_source=ig_story_item_share&igsh=MXZiNmY3eDA1a204bg==

Happy weekend to you!

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31/07/2025

Some schools are like lighthouses—quiet but leading the way.
Crib Point Primary School is one such school.

Over the past 18 months, this incredible team has delivered transformational improvement in Writing outcomes (among all others, including Spelling).

📈 2025 NAPLAN Writing Highlights:
· Year 3: 79% of students in the Strong or Exceeding bands
· Year 5: 88% of students in Strong or Exceeding bands
(Similar schools: 65%–72%; Network schools: 71%–79%, State: 72% in Year 3 and 79% in Year 5)

🎯 The key drivers?
· A carefully sequenced, knowledge-rich curriculum linked to text-level writing instruction
· Tailored professional learning on the science of writing and SRSD
· A strong focus on automaticity in handwriting, typing, and spelling
· SRSD introduced for text-level writing with editable 3 week unit planners
· A school-wide Action Plan with termly goals and coaching
· An outstanding leadership team with a “whatever it takes” mindset

💬 As Principal, Tina Coumbe said:
“This data honours the incredible work our students and staff have done.”
This is more than data—it’s a story of strategy, belief, and courageous leadership; with an urgency to make a significant difference.

It’s an absolute privilege to walk alongside the Crib Point PS team (wtih Tina, Ross and Amelia at the helm) in this journey.

14/07/2025

📚Starting in 3 weeks.. 3-part webinar series on how to use your READING assessment data to transform your students reading. If you have just done (or about to do) your Dibels or Acadience
Middle of Year benchmark, this is for you!

Unlock the Power of Targeted Literacy Cycles™ to Transform Reading Results!

14/07/2025

It’s the start of Term 3 for some states and I have a couple of events on Reading and Writing to share 🌟📚

📚Starting in 3 weeks.. 3-part webinar series on how to use your READING assessment data to transform your students reading. If you have just done (or about to do) your Dibels or Acadience Middle of Year benchmark, this is for you!

https://events.humanitix.com/using-fluency-data-to-transform-reading-results-targeted-literacy-cycles-tm

📝And for VIC friends.. A full day WRITING workshop with my lovely colleague, Jacinta Conway in Keysborough, Victoria on the 4th September! Link here (https://events.humanitix.com/teaching-writing-translating-research-to-practice).

But today- kicking off the term with face to face workshops in Darwin with the 25 Top End schools. Can’t wait to see you today!

Join us for this dynamic, full-day workshop that unpacks the full writing journey—from oral language and transcription to fluent, structured, purposeful texts.

30/06/2025

On a cold wet day in the hills, the staff of Darlington Primary School spent the day analyzing the impact of their newly introduced phonics and spelling programs- UFLI and Word Origins, through a streamlined data analysis approach using a data chats graphic organizer.

Using collated year level data, staff identified strengths, above expected growth and areas of development and set SMART targets for the next half term with planned adjusted teaching approaches to meet the goals, in a one pager.

We then spent the majority of the day refining skills on developing consistent knowledge rich text units using First Nations texts for the upcoming NAIDOC week.

A few snippets of the day have been captured here.

23/06/2025

Inspiration post on high impact reading instruction in Prep!! Some of the best emails or texts I receive are those from my current or previous schools that are demonstrating the incredible transformations in student progress and achievement.

Here are the visuals of the Dibels 8th results of Prep (5 year olds) in Victoria of a fantastic primary school in the Mornington Peninsula. After supporting this school in 2023-24, they are now in the sustainability phase and the outstanding impact continues in reading. The results demonstrate that most of the students are now ABOVE expected standard in the subskills of reading.

The biggest congratulations to the teachers and leaders of this school, who continue to excel despite a range of complexities. It goes to show that with schoolwide evidence based practices and school structures, high expectations for every student, with strong leadership and an urgency to make a difference, these results can occur within 4 months of formal schooling.

The top image is from February, 2025 and within 4 months, the bottom image demonstrates the incredible growth. A couple of new students with known tier 3 disabilities are also evident and although not obvious here, their growth has also been inspiring.

20/06/2025

📝 Evidence-Based Practice for Writing- Notes from Dr Steve Graham's keynote in Sydney in May at the MultiLit Summit.

For anyone that would like to know the full extent of what Dr Steve Graham covered in his keynote, I am sharing my notes.
He also did an intensive workshop with a small group on transcription skills on handwriting, spelling and sentence level work but this is also briefly covered in terms of the research he included in this session. To clarify, I am only sharing this as I am concerned about some inaccurate information being shared since the session! When such a distinguished researcher in Writing comes to Australia, teachers deserve to find out the facts for the benefit of our students.

