December 20, 2025 • 15 mins
What is the Summer Series?
A collection of listener favourites from the Structured Literacy Podcast to get you prepared for 2026.
Today's Episode
In this week's episode of the Structured Literacy podcast, I address the common challenge of tracking student reading progress.
Has something in this episode resonated with you? Get in touch!
Are your students good readers, but poor spellers? If so, you are not alone. Spelling Success in Action addresses phonics, orthography, and morphology to give students a well-rounded understanding of how our language system works.
Find out how you can help your students move beyond guessing and memorisation at https://www.jocelynseamereducation.com/spelling2
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Youtube channel
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#jocelynseamereducation #literacy #bestpractice #earlyprimaryyears #primaryschool #primaryschools #primaryschoolteacher #earlyyearseducation #earlyyearseducator #structuredliteracy #scienceofreading #classroom #learning #learningisfun #studentsuccess #studentsupport #teacherlife #theresourceroom #theevergreenteacher #upperprimary #upperprimaryteacher #thestructuredliteracypodcast #phoneme #grapheme #phonics #syntheticphonics
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (02:31):
Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast,
the place where we talk allthings literacy and education.
I'm Jocelyn and I'm very pleasedto welcome you to this episode.
I tried to maintain a mix ofresearch driven information and
practical know-how in all that Ido, and the podcast is no
exception.
In today's episode, I'maddressing a question that comes
(02:53):
up frequently.
Without a benchmark assessment,how do we track student growth?
And how do I communicateeffectively with parents about
their child's development?
The other part of this pictureis how do I choose a text for
students to read if I don't havethe levels?
This episode coincides with therelease of a brand new tool that
(03:14):
I've developed to help younavigate understanding the
progression of skills andknowledge as students learn to
read, setting goals for reading,tracking growth, and
communicating all of this withparents, other members of your
team, and the studentsthemselves.
If you're a resource roommember, the live Mastermind held
the week that this episode airsin August 2024 provides
(03:36):
additional details and guidancearound reading development and
using this tool.
Of course, if you are listeningafter this date and are a
resource room member, therecording is available to you
along with the recordings of allother masterminds and courses
run inside the Resource Roommembership.
But the tool is available toeveryone, whether or not you are
a member.
You can find the download linkin the show notes of this
(03:59):
episode, season four, episodetwo.
Before we get to the tool thatI've created, let's talk about
reading assessment and how ourviews on reading development
have changed over time.
For the longest time we reliedon benchmark assessments from
leveled reading schemes to helpus assess and monitor student
growth.
The problem with theseassessments is that the levels
(04:21):
they assessed against didn'tactually mean what we thought
they did.
Now I'm not going to say thatthey were completely useless.
When I talk with teachers whoare making the move away from
benchmark assessment, they oftensay that they did get something
out of them.
They got to spend time withstudents one on one, and they
got to make observations aboutparticular reading behaviors
(04:42):
that they could use to setgoals.
And that is all very fair andvalid.
It makes perfect sense.
But benchmark assessments andthe levels they presented were,
and I'm sorry to put it likethis, they were made up.
There was no link to research,frameworks of reading
development, or establishedtheories at all.
If you or your team is workingthrough this particular issue
(05:03):
right now, have a listen toseason one episode seven of the
podcast, why it's so scary tolet go of benchmark assessment.
For many schools, the move frombenchmark assessment based on a
leveled reading scheme involvesan assessment based on a
decodable text series.
There are several around thatinvolve assessing
(05:24):
phonemographeme correspondences,word level blending, and text
level reading.
The text used align with thesequence of code and complexity
set out by the series.
These assessments are certainlya step up from the leveled text
benchmark assessment.
My concern though is that whilethe monitoring of
phonemegrapheme correspondencesand phonemic skills is wonderful
(05:47):
and definitely a step in theright direction, teachers are
still relying on a leveled textassessment of sorts to decide
what children will read.
Of course, the levels that comewith decodable text respond to
more up-to-date thinking aboutreading development and have a
phonics focus rather than asight word one.
