Oz Lit Teacher Blog

The Teaching Stocktake: How to Reduce Learning Shrinkage Mar 02, 2025

I’ve noticed a worrying trend in schools lately… 

With all the pressure to ‘catch kids up’, ‘prepare for the NAPLAN’, and ensure they’re ‘implementin...

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The Problem With Writing Assessments Sep 08, 2024

In a previous blog post I talked about the benefits of using cold writes to diagnose student needs (in the same way pre-tests are used in the maths cl...

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What Is Dyslexia? A Guide For Educators (Part 2) Oct 15, 2023

In my last blog, I shared some of the latest information available to teachers about dyslexia. (Click here to read the previous blog).

Dyslexia is ...

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5 Steps To Improving Your School's NAPLAN Writing Data Aug 11, 2023

The NAPLAN data is out and ‘paralysis-by-item-analysis’ has begun.

I remember the days of looking at item analysis spreadsheets with hundreds of colu...

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3 Reasons You Should Use Cold Writes In The Writing Classroom Jul 09, 2023

A ‘cold write’ is a piece of writing students do in a genre before they’ve had any explicit instruction in that genre.  

Cold writes are usually admi...

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How To Prepare Students For the NAPLAN Writing Assessment Feb 05, 2023

With NAPLAN just around the corner, I've been thinking about how teachers could best use these next 5 weeks to strengthen their students’ writing skil...

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How Do The 6+1 Traits Align To NAPLAN? May 01, 2022

A question I'm always asked when teachers are learning about the 6+1 writing traits is, 'will teaching my students about the traits improve their

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How To Structure Reading Conferences Feb 20, 2022

In my recent blog post on effective writing conferences, I discussed the idea of stripping these now complex meetings back to their original roots...

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5 Tips For Effective Writing Conferences Feb 06, 2022

I’m often asked for tips on how to engage in effective writing conferences with students.

Conferring with writers can feel a bit overwhelmin...

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Admiring Your Students’ Writing- The What, Why And How Nov 07, 2021

The admiring lens is an incredibly powerful tool to use in the writing classroom. The thing is, us teachers need to be constantly reminded of its

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