Leah Myers Consulting - LMC

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When I was at University, I was taught to put students into groups depending on what they needed. This meant some students were learning about nouns, while others coloured in pictures of nouns, and others wrote sentences. This is actually pretty normal in many schools, but I now know there are better ways to lift the learning of all students.

The problem with differentiation is that it often sees well meaning teachers placing ceilings or “caps” on student learning, which immediately reduces equity in a classroom and a student’s ability to progress through the curriculum. It feels like somewhere along the way, we replaced the word differentiation with “completely different activities altogether”.

Responsive teaching, in contrast to this, sees teachers delivering strong Tier 1 instruction where everyone is working towards the same learning goal. For example, learning to use the because, but, so writing strategy from The Writing Revolution. We teach everyone the same content, then when it comes to the activity, students enter at the point of their learning need.

Chillis are just one example of how we can achieve this in classrooms, but a key aspect of them is that students choose which chilli they are doing. I’ve been using this approach in classrooms for the last 5 years and students rarely choose a chilli that isn’t aligned with where they are at. I also don’t make students “keep going” once they finish. Done your chilli activity? Great. Go and have some quiet drawing/reading/insert your activity here time.

This was a huge shift for me. I was definitely part of the “whole language, five rotations” literacy era, but now that I have used both approaches, I can see how powerful responsive teaching is, especially for students who need extending and/or support.

We can absolutely reduce teacher workload and improve student outcomes at the same time, and I really wish someone had told me that earlier in my career.

Teacher autonomy is often framed as the gold standard of professionalism in education. But we need to ask a harder question:

Autonomy for who? And at what cost?

Because when every teacher is left to “do what works for them”, students don’t receive a guaranteed curriculum. They receive whatever their individual teacher happens to know, value, believe, or have time to plan.

In one classroom, a child might receive explicit vocabulary instruction, daily review, structured literacy, worked examples, and carefully sequenced curriculum.

Next door? Endless worksheets. Random activities. Guessing strategies. “Inquiry”. Minimal modelling. No systematic instruction.

That isn’t autonomy. That’s instructional roulette.

And the students most harmed by this inconsistency are almost always the students who rely on school the most.

Children from highly educated, resource rich homes can often compensate for weak instruction. Many others cannot.

Equity is not created by every classroom looking different. Equity is created when every child has access to high quality, evidence aligned instruction regardless of their postcode, teacher, or school.

No one is arguing teachers should become robots reading from slides all day. Explicit instruction is not “death by PowerPoint”. Poor teaching is poor teaching, regardless of pedagogy.

And if you hate PowerPoints that much? Get a document camera.

Because the reality is this:

The more variability we tolerate in instructional quality, the more inequity we create.

Weekend recounts were a staple in many classrooms, but when we better understand the subskills required for writing development, we can make more instructionally precise choices about how we use precious literacy time.

In the same way strong readers are not built simply by being near good books, strong writers are not built by just writing more.

Learning to write is also far more cognitively demanding than learning to read. Before students are expected to write independently, they need explicit instruction in the foundational subskills that make writing possible: transcription, spelling, sentence construction, syntax, and knowledge.

If writing instruction is an area you are exploring, I highly recommend looking into The Writing Revolution, Natalie Wexler’s work on the knowledge gap, and AERO’s growing writing suite. Together, these resources offer a far stronger foundation for supporting all students to become capable, confident writers.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions about these!
Got any you would you add? 👀

👀 Over the weekend, I read the kind of blog that has you punching the air in agreement. Beyond Belief: Reframing Teaching as a Science Based Profession by Jim Hewitt and Nidhi Sachdeva captures something that sits at the heart of so many issues in education.

🥲 We are one of the only professions where belief is often positioned alongside, or even above, evidence when it comes to decision making. And that creates real problems for equity.

⚖️ When instruction is driven by preference or what feels right, we end up with huge variability between classrooms. Two students in the same school can receive completely different instruction, not because of need, but because of belief. That is not equitable.

📝 The blog makes a compelling case for shifting towards evidence informed practice. Not to remove the human side of teaching, but to ensure that what we do is grounded in what actually works.

👩‍💻The schools I work with have already begun this shift. They are aligning practice, building consistency across classrooms, and that is where you start to see real change in outcomes.

🔗 Blog link is in my linktree

Today, I joined over 35,000 Victorian public school teachers and educators in their walk to the steps of Parliament to request better pay. While I’m not a department employee anymore, I spent over a decade of my life in the public education system and I will always stand in solidarity with all educators.

Victorian teachers are the worst paid teachers in this country. We drive around in cars that say “The Education State”, but last year? The Labor government reneged on funding they promised to public schools.

I have worked across every sector (Catholic, Independent, and public) and lemme tell you, our public system is absolutely fried. It’s full of amazing, dedicated but EXHAUSTED people doing their darn best for the students they adore on next to no money. The teachers and the students deserve better.

Last night I was reading a paper published by UNICEF that explains that for a rich country, Australia has one of the most inequitable school systems in the world. Let that sink in.

Education is a human right and I stand in solidarity with all public school teachers ✊❤️

Every year when NAPLAN begins, the same debate erupts about how terrible it is. This year’s technology failures have understandably frustrated teachers and disrupted schools, but the problem isn’t the data itself.

While far from perfect, NAPLAN remains one of the only national snapshots we have of student learning across Australia. It can reveal when instruction improves in disadvantaged schools, when advantage hides weak instruction, and where systems may need to strengthen support.

Getting angry at NAPLAN is a bit like getting angry at a thermometer because you have a fever. It isn’t the diagnosis or the cure, it’s simply the tool that tells us when something in the system needs attention.

(Thermometer analogy credit to Jan Hasbrouck, PhD, and Dr Jennifer Buckingham.)

International Women’s Day isn’t about pink cupcakes.

It’s about asking uncomfortable questions about the systems we work in every day.

In Australian education, women make up the majority of the workforce. Yet when we look at leadership, the picture changes quickly.

Women dominate classrooms.
But they are still underrepresented in leadership roles.
And at the university level, the gap becomes even more stark.

And you know what I always notice?

Every conference I attend.
Every professional learning day.
Every workshop on improving teaching practice.

The rooms are overwhelmingly full of women.

Women showing up.
Upskilling.
Reading the research.
Working to improve their practice and their students’ outcomes.

This isn’t about blaming individual men. It’s an opportunity for men to rally with and alongside us. To recognise that many of the systems we work within were built long ago, and they continue to advantage some more than others.

Naming that reality shouldn’t shut down the conversation.

It should start one.

Because if education is a female-dominated profession, we have to ask an honest question:

Why aren’t women dominating leadership?