Effective teaching and learning at Cloverdale Primary School ensures that all students access programs that are rich in curriculum content and cater for differing students' strengths and interests. Staff make deliberate decisions in the effective use of data to improve outcomes at all levels of the school and work collaboratively to ensure that no child is left behind.
At Cloverdale Primary School, we work collaboratively to plan, teach and assess using a deliberate focus on matching pedagogy to content. We use the following whole-school initiatives and programs:
Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI)
Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) encompasses research-based instructional practices explored by cognitive and educational researchers. EDI is the delivery of strategically planned lessons that explicitly teach new concepts to mastery. Our teachers use EDI to teach new concepts in all learning areas and outlines the steps to success ensuring that all lessons outline a learning objective, activates prior knowledge, concept development, skill development, guided practice, relevance, closure and periodic reviews.
Letters and Sounds
Letters and Sounds is a synthetic phonics program that aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as we as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. Students in Kindergarten to Year 2 engage daily in Letters and Sounds instruction that explicitly delivers a detailed and systematic program for teaching phonic skills with the aim of them becoming fluent readers.
Spelling Mastery
Spelling Mastery is a research-based, structured curriculum using Direct Instruction (DI) for teaching spelling, focusing on phonemic (sound-symbol), morphemic (word parts like prefixes/suffixes), and whole-word (irregular patterns) approaches in short, daily lessons to build strong, dependable spelling skills for lifelong writing confidence. It's systematic, uses small steps, provides ample practice, and is available in levels for different grades, helping students understand how words work rather than just memorizing them.
Talk 4 Writing
Talk 4 Writing, developed by Pie Corbett, enables children to read and write independently for a variety of audiences and purposes within different subjects. The Talk 4 Writing approach underpins students' English knowledge and skills by enabling them to imitate orally the language they need for a particular topic before reading and analysing it and then writing their own version.