But are teachers actuallybuilding understanding of the
(06:10):
full range of skills andknowledge developing readers
need to progress in theirlearning?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
I'm not saying that if yourschool is using one of those
assessment tools that you'redoing something wrong, so please
don't take it that way.
What I am saying is that we needto acknowledge the strengths and
limitations of all of the toolsthat we use.
(06:30):
The framework and tool that I'msharing with you today can be
one part of your decision-makingpicture, but it won't be the
only one.
For bigger picture assessmentand screening of risk, many
schools are making the move tonormed tools such as Dibbles and
Acadiens, and there are othersavailable as well.
These tools are not assessmentsas in the way we usually think
(06:51):
about assessments.
They don't measure what thestudent has learned and give you
a list.
As such, they also don't giveyou a level or a score.
They're screeners of risk.
So if a student's scores are inthe green zone, that doesn't
mean that they get a C in yearthree.
It means that if all goes welland progress continues at an
appropriate rate, the student'srisk of reading failure or
(07:13):
difficulty is low.
You might be wondering why I'dbother to create a framework and
accompanying tool for supportingstudents through reading
development at all when thereare already assessments and
screeners available.
The reason that I developed thiswas because the assessments and
screeners we currently haveavailable aren't nearly nuanced
enough, and beyond a few basicsof learn this code and learn to
(07:36):
blend, there isn't enoughspecific guidance for setting
goals and fully communicatingabout a student's growth through
reading.
I also developed the toolbecause time and again
conversations I was having withpeople included the question,
but how do we decide what theyread?
Many of us are also in thetricky space of not really
(07:56):
understanding when we can movestudents on from decodables.
Because we don't want to causeharm to students, we may then be
limiting their reading materialto decodables for far too long
and not helping them embraceless controlled text when they
would actually be perfectlycapable of managing them and
when their introduction willactually continue to develop
(08:18):
reading.
Let's run through this thingthat I've made and you can make
up your own mind about whetherit might add some value to your
practice.
Firstly, it's called FromPhonics to Uncontrolled Text, an
instructional framework formoving into, through, and past
decodable text.
This tool helps you to trackstudents' reading development,
set goals for next steps inlearning, communicate with
(08:40):
families and other team members,and build your understanding of
the research foundations aboutthe decisions we make about how
to effectively support studentreading development.
The document is completely freeand is organized in four
sections.
Section one provides a rationalefor the tool and guidance on how
to use it.
(09:01):
Section two is a one-pageoverview of a student's early
reading development, from firstlearning code to being able to
go to the library and justchoose texts of their choice.
The third section breaks downeach step in this journey and
provides a brief explanation ofwhy it's important and some
fundamental information based inresearch.
(09:22):
The final section of the tool isa full reference list with links
to open access papers andsources so that you can follow
up and evaluate what I've sharedfor yourself.
I won't unpack the whole toolfor you, you can download it and
have a good look, but I willprovide a quick overview so that
you can decide whether it'ssomething that might be useful
for you and your team.
The one-page overview isintended to be a simple record
(09:44):
that follows a student from thebeginning of school to the point
where they can read uncontrolledtext of their choice.
It's divided into three sectionswith checkpoint boxes at three
critical junctures.
There are 16 milestones listedthat relate to knowledge,
skills, and reading behaviors.
The idea is that as eachmilestone is reached, a box is
(10:05):
coloured in and dated.
This provides a wonderful visualfor school staff, students and
parents to be able to see wherea student is up to in their
journey and what specific goalsare being worked on to help them
reach the next checkpoint.
In developing the milestones oflearning to read, I used a
variety of sources including theHasbrook Tindle Fluency Norms,
(10:25):
the Australian CurriculumGeneral Capabilities, many
research papers, and thewritings of researchers and
experts in the field.
I haven't tried to reinvent anywheels with this tool or muddy
the waters of school leveldecision making.
Trying to align competingassessments and monitoring tools
is a recipe for disaster.
