RESEARCHER | TEACHER | instructional coach | Writer

THE NEW BOOK

cognitorium

/ kɔg•nə•toː•riː•əm /

noun, place of learning

Write to learn

There is no official partnership between Brandon Park Primary / Nathaniel Swain and The Writing Revolution® by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler. THE HOCHMAN METHOD®, THE WRITING REVOLUTION®, and ADVANCING THINKING THROUGH WRITING® are registered trademarks of The Writing Revolution, Inc. The materials in Write2Learn are created as classroom materials to accompany The Writing Revolution®’s methodology and progression of writing skills.

write to learn materials Can now be downloaded to trial in your school

An initiative of teachers at Brandon Park Primary School, Write to Learn (w2L) is a set of curriculum materials for the teaching of writing. It is inspired by methodologies recommended by The Writing Revolution® within an Australian curriculum context, and combines this with teaching approaches from Explicit Instruction.

Benefits of w2L

• Weekly units across every primary year level for the entire year

• Editable powerpoint and word document formats for you to adapt to suit your needs

• Get students learning FROM their writing: Embedding of curriculum content into writing lessons at sentence, paragraph, and text level

• Includes additional units on Story Grammar for explicit teaching of narrative genre, and advanced embedded clause units (e.g. V-ing, and V-ed clauses).

Read more here

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Striking Instagram feeds that now showcase teachers’ decorative endeavours don’t necessarily tell the full story, he suggests. “A lot of people look at those feeds and there’s a lot of beautiful classrooms and stunning spaces, and really interesting aesthetic things that are done. What those pictures don’t reflect is actually how the learning is working in those spaces...”

“It’s the quality of the learning taking place that really matters, he says. “I think what’s really pushing teachers all the time is, ‘How do I make sure my classroom doesn’t look tacky or boring?’ Or there’s pressure that there has to be stuff on the walls that teaches students, rather than the teacher being there to actually teach...”

EducationHQ and Australian Teacher Magazine have a very reasonable yearly subscription which I recommend for teachers to stay up-to-date for everything affecting Australian educators now.

Literacy as easy as A,B,C? Not in all Victorian schools

the age op-ed, February 18, 2022, By Nathaniel Swain

It is a reasonable assumption that schools will teach our kids to read and write proficiently. But data from national and international assessments reveal a large and persistent group of underperforming Australian students, many of whom are functionally illiterate. So, how well are most schools teaching the foundations of literacy?

Time-poor teachers struggling to prepare effective lessons for students

Sydney Morning Herald Interview, January 31, 2022, By Lisa Visentin

Nathaniel Swain, a teacher at Brandon Park Primary in Melbourne, said he’d noticed an increase in recent years in the scope of teachers’ responsibilities and the number of administrative tasks they were required to do, with the stress driving some out of the profession. He said his school was in the process of implementing a plan to tackle burnout by creating shared resources and curriculum materials, which would be ready by the end of the year.

Minister signals curriculum changes

Sydney Morning Herald Interview, February 5, 2022, By Jordan Baker and Adam Carey

The proposed national curriculum also reinforces the primacy of phonics in teaching young primary school students to read, a development that could place pressure on Victoria to follow NSW’s recent cue and move away from its dominant method of balanced literacy.

Nathaniel Swain, a speech pathologist and primary school teacher at Brandon Park Primary in Melbourne’s south-east, said the current Victorian curriculum has “mixed messages around how we want early readers to decipher text. They have phonics in there, and they have some of the foundations in there, but they have a whole lot of other stuff thrown in there as well,” Dr Swain said.

Brandon Park diverges from the Victorian curriculum in that it emphasises synthetic phonics – which teaches children the 44 sounds in the English language and the letter combinations that make them – over balanced literacy, where students are taught to memorise whole words and learn phonics while reading stories.

Experts urge review of masks in four weeks amid fears students can’t hear

Sydney Morning Herald Interview, February 1, 2022, By Jordan Baker

Nathaniel Swain, a teacher and speech pathologist, said he struggled to hear quieter students when they wore masks. “Quieter kids will also tend to hide behind the mask and not want to speak up and find it difficult and muffled,” he said.

“Students with [English as second language] backgrounds are not as expressive as they might have been without the masks on.” Some struggle to understand. “They need to see the face and the mouth and piece that together with the acoustic information,” he said.

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