Oz Lit Teacher Blog

There’s a well-intentioned (but problematic) practice gaining ground in schools right now… 

It seems that in a well-meaning attempt to reduce the (ve...

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...

I’ve noticed a worrying phenomenon in classrooms lately: Whiteboards are becoming noticeboards.

You see, the white on these boards is disappearing in...

A few weeks ago I shared a blog post outlining 6 reasons every teacher should be using Turn and Talk in their literacy classrooms everyday. (Click her...

Many things have changed in the world of literacy instruction over the years, research has developed, new teaching approaches have emerged and some ol...

I once participated in an online course for business owners that taught me more about the principles of effective teaching than anything about busines...

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...

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...

Anchor charts are often referred to as the 'third teacher' in a classroom (the second teacher being the students themselves). So how hard is your thir...