December 13, 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, I share some of my secrets for writing and teaching text-based units that will engage all your students in learning age-appropriate content.
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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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (02:31):
Hi there.
It's terrific to welcome youback to the Structured Literacy
Podcast.
I know that you have manychoices when it comes to podcast
listening, and I don't take thetime you spend with me for
granted.
I want to say a big thank you tothose people who've reached out
to let me know that they findthe podcast helpful.
It's exactly what I hoped forwhen I started it.
I also want to remind you thatyou can find the complete
(02:53):
transcript of each episode aswell as any freebie downloads
and a bunch of information atJocelynSeamereducation.com.
Last week I spent a week inPerth working with a fabulous
school and also delivering mynew workshop, Building the
Foundations for Your UpperPrimary Literacy Block.
I plan to deliver this workshopall around Australia throughout
(03:14):
the rest of 2023 and 2024, sokeep your eyes peeled for dates
in your state or city.
In the last episode of theStructured Literacy Podcast, I
discussed creating a connectedliteracy block where reading and
writing outcomes are addressedat the same time and rich text
is used to provide context forthis learning.
(03:34):
In this episode, I'd like toshare some of my secrets for
writing and teaching text-basedunits that will have all of your
students actively engaged inlearning age-appropriate
content.
To understand why we recommendso much time to be spent on a
text-based unit across allgrades, we need to first address
some of the common practicesthat it's probably time to
(03:57):
rethink.
The first of these is guidedreading.
Guided reading has been astalwart of many classrooms and
has traditionally involvedworking with students in small
groups using a level text from aguided reading scheme or
program.
During these small grouplessons, students were led
through decoding the text usingusually multi-queuing methods
(04:18):
such as looking at the firstletter in pictures to sound out
words or lift words from thepage, as well as being taught
comprehension strategies orskills.
While the teacher worked in asmall group, the other students
worked at stations designed toreinforce or consolidate
learning, such as handwriting,phonics and sight words, and in
older grades,comprehension-focused tasks.
(04:40):
There are several problems withthis approach, aside from the
fact that multi-keuing is notgrounded in research evidence.
Firstly, we know that studentsdo best in adult-led learning.
Without an adult to directattention, we have no way of
knowing who is thinking aboutwhat, and we have all seen what
happens when we leave studentsto their own devices,
(05:00):
particularly in the early years.
Disruption, noise, and franklychaos can detract from even the
best small group lesson that'sbeing run.
The capacity to fullyconcentrate on your own doesn't
develop properly until the lateteen years.
You'll find information aboutthat in Stanislas Dahan's book,
How We Learn.
(05:20):
So asking students to beself-directed in learning
doesn't really work that well,apart from those small number of
students who find learning supereasy.
However, even for thosestudents, self-managed learning
is never going to be aseffective as adult-led lessons.
The second reason that guidedreading practices were not that
effective was that they taughtcomprehension in a way that does
(05:43):
not reflect evidence.
We would focus on teachingstudents to infer, to find the
main idea, or make connectionsas if these were skills that
could be transferred from onetext to another.
We would also teach thesestrategies or skills every
single year for large amounts oftime.
Teaching in this way simply doesnot reflect how comprehension
(06:06):
works.
In order for students to be ableto infer, they need to have a
well-developed vocabulary andhave domain-specific knowledge
that's required to understandwhat's happening in the text
they're reading.
All the strategy work in theworld, without building
vocabulary and backgroundknowledge, won't help students
develop comprehension.
If we don't know what wordsmean, we can't understand the
(06:29):
text that they are included in.
The other part of that is theamount of time that we've
devoted to the development ofthese strategies or skills.
The research indicates that inshort doses, in small amounts,
in the early years that theyhave an effect, but that that
effect drops off remarkably theolder and more experienced the
students get.
So when we're thinking aboutstrategies, let's think about
(06:52):
them not as skills to be taught,but as cognitive processes that
we help students engage with aswe read a rich text.
We put them to work, we don'tteach them.
The final reason that guidedreading practices drop the ball
is that the whole idea ofleveling is flawed.
We have been led to believe thatif we support students' reading
(07:14):
development by finding a levelthe student is up to and then
giving them a book to read thatmatches the level, we're going
to be doing them a service.
There is zero evidence for thispractice.
The only time we need to match atext to a student's point of
development is when they're inthe early stages, and the text
needs to reflect thephonemographeme correspondences
(07:37):
that the students have beentaught.
Students reach a point wherethings can be less decodable,
where they can have thingsshared with them that don't
contain every single thing thatthey've been taught, and they're
just fine.
