S6 E1 - Staying Motivated in Tough Times

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Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, recorded here in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn, and I am so pleased you've joined me as we head into what I know is a particularly demanding time for many educators.

We're just now entering Season 6 of the Structured Literacy Podcast and thank you so much to all the people who have followed us on whatever platform you happen to be listening on. But if you're not already following, can I ask that you subscribe? Just click that little button and that will make sure that you don't miss a single episode that we have for you in this and all the upcoming seasons. It'll also mean that more people are able to find us in the podcast platforms, which is always a good thing.

It's report writing season, which means late nights, data analysis, and that familiar feeling of wondering whether you've done enough for your students this year. Then the school holidays will arrive, and while they're much needed, they often come with their own reflection on what's been achieved and what still feels overwhelming.

Today, I want to talk about something that I think is absolutely crucial for maintaining momentum in our structured literacy journeys: celebrating the small wins.

The Power of Small Milestones

It's so easy to focus only on the big data - those term-by-term assessments, NAPLAN results, or the major project we've committed to implementing. While these big-picture goals are important, keeping our eyes solely on the summit of that mountain can leave us feeling deflated and discouraged. Because when we're climbing the mountain with our eye firmly on the peak it's a little bit like only cheering for our footy team when the full-time whistle blows. We feel like that goal will just never come.

The key to staying motivated and maintaining progress is to break the journey down into smaller chunks and articulate and celebrate those small milestones that will lead us to the big returns we're looking for. So let me share some of these milestone moments that are absolutely worth celebrating.

Milestone 1: Getting Your Timing Right

Celebrate when you get your timings in your literacy block right and work to the clock so that you can fit everything in. Note I didn't say everything in the literacy block was perfect, but that you made it work.

Just getting through all the components - your daily review, explicit phonics instruction, decodable text reading, sentence-level transcription, shared writing, and your language-based lessons through your text-based unit - within the allocated time is genuinely an achievement. It means that you're developing those low-variance routines that support both you and your students. When you can move smoothly from one component to the next without losing instructional time, you're building the foundation for everything else to work.

Milestone 2: Students Knowing the Routines

When the moment comes, when your students know the routines and begin to anticipate what's coming next, you really should celebrate. And we see maximum benefit in this  when someone else is taking the class. So knowing that you can not be there and your classroom will still run relatively smoothly is a huge achievement.

And don't forget that when students know what those low-variance routines are and can manage them, the instances of negative behaviours drop considerably.

So when students can automatically collect their whiteboards for daily review, move to their desks for sentence transcription, or partner up to read a decodable text without extensive direction, you've created something really special. You've built learning behaviours that support everyone's cognitive load and everyone's success, and that's the foundation of a high-challenge, high-support environment.

Milestone 3: Short-Term Data Movement

When you start to see the short-term data move, it's time for a happy dance! Focusing solely on NAPLAN or yearly data collection can make achieving goals feel unrealistic and distant. It can also mean that you can be teaching for an extensive period of time and not realising that things aren't necessarily working. Short-term phonics data will give you such a clear picture of where your students are up to and help you stay the course while feeling motivated. It's these short-term goals that will move the needle on all of the other measures.

In the early years, this might be students automatically recognising graphemes that they were struggling with just weeks ago, or blending words with increasing fluency. In Years 3-6, your students data shows up in daily review sessions, such as when they grow automaticity in their responses to questions like "Write down all the ways you know how to write /ay/". These things can give you and your students such a sense of achievement. And how do we get students to buy in? How do we keep ourselves in the moment and motivated? By building and celebrating success.

These moments of recognition tell you that your explicit teaching is working and that students are building the knowledge they need for the reading and spelling success that you're aiming for.

Milestone 4: Students Making Connections

Celebrate when students start making connections across their learning. In Years 3-6, this might be recognising morphemes across the curriculum. I hear this often from teachers using our Spelling Success program, or our resources in The Resource Room, that they will have learned a prefix or suffix or a base in their explicit literacy lesson, and then in the science lesson, they're saying "hey, we know this base" or "I haven't seen this word before but I think it might have something to do with..." When they're making those connections, it's really powerful. 

For everyone, it's students using vocabulary you've explicitly taught in a range of contexts, or drawing on knowledge built in HASS or science to help comprehend a text in English. All of these connections are indicators of strong learning growth.

When students are able to make connections across curriculum areas, this is evidence that learning is transferring. This is exactly what we're working towards - knowledge that students can use flexibly across contexts.

Milestone 5: Your First Full Data Collection

When you're learning to use a new assessment approach across the school, it can feel really big and scary, particularly if the new tool looks quite different from what you're used to. So just completing the first data collection, even if you realise you've made some mistakes along the way, is absolutely a cause for celebration.

Moving away from benchmark assessments to skills-based assessment represents a significant shift in practice. Getting through that first round of phoneme-grapheme correspondence checks, the blending assessments, or fluency measures means you're building the systems that will give you the information you need to really support and evaluate your students' growth. So just completing your first data collection with a new tool is a cause for a little staffroom party.

The Most Important Milestone: Student Engagement

We want to celebrate this. When your students tell you they've loved a lesson or they're feeling good about themselves, this is what we're aiming for. But we're not doing it because we're becoming childrens' entertainers, we're celebrating because the students themselves can see their own success. We teach for that success, and when students start to experience it, well, all of a sudden, everything else becomes possible.

If you're a leader, this might be teachers expressing confidence and satisfaction in their practice. It could be parents providing feedback that their child is doing things they've never done before. These moments of human connection and growth remind us why we do this work.

Success is All About the Journey

And I know that's a little bit cliche. Success isn't just about big-picture data. Don't get me wrong - that big-picture data is necessary and exciting when it comes. But we're never going to get there if we give up on our improvement journey before we've had time to embed the practices that will lead us to the results we know are possible.

Every small win builds momentum. Every routine that becomes automatic frees up cognitive load for deeper learning. Every moment of student success builds confidence for the next challenge. These aren't just stepping stones to something better - they're the evidence that better is already happening.

As you finish this term and head into the holidays, take time to acknowledge how far you've come. Notice the small changes in your classroom, in your students, and in your own confidence. These victories matter, and they're preparing the ground for even greater success ahead.

Remember, sustainable change happens gradually, and every step forward is worth celebrating. Every single small thing that you do to consistently move your practice to an evidence-informed model of instruction is a gift to your students. You're doing important work, and every small milestone is proof that you're on the right path.

Until next time, happy teaching, and well done on all that you've achieved.

Bye.

Looking for evidence-informed resources to bring structured literacy to life in your classroom?  Join us inside the Resource Room.