Victoria’s new Phonics Plus lesson plans are being rolled out to support early literacy instruction. But do they actually enhance early reading instruction? As a lecturer dedicated to preparing future teachers, I have serious concerns about the quality of instruction they promote.
I emphasise the importance of research-based practice—my students create literacy lesson plans and justify their instructional choices with evidence. But where is the research backing these lesson plans?
The Victorian government promotes Phonics Plus as a way to enhance early reading instruction, focusing on phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, handwriting, and morphology. To support its implementation, the government has provided lesson plans for teachers. Although not mandatory, these plans set the standard for classroom instruction and warrant closer scrutiny.
Are These Lessons Too Long and Too Rushed?
How long might you expect young children to sit and engage as a whole group? Lesson length and sequencing are important considerations. Each lesson requires Foundation students to sit through a 25-minute Phonics and Word Knowledge session—a demanding duration for young learners, especially when tasks require sustained attention and cognitive effort.
A closer look at the sequencing raises more concerns. For example, in Phonics Plus Set 3: Lesson 9, activities jump from syllables to phonemes. Clapping syllables is a whole-word awareness task, immediately followed by phoneme-level analysis requiring segmentation into individual sounds. This shift from recognising larger spoken chunks to identifying separate sounds demands a significant cognitive leap that would even confuse adults.
The Phonics Plus lesson demonstration video on the ARC website reinforces these concerns. The scripted, rapid-fire teaching style, delivered from the front of the room, shows little to no scaffolding for students navigating these concepts.
Cognitive Load Theory emphasises the need for clear, step-by-step scaffolding over rapid shifts. Additionally, the National Reading Panel found that phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when focused and not overloaded with multiple overlapping tasks.
Where’s the Differentiation?
These lessons follow a ‘spray and pray’ approach, treating all students the same regardless of ability. For example, the high-frequency word ‘at’ appears in Lesson 1 as new content for all students. What happens if some children can already recognise and read this word?
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development highlights the importance of tailoring instruction to students’ current abilities—too easy, and they become bored; too hard, and they become frustrated. Bruner also emphasised scaffolding as essential for ensuring students build on existing knowledge rather than receiving one-size-fits-all instruction. Snow, Griffin and Burns stress the need for differentiated literacy instruction, particularly in early years classrooms. The evidence is clear: without differentiation, capable students risk disengagement, while struggling students are left behind.
Fluency Without Meaning?
Another area of concern is the use of texts to build ‘fluency.’ In Phonics Plus Set 1, Lesson 3, the Fluency Text is simply a grid of single letters: A, T, and S. The lesson plan directs teachers to use choral reading and partner reading of this text for 15 minutes.
In Lesson 9, students engage in choral reading using:
Tom can tag Sam and Pat.
Tom can tag Sam at the dam.
The cod is in the dam.
These texts align with phonics instruction but lack narrative value. How can students meaningfully engage with them?
Fluency is not just speed and accuracy but also expression, pacing, and comprehension. The lack of meaningful context in these choral reading tasks suggests students are practising letter and word recognition in isolation rather than developing expressive, purposeful reading.
Choral reading might seem effective, but research suggests otherwise. Shanahan (2024) argues that choral reading does not inherently improve fluency because it focuses on group reading without individualised pacing or comprehension engagement. Kuhn & Stahl (2003) found that fluency is best developed through repeated reading with feedback and discussion about meaning, rather than rote repetition of sentences.
Have you ever sung along to a song only to later realise what the lyrics actually mean? Just as choral singing doesn’t guarantee comprehension, choral reading doesn’t ensure students make meaning from text.
What About Meaning-Making?
Perhaps the most pressing issue in Phonics Plus is the lack of emphasis on meaning-making. Young readers thrive on content-rich texts that foster discussion and comprehension. While decodable texts reinforce phonics, they must be complemented by experiences that promote storytelling, prediction, and interpretation.
Duke and Pearson found that effective reading instruction integrates both code-based and meaning-based approaches. Castles, Rastle & Nation (2018) also advocate for balanced reading instruction embedding phonics within engaging and meaningful reading experiences. The Simple View of Reading reinforces that reading involves both decoding and comprehension—without explicit attention to meaning-making, fluency practice lacks purpose.