So once children can decode, weneed to be moving on.
There is some researchsuggesting that being supported
to read books that are a littlebit too hard for you, that
(07:58):
stretch you, is what leads tothe strongest reading outcomes.
That is, once decoding's beenestablished.
What I do have to say thoughthat we need to carefully
consider text students read asthey're building knowledge of
code and phonemic skills.
But once that's done, keepingthem confined to text that don't
stretch them doesn't serve them.
This brings me to the point ofthis episode, a text-based unit.
(08:21):
When we write text-based units,we actively seek to address the
issues that guided readingpresented.
We teach them whole class sothat there is zero loss of
instructional time.
We build background knowledge,actively teach vocabulary, and
ensure that the chosen texts arerich in vocab concepts and
language features.
We love choosing archaic orolder texts for upper primary,
(08:44):
and when we write our ownstories, as with the case of the
three little pigs, we purposelyinclude rich language such as
the three little pigs livesplendid lives until the day the
wolf came knocking.
The average children's bookcontains more complex language
than an adult television show.
And for this reason, children'sbooks are an excellent stimulus
(09:04):
for language and literacylearning.
But be careful, not all booksare created equal.
Many of us work under theimpression that comprehension
can't develop unless thestudents are lifting the words
from the page themselves.
In the early years, this hastied students' comprehension
work to simple, leveled textsthat don't stretch them at all.
In contrast, text-based unitsare rich and see the teacher as
(09:28):
the decoder while the studentsdo the thinking.
We read the text aloud so thatstudents can grow knowledge and
skills.
In years three to six, I thinkthe picture books have a place,
but it's a much more effectiveapproach to have each student
with a copy of a text in frontof them where they share in
lifting words from the page.
This could take the form of ashort story, a poem, or a novel,
(09:50):
but each student has access tothe text.
The reading can take the form ofa combination of teacher read,
partner read, and individuallyread sections.
Adjustment can be supported toensure that students with
reading difficulty can engagewith the age-appropriate text
too.
When it comes to planning andlearning opportunities, I think
a little differently about thisthan we did in the past.
(10:13):
The first way I encourage you tothink differently is to
recognize that the term mentortext has some limitations.
Saying that we use mentor textimplies that the student's
writing at the end of the unitwill reflect the genre of the
thing that you are teaching.
That means that if we're readinga fiction text, the writing has
to be fiction.
And on the flip side, if we wantstudents to write non-fiction,
(10:34):
the main text has to benon-fiction.
This is simply not the case.
This mindset has also led to anoveremphasis of fiction writing
in upper primary years.
Now, this is purely my opinion,so you take it as you like, but
I think that we do our studentsa disservice when we don't give
them enough time learning towrite non-fiction texts in years
(10:55):
three to six.
After all, writing aboutthinking and learning is the
thing that's going to set themup for success in secondary and
tertiary education.
It's also the writing that willhelp them get and keep a job as
adults.
If you take nothing else awayfrom this episode other than
that, then I'm happy.
My key message here is that thegenre of the writing in a unit
(11:16):
does not have to match the genreof the writing in the stimulus
text.
For example, our text-based unitin the resource room on The
Velveteen Rabbit has a focus oncharacters and character
development.
The recommended summative tasksask students to write about the
development of the VelveteenRabbit throughout the text.
We read a fiction text andproduce a non-fiction piece of
(11:38):
writing.
But we don't just throw thesummative task at the students.
This brings us to my next keypoint about writing robust
units.
We need to gently lead studentsto build their skills and
knowledge gradually, giving themloads of practice of what they
need to know and do in order tobe successful in the final task.
Traditionally, the writingprocess has been an I do, we do,
(12:00):
you do, perhaps across three orfour lessons, with not a lot of
time to develop skills andunderstanding.
In our approach, the we do bitlasts for at least a couple of
weeks and actively supportstudents to apply their learning
in increasingly more complexwriting situations.
For example, we might explicitlyteach students about adjectives.
(12:22):
We then have them identifyadjectives in the stimulus text
and practice writing them atsentence level.
Then we take this and build onit by increasing the amount of
writing that's expected untilfinally, after many
opportunities for practice andonce we've ensured that they
have a solid understanding ofthe text we've been reading, we
ask them to produce a piece ofwriting that constitutes a full
(12:44):
text of their own.
This process might sound reallyfamiliar, and I certainly didn't
develop the explicit teachingmodel.
But there is great value inextending this process across
four or five weeks because it'stime and practice that leads to
proficient comprehension andwriting, and a great text-based
unit takes care of both.
