Perhaps a student is able to read aloud in class for the first time, or produces their first structurally-cohesive piece of text.

Perhaps they initiate a thoughtful discussion using snippets of rich vocabulary that’s just been explicitly taught.

Aside from promising school data, Merlino says these are the kinds of breakthrough moments that show the true impact of the instructional improvement agenda that has swept across Richmond High School’s English department.

“These are small stories and moments that do indicate the really powerful, life-altering, impact of rigorous, evidence-informed literacy instruction,” Merlino, who has been helping lead the shift, tells EducationHQ.

Last year the Head of English at the Melbourne school developed ‘Year 9 Communication’ – a new literacy subject designed to give those students in urgent need of intensive reading and writing support a strong dose of high-quality instruction, and in the areas they needed it most.

“The objective was to drive proficient reading and writing, keeping in mind that both of these are underpinned by many interwoven sub-streams that link closely with background and content knowledge,” Merlino explains.

“For this class I wanted to make sure that I was bolstering student understanding of content and background knowledge, building vibrant, connected, rich webs of knowledge that would help students access reading and writing across the diverse subject areas that they will encounter in their secondary education,”

Instruction followed a ramped-up script, with students given more frequent opportunities for rapid responses in class, for starters.

“[I used] more checks for understanding, more formative feedback, lots of retrieval practice, scaffolding and guided practice that was highly sensitive to their abilities and carefully withdrawn as students moved towards mastery,” Merlino says.

“But all of those explicit instruction skills occurred with the development of rich background knowledge, aiming to maximise the opportunity of skill development…”

Early results from the subject are encouraging, Merlino reports, with the school’s NAPLAN data showing a ‘heartwarming’ uptick across the board.

From Year 7 to Year 9, 85 per cent of students are now achieving high or medium growth in reading, Merlino says – a figure which compares with roughly 73 per cent of students in schools with similar demographics.

“It was great to see several students in that Richmond support program who were identified as ‘needing additional support’ in reading and writing move out of that category – there were some that transitioned to ‘strong’, for example, in reading,” Merlino adds.

The teacher has also turned his attention the senior English units, working alongside two colleagues to lift the ‘knowledge density’ of VCE English.

Parent engagement is a huge focus of the subject, too, and for good reason, the educator says.

“It’s an area I’ve been particularly passionate about – obviously [you get better outcomes when there’s] high expectations shared collaboratively between parents and teachers.” 

A learning celebration where parents were invited to drop into one classroom proved a huge success on this front, Merlino says.

“It was a really valuable opportunity for students to actually share their summative work that they had completed, which in this case was a persuasive essay.

“There were some students who at the beginning of that year really struggled with writing and found it difficult to engage, but through explicit teaching, scaffolding, checking for understanding, they’d built more confidence as the year went on, and seeing some parents be really impressed with how much output students had completed, and just how they felt more confident with their writing, was something great to bear witness to.”

Ensuring all students build up a rich base of background and content knowledge sits at the heart of Merlino’s charge to lift literacy proficiency across the English faculty.

“A really important starting point with understanding language and literacy instruction is that reading and writing aren’t standalone skills that develop in the abstract,” he shares.

“Proficient reading and writing are underpinned by multifarious, interwoven sub-strands that connect inextricably with background and content knowledge, so literacy develops in partnership with knowledge.

“And so, essentially what we’re trying to do to drive improvement is, in our units of work, to build rich, interconnected webs of knowledge – and that includes content knowledge and vocabulary – that helps students access the reading and writing they need to engage in.”

But it’s not enough for this new knowledge to sit briefly in students’ short-term memory and promptly exit. It needs to stick to be useful, Merlino suggests.

“We really want to make sure that once we explicitly teach something, it’s retrieved in a systematic way so that students are truly embedding that information into long-term memory.

“So, we’re being really careful and strategic about the opportunities to respond that students have, ensuring that we’re checking for understanding frequently, with rapid regular formative feedback, and also making sure that we’re spacing and interleaving retrieval practice so that students aren’t visiting skills and never addressing them again.”

Merlino has also turned his attention to the senior English units, working alongside two other teachers in the Year 12 team to lift the ‘knowledge density’ of what’s on offer.

“So being really ambitious and strategic in the knowledge that we’re teaching students, so that they have a really rich web of understanding around the texts and issues that we explore in Year 12 English.

“We’re working on skill development, of course, but also thinking really carefully about how can we give students the intricate, nuanced, interconnected knowledge that will enable them to be great thinkers, readers and writers, and how can we develop that cohesively on a school-wide journey to Year 12,” he shares.

This has translated into some pleasing VCE results, Merlino notes, with the latest cohort of VCE English students achieving a median study score of 31.

The school was really pleased with this outcome, he says.

“Within that, there’s some wonderful sub-data that we think is great: 40 per cent of students achieved a study score of 35 plus, placing those students in the top quartile of the state.

“And 63 per cent of our students scored above 30, which would show that a significant majority of our students performed better than the state average.

“So, those attempts to increase the knowledge density of our unit we believe made a really significant impact on the type of discussion that students could engage with in class, the way they could express their views in written form, and also the way in which they could approach the reading of the text, because that had a really rigorous conceptual frame and lens to take on to the text.”

In 2024 Merlino won the Outstanding Early Career Secondary Teacher title at the Victorian Education Excellence Awards, and he’s used the prize funds to undertake a Master of Education with a language and literacy specialisation at La Trobe University. 

The move has paid serious dividends, he says. 

“That’s been incredibly valuable in driving [many of the initiatives we’re implementing at the school].

“What’s really great about the La Trobe masters, is that it looks at how we can leverage insights from cognitive science to bolster literacy achievement in our own classroom, while also understanding how to use the pedagogical and curriculum levers to drive wider school-level change…” 

Merlino attributes the school’s early successes to a positive staff culture, where support and high expectations reign. 

“[Also the] support and investment from our school leadership team, especially our principal, Andrea Thompson, has been vital.

“And of course, our progress is due to our skilled, dedicated English teachers who implement our initiatives consistently and with fidelity.”