S7 E10 - What Does It Really Take to Make School Improvement Last?

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Hello, hello, welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania on the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn and I'm really glad you're here because this episode is a little different from our usual ones. There's no deep dive into the research on a specific aspect of literacy today, or at least not quite in the way you're used to. What I want to do in this episode is share details of a report released last month that has significant implications for all schools. That is, what is actually needed for the work of school improvement to be successful?

Every school I encounter is working on something, whether that be literacy, numeracy, or well-being. In amongst this work, there is PL, heavy cognitive load, resource provision or resource mandate, and a whole lot of hard work. But if we're really honest with ourselves, how much of the time, money, and energy that is spent leads to real sustained improvements in student outcomes? The answer is not nearly enough.

So today I want to talk about what AERO just told us, about what schools actually need. And I'm sharing this as a way of explaining where the Structured Literacy podcast is heading and what's coming next from Jocelyn Seamer Education. Stick with me. I think you'll find this one useful wherever you sit in your school.

In March 2026, AERO, Australia's National Education Research Organisation, released a guidance report called Leveraging Evidence for System Support. Now, it's aimed at system leaders, departments of education, diocese, and education authorities. The central question it asks is: what does it actually take to support schools to adopt evidence-based practices and sustain them over time? Now I know this might sound like the episode is for someone else, someone who sits a little higher than you in the decision-making framework, but I want you to hear what it says because it explains with rigorous research weight behind it, something that most teachers and leaders have known from experience for a long time: most professional development doesn't work. And the reasons why are predictable and fixable. It is not the first time I've talked about this on this podcast, but today there's a little added dimension.

AERO's Report

The report identifies three types of service that schools need. And when I read them, I thought, well, this is actually the story of the last six years of Jocelyn Seamer Education. The first service is high-quality teaching resources, curriculum aligned, evidence-based, ready to use, and practical. Now we've been building those since 2021. We have the Reading Success in Action phonics program, now getting a rework with the second edition, Spelling Success in Action, our work in 3-6 on understanding word-level components, and the resources available in the Resource Room, which is your whole literacy block for every grade of the school ready to go. And that work continues, we're not nearly done in that space.

The second type of service is knowledge building activities, webinars, professional learning sessions, courses, that sort of thing. This kind of content builds shared understanding of what evidence says and why it matters. And I've been doing that since 2019 when I first began to blog. And the Structured Literacy podcast itself, now at over a hundred episodes, up to somewhere in the range of 140, I think, is arguably the biggest knowledge building effort I've undertaken so far. Even bigger in some ways than my book. If you need to understand the research on fluency or phonics instruction, or why so many kids reach Year 8 and 9 and 10 still struggling with spelling, it's in the back catalogue of this podcast. The back catalogue has grown so much that just about every single question I see asked in Facebook groups these days can be answered by a podcast episode.

The third type of service is where it gets really interesting. AERO calls it knowledge application activities. That's things like coaching, instructional modelling, professional learning communities, and translating all of this into sustained changes in what we actually do in the classroom. And the report is unambiguous when it comes to this work. This is where change actually happens. One-off professional learning does not lead to sustained changes in teaching practice. Resources alone are rarely enough to shift what teachers do. And when we say one-off professional learning, I don't mean that, oh no, it's ok because we did a series of workshops all on different topics. I mean touching on a point once is not enough, and that's what the report is saying. What makes the difference is implementation support that is context-specific, sustained over time, not jumping from one thing to the other, but keeping people focused on a central idea that is developed and embedded, and focused on building the capability of school leaders to drive improvement from within.

I haven't done one-off work for a couple of years now for this exact reason. A single workshop or a single day of PL is just not impactful enough. Now, I'm still asked to do it, but I don't say yes because I cannot, in good conscience, take money for something that I know isn't going to get a school where they want to go. What schools actually need is a whole school journey moving forward together over time that puts us in the position of rumbling with the hard decisions, thanks, Brene Brown, building that shared vision for practice and developing the kind of collective confidence that allows good instruction to keep happening, even when things get hard. Now, a single day or a single touch point on content can never achieve that because it's not just about the knowledge.