Prioritising rapid decoding over comprehension mirrors the shallow processing seen in digital reading, undermining critical literacy. Is this the outcome we want for our students?
Concerning gaps
While Phonics Plus aims to support early literacy, its lesson plans reveal concerning gaps in differentiation and comprehension development. Victoria’s reading reforms must balance phonics with meaningful reading experiences to develop engaged, proficient readers. Unless these gaps are addressed, the lesson plans risk doing more harm than good.
Naomi Nelson is a lecturer and literacy coordinator at Federation University Australia’s Mount Helen Campus. She educates pre-service teachers and works with colleagues to deliver contemporary and engaging literacy courses. Naomi’s PhD research investigates reading comprehension, the impact of reading mode (paper vs. screen), and the strategies students use to understand text.
The header image is a still taken from Phonics Plus In the Classroom, a video from the Department of Education, Victoria
Thank you for your insightful analysis of the new Victorian approach to reading instruction in your article “Phonics Plus: Does the new Victorian approach to reading miss differentiation and meaning-making?”
As an academic involved in preparing pre-service teachers, I found your examination of the lesson plans and overall approach particularly valuable. Your critique resonates strongly with my concerns about implementing these lessons. As you rightly note, these lessons are not mandated, but the daily 25 minutes of phonics is, and many teachers will use these lessons as part of this mandate.
Your point about some decodable texts lacking narrative value is important. As you rightly note, such texts fail to engage children in meaningful reading experiences and do not contribute to their understanding of how language works in context.
Furthermore, your observation about the lack of differentiation in these lesson plans is crucial. As educators, we understand the diverse needs and abilities present in any classroom. The absence of strategies to accommodate this diversity is indeed worrying and could potentially leave many students behind or insufficiently challenged.
Your emphasis on the importance of meaning-making in the reading process is well-placed. Any focus on decoding at the expense of comprehension and engagement with text meaning is a significant concern that deserves careful consideration.
Thank you, Naomi, for bringing these critical issues to light. Your analysis provides a valuable perspective for both current and future educators as we navigate this new approach to literacy instruction.
It is wonderful to have a Victorian academic state what many of us are thinking.
Thank you, Martina, for your generous and considered response. I really appreciate your reflections.
Like you, I have found it difficult to accept these lesson plans as a model of high-quality literacy instruction. To be frank, if one of these Phonics Plus lessons were submitted to me by a pre-service teacher as part of an assignment, it would not pass. The absence of differentiation, the questionable sequencing of content, the limited opportunities for student interaction, and the lack of meaningful engagement with quality text are all significant concerns. These are precisely the issues I teach my students to avoid when designing effective literacy instruction.
Thank you again for your collegial response. It is reassuring to know others share these concerns and are committed to ensuring early literacy instruction remains grounded in research and is responsive to children.
“Thank you, Naomi, for keepng the discussion going. You mention Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, emphasizing tailored instruction to students’ abilities. The assumption of those still using early 20th century thinking is that the role of the society is to “Instruct”, as if everyone’s job is to lecture those they construct as ‘less experienced.’ It also implies there’s one ‘right’ way to see things—making outliers like Newton or Einstein mere deviants.
You also so, “the most pressing issue in Phonics Plus is the lack of emphasis on meaning-making.” – It is difficult to write meaningful drills for 10 million kids. Judging by your concern, the pressing issue in Phonics Plus is not the absence of meaning, but the absence of the student/child.
Question I’d ask is: “Where is the child on Vygotsky’s ladder?” In the “expert’s” head, is the right answer. So, whatever the expert decrees, goes. We could be busying ourselves for 50 years looking for the right sequence only to find out that we had no real hypothesis to defend.
Ania Lian
CDU
Thank you, Ania, for your thoughtful and provocative response. I really appreciate your engagement with these ideas.
You raise such an important point – that at the heart of effective literacy instruction is not simply content or sequence, but the child themselves. I absolutely agree that when instructional design becomes overly focused on delivery from the ‘expert’ to the ‘novice,’ without space for student agency, interaction, or responsiveness, we risk losing sight of the learner altogether.
