A day with Linnea Ehri & Friends

It's a bit of a weird thing for a teacher to spend their Sunday at a professional learning. But I'm not the only weird one and I joined hundreds of other people passionate about education in Melbourne today at LDA's event 'A Day with Linnea and Friends'. 

LDA (Learning Difficulties Australia) somehow managed to lure the Professor Linnea Ehri to Australia to receive the 2022 AJLD Eminent Researcher Award. When I heard that she was presenting in Melbourne I booked a ticket before I had even consulted my wife!

Alison Clarke (founder of Spelfabet) had the MCing duties and introduced each speaker wonderfully, as well as hosting the panel discussion brilliantly ( and had the dubious privilege of sorting out the initial tech issues).

Professor Ehri spoke eloquently about the research she has done about how children learn to read. Her work on orthographic mapping is something that all teachers of English and literacy should understand. Orthographic mapping is reliant on children having the knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences to be able to decode and encode written words. This is the process that enables us to recognise words almost instantaneously. 
I'm not going to go in too much detail as Professor Ehri will be presenting with more of her friends in Sydney on Tuesday, but I found the level of detail her studies on the Four Phases of Word Reading and Development went into fascinating. I was particularly intrigued by her findings when she compared instruction of syllable units against grapheme-phoneme units (in Portuguese). I believe that this level of intricacy is exactly what we need to disseminate further to help inform our teaching practice. 

After a morning tea break full of discussion we were back to listen to Emina McLean. Emina is the Head of English and Literacy at Docklands Primary School, trains pre-service teachers and student speech pathologists, provides professional learning, consults and is a guru on education.  She is also the co-recipient of the Mona Tobias Award. Emina spoke about excellence and equity in Australian education and how Docklands PS is trying to achieve both of these.  My hastily scribbled notes say:
excellence = finding success for our students
equity = ensuring ALL students are successful
Emina unpacked four ways that Docklands PS does that help build excellence and equity.

1.  Specify the knowledge. What will be taught? When will it be taught?
2. Allocate sufficient time. Make sure that there is time to teach, and important things are being prioritised.
3. Explicit and responsive teaching. Teach first. Provide repetition, feedback, reviews, scaffolds. Which students need additional support? How are teachers being supported?
4. Align assessment, curriculum and instruction. Is their cohesion in what is being taught and what is being assessed? Are assessments reliable and valid? 

The other co-recipient of the Mona Tobias Award was Dr Nathaniel Swain. He is the founder of Think Forward Educators, a teacher, instructional coach and researcher. Nathaniel encouraged us to reflect on our literacy instruction so that we can more effectively teach. He encourage us to teach the basics well, not so that we can go 'back to basics' but so we can move beyond the basics. A whirlwind tour of word instruction at Brandon Park Primary School, saw us looking at graphemes, words, morphemes, sentences, and extended texts through PhOrMeS and Read2Learn. The tinkling bell came all too soon to signal time was up.

Jocelyn Seamer was the recipient of the Bruce Wicking Award. Jocelyn is an educational consultant with many (and varied) years of experience as a teacher and school leader. She talked about how we need to help support our colleagues as we embrace educational change. Jocelyn unpacked the value of working with our colleagues and how, like we do with our students, we need to meet them at their point of need. At times this involves coaching, supporting, directing and delegating. We need to be as intentional with mentoring as we are with our teaching. 

Lunch was another golden opportunity for discussions with others. It was nice to put faces to people I've previously only met online. And all too soon we were heading back into the theatre for the next session.

Dr Jennifer Buckingham is the founder of Five from Five and is an expert on educational policy. She led us on an exploration of the policies in literacy education over the last twenty years. The messages from the Boys' education inquiry in 2002, the Rowe report (2005), and Dyslexia Working Party report (2010) all seemed very consistent that schools need to be teaching "a strong element of explicit, intensive, systematic phonics instruction” (Boys' education inquiry, 2002). And while it might feel like no progress is being made, Jennifer shared positive examples in the changes in the Australian Curriculum, the increased uptake of a Year 1 Phonics check, the SA Literacy Guarantee unit, and the Catalyst project of Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn.

It was time for the panel discussion, which saw all our presenters gather and answer questions that had been submitted throughout the day.  There was talk about whether graphemes should be incorporated into phonemic awareness instruction, the usefulness of spelling tricky words, the importance of primary schools getting literacy instruction right, the need for secondary schools to have a consistent approach to supporting their students. And Emina gave me a new motto for school change "Less, done well, is more."

Then it was time for us all to go home (after a bit more chatting and navigating the Greek Festival), and more importantly to our schools and communities to keep improving our literacy instruction so that all children can achieve their success.

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