Oz Lit Teacher Blog

I’m currently reading a fabulous biography on the life, times and writing of Banjo Patterson. I loved Banjo’s poems as a child and was thrilled to nab...

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...

In my last blog post, I shared three fab new mentor texts that you can use to help teach persuasive writing. One question I received after posting tha...

I’m often asked about the best way to structure writing lessons/ units. E.g.:

• Should we base our writing units around genre? OR

• Should we ba...

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...

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...

It’s NAPLAN results time.

The time when teachers and leadership teams want to know how to improve their student data in the most efficient and effect...

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...

A ‘mentor text’ is the name given to any piece of text that can be held up as a strong example of effective writing. Mentor texts essentially help stu...

In part 1 of my series on teaching students about the all-important ‘show, don’t tell’ strategy in writing, I introduced a helpful tool to assist s...