Phonics Plus positions the lesson, not the learner, at the centre of instruction. The emphasis is on fidelity to a script rather than flexibility in response to students’ needs, questions, or understandings.
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development reminds us that learning is relational and occurs in the dynamic space between what a child can do independently and what they can do with support. That space looks very different for different children. Effective teaching, then, requires noticing, listening, and adjusting – qualities that rigid, decontextualised drills cannot accommodate.
Thank you again for your thoughtful contribution. I think this is exactly the kind of dialogue we need to have as we navigate what it means to teach reading well.
Best regards,
Naomi
Thank you Naomi. I am going to be able to use the expression “Spray and pray” more often than I would like!
Thank you! I’m glad “spray and pray” resonated (even if for all the wrong reasons!). Let’s hope that it stays firmly in the category of ‘what not to do’ when planning for diverse learners!
I have been in education for over 50 years, long enough to remember creating my own “phonics” worksheets differentiated for different levels of skill and understanding. I recall keeping them thinking that I could use them again in following years. Wrong!! The students were different, they developed skills at different paces, they had different interests- the practice sheets could not be simply reused. We have forgotten the needs of the students in this latest fad that fails to differentiate teaching and learning.
Our ability to access meaning from written text depends on many factors – the one that delivers the least information about meaning is decoding. Where is the understanding that we create meaning from fiction but extract it from non fiction?
Even when I attended school in the early 1950s our phonics based readers encouraged us to create meaning. It wasn’t meaningless decoding of decidable words pretending to be sentences!
Barbara, what a powerful reflection.
I really appreciate your deep experience and the reminder that even the best-designed resources can never be a substitute for knowing your learners. The idea that a worksheet or a lesson plan could be fit for all misses the heart of teaching: every group of students is different, and good teaching responds to this child, in this moment, with this need.
Your reflections also speak so clearly to one of the great frustrations of education – the constant pendulum swing between approaches. And all too often, that swing isn’t driven by what research or experience tells us works best for students – it’s driven by politics, by standardised testing pressures, and, frankly, by money: the commercial interests of those who stand to profit from selling the next big solution.
These lesson plans narrow the focus of literacy to what can be easily measured – decoding in isolation – at the expense of the rich, complex, messy, meaning-making processes that real reading requires.
And yes, those early phonics readers you describe are something we risk forgetting: reading isn’t just barking at words.
Thank you again for sharing your wisdom, Barbara. It’s such an important reminder that while programs, tests, and political agendas might come and go, the heart of teaching remains relational, responsive, and focused on meaning – not just blindly following a sequence.
Naomi I’d love you to come and visit some schools where we are implementing explicit phonics instruction with significant positive impacts on student reading outcomes. We do differentiate lessons, and phonics plus will provide schools with a solid Tier 1 program. Schools, principals and teachers are overwhelmingly in support of our department providing quality lesson plans. Teachers are and will continue to provide additional support and extend those able students who come to school with strong literacy skills. That won’t change. But teachers are crying out for lesson plans so we can put our time into differentiation, student support, data analysis and student wellbeing.. I’m not sure how much you have to do with schools – I’ve been a Prin in Ballarat for 8 years and our paths have never crossed. I’d invite you to provide your feedback directly to the phonics plus team, and also come and see how we are currently teaching reading and what skills and knowledge we need our graduates to have. It would be incredibly useful for uni’s and schools to work more closely together, and to make sure all our practices are aligned and evidence-informed. You can find me via Read Ballarat – we’ve got 3000 members and we are all about reading, literacy and learning. We also have a Sharing Best Practice conference in Ballarat in November this year where local educators and schools present. They would be great avenues to connect our uni staff with schools and teachers. Your concerns about things like F students sitting for 25 minutes are unfounded – of course we build up to that. And decodables are to practice sounds and blending – that are not supposed to be rich literature. Come and see how we develop both sides of the reading rope – word recognition and language comprehension, and how engaging phonics lessons are for our students. And speak to teachers about how they feel about teaching reading with and without SSP. Teachers can see it works.
