What to do when Things Aren't Working: An Educator's Perspective

In this talk, I'll explain what we did in our school when we realised our approach to teaching literacy wasn't working. From that first realisation that we were being inconsistent in our approach and that we wanted to make things better for all our students, to the possibilities afforded to us by being part of a case study group working at the University of Iowa, this talk will cover how we researched different approaches, decided on Sounds-Write as our Speech to Print approach, ran a pilot project in a Tier 2 setting, and gradually implemented across the school. It hasn't been an easy ride, but the results speak for themselves: as teachers we saw amazing progress, and the students started to see themselves as readers and spellers for the first time.