S1 Episode 1 - Jocelyn's Structured Literacy Journey

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Hi there. My name is Jocelyn Seamer. Welcome to the very first episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I am so happy to be making this switch to a podcast for the last three-ish years, I've been writing a blog called the No Nonsense Educator, and I realized that I myself don't have a lot of time to read blogs, and I do most of my learning through podcasts. So it's logical to make a shift. And here we are.

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I'd love to start this very first episode by sharing with you a little bit about my background through structured literacy and what that looked like for me. Each of us has our own unique journey and our own experiences, and so I just thought I would help you get to know me a little better ahead of our future episodes.

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So I came to teaching as a second career, although I will say that I've always been a teacher. When I was five,  and we played schools with my friends, I insisted on being the teacher if you had met me then and asked, what are you going to do when you grow up? I would've said, ''I am going to be a teacher''. Various experiences, including high school, convinced me that that was not a great idea, but after some years in hospitality, working in adult training,  and getting a little older,  I realized that that was actually what I wanted to return to. So in my mid to late twenties, I went back to university and retrained as a teacher.

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I started out in schools as a volunteer, and then I was fortunate to secure a support role position. So I was working in numeracy at that point. But, I still had always, one hand, in literacy, and I identified some students who I thought, oh my goodness. Okay,   let's see what we can do here.

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So, my first dyslexic student I ever worked with,  his name was Adam. I have his permission to use his name, and Adam's parents had been told by the diagnosing psychologist that they would have to think really carefully about what job Adam was going to be able to do when he grew up because his dyslexia diagnosis would exclude him from many things. And I thought, oh, you know, that just doesn't make any sense to me because I'm looking at this little guy, and he seems perfectly intelligent and capable, but reading is just really hard.

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So I started to work with Adam outside of school over the Christmas holidays, and Adam went from the sort of student who would get his book that he brought home and it was a predictable text at that point, and when it came time to read that book, he would get upset, there'd be tears, there'd be yelling, there'd be throwing the book, hiding behind the couch, all of that sort of thing, cause it was just so hard. And after, you know, a couple of months  of really getting into the phonics with this little boy, he made this incredible shift from being sad and scared to hounding his mom, ''mum, can we read another book?'' And, his mum Sharon, having to say, ''mate, I have to cook dinner now.   I'll read with you later''.

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From that experience, I was absolutely hooked on reading instruction because I saw the power that it had when we made the, and I would not have phrased it as this, but made the shift to a structured approach to literacy. And I thought, oh, I wonder if there's any more students out there? And, of course, there were, and through word of mouth, I ended up with about 30 young people and children who were coming to my house every week, ranging in age from sort of seven to 15. And most of these children did not have a dyslexia diagnosis. They didn't have any noticeable diagnosable difficulty. They were simply instructional casualties.

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And I remember still very clearly sitting there and looking at these kids and thinking, wow, I'm really frustrated because if I could just have you in my class each and every day, we wouldn't be here because you would be able to get what you need at school. And it was at that point that I made the decision that tier one, and again, I would not have used those words then, but tier one instruction was where I wanted my focus to be so that we could reach every child, not just those kids whose parents could afford to send them to tutoring.

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Now we know that structured literacy is good for everyone, not just our strugglers, so the equity issues that come with structured literacy mean that we are levelling the playing field, and we are able to provide something that's useful for everyone.

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From that experience, I went into a remote classroom in the Northern Territory, and that was my first class of my own. So I'd done some other work, and then I was on my first class, and I had foundation to year 2, and there wasn't a lot of differentiation needed because they're all at the same spot, which was kind of nowhere.

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Now I had been really fortunate in my pre-service teacher education that I had attended a private college called Avondale College in Cooranbong near Newcastle. So big shout out to Bev Christian and the team at Avondale, and I learned about the importance of phonics. I learned that there was such a thing called decodable texts and what they were and what they were used for. I learned about reading recovery. I remember we had to do an essay actually critically evaluating the effectiveness of reading recovery. And so, I was so very fortunate to have experiences that opened my eyes to these issues as a pre-service teacher, and I know that that is not the experience of the vast majority of teachers out in the field at the moment.