Thank you for your message and for taking the time to engage. I appreciate the invitation to connect and the opportunity for respectful professional dialogue. I’m always interested in seeing good practice in action, and I absolutely agree that stronger connections between universities and schools can only benefit both spaces.
Just to be clear, my critique was not of phonics itself, nor of the important work happening in schools. It’s about the quality of the lesson plans being provided to teachers and whether they truly reflect what we know about good teaching and learning, particularly in relation to reading, differentiation, pacing, and responsiveness to students.
My concern is not with phonics itself, but with the quality of the Phonics Plus lesson plans being provided to teachers. The absence of meaning-making is most concerning.
In relation to the comment “Teachers are crying out for lesson plans so we can put our time into differentiation, student support, data analysis and student wellbeing…” — I completely understand the workload pressures on teachers, and I recognise why shared resources can be helpful. But I do find this framing a little ambiguous. Effective lesson planning is inseparable from differentiation and the use of student data. As Hattie (2012) reminds us, it’s not programs themselves that lead to impact – it’s how teachers implement them, using their professional judgement and adapting to their students.
I’m also genuinely curious about how differentiation operates within the mandated 25-minute phonics block. How are the needs of students who are already decoding fluently catered for alongside those still developing foundational skills? What do they do during this time? I think these are really important questions for us all to be considering when we think about Tier 1 instruction and equity in the classroom.
And while I understand that lesson pacing can be adjusted over time, I still wonder why we are aiming to build young children up to sit for extended periods in whole-group phonics lessons?
I will certainly take a look at ‘Read Ballarat’ and the ‘Sharing Best Practice’ conference. Thank you again for those suggestions. And I do appreciate the offer to visit and connect with schools. I’d welcome future opportunities for that.
At the end of the day, I believe we are all working towards the same goal: ensuring every child becomes a confident, capable reader. My concern is that the resources provided to teachers should reflect the best of what we know about teaching and learning, supporting teachers to respond flexibly and meaningfully to the learners in front of them.
Hi Naomi
We are definitely working towards the same goal – and that is ALL students learning to read, not just those who come to school primed for literacy. I am not sure we agree on much else but I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this conversation. I have lots of questions, but I am not sure they are easy to respond to in the comment section of a blog.
Firstly, I don’t think you have taught using an SSP program? And I am interested if you have seen a complete 2-hour structured literacy block, where SSP forms one small part along with vocabulary development, rich literature, writing, spelling, handwriting, and oral language? If you did I think most of your concerns would be allayed. Teachers don’t have to have planned something from scratch to differentiate with both support and extension. Lesson plans give us a start and I am not sure differentiation has to be built in – that is what teacher expertise is for.
Secondly, if you don’t think that Phonics Plus is ‘good teaching’ then do you have a suggested scope and sequence and lesson plans that develop automatic word recognition for F/1/2 students? Research shows that this skill is required for a child to become a competent reader. We know it’s not the ONLY skill, but it is essential. As Dr Anita Archer said ‘there is no comprehension strategy powerful enough to compensate for the fact that you can’t read words.’ Or do you not think that automatic word recognition should be developed as a discrete and measurable skill?
Thirdly, I am interested in what you believe should be included in a 2 hour literacy block, and how students should be taught to decode with accuracy and automaticity?
If your issue is not with phonics, is it with SSP programs in general? Is there one that you do approve of? There are many – and Phonics Plus is another variation. They can differ slightly in the sequence, amount of repetition, pacing – but they all teach the 26 letters, 44 sounds and approximately 200 spellings of English over three years. Having a free program for any government teacher to use can only be a good thing.
Not a question – but I will finish with a comment – I do feel that using the term ‘spray and pray’ was disrespectful. While it wasn’t stated in direct relation to the lesson video, that inference could be made. I know you would agree that having educational leaders treat teachers respectfully is essential.
Happy to organise visits to classroom anytime in Ballarat – there are many outstanding teachers using a range of SSP programs, and phonics lessons they have developed themselves, getting outstanding results for their students. And to finish on a point we agree on – that is what it is all about – teaching ALL children to read.
All the best,
Sue
Thank you for raising important questions about the direction of reading instruction in Victoria. However, I think this piece may be missing some key context.