So I've avoided creating thissituation for you in a couple of
(10:48):
ways.
Firstly, the tool doesn't listparticular phonemographem
correspondences for students tolearn.
Your school's chosen phonicsprogram or approach will
determine that focus.
Instead, the code is discussedin general terms and you'll make
decisions about that learning asworks best considering the
programs you already have inplace.
Similarly, I haven't listedspecific high frequency words,
(11:11):
as the focus of this learningwill depend on many factors,
including your phonics programand the decodable text series
you're using.
You also won't find any gradelevels listed on the tool.
It's good to know whatreasonable expectations are for
reading development in eachgrade, but ultimately,
supporting students is aboutmeeting them where they're up
to.
(11:32):
If a student is in grade fiveand still learning core
phonemographing correspondences,that's the learning they need.
Similarly, if a student hasreached the end of year one and
he's reading an unseen picturebook or text at ninety words per
minute with minimal errors,well, they need extending.
Phonics and high frequency wordsare actually only a small part
of the picture when it comes toreading development.
(11:54):
Critical, but small.
What I've attempted to do hereis to provide the nuance of
understanding and reading skillsthat's missing from existing
tools.
To this end, the readingmilestones include things like
the student stops and rereadswhen comprehension breaks down.
That's the comprehensionmonitoring, which is necessary
if students are to read formeaning.
(12:16):
Another milestone is can soundout an unknown word and tidy up
mispronunciation withoutguessing.
That one is about set forvariability, a critical skill in
moving students on from fullydecodable texts.
Another one is attends topunctuation to support phrasing,
including commas.
This one is about prosody, thatthird element of fluency that we
(12:39):
know is important.
The way that I see this sittingis as an overarching guide to
reading development.
The one page overview would belike the cover page on a
student's reading file, withyour phonics and phonemic
awareness assessment sittingbehind it.
Stanislaster Hahn says that ittakes approximately three years
for a student to develop theability to automatically lift
(13:02):
words from the page, moving fromsounding out words to
automatically recognizing them.
Marianne Wolfe describes thischange as a student moving from
a skilled decoder to a strategicreader, and that journey of
being a strategic reader andbecoming that reader takes quite
a long time.
This tool covers the developmentfrom early reader to skilled
(13:25):
decoder and ends when a studentcan read an elementary text that
contains a range of sentencetypes, a larger number of high
frequency words, polysyllabicwords, a range of punctuation,
and the full alphabetic code at90 words per minute with minimal
errors.
This tool will not replace yourphonics monitoring, phonemic
awareness assessment, or normedscreener.
(13:47):
It simply gives you a bigpicture overview at the same
time as sharing more nuancedmilestones beyond phonics.
And when a parent asks you, howis my child developing in
reading?
How do I know that there isgrowth there?
You can whip this tool out andsay, well, here are the
milestones we're looking forSally to achieve.
Right now we're working oncomprehension monitoring.
(14:09):
So when things don't make sense,we have her stop, we want her to
recognize that to go back andreread.
We can be very specific aboutwhat we want parents doing with
students at home.
You can also use the documentsas the basis for professional
learning for your team.
Remember the third section is abrief outline of why each
milestone is important andcontains links to research.
(14:32):
You can spread the milestonesout over a year and tackle them
one by one as a team in shortchunks to build your knowledge
and capacity in making decisionsfor student learning.
Think about this.
If you did this, your team wouldbe highly knowledgeable about
early reading development bythis time next year without the
need to have days out of schoolor to overwhelm everyone.
(14:53):
It's important to know how touse our programs and resources
well.
But it's more important that weknow why we're doing what we're
doing.
It's only when we haveknowledge, are confident with
pedagogy, and know when to dowhat in response to student need
that we can really move theneedle on student outcomes in a
big way.
Programs are necessary, but wearen't going to get where we
(15:16):
want to go without buildingteacher knowledge to.
This episode has been a littledifferent from the usual fair,
but it might just have given yousome food for thought about how
we think about readingdevelopment, how we track it,
and how we set goals.