The Report is Right

I have worked with many schools over the past five years, and AERO's findings match everything I've seen. The number one factor in whether a school's hard work translates into tangible outcomes for students rests with the work of the leadership group, where leaders, including the Principal, are targeted and focused when they are confident to make decisions, not because someone told them it was a good idea, but because they truly understand instruction. When they know how to work with teams in ways that are genuinely collaborative, responsive, and effective, when these things happen, the school gets results. When that piece is missing, even the best resources and the most well-intentioned professional learning will stay at the surface, and the school community finds itself stuck in a cul-de-sac, going around and around and around, doing the same things that look slightly different year after year, but never really getting anywhere.

The Three C's

So, what does it actually take to do that knowledge application work well? Through my work with schools, particularly in the work of Leading Learning Success, which is our 12-month one-in-all-in whole school approach to school improvement, I've come to think about it in terms of three things, and I just call them the three C's, I love a framework. And the three C's are Communication, Cognition, and Culture.

So let's start with communication. We are rarely, and I mean rarely, taught how to communicate with each other in ways that actually solves problems. As leaders, we're not taught how to have a different kind of conversation with someone depending on where they are in their own professional journey. The discussion and the professional conversation you have with a novice in a space is very different from someone who's mastering in that space. We're also not taught how to disagree productively, how to have literally different viewpoints and come to a common understanding that moves us forward. We're not taught how to have the conversation that is uncomfortable, but that is necessary to move the whole group together rather than just descending into tension and going nowhere. And if we're honest, we have all sat in staff meetings and board rooms where that's exactly what happens. One person says, "Hang on a second, I think we need to think about..." that runs contrary to the viewpoint of another person, often a big personality, who is very used to getting their own way. And then everybody shuts up. Everybody knows that if you try and address what has been raised, the conversation will descend very quickly into tense toxicity. A school community cannot move forward when that is the status quo. But these communication skills, they are learnable and they make an enormous difference to what happens in teams. But it's not enough just to say, well, communicate openly. We all need frameworks, we need training, we need practice, we need tools to help us in this space.

The second C is around cognition. And yes, this is around in education, the science of learning, cognitive load, information processing, how memories are formed, and how we grow schema over time. But it's also about something way more personal than that. It's about how we ourselves as adults experience change and growth. It's about what it feels like to be a professional who is learning. It's about understanding why we think the things we think when something new is asked of us. Why some people embrace change and others resist it. And what that resistance is almost never about is stubbornness or bad intent. It's primarily based around fear. So understanding this, for leaders, changes everything about how they support their teams, what they expect from them, and how they filter messages from outside their school.

The third C is around culture. I really like Seth Godin's (2017) definition of culture, which is, people like us do things like this.

The development of strong culture is not an accident. When a team builds genuine collective efficacy, a shared belief that what they do together matters and makes a difference, then culture is built deliberately. And when it is built deliberately, it's much more likely to last. Sustained school improvement doesn't happen because a school gets lucky with its people. It happens because somebody takes responsibility for building and engineering the conditions that allowed those people to do their best work together over time. Now, occasionally you may get lucky and build a team that can move forward without too much direction and too much hard connecting work, but that situation does not last.

A New Podcast...

These three things, communication, cognition, and culture, are what the Leading Learning Podcast is going to be about. That's right, I'm launching a brand new podcast. It's called the Leading Learning Podcast, and it is specifically designed for school leaders, for Principals, Deputies, Curriculum Leaders, and anyone who carries any responsibility for the professional culture of a school, and engineering the conditions under which teachers teach and students learn. That also includes people working in regional offices and system-level roles, the people whose decisions shape the conditions that schools work within. And if you are responsible for supporting schools to improve, this podcast is for you too. The Leading Learning Podcast will go into depth on the things the Structured Literacy Podcast has touched on, but hasn't had as its primary focus. How to lead improvement that sticks, how to build teams that grow, how to have the hard conversations and come out the other side with more trust, not less. How to use what we know from the cognitive sciences, not just to teach students, but to support adult learners in your team. How to build a culture where evidence-informed practice becomes the norm, not because someone mandated it or pressured a school into doing a thing, but because the people in the building believe in it and know how to make it happen.

Some of what I share will be learnings from my own journey as a school leader, some from the experience of the schools who have completed Leading Learning Success and are still working their way through our whole school improvement program that is designed to get teams on the road to developing the three C's together and collectively. Some of it will be about research and the instructional landscape, and we'll address the very real challenges of what leaders and teams are going through every single day at this point in education.

If you are a school leader, I would love for you to search for the Leading Learning Podcast on your favourite podcast app and subscribe. The first episode is live right now and it's waiting for you. But just hold on a little minute, don't leave me yet. Put a pin in that one and do that when we finish listening. If you are a classroom teacher who wants to understand the bigger picture of what school improvement really requires, I think you'll find it useful too.

