A Unicorn School

Cobram Secondary College shares the Illuminate journey

We were fortunate to have a visit from renowned Literacy consultant, Diane Snowball, Roz Muscat (Literacy Leader, Alkira College), Michael Muscat (Executive Principal) in the last few weeks. It was a wonderful opportunity to share the journey of our staff and students, whilst continuing to explore the next steps to continue our growth as a reading community.

We wanted to share the feedback that we received from Diane Snowball about our wonderful school.

Response to visit from Diane Snowball (Literacy Consultant), Roz Muscat (Literacy Leader, Alkira College), Michael Muscat (Executive Principal)

Dear Penny, Kimberley and Dianne

Thank you very much for organising our visit to your fabulous school. We greatly appreciate the time and thoughtfulness that went into the planning so that we were able to learn so much about the literacy work and other interesting projects at Cobram Secondary College.

You are to be congratulated on the great achievements in your Illuminate project, with a focus on independent reading for all students at every year level, every school day. Although it is so important for every student to read independently every day, we do not know of any other secondary school that has even attempted to include this practice in their school program at every year level. Congratulations for establishing this practice so successfully. 

For many years researchers have established the importance of independent reading to not only improve students’ reading but also their writing and that it is the most effective way to increase students’ vocabulary and improve their grammar and punctuation. So your Illuminate project is providing the opportunity for every single student at Cobram Secondary College to improve in all of those aspects of literacy. Some secondary schools are introducing daily independent reading for years 7-8 or 7-9, but because you include this practice right through years 10, 11 and 12, your students continue to benefit from their independent reading. 

In addition, reading is being established as a habit so that your students are much more likely to enjoy reading in the future, giving them a richer life experience. 

One of the great benefits of your Illuminate organisation is that you involve every teacher and therefore you provide professional learning about the teaching of reading to the whole staff. They are all learning how to teach reading strategies and to monitor students’ reading through individual conferences. The spill-over effects are extensive. Each student feels more valued, each student’s  needs are identified and therefore can be dealt with, and each teacher becomes much more aware of the need to teach reading in the context of their subject areas. ‘Reading across the curriculum’ has been talked about for a long time but you are actually achieving it. 

You are also the only school where the most useful organisation of the school library has been changed to suit the needs of adolescent readers and now have an exemplary school library for others to learn from. This must have taken a huge amount of time to do, but now other schools can benefit from your work. 

We realise that this has not been easy to accomplish because of staff shortage and lack of funding for books and other resources, but your hard work, excellent planning, understanding about the importance of independent reading and the teaching of essential reading strategies, continual professional learning for teachers, support for teachers through modelling and practical documents to maintain consistency of practice and related terminology and your passion for the work have all helped you to achieve your success. You have also had the usual staff changes, but you have good  plans for the training of new staff. 

Most of all we congratulate you on being astute enough to stick with your work focus. Although many of your staff now know much more about the teaching of reading in a secondary school than you will find in other secondary schools across the state, you realise the importance of deeper understandings and especially more knowledge about identifying the issues when a student is struggling with reading. Obviously there are other areas of literacy you would like to focus on, but fortunately you can do this within your current framework and you know that it would not be wise to change your focus on reading at such an early stage of implementing Illuminate. 

We hope that others appreciate your achievements so that they support your work and use your school as a model for others. 

I will personally support you in any way I can and look forward to seeing your progress in the future. You deserve to be assisted in your work so that all can see what can be achieved when proper support is given for a school where the leaders are guiding the teachers to do the most effective literacy work to improve all students’ reading. 

Thank you again for giving us your time and looking after us so well during our visit. 

Best wishes 

Diane Snowball