The Structured Literacy Podcast
Hi there, I'm Jocelyn Seamer. Teacher, former school leader, author, and all around cheerleader for teachers everywhere. Learning to read and write is a matter of social justice. Every child deserves to learn through evidence informed practices, and every teacher deserves to be fully supported to make that happen.The Structured Literacy Podcast goes beyond the program to get to the heart of what it's really like to build a structured approach to literacy across the school.
The Structured Literacy Podcast
S6 E20 - A Simple Way to Make School Improvement Stick
School leaders and teachers constantly face the challenge of turning great ideas into
lasting change. In this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, Jocelyn
shares a practical, simple strategy to keep school improvement initiatives
alive and thriving. Learn how to create consistency, maintain momentum, and
prevent your best efforts from fading away. Whether you're a school leader or
classroom teacher, this episode offers a straightforward approach to making
school improvements stick.
Has something in this episode resonated with you? Get in touch!
Are your students good readers, but poor spellers? If so, you are not alone. Spelling Success in Action addresses phonics, orthography, and morphology to give students a well-rounded understanding of how our language system works.
Find out how you can help your students move beyond guessing and memorisation at https://www.jocelynseamereducation.com/spelling2
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Well, hello, hello. Welcome to this week's episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn, and I am delighted to have you here with me. I'm recording on the lands of the Palawa people in Tasmania. Now it is term four of 2025, and everybody is busy and getting a little tired. So this episode is short and sweet with a quick win for you to get ready for the next school year.
Jocelyn:We've all been there. We begin a new initiative, including all the right things like building the why, modelling, allowing people to have a play, observing, giving feedback, and making sure that everything is documented. We high-five around the leadership meeting and move on to the next item on the never-ending priority list. Then six months or a year later, we look up and discover that our once universal effective practice has devolved into inconsistency, ad hoc application, and lethal mutations.
Jocelyn:How does this happen? Are we crazy to think we can ever really get anywhere with consistent school improvement, we ask? In today's episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, I'm going to share some observations about how and why this happens, as well as some suggestions for how to prevent this frustrating and oh so common situation from arising. Whether you are a school leader or a classroom teacher, today you'll learn about how to keep momentum going post-implementation of a new practice. Let's dive in.
Jocelyn:Today's episode picks up after implementation of a new practice, where the team has been trained, seen modelling reflected and evaluated, and documented practices. Doing what I'm about to describe without doing those things doesn't get the job done. It's a bit like the "wash your dishes" sign that we see in the staff room. We don't talk about it or we simply mention it, we pop the sign up on the wall and walk away. Documentation without the we do part of the application ends up becoming just another part of the environment or another file on the server and essentially ignored. An increasingly common approach to embedding practices is to create a playbook or a guidebook, which becomes your school's guide for instruction in the school.
Jocelyn:Now, this idea of documenting practices is not new, but gains traction in the modern age through the book The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber. The term playbook was popularised in the business space in 2021 in the book The Business Playbook by Chris Ronzio. And of course, you might have heard of playbooks from American football.
Jocelyn:The idea of playbooks in schools is one that is growing in popularity, and many people are talking about them and how to create them. So I'm not going to go into specifics of all of the elements of what goes into a playbook in this episode. What I'd like to cover is how to create the system that ensures that a playbook or set of guidelines doesn't become a thing that sits on a shelf or lives in a hard drive and is forgotten. We want it to remain a living, working document that supports our school's improvement efforts. And I'm going to start us off with an "at my old school" story and share a practical, simple way to get started with this work. So take from this story what works for you and just ignore what doesn't.
Jocelyn:At my old school, I wanted each person in the school to have a written record of everything that was important, particularly the instructional elements we knew needed to be consistent if we were going to reach our big picture goals. Like everyone listening to this episode who works in schools, I was time poor, had a to-do list that was miles too long, and I didn't have the headspace for creating anything fancy. If you're a school leader listening to this, you know exactly what I'm talking about. One day I found boxes and boxes of empty blue lever arch files, and they were remnants of some long-forgotten initiative. But from that moment, the document we were creating was called the Blue Folder, for no other reason than I had at hand were blue folders.
Jocelyn:Now, while we do need to keep digital records of all of the important things, I have a preference for physical artifacts. Having something that you hold in your hands that takes up space but is portable makes any undertaking somehow more real. It's certainly how we do things in our Leading Learning Success program with schools. Each person has a folder that they bring to every single session.
