Hi, I’m Amanda

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I’m an Instructional Literacy Coach, and I’m passionate about leadership, literacy and learning. I believe in supporting leaders, teachers and students to achieve literacy success.

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I established Hands on Heads Consulting to support and inspire educators in their literacy practice. During my 14 plus years in the teaching profession, I was a Primary Classroom Teacher, experiencing both lower and upper primary year levels. As my career progressed, I held positions of leadership, including Literacy Coach, International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme Coordinator and Head of Curriculum (Junior School). I loved collaborating with my colleagues to research, inquire, plan, implement, reflect and evaluate effective and evidence-informed literacy practices while building the capacity of classroom teachers for them to see the success of their students' literacy progress. 

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Now, as an Instructional Literacy Coach and Consultant I find myself in and out of classrooms, working with upper primary and lower secondary classroom teachers and school leaders to help them improve what they are already doing. Every day, I collaborate with informed school leaders to empower their teachers to transform their literacy practices- taking them from reading rotations to whole-class explicit teaching while still ensuring student collaboration, curiosity and critical and creative thinking. I love providing side-by-side support to teachers IN their classrooms. 

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As a teacher, educator and leader, I embraced a multidimensional approach to literacy and learning- explicit teaching meets student agency. My teaching practices have been acknowledged as 'innovative', 'explicit' and 'evidence-informed' by luminaries such as Lyn Sharratt and Jen McVeity. I’ve collaborated with Seven Steps to Writing Success as an Expert Reviewer and with the Australian Council of Educational Research, providing feedback about the Progressive Achievement Tests (PAT R). Through Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools, I participated in the School Improvement Literacy Program and was involved in the Data Collective with Lyn Sharratt. I’ve undertaken professional learning with Philip Holmes-Smith for the analysis of NAPLAN Data and with Dr Sandy Heldsinger for Brightpath Writing Assessment, with Kath Murdoch’s Getting Personal with Inquiry Learning, and with the International Baccalaureate for Making the Primary Years Programme Happen.

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When I’m not working with schools, you’ll find me up to my elbows in sticky notes sprawled across my desk, or deep diving into the latest evidence and inspiration behind innovative best practices both in literacy, education and leadership. Otherwise, you’ll find me baking at the beach, talking to my partner in Italian or in the pilates studio, but never before an almond latte!