Jo Tooley is an Education Officer (EO) at Toowoomba Catholic Schools Office (TCSO). She is coordinating the rollout of the Diocesan-wide project, Subject Discipline Literacy (SDL), to improve teacher efficacy in subject-specific literacies. The Lexis Education’s ‘3L: Language and Literacy for Learning’ course is being undertaken by every Secondary teacher as a pedagogical base for this implementation.
First, congratulations on your latest 2024 NAPLAN results, and thank you for accepting to share with us your journey implementing Lexis Education’s 3L course across the Diocese. Can you tell us a bit more about the broad context of the implementation that took place?
The context for implementation was a culmination of factors, including a need for an approach to literacy that moved beyond a focus on Reading Comprehension driven by NAPLAN and senior subject data. The previous focus on reading, whilst showing great success in our Primary context, was focussed only on teachers in subject-area English. As a result, this approach did not support the development of literacy pedagogy across all teachers in all subjects, leading to the inconsistent teaching of literacy within schools and across the system.
What was the biggest motivator for seeking an intervention like Lexis Education’s 3L?
The biggest motivator for seeking an intervention from a data perspective was our NAPLAN writing results. At the time, we had too many students falling into the ‘National Minimum Standard’ (NMS) category in their NAPLAN results, which, as a Catholic system, became a major concern from a Social Justice perspective. After discussion at a Principal and Teacher level, it became clear that the geography of our Diocese – with Secondary schools as far as Roma and Goondiwindi – it was clear TCSO solution that was equitable for all teachers, that could be delivered in-person in their context and worked towards the development of a metalanguage to support inter-school discussions.
Tell us more about your implementation strategy.
The implementation strategy was to train one coach per school to deliver the 3L training; this cost was sponsored by TCSO. Each coach was given a 0.2 release to support the training and follow-up pedagogical coaching required in each context. The in-school coaches were shadowed by an Education Officer for their initial training days, who had also been trained as 3L (Language and Literacy for Learning) tutors. In some contexts, the in-school coach and the EO shared the delivery of training to help model and support andragogical, versus pedagogical, processes. Over time, the in-person EO requirement has been metered by the school coach, to the point where EOs are not always required in the training room and take on more of a mentor role.
Any other specific tips for embedding it across multiple schools? Any lessons learnt?
The rollout has required digital supports, which have been developed across the Microsoft Suite of tools. All teachers complete their Between Module Activity (BMAs) and Between Module Reading (BMRs) reflections in OneNote, which is overseen by the Education Officer for the school and the in-school coach. The OneNote has been linked to a school-specific Microsoft Team, where all communications and sharing of resources are kept. In addition, a system-wide Viva Engage page has been embedded in each TEAMs page to act as a closed-container social media communication platform, specifically for celebrating achievements and sharing resources across schools.
How have teachers responded to the SDL program?
Like any change management process, there were initially mixed responses. Many teachers believed literacy teaching was the domain of the English Department and that there was no time in the busy curriculum to dedicate to explicitly teaching grammatical concepts. We have been very fortunate to have had a large cohort of early adopters who were very influential in their schools and championed the results of an explicit approach to literacy, regardless of their subject-specific context.
We have also been very mindful to work with each school to support an individual training pattern and schedule, which has been welcomed by staff and administrators. We are mindful of the change fatigue of our staff, so need to continue to be agile and ensure the program grows with each school but with a system lens.
What results have you seen so far?
We have seen some promising upward trends across our macro-data, particularly in writing, which has been excellent evidence of the efficacy of implementing a system-wide evidence-approached model. Now that we have over 50% of our teachers trained, we are looking forward to unpacking the growth data from the 2023 Year 7s to their 2025 Year 9 results. There were also some improvements in the External Exam marks in 2024, which will hopefully be replicated and improved upon in the 2025 data sets.
From an anecdotal perspective, it is clear from the evaluation forms collected at the end of 3L training that teachers are feeling valued and supported, which hopefully translates into changed mindsets and an embedding of practice.
What’s next for the Diocese?
Our next steps are to continue to create digital resources for our teachers and to collate some filmed illustrations of practice of literacy in action. We have already developed these for Register Continuum and Modality, with Genre and Unit Planning to follow later this year. We also are looking at training our school officers in elements of functional grammar to support teachers. Part of the school officer training will include the development of classroom resources for use with students who have been identified as needing 1:1 support. This work will happen in conjunction with our Inclusion Team to ensure that the resources support students who are working at a Primary level and aligns with our TCS Multi-Tiered Systems of Support model.
What would you say to any school leader considering an implementation of this pedagogy, and wondering whether 3L would be right for them?
The important considerations include the ability to invest time and money into the implementation that is required for success. Our initial rollout for training in 3L was envisioned as a three-year process, with five-years for SDL to be moving student data. I think talking to other schools and systems around their approach is useful, but ultimately, it is imperative that any change is seen as more than a quick fix for data, it is a change of mindsets and practice which takes time and a range of supports.
Thank you, Jo, for sharing these very useful insights.