Over the last 5 years, staff at St Mary’s School in Geelong, Victoria, have had a clear focus on lifting student outcomes through evidence-based instruction. What started with a simple scope and sequence of phonics teaching for Foundation students has now spread to all curriculum areas and year levels.
As we begin 2025, Deborah Boland – F-2 Learning Leader at the Catholic primary school – tells Teacher the rollout is continuing apace, with new strategic goals related to its 3 spheres of Teaching and Learning, Leadership, and Wellbeing.
Digging into data and upskilling staff
Boland joined St Mary’s in 2019, just after it had started to use phonics instruction in Foundation. ‘In 2020, Learning Leaders were appointed from F-2 and 3-6, and I was the 3-6 Learning Leader,’ she explains. ‘Along with the Deputy Principal, the Learning Leaders looked at evidence-based instruction across the school.
‘We looked really closely at our data … [which highlighted] teachers were working really hard, doing the best they could, looking for the best instruction for students, but we weren’t seeing that translate to good growth with our results. That's kind of where it began.’
Then COVID hit, and the landscape shifted. The Learning Leaders and Deputy Principal took part in as much professional learning as they could access, including weekly webinars. ‘We pulled together as much good knowledge for ourselves as we could, so that we could start to upskill our teachers in all of those areas.’
This included personal PD with US-based The Writing Revolution, online learning for staff in Lyn Stone’s Reading for Life and Spelling for Life, and a collaboration with Dr Lorraine Hammond. The school started using the DIBELS reading skills assessment to gain a better understanding of the target areas needed to progress student learning and brought in Spelling Mastery from years 3-6.
‘In 2021, all our focus was on “the big 6”, so to speak – oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. And we upskilled staff on that. We took on The Knowledge Gap [by Natalie Wexler] as our mentor text.’
It was also crucial to make direct links with the School Improvement Plan. The overarching goal for 2020-24 was: educators collaborate to design learning that is evidence-informed, utilises high-impact strategies and challenges all learners.
‘We pulled that apart in our annual action plan and made sure that we were targeting evidence-based instruction, firstly with the spelling and reading, and then as we worked with Lorraine and other professionals in that space [we started to see] that it wasn't just explicit instruction that was important in English; we needed to bring that in across our school, in all curriculum areas.’
From 2022 the focus was on introducing explicit direct instruction across the school. St Mary’s worked with Dataworks in the US to upskill staff. ‘We had to review a lot of our planning documents to reflect that when we were teaching something to someone who was a novice learner, they were actually getting explicit instruction – we were engaging the students regularly, they weren't sitting for long periods of time without responding and showing us what they knew,’ Boland recalls.
‘We were working with teachers in finding out: How effective is your teaching? And that was important for all of us, as a staff. We had to examine our own practice in that way: Am I asking enough of my students regularly? Do I know what 80% of my class knows? Can I move on with my instruction or do I need to re-teach? So, we did a lot of work in that space.
‘A lot of those principles from our explicit direct instruction were from Rosenshine’s work, and the research about cognitive load. That's when we started in 2022 and 2023 to delve into what that meant.’
Change in classroom practice – an example
Boland shares how classroom practice has changed. Previously, teachers would have asked students a big inquiry question that tied into the focus for the term – for example: How was life different in 1788 compared to now?
‘Then we'd straight away say, “what do you want to know”. They did not know what they wanted to know because we had not taught them anything about what life was even like in 1788. We were putting them in a position of questioning something they had no knowledge about.
‘Now we would still have that question … “This is our focus: What was life like in 1788?” but then we would teach it explicitly. “… in 1788 in England, this was happening … at the same time in Australia this is what life was like for the Indigenous population … “. If it was a 10-week term, we'd have probably 7 to 8 weeks of explicit teaching, where all of our reading and writing centred around that vocabulary instruction. Then we would open it up to students to present their learning, and we might give them some options. “You could create a diorama – what the shore would have looked like to Indigenous Australians whenever boats were arriving; perhaps you might want to make a poster that explains some information about what life was like when people, when convicts, were transported to Australia.”
‘So, they already have that point of confidence to begin from; they can then invest their cognitive load, so to speak, on “how will I present it?”, “how will I make it work?”
Natalie Wexler says that knowledge is like Velcro – once you have something, it's so much easier to stick everything else to it. With the explicit instruction, we're just seeing students a lot more confident … and we're not asking unreasonable things of novice learners.’
Extending explicit instruction
Last year’s PD focus was the school’s intervention model – putting a framework around the support offered to students. ‘The F-2, 3-4 and 5-6 Learning Leaders are all out of the classroom, and they are primarily responsible for making sure that in our planning and teaching we are using explicit instruction; making sure our planning reflects that so that teachers have a thorough outline of what they need to say and question during each lesson.
‘It's helped us with MACS [Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools] partnering with Ochre for our maths lessons. That's worked well, because a lot of that type of planning aligns with that.’
The explicit instruction has extended to the behavioural curriculum too. ‘How it's important to be very explicit with a script at the beginning of the year, so that we have that low variance across all of the classrooms. Every teacher knows what they need to do and say … “this is how my class starts”, “this is how we line up in the morning”, just to set up that very calm learning environment.’
Impact and planning for the future
The change in instruction is already starting to have an impact on student achievement, particularly at year 5. In 2024, St Mary’s achieved growth in its year 5 mean scores in all NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) areas. The school was ranked third in the Geelong region for its year 5 NAPLAN results, and first in Catholic schools in the region. Between 2023 and 2024, the biggest growth areas were Numeracy and Spelling, something Boland and colleagues attribute to explicit instruction from the Ochre mathematics units, and systematic rollout of Spelling Mastery.
At a system level, MACS has launched its Vision for Instruction – a system-wide approach to achieving teaching and learning excellence that’s grounded in evidence-based practices and principles. Boland says staff at St Mary’s feel they’re in a great place with the introduction of that Vision, as their work aligns strongly with it.
‘This year, we want to look a lot more closely at coaching and mentoring and get a very good model up and running for that. And I think the behaviour curriculum, too, is something that we want to keep working on.’
As in previous years, a crucial aspect is the link to the School Improvement Plan. In the Learning and Teaching sphere the focus is to deliver a knowledge-rich, evidence-based teaching and learning program so that all students make progress; in the Leadership sphere, it is to enhance the culture of collaborative professionalism through critical reflection and feedback; and in the Wellbeing sphere, it is to establish and maintain calm and orderly learning environments.
These overarching goals will be broken down in the annual plans into smaller action points and targets for different cohorts, year groups and so on, and St Mary’s journey of evidence-based instruction will continue.
References
Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator, 36(1), 12.
How do you and your leadership colleagues ensure teaching practice across the school is consistent and evidence-informed?
The journey at St Mary’s started with a close look at the data. What does your student data tell you about the effectiveness of teaching practice, the strengths and areas for improvement?
Professional learning for the leadership team, and all members of staff, was a priority for the school. Thinking about an improvement target you and your team have for 2025, do staff have the knowledge and tools to achieve this goal? If not, what supports will they need?