How we teach reading: groundbreaking new national survey canvassing teachers

By Grant Quarry
Published October 28, 2024

With much contention in recent years regarding the best approach for teaching children how to read, there’s been precious little data from those working in classrooms around what is actually being taught, where, when and how. Until now.

"The survey is sort of an affirmation, I suppose, in some ways, for teachers. We want to hear from you and we want to know what you're doing and how you're going and what do you need," PETAA president Helen Adam says.

Launched last week by the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA), a groundbreaking new initiative aims to provide a comprehensive look at current pedagogical practices, instructional routines and strategies, resources utilised by educators in the primary years, reading models and more, shedding much-needed light on the realities of teaching reading in our diverse learning environments at the most critical time for student development of reading skills.

PETAA is calling for all primary educators across Australia to participate and contribute their invaluable perspectives.

“…there is so much chatter and so much media focus, so much government focus, to the point where, in some jurisdictions, teachers are being told exactly what to teach, how much time to spend on each aspect, and more,” PETAA president Helen Adam tells EducationHQ.

“But [until now] we haven’t asked the teachers, ‘is this what you’re doing?’

“What are your challenges? What are your triumphs? What’s the pedagogy you’re using? What’s the model of reading? What do you believe about reading? What do you get the children to do?”

The researcher at Edith Cowan University’s School of Education says it’s vital that the constant lag of certain demographics of children “who, no matter what we do, or appear to do, are still lagging behind”, is addressed.

“We need to get beyond what teachers aren’t doing in their job, to find out what teachers are doing and what else might we be able to do to address [that] to make up those differences.”

Understanding how reading is taught in primary classrooms is vital not only for the development of effective teaching practices but also for shaping educational policies that truly reflect the needs of students and educators alike.

Adam says members want and need the information the survey will provide and that at a “highly successful” conference a fortnight ago, they expressed a “really strong appetite” to have input.

“They want to be heard,” she says.

“It can be very demoralising for teachers to be constantly reading in the media: ‘you’re not doing your job properly’ and it’s an opportunity for teachers and not just PETAA’s 40,000 members, but beyond that, for teachers to have a voice about what are they doing."

While Grattan Institute last year released a major study based on NAPLAN data, the voices of teachers are most often left out of the conversation.

Adams says teachers haven't been asked: what kind of pedagogical approaches do you use? What kind of reading models influence your practice? How do you manage diverse classrooms? How much focus do you put on the different elements of reading? How do you use the different kinds of texts? What is the nature of the texts? Do you group children? Do you do whole class instruction? Do you do a combination of each?

These are the types of questions the survey includes.

Teachers will also be asked: What are your beliefs about how children learn to read? How does that translate into practice? And how do you diversify your curriculum across a classroom – a day, a week, and the whole time of a child’s lifetime at school?

“The survey will empower educators to share their voices and experiences, allowing us to build a comprehensive report that illustrates the real story of teaching reading in primary education,” Adam says.

The resulting report from the survey will serve as an essential resource for teachers, schools, and policymakers, providing evidence-based recommendations and insights to enhance literacy education across Australia.

“…we’ll be doing a lot of analysis to capture the key themes, the key messages,” Adam says.

“And we believe that this will be relevant to all stakeholders, from the policymakers, the ministers of education, right through to educators on the ground.

“…it will have relevance for initial teacher education, for example, ongoing professional learning for teachers, and ultimately, hopefully, beneficial to children as we hear and we can capture and add this conversation into all those other conversations and studies that have been done and are being done to improve the outcomes for Australian children in reading.”

The survey closes at 11:59pm on Wednesday, November 20.

To participate, click here.