(13:05):
The other way that ourtext-based units are different
from others is that we have alimited number of goals for each
unit.
While students will have a rangeof experiences throughout the
unit, there are three main goalsthat we focus on and explicitly
assess.
One text-level goal, onesentence level goal, and one
word level goal.
If you're thinking that thissounds super simple, you're
(13:27):
right.
The impact of this targetedapproach to goal setting is that
students have oodles of practicewith each goal and are therefore
in a really strong position towrite with detail and depth at
the end of the unit.
It's perfectly understandablethat you might like this idea
while being worried about it atthe same time.
After all, most of us spend ourtime worried we aren't doing
(13:50):
enough.
However, I want to encourage youto adopt this paired back
approach to planning.
What this does is enables you togo an inch wide and a mile deep
in your planning instead of aninch deep and a mile wide.
When we fill our units with waytoo many goals, it's like we're
dragging the kids behind a horseby a rope.
They might physically reach thedestination at the same time as
(14:14):
us, but they aren't keeping up.
We know that repetition,rehearsal, and retrieval are the
keys to long-term learning, withlearning being that permanent
change in long-term memory.
Having really busy units simplydoesn't leave us with sufficient
time for that to happen.
We're then in the position ofgetting to the end of the unit,
and students simply not beingable to remember what we've
(14:36):
taught or complete a largertask, leaving us in the position
of having to feed the task tothe students so much that it's
really no longer their work andwe can't call it independent.
Text-based units are a great wayto help students develop skills
and knowledge at the top of therope.
That is, to develop the languageand literature components of
(14:57):
literacy.
Keeping things simple, applyingthe explicit teaching model
across the whole unit as well aswithin individual lessons, and
providing loads of practice thatsets students up for success
means that you'll be able tohelp your students understand
text and write with confidence.
If you're interested inaccessing our text-based units
(15:17):
that are ready to go, all therefor you, freeing up your
preparation time and feelinglike a pro, join us in the
resource room community byvisiting
JocelynSeymereducation.com.
If you're interested in learningmore about how to write your own
units, we have a course calledWriting Success Inside the
Evergreen Teacher Membership,which you can also find out
about on our website.
(15:38):
Thank you so much for joining mein this episode of the
Structured Literacy Podcast.
I'll see you next time.
unknown (15:42):
Bye.
Hi there.
It's terrific to welcome youback to the Structured Literacy
Podcast.
I know that you have manychoices when it comes to podcast
listening, and I don't take thetime you spend with me for
granted.
I want to say a big thank you tothose people who've reached out
to let me know that they findthe podcast helpful.
It's exactly what I hoped forwhen I started it.
I also want to remind you thatyou can find the complete
(02:53):
transcript of each episode aswell as any freebie downloads
and a bunch of information atJocelynSeamereducation.com.
Last week I spent a week inPerth working with a fabulous
school and also delivering mynew workshop, Building the
Foundations for Your UpperPrimary Literacy Block.
I plan to deliver this workshopall around Australia throughout
(03:14):
the rest of 2023 and 2024, sokeep your eyes peeled for dates
in your state or city.
In the last episode of theStructured Literacy Podcast, I
discussed creating a connectedliteracy block where reading and
writing outcomes are addressedat the same time and rich text
is used to provide context forthis learning.
(03:34):
In this episode, I'd like toshare some of my secrets for
writing and teaching text-basedunits that will have all of your
students actively engaged inlearning age-appropriate
content.
To understand why we recommendso much time to be spent on a
text-based unit across allgrades, we need to first address
some of the common practicesthat it's probably time to
(03:57):
rethink.
The first of these is guidedreading.
Guided reading has been astalwart of many classrooms and
has traditionally involvedworking with students in small
groups using a level text from aguided reading scheme or
program.
During these small grouplessons, students were led
through decoding the text usingusually multi-queuing methods
(04:18):
such as looking at the firstletter in pictures to sound out
words or lift words from thepage, as well as being taught
comprehension strategies orskills.
While the teacher worked in asmall group, the other students
worked at stations designed toreinforce or consolidate
learning, such as handwriting,phonics and sight words, and in
older grades,comprehension-focused tasks.
(04:40):
There are several problems withthis approach, aside from the
fact that multi-keuing is notgrounded in research evidence.
Firstly, we know that studentsdo best in adult-led learning.
Without an adult to directattention, we have no way of
knowing who is thinking aboutwhat, and we have all seen what
happens when we leave studentsto their own devices,
(05:00):
particularly in the early years.