You can download from Phonics toUncontrolled Texts, a framework
for moving into, through, andpast decodable text from the
(15:36):
show notes of this episode atjosnseyucation.com.
And resource room members, ifyou're listening to this episode
on the morning it's released, besure to join me for the live
mastermind this afternoon, whereI unpack the rationale and
practical elements of using thetool.
If you're listening after thedate of release, well the
recording will be there waitingfor you.
(15:57):
Thanks so much for joining me.
I'll see you in the next episodeof the Structured Literacy
Podcast.
unknown (16:02):
Bye.
Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast,
the place where we talk allthings literacy and education.
I'm Jocelyn and I'm very pleasedto welcome you to this episode.
I tried to maintain a mix ofresearch driven information and
practical know-how in all that Ido, and the podcast is no
exception.
In today's episode, I'maddressing a question that comes
(02:53):
up frequently.
Without a benchmark assessment,how do we track student growth?
And how do I communicateeffectively with parents about
their child's development?
The other part of this pictureis how do I choose a text for
students to read if I don't havethe levels?
This episode coincides with therelease of a brand new tool that
(03:14):
I've developed to help younavigate understanding the
progression of skills andknowledge as students learn to
read, setting goals for reading,tracking growth, and
communicating all of this withparents, other members of your
team, and the studentsthemselves.
If you're a resource roommember, the live Mastermind held
the week that this episode airsin August 2024 provides
(03:36):
additional details and guidancearound reading development and
using this tool.
Of course, if you are listeningafter this date and are a
resource room member, therecording is available to you
along with the recordings of allother masterminds and courses
run inside the Resource Roommembership.
But the tool is available toeveryone, whether or not you are
a member.
You can find the download linkin the show notes of this
(03:59):
episode, season four, episodetwo.
Before we get to the tool thatI've created, let's talk about
reading assessment and how ourviews on reading development
have changed over time.
For the longest time we reliedon benchmark assessments from
leveled reading schemes to helpus assess and monitor student
growth.
The problem with theseassessments is that the levels
(04:21):
they assessed against didn'tactually mean what we thought
they did.
Now I'm not going to say thatthey were completely useless.
When I talk with teachers whoare making the move away from
benchmark assessment, they oftensay that they did get something
out of them.
They got to spend time withstudents one on one, and they
got to make observations aboutparticular reading behaviors
(04:42):
that they could use to setgoals.
And that is all very fair andvalid.
It makes perfect sense.
But benchmark assessments andthe levels they presented were,
and I'm sorry to put it likethis, they were made up.
There was no link to research,frameworks of reading
development, or establishedtheories at all.
If you or your team is workingthrough this particular issue
(05:03):
right now, have a listen toseason one episode seven of the
podcast, why it's so scary tolet go of benchmark assessment.
For many schools, the move frombenchmark assessment based on a
leveled reading scheme involvesan assessment based on a
decodable text series.
There are several around thatinvolve assessing
(05:24):
phonemographeme correspondences,word level blending, and text
level reading.
The text used align with thesequence of code and complexity
set out by the series.
These assessments are certainlya step up from the leveled text
benchmark assessment.
My concern though is that whilethe monitoring of
phonemegrapheme correspondencesand phonemic skills is wonderful
(05:47):
and definitely a step in theright direction, teachers are
still relying on a leveled textassessment of sorts to decide
what children will read.
Of course, the levels that comewith decodable text respond to
more up-to-date thinking aboutreading development and have a
phonics focus rather than asight word one.
But are teachers actuallybuilding understanding of the
(06:10):
full range of skills andknowledge developing readers
need to progress in theirlearning?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
I'm not saying that if yourschool is using one of those
assessment tools that you'redoing something wrong, so please
don't take it that way.
What I am saying is that we needto acknowledge the strengths and
limitations of all of the toolsthat we use.
(06:30):
The framework and tool that I'msharing with you today can be
one part of your decision-makingpicture, but it won't be the
only one.
