My Teaching Progression

Where I Started

When I first began teaching intervention, my lessons were highly structured and focused almost entirely on remediating missing phonics knowledge. A typical lesson looked something like this:

• Handwriting / Alphabet practice

• Phoneme–grapheme correspondence

  • read

  • spell

  • read again

• Reading practice

• Write a single sentence

Assessment would identify missing spelling patterns, and I would explicitly teach those patterns before reassessing and repeating the cycle.

That approach absolutely worked. Students became much stronger decoders and spellers because instruction was systematic and explicit.

But over time, I realised something important.

Many students could accurately decode words yet still struggled with comprehension, vocabulary, writing, and understanding the increasingly complex language they encountered in the senior years.

Teaching students to read words wasn't enough. I wanted to teach them how language works.

Today: A Structured Literacy Framework

Everything still begins with a comprehensive assessment.

Baseline Assessment

Every student completes a detailed assessment battery that helps identify strengths and areas requiring explicit instruction.

This includes:

• Assessment of sounds

• Phonological awareness

• Encoding non-words

• Decoding non-words (including syllable types)

• Encoding real words

• Writing sample

• Oral reading fluency (speed, accuracy, and expression)

• Reading comprehension

• Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN)

• Auditory memory

Rather than relying on a single assessment, I build a profile of how each student processes spoken and written language. This allows instruction to be highly targeted from the very first lesson.

Stage 1: Build the Code

The first priority is always ensuring students have secure knowledge of the alphabetic code. Instruction focuses on:

• phonemes

• graphemes

• spelling patterns

• syllable types

• decoding

• encoding

Reading and spelling are always taught together because they rely on the same underlying knowledge.

Stage 2: Build the Meaning System

Once the major gaps in the code have been addressed, instruction expands into morphology. Students begin learning:

• the most common suffixes

• the most common prefixes

• high-frequency base morphemes

Importantly, morphology doesn't replace phonics. The two continue to be taught alongside one another, allowing students to connect sound, spelling, and meaning simultaneously.

This dramatically improves vocabulary growth, spelling, decoding, and comprehension.

Stage 3: Apply Learning Through Knowledge-Rich Texts

Every week, students read carefully designed texts that intentionally weave together everything they are learning. Each text is built around several layers.

The decoding layer

The week's phoneme, grapheme, spelling pattern, or morpheme appears repeatedly in meaningful contexts, providing the repetition needed for automaticity.

The vocabulary layer

Students encounter new academic vocabulary alongside explicit instruction in word meanings and morphology.

The knowledge layer

Rather than isolated passages, texts explore real-world topics such as ecosystems, inventors, history, science, or New Zealand wildlife.

This allows students to build background knowledge while simultaneously strengthening literacy.

The language layer

As students progress, texts gradually introduce increasingly sophisticated sentence structures and academic language without overwhelming cognitive load.

Instead of practising disconnected skills, students see how all of those skills work together inside authentic reading.

Stage 4: Move Reading Into Writing

Every reading lesson leads naturally into writing. Students don't simply answer comprehension questions. Instead, they use the knowledge they have just learned to communicate ideas through writing.

Writing tasks are carefully scaffolded to match each student's current stage of development. Early writers may focus on:

• who did what

• complete sentences

• punctuation

As students progress, instruction expands into:

• sequencing

• compare and contrast

• cause and effect

• explanation

• discussion

• classification

• analysis

The reading text becomes the knowledge source that reduces cognitive load, allowing students to focus on organising and expressing ideas rather than trying to invent content.

Stage 5: Develop Academic Language

Once students have a solid foundation in decoding, spelling, and morphology, instruction moves beyond words themselves. Students begin learning the language of learning. This includes explicit teaching of:

High-impact power verbs

Such as:

• explain

• analyse

• compare

• discuss

• describe

• classify

• predict

• evaluate

Students learn exactly what each verb is asking them to do and how to structure an appropriate response.

High-impact concept words

Students also explicitly learn abstract concepts that appear repeatedly across the curriculum, including ideas such as:

• context

• concept

• structure

• evidence

• process

• system

These are the words that often create hidden barriers in assessment tasks, particularly for older students.

By teaching them directly, students become far more confident when approaching classroom learning and assessments across multiple subjects.

How Everything Fits Together

The biggest change in my teaching has been recognising that literacy is much more than learning to read words. Today, every lesson deliberately integrates:

• decoding

• spelling

• handwriting

• morphology

• vocabulary

• background knowledge

• sentence structure

• reading fluency

• comprehension

• writing

• academic language

Rather than teaching these as separate subjects, they are woven together into one coherent learning experience. Students aren't just learning to decode. They are learning how language works.

And ultimately, that's what gives them the tools to become confident readers, writers, and thinkers across every area of the curriculum.