Disruption, noise, and franklychaos can detract from even the
best small group lesson that'sbeing run.
The capacity to fullyconcentrate on your own doesn't
develop properly until the lateteen years.
You'll find information aboutthat in Stanislas Dahan's book,
How We Learn.
(05:20):
So asking students to beself-directed in learning
doesn't really work that well,apart from those small number of
students who find learning supereasy.
However, even for thosestudents, self-managed learning
is never going to be aseffective as adult-led lessons.
The second reason that guidedreading practices were not that
effective was that they taughtcomprehension in a way that does
(05:43):
not reflect evidence.
We would focus on teachingstudents to infer, to find the
main idea, or make connectionsas if these were skills that
could be transferred from onetext to another.
We would also teach thesestrategies or skills every
single year for large amounts oftime.
Teaching in this way simply doesnot reflect how comprehension
(06:06):
works.
In order for students to be ableto infer, they need to have a
well-developed vocabulary andhave domain-specific knowledge
that's required to understandwhat's happening in the text
they're reading.
All the strategy work in theworld, without building
vocabulary and backgroundknowledge, won't help students
develop comprehension.
If we don't know what wordsmean, we can't understand the
(06:29):
text that they are included in.
The other part of that is theamount of time that we've
devoted to the development ofthese strategies or skills.
The research indicates that inshort doses, in small amounts,
in the early years that theyhave an effect, but that that
effect drops off remarkably theolder and more experienced the
students get.
So when we're thinking aboutstrategies, let's think about
(06:52):
them not as skills to be taught,but as cognitive processes that
we help students engage with aswe read a rich text.
We put them to work, we don'tteach them.
The final reason that guidedreading practices drop the ball
is that the whole idea ofleveling is flawed.
We have been led to believe thatif we support students' reading
(07:14):
development by finding a levelthe student is up to and then
giving them a book to read thatmatches the level, we're going
to be doing them a service.
There is zero evidence for thispractice.
The only time we need to match atext to a student's point of
development is when they're inthe early stages, and the text
needs to reflect thephonemographeme correspondences
(07:37):
that the students have beentaught.
Students reach a point wherethings can be less decodable,
where they can have thingsshared with them that don't
contain every single thing thatthey've been taught, and they're
just fine.
So once children can decode, weneed to be moving on.
There is some researchsuggesting that being supported
to read books that are a littlebit too hard for you, that
(07:58):
stretch you, is what leads tothe strongest reading outcomes.
That is, once decoding's beenestablished.
What I do have to say thoughthat we need to carefully
consider text students read asthey're building knowledge of
code and phonemic skills.
But once that's done, keepingthem confined to text that don't
stretch them doesn't serve them.
This brings me to the point ofthis episode, a text-based unit.
(08:21):
When we write text-based units,we actively seek to address the
issues that guided readingpresented.
We teach them whole class sothat there is zero loss of
instructional time.
We build background knowledge,actively teach vocabulary, and
ensure that the chosen texts arerich in vocab concepts and
language features.
We love choosing archaic orolder texts for upper primary,
(08:44):
and when we write our ownstories, as with the case of the
three little pigs, we purposelyinclude rich language such as
the three little pigs livesplendid lives until the day the
wolf came knocking.
The average children's bookcontains more complex language
than an adult television show.
And for this reason, children'sbooks are an excellent stimulus
(09:04):
for language and literacylearning.
But be careful, not all booksare created equal.
Many of us work under theimpression that comprehension
can't develop unless thestudents are lifting the words
from the page themselves.
In the early years, this hastied students' comprehension
work to simple, leveled textsthat don't stretch them at all.
In contrast, text-based unitsare rich and see the teacher as
(09:28):
the decoder while the studentsdo the thinking.
We read the text aloud so thatstudents can grow knowledge and
skills.
In years three to six, I thinkthe picture books have a place,
but it's a much more effectiveapproach to have each student
with a copy of a text in frontof them where they share in
lifting words from the page.
This could take the form of ashort story, a poem, or a novel,
(09:50):
but each student has access tothe text.
The reading can take the form ofa combination of teacher read,
partner read, and individuallyread sections.
Adjustment can be supported toensure that students with
reading difficulty can engagewith the age-appropriate text
too.
When it comes to planning andlearning opportunities, I think
a little differently about thisthan we did in the past.
(10:13):
The first way I encourage you tothink differently is to
recognize that the term mentortext has some limitations.
Saying that we use mentor textimplies that the student's
writing at the end of the unitwill reflect the genre of the
thing that you are teaching.