For bigger picture assessmentand screening of risk, many
schools are making the move tonormed tools such as Dibbles and
Acadiens, and there are othersavailable as well.
These tools are not assessmentsas in the way we usually think
(06:51):
about assessments.
They don't measure what thestudent has learned and give you
a list.
As such, they also don't giveyou a level or a score.
They're screeners of risk.
So if a student's scores are inthe green zone, that doesn't
mean that they get a C in yearthree.
It means that if all goes welland progress continues at an
appropriate rate, the student'srisk of reading failure or
(07:13):
difficulty is low.
You might be wondering why I'dbother to create a framework and
accompanying tool for supportingstudents through reading
development at all when thereare already assessments and
screeners available.
The reason that I developed thiswas because the assessments and
screeners we currently haveavailable aren't nearly nuanced
enough, and beyond a few basicsof learn this code and learn to
(07:36):
blend, there isn't enoughspecific guidance for setting
goals and fully communicatingabout a student's growth through
reading.
I also developed the toolbecause time and again
conversations I was having withpeople included the question,
but how do we decide what theyread?
Many of us are also in thetricky space of not really
(07:56):
understanding when we can movestudents on from decodables.
Because we don't want to causeharm to students, we may then be
limiting their reading materialto decodables for far too long
and not helping them embraceless controlled text when they
would actually be perfectlycapable of managing them and
when their introduction willactually continue to develop
(08:18):
reading.
Let's run through this thingthat I've made and you can make
up your own mind about whetherit might add some value to your
practice.
Firstly, it's called FromPhonics to Uncontrolled Text, an
instructional framework formoving into, through, and past
decodable text.
This tool helps you to trackstudents' reading development,
set goals for next steps inlearning, communicate with
(08:40):
families and other team members,and build your understanding of
the research foundations aboutthe decisions we make about how
to effectively support studentreading development.
The document is completely freeand is organized in four
sections.
Section one provides a rationalefor the tool and guidance on how
to use it.
(09:01):
Section two is a one-pageoverview of a student's early
reading development, from firstlearning code to being able to
go to the library and justchoose texts of their choice.
The third section breaks downeach step in this journey and
provides a brief explanation ofwhy it's important and some
fundamental information based inresearch.
(09:22):
The final section of the tool isa full reference list with links
to open access papers andsources so that you can follow
up and evaluate what I've sharedfor yourself.
I won't unpack the whole toolfor you, you can download it and
have a good look, but I willprovide a quick overview so that
you can decide whether it'ssomething that might be useful
for you and your team.
The one-page overview isintended to be a simple record
(09:44):
that follows a student from thebeginning of school to the point
where they can read uncontrolledtext of their choice.
It's divided into three sectionswith checkpoint boxes at three
critical junctures.
There are 16 milestones listedthat relate to knowledge,
skills, and reading behaviors.
The idea is that as eachmilestone is reached, a box is
(10:05):
coloured in and dated.
This provides a wonderful visualfor school staff, students and
parents to be able to see wherea student is up to in their
journey and what specific goalsare being worked on to help them
reach the next checkpoint.
In developing the milestones oflearning to read, I used a
variety of sources including theHasbrook Tindle Fluency Norms,
(10:25):
the Australian CurriculumGeneral Capabilities, many
research papers, and thewritings of researchers and
experts in the field.
I haven't tried to reinvent anywheels with this tool or muddy
the waters of school leveldecision making.
Trying to align competingassessments and monitoring tools
is a recipe for disaster.
So I've avoided creating thissituation for you in a couple of
(10:48):
ways.
Firstly, the tool doesn't listparticular phonemographem
correspondences for students tolearn.
Your school's chosen phonicsprogram or approach will
determine that focus.
Instead, the code is discussedin general terms and you'll make
decisions about that learning asworks best considering the
programs you already have inplace.
Similarly, I haven't listedspecific high frequency words,
(11:11):
as the focus of this learningwill depend on many factors,
including your phonics programand the decodable text series
you're using.
You also won't find any gradelevels listed on the tool.