The Phonics Plus resources are not designed to address the entire reading process, but rather to support the word recognition component of the Simple View of Reading. These lessons are foundational, but are not intended to cover the entirety of a literacy block. They build the decoding skills students need to access meaning-rich texts later on. To critique them for not foregrounding comprehension is to misunderstand their intended purpose.
There also seems to be a misconception about explicit instruction. High-quality explicit teaching is not passive or rigid. When done well, it’s responsive, interactive, and highly supportive of differentiation. Teachers use it to ensure clarity, check for understanding, and scaffold success. A resource such as Phonics Plus allows teachers to adapt it for their students, rather than re-inventing the wheel. I am concerned that you would suggest teachers would mindlessly ‘spray and pray’.
Finally, many teachers have been calling out for this kind of support. These resources are answering a genuine need: for clarity, structure, and alignment with evidence-based practice. They are not the whole solution, but they are a step in the right direction.
Let’s keep having these conversations, but let’s also be precise about what we’re critiquing and why. Teaching phonics in a structured way does not preclude meaning-making. Rather, it opens the door for our students to be able to comprehend text. Our students deserve this. And so do teachers.
Thank you for your response, James, and for continuing this important conversation. I absolutely agree that phonics instruction plays a critical role in supporting students to develop the word recognition skills necessary for reading. However, I do want to clarify a few key points.
Firstly, the Phonics lessons cover almost half of the literacy block (55 minutes). This raises a very practical question: once this significant portion of the literacy block is allocated to these lessons, what time remains for rich, meaning-based reading experiences, oral language development, vocabulary instruction, and comprehension work, let alone writing? It’s also concerning when we consider that, in many early years classrooms, phonics lessons are often implemented as whole-group sessions, meaning that opportunities for responsive, differentiated, and small-group teaching are further reduced.
Secondly, I find the comment that “They build the decoding skills students need to access meaning-rich texts later on.” somewhat problematic. The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) does not suggest that word recognition must be mastered before meaning-making can begin. Rather, the SVR presents reading as the product of both word recognition and language comprehension. It shows that reading equals the product of decoding and comprehension. There is no sequence, it is a simultaneous interaction. As Hoover & Tunmer (2018, p. 6) emphasise, “Neither word recognition [decoding] nor language comprehension is sufficient on its own – both are essential and interdependent.” Similarly, the Big Six (Konza, 2011) are not a hierarchy to be worked through in isolation, but a set of interrelated and interdependent components that must be taught in a balanced and integrated way.
I absolutely agree that high-quality explicit teaching is not passive or rigid. But to achieve that quality requires space for professional judgment, deep knowledge of content, and responsiveness to learners – qualities that are difficult to exercise within highly prescriptive lessons that leave little room to manoeuvre.
I really appreciate the opportunity to continue this conversation. Ultimately, we are all working towards the same goal: that every student develops the skills and knowledge to become a confident, capable reader. But achieving that requires us to keep reflecting not just on what we teach, but how we teach it, and for me, the current Victorian Phonics Plus lesson plans simply don’t model the kind of flexible, responsive, high-quality instruction that I believe our students – and our teachers – deserve.
Thanks for responding Naomi.
Most schools that I have worked at and worked with have a literacy block of at least 120 minutes. I think it would be rare for a primary school to restrict literacy teaching to only 55 minutes in a day.
You touch on an important aspect when you mention the tension between whole-class teaching and small group instruction. I spent the first part of my career advocating for small groups, but when I started predominantly to the whole class, I was amazed at how much more learning started to happen. Essentially, whole class teaching enables us to maximise our instructional time with every individual in our classroom. We are able to be responsive to their needs, give feedback immediately & effectively differentiate our teaching on the spot. This cannot happen if the teacher is working in a small group and a child in another needs support.