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I was also really fortunate that when I entered my first classroom role, there was a literacy coordinator in our group of schools who knew about structured literacy, and she brought on board a systematic synthetic phonics program, and we were able to get kids moving. So, kids who had been reading the same level one, levelled reader for five years, all of a sudden could tackle more complex things because, lo and behold, we were teaching them the code. And again, that power of structured literacy to be able to support every student was just so very clear.

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In my own children, there's variation, as I'm sure most parents will observe if you have more than one child. My first child was two and saying, mummy, let's do our sounds on the fridge and my second child, yeah, couldn't care less and would rather just throw the magnets around. Again, I'm sure parents can relate, but I know that had that child not had structured literacy as the way that they learned to read,  that we would probably be looking at a young person with a reading difficulty, so I'm so thankful that I knew what I knew.

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Although I have to say, I think if I took a time machine and went back in time and had a look at what I was doing,  overall, I might tap myself on the shoulder and give myself some guidance. But that's the nature of professional growth, that we should be able to identify areas of practice where we have grown, where we can see change. If we can't do that,  then that's probably a worry.

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So I spent a couple of years in that school, and then I did some other things, but for me, I had one experience of working in a school that was not focused on structured literacy, and it made me see that I just could not work in that way. So discovering that power of structured literacy for me, honestly, it was like I had walked into the light and I could never go back, and I know that makes me sound like a bit of a zealot, but it's a moral and ethical issue that we need to provide equitable access to evidence informed instruction. So I chased the roles in schools that I knew had a strong literacy approach.

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The other thing that I did was I decided that if I was going to be able to continue to do that, because they really weren't at that point that many schools who were on the bus, I was going to have to become a school leader and make the change myself so that's what I did and that was an incredible experience and to be able to make change quickly is fantastic. The larger the school, the harder that is, and again, to be able to see the results of children with quite significant diagnoses, be able to reach, over time,  an age appropriate level of reading development is so incredibly rewarding.

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So I went from little schools to a big school, and once again, kids who had underperformed for such a long time were thriving with structured literacy, and  I felt very affirmed that the work we were doing was on the right track. I knew that I had the capacity to support those people in my school, but I wanted more. I wanted to effect more change and support others to be able to reach every child in Australia and beyond and so two years ago,  towards the end of 2020, we made a move, and I left school for the second time and moved into this work that I'm doing now.

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And to say that the last two years has been rewarding is an incredible understatement. The literally thousands of people who've engaged in my free trainings. We've had close to a thousand people participate in a 12 week teach along course, the interactions with people in the Facebook group. People who email me and who I meet at conferences and sharing best practices and comment on how much they're enjoying their teaching. All of that is so incredibly rewarding, and I feel truly blessed and privileged to be able to do the work I do now to support all of you.

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And this podcast is part of that. To give you a way to access,  support and information and guidance and connection because this podcast will not just be all about me, and from time to time, we'll have an expert come and visit.   We are going to have regular episodes called Inside the Classroom with real teachers who have been exactly where you are now. So that you could know that on the days when you think, oh my goodness, any moment now, someone's about to discover that I really don't know what I'm doing,  you can know that you are not alone, and I guarantee you that you are marking yourself in your reading instruction a lot harder than you need to be. The very fact that you are listening to this first episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast tells me that you are on the bus, and when you're on the bus, you're only looking to take the next step. That's the most important one.

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So through this podcast, I hope to extend the good work that we've done in the blog post. Sharing those simple, actionable, research informed strategies that help you and your students experience reading success. So check back in for the next episodes. Don't forget to rate and subscribe so that you never miss a thing.

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I look forward to bringing you future episodes on a range of topics. Not just for the early years but for the upper primary as well. We need to make sure that our upper primary colleagues are cared for and informed, and supported as they join us on the bus, and we bring those strong literacy practices to the whole of the primary school.

Thank you so much for listening as I shared a little bit about my journey. I really look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Bye.