Professional Learning

At Tracks to Literacy, we provide bespoke professional learning for teachers, education assistants, and allied health professionals. Based on up-to-date research evidence from the Speech Pathology, Psychology, Cognitive Science and Education fields, our professional learning sessions include a balance between theory, research evidence and practical strategies for immediate implementation. All content is directly linked to the West Australian Curriculum and Early Years Learning Framework. Sessions can be delivered through a range of modes from whole school right through to specialised cohorts. We also work with school leadership teams to support a whole school approach and ensure sustainability.

Professional Learning Sessions

Oral Language

With direct links to the (West) Australian Curriculum, this session addresses how to systematically and explicitly teach the expressive and receptive language skills required for successful social, reading and writing development. Topics covered include vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and fiction and non-fiction texts.

Writing

In this session, the TTL team will step you through how to design a systematic, explicit and comprehensive writing programme that incorporates only evidence-based techniques. Covering oral language foundations, planning and ideation, through to sentence-level writing, punctuation, paragraphing text structure and vocabulary selection, this session will help set you and your students up for success.

Listening and Reading Comprehension

Framed within the Simple View of Reading and The Reading Rope, this session will help educators plan for systematic and explicit instruction that focuses on automatic word recognition and language comprehension. Language comprehension skills addressed include background knowledge, vocabulary, concept development, receptive grammar, inferencing, comprehension monitoring and text comprehension.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary skills are essential for social and academic success. Explicit and systematic vocabulary instruction is necessary to ensure that we close the language and reading gap for our most vulnerable students. In this session the TTL team will explore how to plan and implement effective vocabulary instruction across all area of the curriculum, using evidence-based, tried and tested strategies for immediate application.

Response to Intervention and Whole School Assessment Processes

Response to Intervention, also known as Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) is “a practice of providing high-quality instruction and interventions matched to student need, monitoring progress frequently to make decisions about changes in instruction or goals, and applying student response data to important educational decisions” (NASDE, 2006, p. 3).

Brightpath Oral and Written Narrative - Next Steps

In this session, the TTL team will support your staff to analyse Brightpath Oral Narrative and/or Written Narrative assessment data to set long-term and short-term targets, and develop an instructional plan to achieve them.

Supporting Social Skills K-10

Self-awareness, self-esteem, self-efficacy, conversation skills, assertiveness and social problem solving skills are all essential skills for happy and confident students.

Using practical ideas grounded in research, Tracks to Literacy can help you plan and implement effective social skills supports for students from kindergarten to Year 10. Our approach includes whole class, small group and individual strategies to support the development of play, conversation skills, emotional literacy, pragmatic language, and conflict resolution, while maintaining a neurodiversity affirming approach.

Understanding SLCN - Speech Language Communication Needs

Approximately 10% of all children have long term speech, language and communication needs. While some of these needs might be obvious, many are invisible and can go unnoticed and unsupported for years.

This session will cover:

developmental norms for speech, language and communication
signs and symptoms of speech, language and communication needs
strategies for support in the classroom, home and community
referral pathways for assessment, diagnosis and intervention support