S6 E2 - Simple Levers to Pull to Increase Your Impact

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Well, 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 welcome, welcome, welcome.

Once you've implemented your phonics program, established your partner reading routines, sorted out your spelling instruction in Years 3-6, and found a source for quality text-based units, it would be forgivable to think that the job of school improvement is done. I'm sorry to tell you that it's not.

Taking the next critical steps to move your practice from good to really great is not a matter of new shiny things, it's not a matter of getting new programs or doing more PL on its own, but it's a matter of increasing the impact we are having in our literacy blocks.

In today's episode, I'd like to share five ways that you can increase the impact on student outcomes in your classroom. Now, this is not an exhaustive list, but it will give you a starting point to level things up in instruction.

Lever 1: Increase Student Responses and Engineer Early Engagements

The first lever that you can pull is to increase the number of student responses in lessons and engineer your first response to be within the first 30 seconds of the lesson. This can be as simple as an "I say, you say" routine, where the students repeat what you say and then share that key vocabulary with a partner. But what it does is activates the alerting system, which is a component of attention that signals our brain that it's time to attend, it's time to pay attention now.

We don't just want students giving more responses though, we want to increase the number of correct responses. Archer and Hughes, in their text "Explicit Instruction," emphasise that high success rates are crucial for learning. And we see this reflected in Roseshine's Principles. So managing this well is a must.

When we think about Stanislas Dehaene's four pillars of learning, attention is the very first pillar. Without directing student attention to what we want them to learn, the other pillars simply cannot function effectively. That quick "I say, you say" at the start of your lesson isn't just a nice warm-up, it's a neurologically informed practice that primes the brain for learning.

And we don't just want those responses to be at the start of a lesson, we want them to be all through the lesson. So remember the I do part of your lesson is not a 25-minute lecture, it is the introduction of the lesson and students need to be involved in some way right from the start.

Lever 2: Manage Your Response Ratio Strategically

Closely related to increasing the number of responses students have to provide is managing the ratio of types of responses. Simple repetition to focus attention, short responses to check for understanding, and elaborative responses are all important. The authors of "Powerful Teaching" tell us that elaborative responses help students make connections and deepen understanding, but they require more cognitive load than simple repetition.

The trick is to know which kind of response will get us which desired outcome. Are we looking for attention, for remembering, or for application? Plan these opportunities ahead of time for maximum benefit. You can use a questioning matrix for this in your planning time. So using the questioning matrix helps you to plan the questions in a really intentional way

Think about a phonics lesson: we might start with simple repetition of phoneme-grapheme correspondences to focus attention, move to short responses as students blend words to check understanding, and then use elaborative responses when students explain the spelling patterns they notice or make connections to previously learned morphemes. It's also when we ask them to construct simple phrases on their own. So these different sorts of responses are important right across the curriculum.

Lever 3: Transform Your Daily Review

So literally review your daily review routine and do it as a team, more heads are better than one. And increase the ratio of retrieval to recognition. Retrieval is a much more powerful mechanism for building memories than simply recognising information when we see it. Instead of always asking students to tell you the phoneme when you show them the grapheme and asking them to read words, make sure that you are regularly saying the phoneme and asking them to write the grapheme, instead of just showing words for them to read, ask the students to spell the word without having seen it first.

And in vocabulary, instead of just the recognition tasks of vocabulary, ask them to provide a meaning or to answer questions. Such as the question types thar are outlind in Bringing Words to Life.

So you could introduce a big box of questions instead of, or to complement, your existing daily review PowerPoints. I have a whole Research to the Classroom series about this very topic, which explores how retrieval practices strengthen memory consolidation and make knowledge more accessible for future learning.

The research on this is compelling. The testing effect shows us that the act of retrieving information from memory strengthens those neural pathways much more effectively than simply reviewing the same information repeatedly. When we ask students to recall rather than recognise, we're building robust, long-term memories.

Lever 4: Implement Personalised Practice Opportunities

This can take the form of a simple manila folder with materials inside that align exactly with what your students need. This is most powerful for phonics and early morphology work. Resource Room members have access to printables and a mastermind training about using this effectively.

It's crucial that this is based on real-time data, not general, same-same practice for the whole class. Personalised practice is about establishing a tailored approach to consolidation. Remember what we know about cognitive load theory: students can only process so much new information at once, and what's new varies dramatically from student to student.

As I outline in my book, "Reading Success in the Early Primary Years," meeting students where they're up to is fundamental in a structured literacy approach. Some students might need additional practice with basic code correspondences while others are ready for complex code patterns. Personalised practice ensures that every minute of practice time is targeted and effective.

Lever 5: Encourage Connection Building

Encourage your students to be connection builders. Part of schema making is making connections between what we are learning now and what we already know. So, model making these connections and actively encourage students to do the same.

This is one of Rosenshine's Priniciples, which is to begin every lesson with a review of previous content. That's not about daily review, that's about activating schema to support working memory. There are other ways to use this connection building as well, so you can begin with connections to self, and that's an easy bit, kids are pretty good at that. So you can ask, "When have you ever heard the word..." or "Does this remind you of anything you've experienced?" Then, stretch it out to include connections to prior learning experiences, especially when you know they have had them because you provided them and checked for understanding.

When you're asking students to make those personal connections, just be a little careful in how you do that, though, because you don't want to alienate some students from the lesson. So Hollingsworth and Ybarra's universal scenario is a great way to do this. Ask the question on something that you know that everyone can connect to. Thinking about morphology, when teaching the morpheme 'un-' or UN, you might ask students to connect it to other 'un-' words they've learned, or to think about times they've undone something in their own lives, such as, "I've undone my shoes" or "I've undone my bag". When exploring character motivations in a text-based unit, you might ask them to connect the character's feelings to emotions they explored in a previous story.

This isn't just about engagement, though it certainly helps with that. When students actively make connections, they're building and connecting the robust schema that supports both comprehension and retention. They're doing the cognitive work that transforms isolated facts into interconnected networks of knowledge.

Bringing It All Together

These five levers aren't revolutionary new practices: they're refinements of what you've already been doing. They're about being more intentional, more strategic, and more responsive to what we know about how learning actually works.

The beauty of these approaches is that they don't require you to throw out everything you've worked so hard to establish. Instead, they build on your solid foundation of structured literacy practices to create even greater impact for your students.

Remember, good teaching is often about the accumulation of small, intentional decisions and actions rather than dramatic overhauls. These five levers give you concrete ways to increase your impact without overwhelming yourself or your students.

As you consider which lever to pull first, think about your current context and your students' needs. You might find that one resonates more strongly with where you are in your teaching journey right now, and that's ideal. Start there, build confidence, and then layer in the others as it makes sense.

Your students are fortunate to have teachers who are committed to continuous improvement. Every time you refine your practice based on evidence about how children learn, you're making a difference that will ripple all through all their future learning.

Until next time, happy teaching, everyone.

References:

Archer, A., & Hughes, C. (2011). Explicit instruction: Effective and efficient teaching. Guilford Press.

Dehaene, S. (2021). How we learn: Why brains learn better than any machine…for now. Penguin Books.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255.

Seamer, J. (2023). Reading success in the early primary years: A teacher's guide to implementing systematic instruction. Routledge.

Show Notes:

Research to the Classroom: Daily Review - Part 1 - The Research

Research to the Classroom: Daily Review - Part 2 - Teaching

Research to the Classroom: Daily Review Part 3 - Teacher Talk

Looking to increase your impact on student learning? Join us inside The Resource Room!