I admit that my statement “They build the decoding skills students need to access meaning-rich texts later on.” was a touch clunky and missed the nuance I was trying to bring. I was attempting to suggest that Reading Comprehension is the ability to make meaning from texts that we READ. Of course language comprehension should be taught in alongside word recognition skills, and I apologise that this wasn’t conveyed effectively. Dr Wes Hoover conveyed it beautifully when he said “Reading comprehension is extracting & constructing literal & inferred meaning from linguistic discourse represented in print” at a recent conference in Fed Uni’s hometown of Ballarat. This means that of course we’ve got to understand language AND have the ability to get the words off the page. My choice of the word “texts” was meant to convey a distinction between making meaning from written text and from spoken language. Obviously, this was not clear.
I would argue that expecting individual teachers to create their own lessons (which is the case in many schools) adds an unnecessary burden to teachers, increasing our workload and hampering our ability to have the time or headspace for the professional judgement or responsiveness to learners that is so important. As for the deep content knowledge, perhaps the question could be asked how universities are equipping ITE with this. I know I left my undergraduate degree with a pitiful knowledge of the basics of learning to read.
Quality assurance is important, particularly when it comes to ensuring consistency, accuracy, and effectiveness in teaching resources. However, it’s also essential to recognise that many teachers are already using these shared resources exceptionally well, and these materials have been developed by experienced educators with deep content knowledge and a strong understanding of effective pedagogy.
Rather than viewing these resources with skepticism, we might instead see them as a valuable tool for supporting teachers, reducing workload, and promoting coherence across classrooms. After all, when educators design lessons entirely from scratch, often in isolation, where is the equivalent mechanism for quality assurance? While professional judgment is vital, so too is the need for a shared understanding of what ‘good’ looks like something high-quality, collaboratively developed resources can help establish (and enriched by discussions such as this).
The focus should not be on dismissing centralised or shared materials, but on supporting teachers to use them intelligently, adapting where necessary, but also trusting the expertise embedded within them. Quality assurance shouldn’t only be about sniping from the sidelines; it should also involve building a culture of professional learning, reflection, and ongoing refinement.
Naomi, I echo Sue’s comment above and invite you to visit the local Ballarat school I teach at. Whilst we don’t currently use the Phonics Plus lessons, we have developed our own F-2 phonics curriculum that is very similar to the Phonics Plus lessons. Developing our own scope and sequence, lesson outline and weekly program plans involved hundreds of hours of work over 2 years for myself and another teacher. I would have loved for the Vic Dept of Education to start producing these resources for their teachers years ago!
You mention the phrase ‘spray and pray’ in your piece and I’m assuming you mean the teacher simply speaks at the students and prays that they’re understanding the content? I clicked on this lesson in the Phonics Plus Foundation resources – Phonics Plus Set Review A: Lesson 1. I read through the lesson and at a quick glance counted over 53 opportunities for students to respond in the lesson verbally, e.g by segmenting words into sounds or saying sounds and blending them to read them, or by reading sentences or short texts. I also counted about 21 opportunities for students to respond by writing, e.g writing words and sentences on mini whiteboards. So in 60 minutes, students are responding either verbally or by writing over 70 times, or every minute or so. This high response rate is giving the teacher 70 occasions to check students understanding of the content and either re-teach or review something quickly, give some students a harder word/sentence or give direct support to a student who might be struggling, or even move forwards and skip some words in their lesson. I’m sure you’re aware that the Vic Dept of Education recently released their ‘Positive Classroom Management Strategies’ guide which includes opportunities to respond as an evidence based strategy to support student learning. Teachers who use this strategy within an explicit style of teaching know that it is definitely not ‘spray and pray’.
You also mention in your reply to James’ comment above that you worry that the Phonics Plus lessons take half the literacy block. In most schools that would leave another 50-60 minutes of that literacy block. In my school and many others, this is where we teach our ‘English lesson’ – either the teacher, or the teacher and students (depending on grade level) reads a rich, complex text aloud, pauses and asks questions, has students respond either orally or in writing, teaches and discusses Tier 2 vocabulary words from the text and does a further writing task. The timing is certainly tight but with consistent routines and explicit teaching, it’s achievable and so worthwhile.
Again, I would invite you to come to my school and watch any of our F-2 phonics lessons in action to see that lessons in a similar style to Phonics Plus are absolutely what young students need in order to become skilled readers. Let me know if this is something you’re interested in and I’d be happy to email you and set this up.
