Whole school approach to the teaching of literacy

WebPartZone1_1

PublishingPageContent

Whole School Approach to the Teaching of Literacy

At Balmoral State High School each teacher takes responsibility for the teaching of literacy. Explicit reading instruction is an embedded practice within Balmoral's instructional model for the teaching of reading and a vital component of each lesson.

Balmoral SHS's Whole School Reading Plan incorporates evidence-based reading strategies that have been evaluated by researchers within school settings, and found to be effective.

Teaching reading comprehension strategies involves teachers as expert readers consciously modelling and applying specific tools until these become automatic for students. Teachers often use metacognitive talk to model strategies and use questioning to encourage students to apply them. After the initial teaching, students need to practise the strategies in small groups, pairs or individually across the curriculum. Through this, pupils learn to plan, monitor and evaluate their own comprehension and/ or their own use of the comprehension strategies. This process supports a gradual release of responsibility to students, moving from teaching to guided practice to independent practice.

Screenshot 2026-05-27 110729.png

At Balmoral SHS, Tier 1 teaching practices have been structured around the three levels of text comprehension: Literal, Inferential and Interpretative. Explicit teaching of text comprehension at each of these levels ensures students develop the metacognitive skills that will assist them to be successful in both academic reading and reading for life.

Every lesson in Junior Secondary, provides the opportunity for teachers to incorporate the explicit teaching of these comprehension levels guided by the demands of the selected text and the curriculum. In this way, students are gradually released to become independent readers who are prepared for the rigour of the senior curriculum and beyond.

2026 Whole School Reading Plan

All Year 7 students complete DIBELS reading comprehension and fluency testing during Week 3 of Term 1. Follow up testing occurs in Terms 2 and 3.

There are two separate DIBELS tests:

ORF: a whole class test that takes approximately 5 minutes, and which will be delivered across all classes in Week 3, and
MAZE: an individual test taking 1 -2 minutes to be conducted from Week 3.
Testing results will be used in a number of ways:
Teachers will be able to check these results, to more fully understand student's individual levels of reading comprehension.
Testing results will enable students to be identified as either reading at age-appropriate levels or requiring additional support and/or further investigation.
Students have follow-up testing twice more across the year.

The guiding principles of our Whole School Reading Program are:

At grade level texts or higher are the best choice for most students as those are often the texts that students can't already read well (Shanahan, 2020). The purpose of explicitly teaching reading strategies is to guide students to make sense of a text that they cannot succeed with on their own and to develop their abilities to deal with such texts.
Comprehension strategies are explicitly taught to enable students to develop autonomy reading complex texts over time.
Texts need to be context based embedded in the unit, not unrelated pieces of reading
Consider the length of texts when selecting– texts that are too short offer little stretch, while too lengthy, may compete with other priorities in the lesson. Aim for between 10-20 minutes reading each lesson
To develop higher reading achievement, we need an evidence-based shift in mindset—encouraging and helping students to read, struggle, and ultimately comprehend more complex texts

Tier 1 - Universal Instruction

Students with test results indicating they are reading at Year/Age level will continue to be actively supported by their teachers through ongoing explicit teaching of the three levels of comprehension.

These levels, literal, inferential and interpretative, are not new, and have been successfully taught by many of our teachers to support academic reading. The Region's focus on reading means the school must demonstrate that these skills are being explicitly taught across all our classrooms.

The Tier 1 Whole School Reading Program is designed to meet these requirements. It is resourced with high yield, evidence-based strategies. In seeking not to overwhelm teachers, 2 or 3 strategies have been resourced as teaching strategies for each of the three comprehension levels. Unpacking these strategies will be incorporated in your Intentional Collaboration Meeting times throughout the year, providing context for your subject area.

These strategies are not exhaustive, and you may wish to include other research-based explicit teaching approaches. It is important that you provide unit-based texts each lesson (with the exception of practical lessons) to support your students to develop their self-efficacy in understanding complex texts. These texts may be online or taken directly from their text books.

Tier 2 - Targeted Support

Students whose testing results indicate they are reading below Year/Age level will continue to be actively supported by all teachers through the Tier 1 strategies implemented each lesson. Additionally, these students will attend structured small group sessions that focus primarily on literal and inferential reading strategies under the guidance of a trained Teacher Aide.

In order to be successful with the academic texts offered in their subjects, these same texts will be collated and used as reading material in these sessions. This strategy is known as pre or post reading and provides a second opportunity to engage with written content related to their units of study. These texts will be gathered across all core content areas.

The sessions will be timetabled at regular times with students absent for approximately 30 minutes of lessons.

Tier 3 - Intensive Support

Students requiring intensive support can be evaluated by the Speech Pathologist who attends our school three days per week in the ground floor of V Block.

Students may receive further testing, as required, with individualised programs of support developed by the Speech Pathologist and delivered by trained Teacher Aides. Much of this work involves using Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) which tracks the progression of grapheme-phoneme correspondences through dedicated reading texts and activities.

Students whose test results indicate they are reading well below Year/Age level will continue to be actively supported by all teachers through Tier 1 strategies. Additionally, these students will attend structured sessions, either in pairs or small groups, where a Teacher Aide will focus primarily on phonics, with additional literal and some inferential reading strategies.

These Teacher Aide sessions will be timetabled at regular times with students absent for approximately 30 minutes of lessons and levelled texts determined in conjunction with the Speech Pathologist.

Zena Carusi-Lees

Head of Pedagogy and Performance

WebPartZone1_2

WebPartZone2_1

WebPartZone2_2

WebPartZone2_3

WebPartZone3_1

WebPartZone3_2

WebPartZone3_3

WebPartZone3_4

WebPartZone4_1

WebPartZone5_1

WebPartZone5_2

WebPartZone6_1

WebPartZone6_2

WebPartZone7_1

WebPartZone7_2

WebPartZone8_1

WebPartZone8_2