Jocelyn:It's possible that I prefer this because I have a tendency for out-of-sight, out-of-mind thinking, but there's another important element to consider. The physical resource becomes a visible symbol of our collective commitment to the work. For us at my old school, the blue folder became a part of how we did business. In other words, a part of the culture of the school.
Jocelyn:The number one goal of any school leader that I speak with is consistency. In a past career, we had a saying: consistency creates credibility. That's true, it does. We also know that consistency lightens cognitive load, streamlines our efforts, and supports the building of collective efficacy, which is so important for us in schools. It means we're all rowing in the same direction. We all believe in the possibilities of what we can achieve, and we work together to make that happen.
Jocelyn:So my view is that physical artifacts are preferable to digital collections. Every time you have a meeting, people bring the folder. If they arrive to the meeting without the folder, they are sent to go and get it. Bringing and using the folder is a visible, tangible signal of one in, all in. And of course, the folder itself doesn't guarantee commitment or consistency, but it helps. The next decision that I made in choosing a lever arch folder for the work made it much easier for the folder to contain a living, working document. Binding the pages looks nicer and it's a little bit fancy, but it makes the document static. You basically have to have a PhD in binding machine operations to replace or add pages as you update. With a folder, you can simply remove one page and replace it with another or add extra sections as needed. In our blue folder, we had sections for curriculum, professional development, assessment, and policies and guidelines. Although a word of caution is to be selective about which policies you put in, and you might even just provide summaries and annotate them about how it's most relevant to your school, or your whole folder will just be filled up with policies.
Jocelyn:When I created the folder, I didn't sit down with a blank page and start writing a completely bespoke document for the school. The first step was to gather all of the existing documentation we already had. Lesson overviews, curriculum maps, scope and sequence documents from various programs, copies of visuals such as the common visual timetable we used in every classroom, assessment schedules, and duty rosters were all easy to put my hands on. Every school has a range of documents lying around, or on the server, that have been created in the hopes that their content will become the way we do things here. Begin with those.
Jocelyn:One of the ways to make this work collective and bring people along on the journey is to give each person a checklist of items you want them to bring to a meeting, which is essentially the contents page you want to have in your folder. This could be the literacy block overview, assessment schedule, reporting guide, or whatever else you think you need people to use or you think is in use. Then at a meeting, go through the list. When you read out an item, have the teachers hold up the thing or the version they use and see exactly where things are the same and things are different. I guarantee that leaders have made assumptions about which version of something people are using. Doing this kind of check-in allows you to do an audit without having to go classroom to classroom and take many, many hours. Where you discover that everyone has their own version of something, that's a signal that there's work to be done on creating shared understanding. When this arises, just make a list of the items where it's been a bit of a choose your own adventure up until this point, and then later you can prioritise what you're going to work on first.
Jocelyn:You can also ask for volunteers for a slice team to help you work. That is, someone from a range of grades and areas of the school who can give feedback, clarify thinking, and share the love on the work of creating consistency. One person in the leadership team doesn't have to devote their entire being to doing all this work themselves.
Jocelyn:We all know that the guidebook or playbook's document's purpose is to help create consistency. But there's a bit about this that I see many schools miss when doing this work. The bit that's missed is that the folder isn't the end goal. The end goal is that you've created a system that helps maintain consistency. A system that keeps the work flowing when a leader has to move on to a new priority. A system that becomes the culture, the way we do things around here.
Jocelyn:I've already mentioned bringing the folder to meetings as a way of creating culture, but I have another top tip that is more about how we operate. Are you ready for that hot tip that will change everything? Well, here it is. Create the culture that in your school, whenever anyone has a question about instruction, the first place they go to is the folder, whether it be blue, green, yellow, or red. Instruct and reinforce for all teachers, but especially teachers who are new to the school, that the folder is the primary source of wisdom. The folder is your friend.
Jocelyn:Without making the folder the go-to place for information, this happens: and I want you to imagine, you're a new teacher and you say, "Hello, I'm new to the school. Can you tell me how we teach high-frequency words?" The existing teacher responds, "Sure, let me tell you what I do." And at that moment, right there, let me tell you how "I do it" is the point at which your consistency begins to break down and the ad hoc application of your practices begins. Because everyone has their own version of how I do it, and everyone tells a slightly different story.
