Literacy Impact Educational Services

Principals often tell me:
“We collect a lot of data but we don’t know what to do with it”

But a school without effective data informed practices in an RTI/MTSS system is a leaky bucket…There will always be a constant stream of students slipping through the cracks.

Schools are overseeing:
- DIBELS data
- PAT data
- Phonics Check data
- On Entry or FELA data
- Writing data
- Intervention programs
- ORF Progress monitoring
- Intervention staff
But leaders tell me they feel uncertain about what the data is actually telling them.. and some of the assessments being used are not providing valid data in the first place.

Teachers feel uncertainty knowing what is going on or what steps to take:
- Is this a decoding issue?
- Should this student go into phonics intervention? Spelling intervention?
- Is this a language based issue?
- Is this fluency related?
- Are we using the wrong intervention?
- Is this a schoolwide issue?
Often, schools do not yet have a clear decision-making pathway for answering those questions consistently.

Teachers and leaders need clarity about:
- What kind of difficulty is sitting underneath the data
- What percentage of students are in each band in each year level (and what is the health of the system overall?)
- What reading, spelling and writing difficulty profiles actually exist?
- What diagnostic screening should happen next?
- Who responds to the data and when?
- What instruction changes are required for the individual, class or school?
- When intervention is reviewed and who oversees this?
- The link between mind health and literacy progress and achievement

Schools with effective data informed practice systems move from saying:
“This student is at risk”
TO:
“We know exactly what the likely difficulty is, what to assess next and what instruction is required with a plan with targeted goals, actions, progress monitoring and review.”

Schools that do this well have:
- ORF decision-making tree/pathways
- Clear diagnostic precision
- Strong intervention review points
- Structured next-step responses
- Effective data-to-action systems
- Streamlined data chats where teachers feel confident in analyzing data for impact
- The content and pedagogical skill in teaching essential skills to mastery
- Schoolwide understandings about how students learn best

Without this clarity:
- Schools are like a leaky bucket with students slipping through the cracks
- Students are not identified early leading to ongoing ramifications
- Students stay in support or intervention too long; or in the wrong intervention
- Intervention becomes reactive and not targeted to the specific need/s
- Staff confidence decreases not knowing how to meet student needs
- We create students who are instructional casualties
- Leadership and classroom teachers carry the load of managing increasing numbers of students struggling- which frequently has a causal effect on mind health and behaviour

At Crib Point Primary School:
Foundation students identified in significant literacy risk on DIBELS reduced from 67% to 5% across 2024, while students at Benchmark and Above Benchmark increased from 7% to 79%.
Year 1 DIBELS ORF Accuracy shifted from 35% of students in significant risk to 6% across 2024, while students at Benchmark and Above Benchmark increased from 56% to 94%

Students at Benchmark and Above Benchmark increased from 7% to 79% in one year through:
- Developing a clear process for data analysis and next steps
- Scheduled data chats where staff all feel confident knowing how to use student data effectively
- Targeted Literacy Cycles- 5 week cycles of improvement
- Codified instructional practice
- Explicit instruction where literacy skills are taught to mastery
- Leadership implementation capability and a relentless ‘whatever it takes’ mentality to support staff and students to succeed
- Stronger intervention systems following an ORF decision making tree
- Exceptional Education Support staff who have been upskilled and support students in targeted intervention across the school

Crib Point didn’t improve because they worked harder. They improved because they strengthened the system that students were learning within.

The answer wasn’t more intervention. The answer was strengthening Tier 1 instruction and implementation consistency and being skilled in how to use data effectively to prevent most literacy difficulties occurring in the first place.

If you would like to refine your effective data practices to inform instruction and intervention, check out the online self-paced courses at www.literacyimpact.com.au

"Every day I'm pulled into another teacher’s classroom with a new anecdote." - Assistant Principal, St Paul’s Anglican, Vic.

After two terms into the writing improvement journey with SRSD, the wins were aplenty in our half day consultation today with the leaders of the 3 campuses.

A leading teacher shared how uncomfortable she initially felt modelling positive self-talk statements to her students. “Mortified” was the word she used.