School Improvement has always been here

I want to take a moment to be clear about something here. Jocelyn Seamer Education isn't moving into school improvement. School improvement has always been the work that we have done. I view that our responsibility is to be a partner for that whole school improvement journey, not just one piece of it. And the AERO Reports three types of service. We have been working across all three for years now. We provide high-quality, evidence-based resources. We provide knowledge building courses, workshops, this podcast, my Substack, and the work I do with schools every day. And increasingly, through our work with schools, we provide the coaching frameworks and sustained support that helps teams take the knowledge they have and turn it into decisive, confident action in schools. We have Foundations for Literacy Success that help teams really understand the instructional landscape and give leaders tools to bring the whole team together to develop the shared vision of what good performance looks like. I've already mentioned Leading Learning Success, but this goes for our programs as well. We don't just hand you a program and say best of luck, when you adopt one of our programs as part of your school improvement journey, we're there with you, coaching you through implementation and beyond.

A New Product...

That full picture is what led us to develop something else new that I'm really excited to share with you. What I didn't want was to wind down this podcast, and don't worry, it's not disappearing, but to move into a different space in the podcasting and leave teachers feeling as if I'd abandoned them because I will never do that. So what I've developed is JSE Quick Wins. Over the past six years, we have produced a lot of high-quality practical courses, our Teach Along courses that have run from between 6 weeks to 12 weeks. The kind of deep structured learning that has taken teachers and leaders through content over time and helped them take real tangible action. We know that that content is as relevant today as it was when it was created. But we also know that teachers and leaders are more time poor than ever. The pressing question that you have about "what do I do now" doesn't arrive conveniently when you hit that module in a long course. The question arrives when you need the question answered and you need an answer right now.

So what we're doing is we're making individual modules from those courses available as standalone resources called JSE Quick Wins. So they are highly practical, immediately applicable modules that you can access the moment you need them. No sitting through six or eight weeks of a course to find the answer you want. It will be right there in front of you. And they'll range in price from somewhere from $12 to $27. And you'll have the option of limited or lifetime access. So you get to choose how you experience the journey. If you're a classroom teacher wondering what to do about a specific challenge right now, this is for you. We don't have a hundred different Quick Wins available, we're starting small, so that we can gather feedback and make sure that the work we're doing is in alignment with the needs of teachers right now. So there is a Quick Win there ready for you to have a look at, and more are going to be added regularly.

So, what does all of this mean for the Structured Literacy Podcast?

First thing to remember is it's not going anywhere. That very full back catalogue, all of it is staying exactly where it is. If you need an episode on decodable text or fluency or why spelling programs might not be getting the outcomes we want, then the episodes are there. What's changing is the schedule. So the Structured Literacy Podcast will no longer be a weekly show. I will continue to make literacy-focused episodes when there is something genuinely important to add to the conversation. New research worth discussing, a question that comes up repeatedly, something in the field that shifts and needs careful thinking through. When that happens, you're going to hear from me. And I want to be honest with you about why I've come to this, what has been a difficult decision. I would love to think that I can do everything all at once. But it turns out I can't, and nobody can. Pretending otherwise is a fast track to doing nothing particularly well. So while my personal focus has shifted to the podcast space of being on big picture school improvement, our team is as focused on literacy as it has ever been because literacy is what we live and breathe. So the resources, the courses, the Quick Wins modules, the Resource Room, all of that continues and will continue to grow. We haven't finished working on literacy, not even close.

I have just recognised that for myself, the most important conversation I can have right now, the one that will make the biggest difference to the outcomes of students, is about what it takes for schools to make the hard work count. It is in the leadership and school improvement space. So if you are a classroom teacher, you can head to our website and explore the JSE Quick Wins through the Professional Learning tab. You'll get the practical help you need right when you need it. If you're a school leader or someone who wants to understand that world, search for the Leading Learning Podcast on your favourite podcast app and subscribe. The first episode is there and it's waiting for you right now.

Thank you as always for being here for the years of listening, sharing, and doing this work with such genuine care for the students in your classroom. It has meant more to hear how this podcast has helped teachers than I can easily say. But this is not a goodbye. This is nothing but an until you hear from me again, happy teaching.

Show Notes:

AERO, Australian Education Research Organisation

Leveraging Evidence for System Support

Professional Learning

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