That means that if we're readinga fiction text, the writing has
to be fiction.
And on the flip side, if we wantstudents to write non-fiction,
(10:34):
the main text has to benon-fiction.
This is simply not the case.
This mindset has also led to anoveremphasis of fiction writing
in upper primary years.
Now, this is purely my opinion,so you take it as you like, but
I think that we do our studentsa disservice when we don't give
them enough time learning towrite non-fiction texts in years
(10:55):
three to six.
After all, writing aboutthinking and learning is the
thing that's going to set themup for success in secondary and
tertiary education.
It's also the writing that willhelp them get and keep a job as
adults.
If you take nothing else awayfrom this episode other than
that, then I'm happy.
My key message here is that thegenre of the writing in a unit
(11:16):
does not have to match the genreof the writing in the stimulus
text.
For example, our text-based unitin the resource room on The
Velveteen Rabbit has a focus oncharacters and character
development.
The recommended summative tasksask students to write about the
development of the VelveteenRabbit throughout the text.
We read a fiction text andproduce a non-fiction piece of
(11:38):
writing.
But we don't just throw thesummative task at the students.
This brings us to my next keypoint about writing robust
units.
We need to gently lead studentsto build their skills and
knowledge gradually, giving themloads of practice of what they
need to know and do in order tobe successful in the final task.
Traditionally, the writingprocess has been an I do, we do,
(12:00):
you do, perhaps across three orfour lessons, with not a lot of
time to develop skills andunderstanding.
In our approach, the we do bitlasts for at least a couple of
weeks and actively supportstudents to apply their learning
in increasingly more complexwriting situations.
For example, we might explicitlyteach students about adjectives.
(12:22):
We then have them identifyadjectives in the stimulus text
and practice writing them atsentence level.
Then we take this and build onit by increasing the amount of
writing that's expected untilfinally, after many
opportunities for practice andonce we've ensured that they
have a solid understanding ofthe text we've been reading, we
ask them to produce a piece ofwriting that constitutes a full
(12:44):
text of their own.
This process might sound reallyfamiliar, and I certainly didn't
develop the explicit teachingmodel.
But there is great value inextending this process across
four or five weeks because it'stime and practice that leads to
proficient comprehension andwriting, and a great text-based
unit takes care of both.
(13:05):
The other way that ourtext-based units are different
from others is that we have alimited number of goals for each
unit.
While students will have a rangeof experiences throughout the
unit, there are three main goalsthat we focus on and explicitly
assess.
One text-level goal, onesentence level goal, and one
word level goal.
If you're thinking that thissounds super simple, you're
(13:27):
right.
The impact of this targetedapproach to goal setting is that
students have oodles of practicewith each goal and are therefore
in a really strong position towrite with detail and depth at
the end of the unit.
It's perfectly understandablethat you might like this idea
while being worried about it atthe same time.
After all, most of us spend ourtime worried we aren't doing
(13:50):
enough.
However, I want to encourage youto adopt this paired back
approach to planning.
What this does is enables you togo an inch wide and a mile deep
in your planning instead of aninch deep and a mile wide.
When we fill our units with waytoo many goals, it's like we're
dragging the kids behind a horseby a rope.
They might physically reach thedestination at the same time as
(14:14):
us, but they aren't keeping up.
We know that repetition,rehearsal, and retrieval are the
keys to long-term learning, withlearning being that permanent
change in long-term memory.
Having really busy units simplydoesn't leave us with sufficient
time for that to happen.
We're then in the position ofgetting to the end of the unit,
and students simply not beingable to remember what we've
(14:36):
taught or complete a largertask, leaving us in the position
of having to feed the task tothe students so much that it's
really no longer their work andwe can't call it independent.
Text-based units are a great wayto help students develop skills
and knowledge at the top of therope.
That is, to develop the languageand literature components of
(14:57):
literacy.
Keeping things simple, applyingthe explicit teaching model
across the whole unit as well aswithin individual lessons, and
providing loads of practice thatsets students up for success
means that you'll be able tohelp your students understand
text and write with confidence.
If you're interested inaccessing our text-based units
(15:17):
that are ready to go, all therefor you, freeing up your
preparation time and feelinglike a pro, join us in the
resource room community byvisiting
JocelynSeymereducation.com.
If you're interested in learningmore about how to write your own
units, we have a course calledWriting Success Inside the
Evergreen Teacher Membership,which you can also find out
about on our website.
(15:38):
Thank you so much for joining mein this episode of the
Structured Literacy Podcast.
I'll see you next time.
unknown (15:42):
Bye.
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