Yet she persisted and now the students are using that same language themselves when writing.

A Year 1 teacher described children choosing to play "teacher" during wet weather play one lunchtime. The Year 1’s stood at the whiteboard teaching TREE (writing strategy for persuasive texts) and modelling positive self-talk to each other!

These are the kinds of observations that not only show students internalizing the strategies we explicitly teach but that they enjoy doing them for ‘fun’ in their free time (lunchtime!)

And then the best story shared was about the Year 2 student who would say: “I quit” for anything that seemed remotely hard to him.

However, his mum recently emailed his teacher to say: He's been talking about TREE at home all week! And in class his teacher has noticed something very exciting- he has been rubbing out, revising, trying again; and his writing is improving.
But the real shift is what sits underneath the observable behaviours: he is developing self-regulation, persistence and confidence when faced with challenge.

This is what the SRSD research base has consistently shown. When students are explicitly taught strategies for planning, revising, monitoring and regulating their thinking, they become more independent learners who are better equipped to manage difficulty in complex tasks like text level writing.

Self regulation is also listed as one of the most powerful feedback types for learning in the AITSL Reframing feedback document. SRSD strengthens that process by giving students the tools to act on feedback, reflect on their progress and regulate their own learning.

Well done St Paul’s teams; I’m so looking forward to seeing you all next month for the next installments and writing wins!

Camilla Gaff Melissa McCrae Denelle Calafiore

Join me tomorrow when I share how you can support students with text level writing difficulties in small group intervention.

Final chance to book into the ‘Teaching Writing with Impact: What the Evidence Tells Us’ course starting on Wednesday. All sessions will be recorded, so if you can’t make it live, you can watch it at your own pace.

We are excited to welcome such respected professionals in the field of writing to share their knowledge on best practices for writing instruction.

Find out more at https://ldaustralia.org/events/

Something I have noticed in schools is that literacy improvement often sits with one person.

One incredible, dedicated, exhausted person carrying the weight of the school's literacy outcomes largely on their own; and sometimes with no additional time outside a full teaching load or while also wearing 30 other hats all day in a Deputy Principal role.

When improvement lives in a person rather than a system, it's fragile and virtually impossible to see meaningful change. It wobbles when the person is away, stalls when they're overwhelmed and disappears when they move on.

The schools that create lasting change build the instructional architecture — clear vision for literacy improvement, clear roles and responsibilities, scheduled dates for assessments and data analysis mapped out across the year, shared expectations, codified practice, sustainable processes and leadership structures that can be maintained regardless of who is in the building on any given day. This shift from individual to collective responsibility is essential.

Whilst whole school literacy reform can and often does start with one champion, the most sustainable approach is through a team of implementation champions who can motivate colleagues, trial initial routines to build buy-in and support overcoming barriers, resistance to change and inevitable implementation dips.

Ideally the implementation team will have a range of skills and knowledge, a sense of urgency in working towards the school's vision for students; as well as good interpersonal skills and relationships with the staff.

The best school based literacy team I ever worked in included a school leader, a couple of teachers, an education assistant and our school librarian. School librarians are passionate about literacy by nature, a wonderful source of rich text knowledge and often an ally for co-ordinating budgeting and purchasing of new texts for the school. I'm looking at you, Phillips- you amazing superwoman!

Is your school's literacy improvement sitting in a system — or in a person? 💙

💐 Some lovely feedback and a metaphorical 'bouquet' after the Writing PL for the Centre for Excellence, Department of Education WA schools a couple of weeks ago. Its easy to be passionate about doing what I love - supporting teachers and school leaders to make a transformative difference in the literacy outcomes for students ✨

When students are having difficulty with writing, we often don't take their handwriting legibility and pace into consideration.
A 90 second handwriting pace screener can provide valuable insights into what is going on.

To assess handwriting legibility and fluency:

1. Provide students with a short paragraph from a grade-level text (could be a dictation or History or Science content for example)

2. Ask students to copy the paragraph as quickly and neatly as possible on a piece of paper that has the same width of lines as they would normally write on (that is appropriate to the year level curriculum)

3. Students write for 90 seconds. If they complete the passage, they continue to copy from the start of the passage. Punctuation should also be copied as per the passage.