Jocelyn:Let's create this with an alternative response. New teacher says, "Hello, I'm new to the school. Can you tell me how we teach high-frequency words in this school?" The existing teacher says, "Sure, let's grab out our blue folders and I'll talk you through how we do it here." That version of events gets you a much different outcome. "Let me tell you how we do it here," gives you half a chance of achieving the consistency you're looking for.
Jocelyn:I was coaching one of our Leading Learning Success leaders last week, her name is Monique, and she was telling me how she's created some wonderful guidelines for staff. When there's an instructional routine or engagement norm to be implemented, she videos herself using the practice in the classroom. Then she creates a QR code so that anyone can scan it and see the routine in action while they review the written instructions. Adding something like this is an absolute game changer. Top tip though, sign up for a site where you can create dynamic QR codes. These allow you to change out the file that the QR code links to so that you don't have to change all the pages out every time you want to update the video.
Jocelyn:So with this in mind, let's run that scenario again. The new teacher says, "Hello, I'm new to this school. Can you tell me how we teach high-frequency words here?" The existing teacher says, "Sure, let's grab our blue folders. We can watch a video of a lesson and I'll talk you through the steps." I can almost hear the leaders listening to this saying, "Jocelyn, are you mad? I don't have time to video everything." And of course you don't, I know that. That's where the SLICE team comes in. They help create the videos and coordinate your experienced, high-performing teachers, who best reflect your school's expectations, to make the videos. This is collective work, remember, not one person's year-long crusade.
Jocelyn:When you have a shared approach to the work, leaders can focus their energies on modelling the use of the folder, being the one to start saying, let's grab out our folders and look at our school's guidelines. The leader sets the pace, the leader models what they want to see and then celebrates when team members join in. Over time, with clear communication and expectations, we are able to celebrate more and more small wins that add up to be the big wins we're looking for.
Jocelyn:The difference between someone taking one, two or three years to on their own put together their playbook or guideline and bringing the team in for the collective work is the difference between a doer and a leader. As leaders, I know how easy it is to get bogged down in the technicality. I had an idea, I'm going to be the one to do it. But whilever you stay in that mode, you're not able to stretch out and expand your influence to the places you want it to go. So where you can build the capability of your team, please do so. That allows you to stretch out and means that you are creating systems that will last beyond your presence in the school. Otherwise, when you go on one term of long service leave, everything implodes. So the consistency here is not just about documenting the practices, it really is about creating the systems and structures that make this a one in, all in mode of working.
Jocelyn:I know how overwhelming it can feel to be a leader thinking about getting this sort of thing together. I can't tell you how many times I've started a conversation with the phrase, we really should, X, Y, Z, knowing that we're probably not going to get to it anytime soon. And if I'm really honest, I still do that even when I'm not working in a school now. If that's you right now, please know that you're not alone and that you can start this work with doing just one thing. Get the folders. Even if you walk into a pupil free day at the start of next year with boxes of empty folders and hand out a draft contents page, you will have taken a step. From there, the next step is get your SLICE team together. Someone from admin, someone from each phase of schooling, and a specialist. Step three, put it in your staff meeting agenda in the calendar that you will actually give people time to collect what they use that reflects that draft contents page you've shared with them. Step four is to do that and then put it on another staff meeting schedule to do the comparing, where you say everybody get out your literacy block overview, hold it up so we can see if we're all on the same, literally on the same, page. You don't have to complete a 357-page document by the start of next year. As we know from Rosenshine's Principles, we can break things down into small chunks and do them one at a time.
Jocelyn:In taking this step-by-step approach, we're making the work achievable. Remember, the goal isn't just to have the document, the goal is to have the system that makes the document do the thing we need it to do, which is to support consistency in our schools. We know that consistency is an incredibly powerful mechanism for achieving great things. It's not an easy thing to achieve, though. So as you're going about the planning work for the next school year, whether you're listening to this as it's recorded in 2025 or in some future year, remember that small things get you big goals. That the planning you do matters. Think about the purpose of the planning you're doing and give yourself the space and grace to not be superhuman.
Jocelyn:These sorts of things matter, but they will not work and they won't happen if you break yourself in the process of trying to achieve all the things and be all things to all people. If you're a classroom teacher listening to this episode and you know that this is the work that your school has been talking about doing, share this episode with somebody else in the school, even if this is for your year level team to be the lighthouse team for the work.
Jocelyn:Everyone, it's term four. I know we're getting tired. I know that the rest of the term feels like a write off of to-do lists. But let me tell you, I think you've got this. Everything is going to be ok. Thank you so much for joining me on the Structured Literacy Podcast. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye.
