1. Create a Hybrid Writers’ Workshop
Handwriting is an important part of an English student’s development. Imagine transforming your writing instruction by combining handwritten drafts with digital feedback. Using EP Studio, you can develop a custom writing program where students form ideas and handwrite their initial drafts (maintaining those crucial fine motor skills) to discuss in a partner or group workshop setting before shifting to Education Perfect to do their second draft and take advantage of EP’s peer critique (controlled and anonymous), while automated grammar and structure checks help students self-correct basic errors.
2. Launch a Department-Wide Reading Challenge
Transform your novel study into an engaging cross-class competition. Using Education Perfect’s lesson building and quiz functionality, department members can collaborate on creating content that focuses on comprehension skills and/or the lessons teachers have made specifically relating to themes, characters, historical context or plot points in their set texts. There is a wealth of existing content in EP’s Junior Novels sections that can be used for this purpose and all reading challenge content can be arranged and shared in collaborative folders. Students earn points for completing activities, and live leaderboards track both individual and class progress. The gamified approach drives engagement, while automated marking and differentiation ensure each student progresses at their own pace.
3. Reinvent Grammar Instruction
We know technical English skills can sometimes be dull to teach. EP can help to make technical skills practice engaging with our pre-built tests and existing lesson content from within the ‘Discover’ section of the platform. This contains resources for all levels, from primary through to secondary, and region-specific texts and perspectives to keep the content relevant and engaging. Students can progress through increasingly challenging levels, with automatic remediation ensuring they master basics before moving forward. The platform’s analytics show exactly where students are struggling, with auto marking allowing you to focus class time on specific students and areas that need attention. Turn grammar lessons from a source of groans into a competitive challenge.
4. Build a Whole-School Literacy Initiative
Create a school-wide literacy program using Education Perfect’s collaborative features. Core English teachers can develop and share foundational literacy lessons through the platform, which subject teachers across departments can then integrate into their specific contexts. Track student progress across subjects – Science teachers can see if students are struggling with technical writing, while History teachers can build on analytical skills developed in English.
5. Deliver Personalised Literary Instruction
Address mixed-ability classes by utilising Education Perfect’s differentiation features. Upload your chosen poems or literary works using EP Studio, create different levels of analysis tasks, and let the platform’s automatic differentiation direct students to appropriate content. Advanced students can dive deeper into complex metaphors while others build confidence with basic analysis. Live engagement data helps teachers identify when to step in with additional support.
6. Customise Your Curriculum-Aligned Content
Bridge the gap between standardised resources and your unique teaching approach by customising Education Perfect’s extensive content library. Whether you’re teaching Year 9 Australian Curriculum text response or NCEA Level 1 Unfamiliar Text, EP Studio lets you modify existing curriculum-aligned content to match your department’s specific approach. Add your own scaffolding questions for Shakespeare analysis, incorporate your school’s preferred essay structure templates, or adapt creative writing prompts to reflect your local context. The platform’s flexibility means you can maintain consistency with your department’s teaching methodology while leveraging high-quality, curriculum-mapped resources. Share your customised lessons across your department to ensure all classes receive the same quality instruction, adjusted for their specific needs.
Unlock the full potential of every student and with a free trial of EP English, available to you now!
]]>To everyone but primary school teachers, learning to read is a very mysterious process. From the outside it also appears to be an extremely frustrating one for some brains and, given our consistently poor results in international literacy tests, an apparently ineffective one for far too many young people in Aotearoa. New Zealand’s slide in youth literacy scores has been persistent since 2000 and this year’s lows are again provoking much hand wringing. Blame has been cast in the direction of digital devices, the rapid uptake of technology in our schools, a curriculum lacking in specifics and, inevitably, claims that teachers are not teaching the basics properly.
But what are the basics? More importantly, can everyone agree on them?
Proponents of a structured literacy approach have argued – with increasing frustration – that the foundations of reading and writing are being too sloppily laid for too many children. They’d like the planned overhaul of early literacy teaching to happen faster, and with much more clarity and specificity for teachers. But changing how we teach reading will be the most significant shift the sector has seen in decades. Embedding an evidence-based approach is obviously the right move but the implications are likely to reach much further than we might think.
Remind me again what ‘structured literacy’ actually means?
Heralded as a solution to Aotearoa’s literacy recession, structured literacy is an evidence-based approach to teaching reading that is very hot right now. For those not enmeshed in the world of syllable splits and vowel teams, a quick explainer…
The approach to teaching reading is drawn from a cross-disciplinary body of research known as the ‘Science of Reading’. Findings from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, linguistics and educational research are used to inform a step-by-step framework for teaching reading and writing. It’s not sexy. Indeed, critics say it’s boring, lacks context, and is too rigid. But the empirical evidence is there: it works – and especially so for our dyslexic and neurodiverse learners. What’s more, results from the Better Start Literacy Approach shows that Māori and Pasifika learners in Years 0 – 2 are also benefiting in a big way from more explicit teaching of words and sentences.