4. The score is the number of legible letters written in 60 seconds.

This task measures handwriting automaticity, which research shows is strongly related to writing productivity, quality, length and reduced cognitive load.

A lot of the fab schools I am partnering with are doing this screener twice per year and are finding out some eye opening data about why their students are reluctant writers or find text level writing and dictation so difficult.

For further information on the screener and all things handwriting, see Steve Graham's article below.- it is one I have repeatably gone to year after year.

If you would like to learn more about the highest effect size of writing instruction in SRSD, sentence level writing and handwriting, check out the upcoming writing Conference on 17-18th June with Learning Difficulties Australia. It is going to be brilliant!! I am going to be presenting on how to take small group intervention for writing with SRSD.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306218101_Want_to_improve_children's_writing_don't_neglect_their_handwriting

One of the hardest things about instructional leadership is getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Holding the line can feel uncomfortable when implementation is not being followed through as expected.

But when you are juggling so many things and wearing so many hats throughout the day, it often gets put on the backburner. Conversations get avoided, expectations quietly become optional and instructional inconsistency becomes the norm.

But the problem with this is that we are often creating more worries or uncertainty for staff which can erode staff morale and trust.

Unclear expectations tends to create more anxiety in staff, inconsistency creates more frustration and optional implementation creates inequity for students.

The kindest thing a leader can do is create clarity and hold the line. This is not the same as rigidity, blame or compliance for its own sake. Instead, it is about calm, clear, consistent; with transparent messaging and schoolwide documentation that leads with 'why' we are doing this for our students, followed by the schoolwide expectations to make it happen- in consultation with staff in a clear and strategic planned approach.

When implementation challenges emerge, we need to lean in to the concerns of staff and listen, remove barriers or hurdles that may be in the way and ask staff "how can we support you to meet the expectation?"

This way we are all working towards the same moral purpose and helping educators to be the best they can be.

So looking forward to this day of Writing instruction with LDA. You do not want to miss hearing from the incredible Dr Karen Harris - guru and creator of SRSD who will be headlining the 2 day event.

Self regulated strategy development (SRSD) is the leading approach in teaching text level writing of any approach ever researched. The effect sizes speak for themselves and I cannot recommend it highly enough for every school.

Learning Difficulties Australia The official page for Learning Difficulties Australia - assisting students through effective teaching practices based on scientific research.

We often confuse student data with diagnosis.
They are two vastly different things; especially when the data used has low validity in determining the pathway for next steps.

Low reading, spelling or writing assessment data tells us something is wrong/not on track/on track or above. It doesn’t automatically tell us why or what to do next.
A student might perform poorly because of weak reading accuracy, slow reading pace, limited vocabulary, poor background knowledge, spelling gaps, handwriting fluency, low reading volume OR.... because they have not had daily access to year level text.

These things are not the same problem and do not need the same response. The latter is a situation that is an equity issue that can be rectified at the whole class level through daily exposure to year level text with teacher modelling, choral reading, frequent checks for understanding, immediate corrective feedback- repeated over a week to build stamina, accuracy, pace and comprehension.

In addition, when schools use student data such as NAPLAN or PAT or a generic spelling test as the entry point to intervention or exclusion from whole class year level instruction, this is like prescribing an antibiotic to a low blood pressure result. They just don't equate and could have dire consequences.
This is why, in my School Improvement Blueprint™, we separate the ‘Issue’ from ‘Audit’ and ‘Diagnose’ stages of implementation before jumping to intervention and next steps.

When we use broad data to make precise decisions, we risk building pathways that do not actually close the gap. They may just mask the problems, or inadvertently, make things much worse. Our students’ literacy outcomes depend on our well informed, precise decisions- with prompt and accurate follow up actions.

If you or your school would like support in using literacy data to effectively inform instruction and intervention or to develop a decision making tree for assessment decisions and next steps, feel free to reach out.