Link to the notes here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/131Ig3d6VASR90Ly81wydcRoQOUqwSYj-/view?usp=drivesdk

Happy Friday 🌟

05/06/2025

Questions for the day:

❓How many minutes do your students have eyes on 'year level' text per day where they are chorally reading aloud, with immediate corrective feedback?

❓And how does this line up with how many words per minute your students' require to meet end of year standard in a Dibels or Acadience end of year benchmark?

❓Does what we are currently doing match up with where we want our students to be? Are we setting students up with the right amount of rigour, text complexity and support to achieve this?

This is something we need to address system wide as even with the best explicit instruction and knowledge rich curriculum in the world, with not enough challenge, practice and daily 'year level' content for every student, we will never close the gap between where our students are at in terms of literacy and where they need to be.

❓How can we share this message wider so that this rigour and ‘year level’ text complexity is happening in every classroom every day? (in terms of what we are reading but also writing about too!)

Loom

In this video, I discuss the importance of incorporating rigour and complexity in literacy instruction, particularly through choral reading and immediate corrective feedback. I emphasize the need for students to engage with year-level texts daily to improve their reading fluency and comprehension. I...

17/05/2025

📚 Essential Resources for Planning a High-Quality Writing Unit
🖊️ Transform your writing instruction with high quality model texts, graphic organisers & assessment tools

✨ Build confident, capable writers with the right tools from the start.

Why Writing is So Complex:

Writing isn’t just one skill – it draws on:
🧠 Working memory
✍️ Transcription (spelling, handwriting, punctuation)
💭 Composition (ideas, sentence & paragraph writing)
⚙️ Executive function (planning, motivation, revising)

Support Writing with These Essentials:

✅ Gradual Release of Responsibility
✅ Think-aloud modelling (sentence, paragraph & text level)
✅ Exemplar texts to show the end goal
✅ Graphic organisers for planning
✅ Rubrics & editing checklists for self-assessment

Creating High-Quality Model Texts:

💡 Align them with your class reading text or knowledge unit
📈 Aim for A-grade exemplars to raise expectations
🔤 Include grammar & punctuation focus areas
📚 Match your curriculum and year level descriptors

Model texts are not optional—they’re essential.

Use AI to Save Time Without Compromising Quality
As a teacher, I used to spend hours writing these myself.
Now? With AI + great prompts, I save time AND align to curriculum.

✨ Here’s what I generate:

✔️ Model Texts
✔️ Planning Graphic Organisers
✔️ Student & Teacher Rubrics
✔️ Editing Checklists

📝 Here is a link to a free planning prompt that can make a significant difference in enhancing your writing instruction.
Happy teaching!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1peU4tOAjUM2VvloEcegrO3Whz0JL_5o0/view?usp=sharing

11/05/2025

🎁 Give the Gift of Reading Knowledge this Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day to all the incredible mums, step mums, fur mums, and heavenly mums. My heart is full this morning—after cheering my son’s soccer win, I delivered books to a Deputy Principal in the hills ready to kick off a staff book study tomorrow.

It made me reflect—how many mums out there want to better understand how children learn to read and what high-quality reading instruction actually looks like in classrooms today?

To celebrate Mother’s Day, I’m offering my book at cost price: just $21.95 (plus postage)—instead of the regular $42.95.

If you’d like a copy (or more)—or want to gift one to a mum or educator you know—just email [email protected] before midnight, May 11 (WST) with:

Your name (or your friend’s name)
Postal address
Number of copies
Subject line: Gift of Reading Knowledge

Let’s empower more mums (or dads!) with the knowledge they deserve.

Happy Sunday! 🌷🎁💐

01/05/2025

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Mercy College staff in Koondoola in person to follow up on the work they’ve been doing in implementing my online modules over the 18 months. I’m in awe of the evidence based literacy practices now in place and the dedication to fine tuning to align with what is best practice around reading comprehension. Several staff members and leaders were also in attendance from the secondary school and were bursting with how they will be applying the new knowledge in Years 7-12! Inspiring leaders and teachers and even luckier students!

17/02/2025

🗣️We have done our Dibels reading screening but what do we do next?!!' If this is on your mind, you are not alone!

Jump on the 35 minute tutorial below to find out the initial steps in analysing Dibels or Acadience data: 'Effective use of ORF screening data" 35 minute FREE tutorial here 🌟https://drive.google.com/file/d/13D1VIiFddKFjW_v8EgQvedX0BQ6840H0/view?usp=sharing

Fluency Screening Record of Band Percentages: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VgjQNZ91IzbGRmyRzAbid-TGqTdjMxfV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117403164701780678404&rtpof=true&sd=true