Leah Myers Consulting - LMC

I adore teachers. I am one. I work with them every day.

But student outcomes must come before adult comfort.

If our instructional choices are not improving literacy and numeracy outcomes, we have a professional responsibility to question them, to analyse them, and to change them if needs be. Even when and if this feels uncomfortable.

Education should be guided by evidence & student data, not ideology, nostalgia, adult preference or “but it’s how we’ve always done it.”

Weekend recounts were a staple in many classrooms, but when we better understand the subskills required for writing development, we can make more instructionally precise choices about how we use precious literacy time.

In the same way strong readers are not built simply by being near good books, strong writers are not built by just writing more.

Learning to write is also far more cognitively demanding than learning to read. Before students are expected to write independently, they need explicit instruction in the foundational subskills that make writing possible: transcription, spelling, sentence construction, syntax, and knowledge.

If writing instruction is an area you are exploring, I highly recommend looking into The Writing Revolution, Natalie Wexler’s work on the knowledge gap, and AERO’s growing writing suite. Together, these resources offer a far stronger foundation for supporting all students to become capable, confident writers.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions about these!
Got any you would you add? 👀

👀 Over the weekend, I read the kind of blog that has you punching the air in agreement. Beyond Belief: Reframing Teaching as a Science Based Profession by Jim Hewitt and Nidhi Sachdeva captures something that sits at the heart of so many issues in education.

🥲 We are one of the only professions where belief is often positioned alongside, or even above, evidence when it comes to decision making. And that creates real problems for equity.

⚖️ When instruction is driven by preference or what feels right, we end up with huge variability between classrooms. Two students in the same school can receive completely different instruction, not because of need, but because of belief. That is not equitable.

📝 The blog makes a compelling case for shifting towards evidence informed practice. Not to remove the human side of teaching, but to ensure that what we do is grounded in what actually works.

👩‍💻The schools I work with have already begun this shift. They are aligning practice, building consistency across classrooms, and that is where you start to see real change in outcomes.

🔗 Blog link is in my linktree

Today, I joined over 35,000 Victorian public school teachers and educators in their walk to the steps of Parliament to request better pay. While I’m not a department employee anymore, I spent over a decade of my life in the public education system and I will always stand in solidarity with all educators.

Victorian teachers are the worst paid teachers in this country. We drive around in cars that say “The Education State”, but last year? The Labor government reneged on funding they promised to public schools.

I have worked across every sector (Catholic, Independent, and public) and lemme tell you, our public system is absolutely fried. It’s full of amazing, dedicated but EXHAUSTED people doing their darn best for the students they adore on next to no money. The teachers and the students deserve better.

Last night I was reading a paper published by UNICEF that explains that for a rich country, Australia has one of the most inequitable school systems in the world. Let that sink in.

Education is a human right and I stand in solidarity with all public school teachers ✊❤️

Every year when NAPLAN begins, the same debate erupts about how terrible it is. This year’s technology failures have understandably frustrated teachers and disrupted schools, but the problem isn’t the data itself.

While far from perfect, NAPLAN remains one of the only national snapshots we have of student learning across Australia. It can reveal when instruction improves in disadvantaged schools, when advantage hides weak instruction, and where systems may need to strengthen support.

Getting angry at NAPLAN is a bit like getting angry at a thermometer because you have a fever. It isn’t the diagnosis or the cure, it’s simply the tool that tells us when something in the system needs attention.

(Thermometer analogy credit to Jan Hasbrouck, PhD, and Dr Jennifer Buckingham.)

International Women’s Day isn’t about pink cupcakes.

It’s about asking uncomfortable questions about the systems we work in every day.

In Australian education, women make up the majority of the workforce. Yet when we look at leadership, the picture changes quickly.

Women dominate classrooms.
But they are still underrepresented in leadership roles.
And at the university level, the gap becomes even more stark.

And you know what I always notice?

Every conference I attend.
Every professional learning day.
Every workshop on improving teaching practice.

The rooms are overwhelmingly full of women.

Women showing up.
Upskilling.
Reading the research.
Working to improve their practice and their students’ outcomes.

This isn’t about blaming individual men. It’s an opportunity for men to rally with and alongside us. To recognise that many of the systems we work within were built long ago, and they continue to advantage some more than others.

Naming that reality shouldn’t shut down the conversation.

It should start one.

Because if education is a female-dominated profession, we have to ask an honest question:

Why aren’t women dominating leadership?

Welcome back to the misconception series - this is post number 5 (also hello 👋 to all the millennials who just read that and instantly thought of “Mambo number 5…”)

For years, many of us were taught that every lesson should start with an engagement hook. Something fun, surprising, or entertaining to grab students’ attention and get them interested in the lesson but my friends, this is not a good measure of learning because engagement and learning are two very separate things.

Students can be busy, excited, laughing and participating… and still not learn very much at all.

What we know that actually strengthens learning is review. Revisiting previously taught content, retrieving knowledge from memory, and giving students opportunities to practise what they have already learned.

Instead of asking “How will I hook them in?” a more useful question might be “How will I check their understanding and pace the review of this content to ensure it’s gone into their long term memory?”

Because attention might start a lesson, but if the learning doesn’t make it into long-term memory, we’re totally missing the point. 📚