ACT teachers have been using evidence-based methods in secret because they do not feel not supported by their colleagues, an inquiry has heard.
Anonymous groups of primary school teachers have told the ACT literacy and numeracy inquiry they wanted all schools to have access to the same teaching materials to cut down on workload and boost student performance.
One group of current ACT public school teachers who are part of the ACT Alliance for Evidence-Based Education said some educators had been explicitly told not to teach phonics or use decodable readers, which are mandated in version 9 of the Australian curriculum.
The teachers said they felt a sense of "moral injury" because they were unable to help students who were "instructional casualties arising from the shortcomings of public schools".
"We know the research evidence. Yet we work within an education setting that preferences inquiry-based instruction, balanced literacy, and pedagogy which does not meet the needs of all students," their submission said.
"This situation represents a breach of our ethical and professional principles, and it causes us significant distress."
The literacy training promoted by the Education Directorate was inadequate and the "10 essential literacy practices" used by the system were "entirely unsatisfactory and superficial", the teachers said.
The alliance submission said a minority of teachers were working to implement science-backed practices in their schools. They said teachers were often encouraged to use their intuition over evidence.
"We have been routinely dismissed when we try to be heard. For this reason, we have not been able to put our names to the quotes in this paper because we are genuinely afraid about the professional ramifications for our careers," they said.
A separate anonymous group of ACT primary school teachers said they had invested their own time over the past decade to implement evidence-based approaches in the classroom.
This included chunking learning into small, manageable tasks, building fluency with number facts and setting tasks that built on students' existing knowledge but were not too easy, nor too challenging.
The teachers said they were concerned about the number of families accessing private tutoring in order for their children to learn how to read.
"ACT primary schools need standardised, clear goals focused on teaching and learning, such as the goal that every student will learn to read," the teachers said.
"Teachers must understand the five main components that underpin reading. These components, informed by science, are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Professional learning and coaching need to be aligned with these same goals."
The anonymous teachers said schools should adopt a scripted, systematic synthetic phonics program. This approach introduces letters and sounds in a structured way, according to a scope and sequence.
This is in contrast to an analytic phonics approach where the phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters or groups of letters) are taught by breaking down whole words, often from children's literature.
Don't 'reinvent the wheel'
The Australian Education Union ACT branch rejected the idea ACT public schools were underperforming in literacy and numeracy benchmarks and the notion that public school teacher did not teach phonics or use explicit instruction.
"In the ACT, powerful voices have deployed significant resourcing to repeat claims in the media that one approach to teaching is backed by 'science' and 'evidence', and all others are not," the union's submission said.
"This campaign has long roots in other countries like the United States and borrows ideological framings that discredit public school teachers, arguing that a teacher's professional discretion should be replaced with commercial programs sold for profit to public school systems."
The union's submission said it could not support mandating the way teachers teach but it did support more centralised support for teaching materials, assessments and reporting.
Teachers spend their own money on resources and spend hours creating lesson plans from scratch, especially in the first few years in the classroom, the union said.
"We do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to providing these materials, given many are already available to the public online, and many schools have already procured resources that are on the market.
"What our schools are missing is guidance from the Education Support Office that curates high quality and relevant learning materials."
The union said schools needed the resources to run small group or one-on-one tuition to support students at risk of falling behind in literacy and numeracy.