Thank you, Kelsie. I can see how passionate you are about literacy and I have enormous respect for the time and expertise required to build a whole-school approach to early reading instruction. I also have a primary teaching background, and I have spent the last 23 years working in education, including time teaching and coaching in schools and observing many literacy lessons. My critique is not coming from a lack of familiarity. It is coming from a deep concern about how lesson design shapes what is possible for teachers and learners in very real, diverse, and complex classroom spaces.
I was really interested in your comment about counting 70+ student responses in a single phonics lesson. That is certainly impressive, but I think it also opens up an important conversation about the difference between opportunity to respond and opportunity to think. As per the Gradual Release of Responsibility model and several of the High Impact Teaching Strategies, learning is not just about the number of turns a student takes. It is about the quality of those turns, the cognitive demand, and the connection to meaningful reading and writing. Frequency of student response is not the same as quality of engagement or learning.
In fact, recent research in reading instruction (for example, Shanahan, 2024) cautions us not to equate rapid-fire word practice with deep learning, particularly if those responses are decontextualised from meaningful texts or language-rich experiences.
In terms of my use of the phrase “spray and pray”, this was aimed at the design of the scripted lessons themselves, not at the teachers implementing them. The tightly prescribed, front-loaded delivery in some of the Phonics Plus lessons appears to reflect an underlying assumption that delivering content to the whole group, in rapid succession, will be sufficient to ensure learning, which is what I meant by a spray and pray approach.
And I completely take your point about the rest of the literacy block. When it works well, it is a beautiful thing. My concern, though, is that we cannot assume all students are getting that balance, especially if the core lesson plans model a version of reading instruction that privileges word recognition at the expense of language comprehension.
Thank you again for your invitation to visit. I would love to take you up on that and see your approach in action. It is through these kinds of conversations, and seeing each other’s practice, that we all continue to learn in what is such a complex and challenging space.
Thanks for your reply. In my experience, it seems to be the more experienced teachers who often have a problem with using pre-planned teaching materials. Personally, if I am confident that resources have come from a reputable source, I am relieved to have them. Using them does not mean I don’t make tweaks and changes when needed for my school or students. But it does mean I am saving hours and hours of planning time every week, it helps to ensure my team and school as a whole are teaching consistently across classrooms, it provides new graduate teachers resources to work with instead of spending their time trawling through Twinkl etc. So many benefits! Phonics Plus resources also allow teachers to spend their time focusing on when and how to differentiate the content and how best to teach it to students, instead of spending all their time just creating resources.
I agree with you about opportunities to respond not always necessarily being opportunities to think. Teachers need to understand that interspersing some deeper questions amongst the more simple oral response questions is important. I would argue however, that by using pre-planned resources like Phonics Plus, teachers then actually have time to discuss this with their team and plan these check points in to the lesson as they’re not madly scrambling to create the lessons themselves.
In response to your clarifying the term ‘spray and pray’ and your concerns about whole class teaching, I can only share what my school does, but I know of many others that follow a similar approach and I would think this is fairly standard. Our F-2 phonics program is our Tier 1 program, so it is suitable and successful for about 80% of our students. Through regular assessment, we’ve identified a smaller group of students who are not keeping up and they receive additional reading and spelling sessions across the week through our Tier 2 intervention program. There is again a tiny proportion of students who need more than this, and we plan sessions according to their needs. I’m lucky that I’m at a big enough school where we have multiple classes of students completing phonics lessons at the same time so we have the flexibility to swap students into classes where the teacher is moving through the phonics sequence a bit faster or at a slower pace to allow for more review. Differentiation is built in to our program from the start.
You make an interesting point here – ‘core lesson plans model a version of reading instruction that privileges word recognition at the expense of language comprehension’. This concern often comes up when discussing beginner readers and their decoding skills compared to their comprehension skills. I would argue that the opposite has been true, and in the past, unfortunately, students’ comprehension has been more important than their word reading skills. If students don’t have high level word reading skills, they won’t ever get to a strong level of reading comprehension. It’s almost impossible to understand a rich text if you struggle reading the words!
