Supporting change

Knowing how to drive and manage change is the first step in improving literacy instruction in your school. Use the following resources to guide you as you implement change.

• Boulder, pebble, sand

This tool helps school leaders to break down change into manageable parts for their team to work on.

• Practical guide – inquiry cycles

This Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) document explains what an inquiry cycle is and how it can be used to support staff improvement.

• Putting evidence to work: a school’s guide to implementation

This Evidence for Learning guidance report outlines strategies for implementing change in schools based around the stages of implementation – explore, prepare, deliver and sustain.

Guiding your team to change their approach to literacy instruction involves using your change management skills and your knowledge of best practice literacy instruction.

Seeing what whole-school improvement looks like and finding out how it can be achieved will help you to create change and improvement in your school.

Use these resources to explore ways you can support whole-school change in your approach to literacy instruction.

• Systematic synthetic phonics at East Adelaide School, South Australia

This video explains how East Adelaide School, South Australia, achieved whole-school literacy change and improvement in student outcomes.

• St Augustine’s Primary School, Wodonga, Victoria

This Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) case study includes videos of classroom practice and interviews that give insight into a whole-school approach to literacy improvement.

• Leaving the balanced literacy habit behind: a theory of change

This article by Pamela Snow from La Trobe University outlines the reasons why changing from a balanced literacy approach to an evidence-based approach is needed. She examines a cyclical model for change and how this can be used to support schools to make a shift in their literacy pedagogy and instruction.

• Change is hard, and we need everyone to do it

This 13-minute podcast by Jocelyn Seamer Education discusses the common stages we go through when undergoing change, and aligns these feelings, attitudes and actions to undergoing change in literacy instruction within a school. (Note: begin listening at 1 minute 50 seconds.)

• Principals and school leaders

This article from Five from Five, written by Steven Capp, former principal of Bentleigh West Primary School in Victoria, provides an insight into the school’s move to implementing evidence-based literacy instruction. He outlines the positive results that emerged due to developing an evidence-based, whole-school approach to data-informed literacy instruction. You can also access embedded videos of other principals explaining evidence-based literacy instruction in their schools.

• Principals as Literacy Leaders: confident, credible and connected

This research report provides findings of a two-year research project that has led to the Principals as Literacy Leaders (PALL) program, which supports principals as literacy leaders. It includes information on teaching literacy using the Big Six framework and incorporating a systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) approach, leading staff to gather and analyse data, and plan for intervention.

• After the Year 1 Phonics Check: for school leaders

This Literacy Hub webpage provides advice on how to analyse and respond to data gathered from the Year 1 Phonics Check. It gives an overview of how school leaders can use this information to inform whole-school planning and resourcing.