Teaching methods operate on the understanding that language has rules and structures, and that these rules can be learned, just like everything else. Some languages are less ‘reliable’ than others, of course. The phonology of English doesn’t map very regularly or logically onto its alphabet — just take ‘sure’ and ‘wore’ as head-scratching examples — but there are rules. In contrast, the sounds of te reo Māori correlate quite neatly with the letters used to represent them.
Under a structured literacy approach children are systematically and explicitly taught the structures of written language. That includes phonological awareness, alphabetic principles, and how the sounds of our language map onto the squiggles on the page. With plenty of repetition and practice they improve fluency until the process becomes automatic. They then move on to the next stage of vocabulary acquisition and comprehension.
Surely teachers are already doing that, though?
Yes… but mostly no. While there are elements of structured literacy at work in New Zealand’s teaching of reading – termed ‘balanced literacy’ – it’s not a systematic framework and there’s a lot of variability in how language instruction is delivered.
Underpinning the current approach is the ‘whole language’ philosophy that assumes we acquire written language in the same way that we do oral language (by lots of exposure to natural language). Learners are taught to use strategies like context cues to make meaning of unfamiliar words. New Zealand teachers have largely taught reading and writing this way since the 1970s, with some direct instruction around phonics and decoding (the ‘balanced’ part of balanced literacy).
As an analogy, let’s imagine I’m watching rugby and the commentator keeps talking about ‘mauls’. If I watch enough mauls and hear the word ‘maul’ said at the same time, my brain might fill in the gap to make sense of what a maul actually is (this is yet to happen). In contrast, by using a structured approach someone could show me a slow-motion clip of a maul, explicitly point out the components of a maul, and then explain how it fits with the other things that happen in a rugby game.
Using the first method – which assumes that a lot of action is happening implicitly in my brain – might work pretty well for most children needing to understand a maul (about two-thirds) but, for too many, it doesn’t. And they’re often the learners who need a bit more differentiation too — including our dyslexic or neurodiverse children and English-language learners.
Guess who’s back…
Like cuts of jeans and sofa colours, trends in education are cyclical, albeit slow-moving. The open plan learning of the late 1970s returned as ‘modern learning environments’ in the mid 2010s; then were repainted as ‘innovative learning environments’ (when ‘modern’ stopped making sense, one supposes) and, in their death throes, ‘flexible learning spaces’. In the same way, New Zealand has been here before with structured literacy. Many teachers of a certain vintage were themselves taught to read this way.
Right now, in the same way that fashion trends are led by the well-resourced, those that can do structured literacy, are. Even a few high schools around the country have picked up the approach. After all, if students can’t decode the new vocabulary that comes with specialised subjects like chemistry or art history, how will they ever access higher levels of the secondary curriculum?
Schools that have seen the successes of structured literacy and have the means are squeezing their professional development budgets to upskill staff in explicit literacy instruction. It means a lot of winding back for teachers, a lot of gap filling, new teaching resources and a ton of specific knowledge — so a move to structured literacy is no small one. And not all schools can access the expertise or funds to run this kind of professional development.
While schools wait for more direction and resourcing around the literacy plan (which indicates a significant shift toward structured literacy principles) the word is spreading organically between teachers and schools. Education is a notoriously bulky ship to turn around, which is perhaps why, even in the face of so much evidence, it has taken so long to get to this point.
Change is hard
Quite simply, the way we used to think was best is obviously no longer the most effective way. What’s changed is our understanding of the brain. Thanks to cross-disciplinary research we now have much better evidence of what actually goes on when we learn to read.
The problem is that a national shift to structured literacy will require a profound and far-reaching overhaul. Aspects of this change will deeply confront our teaching workforce’s long-held beliefs about the best way to do their jobs. It will involve the swallowing of many bitter pills, dead rats, and sour objections at a policy level to confront our nation’s worsening ability to read and write.
How do we get agreement across teacher-training institutions? And what do we do with all the children who have already muddled through their first few years of reading instruction – the 15 year-olds poised to leave school with only rudimentary literacy skills?
And how do you retrain an entire workforce?
Teaching children to read this way is not easy – it takes a huge amount of linguistic knowledge to begin with. Most teachers haven’t worked at the granular level required to teach decoding skills in such an explicit and sequential manner. These teachers may naturally feel some scepticism about teaching in a way that contradicts what they learned at teachers’ college, and equally, there will be feelings of remorse.
Talking to the Conversations That Count podcast The problem with literacy, Josie Woon, co-principal of Te Kura o Takaro, describes the guilt that came with realising that she’d been doing a disservice to her neediest students for decades, saying that teachers “should be marching in the streets for this kind of knowledge.” There’s a real risk however that, particularly if it’s implemented patchily or poorly, structured literacy will be cast aside by frustrated teachers as “just another initiative”. The more teachers can hear from people on the ground, those who are actually using structured literacy with struggling readers and seeing improvement, the better. Likewise, sector leaders should not underestimate how much support teachers will need with this change. Otherwise we could be consigning good, evidence-based practice to the back of the PE shed along with interactive whiteboards, the Numeracy Project, and those silly V.A.K questionnaires.
By Jen Smart
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