I’ve emailed your Fed Uni email address – hopefully this gets to you and we can set up a visit.
Hi Sue,
I think, as you say, we probably won’t agree on much beyond the fact that we both care deeply about students learning to read.
Just to clarify again, my blog was never a critique of phonics, SSP, or the importance of building automatic word recognition. These are well-established components of effective reading instruction and not in dispute. My focus was on the Phonics Plus lesson plans themselves – on the quality of their design, the rigidity of their delivery, and whether they genuinely support teachers to meet the diverse needs of learners in real classrooms.
That said, I completely understand why they are appealing, particularly from a leadership perspective. In large schools, with new or early-career teachers, the uniformity and structure can offer a sense of security and clarity. From that angle, I can see why these kinds of resources are welcomed.
But I have to admit, from my perspective in teacher education, it does feel a little disheartening. I spend a lot of time working with pre-service teachers to develop carefully planned, research-aligned lessons — teaching them to use data, to differentiate, to sequence learning thoughtfully, and to justify their choices. It does raise the question of what we are preparing them for, if in practice they are simply going to be handed a script to follow.
As someone who has spent over two decades in education – in classrooms, in schools, and now in teacher education – I’m less focused on defending my position and more focused on continuing to advocate for lesson design that supports flexibility, responsiveness, and alignment with research. I’m always open to constructive dialogue, but I think it’s clear that my concerns are grounded in different priorities.
In the end, I suspect we’re looking at the same thing through different lenses — yours as a leader navigating the realities of system-wide implementation, and mine as a teacher educator thinking about how we develop adaptable, reflective practitioners.
I do appreciate your offer to visit classrooms. I love the time I get to spend in schools, and I’m always interested in seeing the data and how programs are being used in context.
All the best,
Naomi
Hello Naomi,
I’m wondering why it’s necessary for children to think deeply about what sound the digraph ‘sh’ represents, for example? My understanding is that surface learning is not ‘lesser than’, but a necessary precursor to deep and transfer learning. Let’s teach them the skills they need to think deeply about what they read. I understand you are supportive of teaching phonics. The most effective way to do this is through SSP with explicit instruction, and teachers are able to differentiate provided resources based on student needs. Please don’t be concerned that teachers are not using rich texts to teach reading comprehension. They certainly are!
Hi Laura,
Thanks for your comment and for contributing to the conversation.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not suggesting that students need to engage in deep philosophical thinking about the digraph ‘sh’! I completely agree that learning to read requires both surface-level knowledge (like phoneme-grapheme correspondences) and deeper comprehension skills.
My concern, though, is less about whether we teach these skills, and more about how we structure that teaching in practice. The risk I see with scripted approaches is not the presence of explicit phonics instruction, but the absence of flexibility, responsiveness, and differentiation.
It reminds me of the days when every student was handed the same textbook to work through in the same sequence, regardless of where they were at, what they already knew, or what they actually needed next. It provided structure, and it was easy- but often at the expense of genuine learning. We have come a long way since then in understanding that the effective teaching of reading isn’t just about delivering content, getting students to parrot it back and then ticking the box – it’s about connecting the right content to the right learner at the right time.
I absolutely trust that many teachers are using rich texts alongside phonics instruction, and that’s excellent to hear. My concern is not with the professionalism or capability of teachers. My concern lies with the models of practice presented to them through resources like Phonics Plus. Resources matter. They shape practice, particularly for early career teachers or those still building confidence in teaching literacy.
What troubles me is that Phonics Plus, in its current form, seems to operate on an assumption that teachers don’t know how to teach reading well, and the reading crisis narrative continues. And while I understand the appeal of consistency and clarity, there’s a fine line between supporting teachers and deskilling them.
At its worst, this kind of tightly scripted approach feels less like an investment in teacher expertise and more like an attempt to get NAPLAN results up quickly -a scalable solution that works neatly on a dashboard for those with a vested interest in system-level results (politicians!).
In the long term, what builds real reading success isn’t fidelity to a script – it’s trusting teachers to use their knowledge, judgement, and professional expertise to make decisions for the students in front of them.
As always, I appreciate respectful professional dialogue about these issues.
Best,
Naomi