It's good to know whatreasonable expectations are for
reading development in eachgrade, but ultimately,
supporting students is aboutmeeting them where they're up
to.
(11:32):
If a student is in grade fiveand still learning core
phonemographing correspondences,that's the learning they need.
Similarly, if a student hasreached the end of year one and
he's reading an unseen picturebook or text at ninety words per
minute with minimal errors,well, they need extending.
Phonics and high frequency wordsare actually only a small part
of the picture when it comes toreading development.
(11:54):
Critical, but small.
What I've attempted to do hereis to provide the nuance of
understanding and reading skillsthat's missing from existing
tools.
To this end, the readingmilestones include things like
the student stops and rereadswhen comprehension breaks down.
That's the comprehensionmonitoring, which is necessary
if students are to read formeaning.
(12:16):
Another milestone is can soundout an unknown word and tidy up
mispronunciation withoutguessing.
That one is about set forvariability, a critical skill in
moving students on from fullydecodable texts.
Another one is attends topunctuation to support phrasing,
including commas.
This one is about prosody, thatthird element of fluency that we
(12:39):
know is important.
The way that I see this sittingis as an overarching guide to
reading development.
The one page overview would belike the cover page on a
student's reading file, withyour phonics and phonemic
awareness assessment sittingbehind it.
Stanislaster Hahn says that ittakes approximately three years
for a student to develop theability to automatically lift
(13:02):
words from the page, moving fromsounding out words to
automatically recognizing them.
Marianne Wolfe describes thischange as a student moving from
a skilled decoder to a strategicreader, and that journey of
being a strategic reader andbecoming that reader takes quite
a long time.
This tool covers the developmentfrom early reader to skilled
(13:25):
decoder and ends when a studentcan read an elementary text that
contains a range of sentencetypes, a larger number of high
frequency words, polysyllabicwords, a range of punctuation,
and the full alphabetic code at90 words per minute with minimal
errors.
This tool will not replace yourphonics monitoring, phonemic
awareness assessment, or normedscreener.
(13:47):
It simply gives you a bigpicture overview at the same
time as sharing more nuancedmilestones beyond phonics.
And when a parent asks you, howis my child developing in
reading?
How do I know that there isgrowth there?
You can whip this tool out andsay, well, here are the
milestones we're looking forSally to achieve.
Right now we're working oncomprehension monitoring.
(14:09):
So when things don't make sense,we have her stop, we want her to
recognize that to go back andreread.
We can be very specific aboutwhat we want parents doing with
students at home.
You can also use the documentsas the basis for professional
learning for your team.
Remember the third section is abrief outline of why each
milestone is important andcontains links to research.
(14:32):
You can spread the milestonesout over a year and tackle them
one by one as a team in shortchunks to build your knowledge
and capacity in making decisionsfor student learning.
Think about this.
If you did this, your team wouldbe highly knowledgeable about
early reading development bythis time next year without the
need to have days out of schoolor to overwhelm everyone.
(14:53):
It's important to know how touse our programs and resources
well.
But it's more important that weknow why we're doing what we're
doing.
It's only when we haveknowledge, are confident with
pedagogy, and know when to dowhat in response to student need
that we can really move theneedle on student outcomes in a
big way.
Programs are necessary, but wearen't going to get where we
(15:16):
want to go without buildingteacher knowledge to.
This episode has been a littledifferent from the usual fair,
but it might just have given yousome food for thought about how
we think about readingdevelopment, how we track it,
and how we set goals.
You can download from Phonics toUncontrolled Texts, a framework
for moving into, through, andpast decodable text from the
(15:36):
show notes of this episode atjosnseyucation.com.
And resource room members, ifyou're listening to this episode
on the morning it's released, besure to join me for the live
mastermind this afternoon, whereI unpack the rationale and
practical elements of using thetool.
If you're listening after thedate of release, well the
recording will be there waitingfor you.
(15:57):
Thanks so much for joining me.
I'll see you in the next episodeof the Structured Literacy
Podcast.
unknown (16:02):
Bye.
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