Pillar 1: Purposeful Planning
The Teacher's Toolkit for Literacy Podcast — 2026 Series
When two Year 6 teachers at a small regional school in Collie, Western Australia sat down to name what made their writing instruction work, they started where they always start: with planning. Danielle Monique and De Ludlum have spent five years building a writing programme that transforms even the most reluctant writers into confident, purposeful creators. Their first pillar — purposeful planning — is the foundation on which everything else rests.
Beginning With the End in Mind
Danielle and De plan every writing unit by asking one question first: what do they want students to achieve? From that end point, they work backwards, mapping each learning intention against curriculum expectations and anticipating where students will struggle. This backwards planning approach gives their teaching a clarity and coherence that students can feel.
Crucially, expectations, success criteria, and vocabulary are introduced early and reinforced consistently — across writing, reading, word work, and classroom displays. Students don't encounter key language for the first time when they're asked to use it. They've been seeing it, hearing it, and practising it for days beforehand. This front-end loading removes unnecessary guesswork and replaces anxiety with confidence.
Planning Together Makes the Difference
Danielle and De plan as a team, and both are emphatic that this partnership sharpens their thinking. Danielle brings a secondary English and drama background, which means she naturally approaches writing with complexity. De brings a primary generalist perspective that keeps things grounded in what students actually need. Each challenges the other's assumptions.
"Something I think is great, De might not think is particularly good," Danielle explains. That productive friction produces better units than either teacher could design alone. For teachers who work without a formal co-planning partner, the lesson is clear: finding even an informal thinking partner — someone who will push back, ask questions, and see things differently — significantly strengthens planning.
A Unit in Action
To make purposeful planning concrete, Danielle and De walk through an actual unit: When Animals Collide: The World's Most Bizarre Creatures, built around Philip Bunting's picture books. Students take two completely different animals, mash them together, and write about their new creature in Bunting's distinctive style. The title alone functions as a provocation — students are intrigued before the unit even begins.
Two weeks before the formal writing unit starts, students are immersed in the mentor text through reading workshops. They read like writers, noticing layout, language, illustration, humour, and structure. This immersion means that when writing begins, students already feel at home in the text world they're about to enter.
The Five-Week Writing Structure
The unit itself runs for five weeks, planned day by day on a detailed grid. Week one opens with a cold task — students read an informational text, take notes, and write a paragraph summary. This diagnostic snapshot tells Danielle and De exactly where students are, so they can adjust the weeks ahead accordingly.
From there, each week builds purposefully. Students analyse text features, draft paragraphs, name their creatures, compare different text types, and move through focused rounds of editing and revising. Reading and writing remain tightly linked throughout. By week four, reading workshops begin front-end loading the next unit — narrative — while writing continues through final editing and submission. Week five is dedicated entirely to publishing, with students using Canva to produce polished, illustrated pages that are bound into a class book. Two copies are made: one for the classroom library, one for the school library.
No Surprises: The Critical Features Document
Students don't simply receive a vague outline at the start of a unit. They receive what Danielle and De call a critical features document — a student-facing map of the entire unit, with submission dates clearly marked and success criteria made explicit. Planning doesn't stay in the teachers' heads. It goes directly into students' hands.
This transparency is deliberate. When students can see the whole journey, they can take genuine ownership of it. Staged submission points throughout the unit mean that no student quietly falls behind unnoticed. Teachers can intervene early, conference individually, and — when necessary — offer students the option to start again with full support.
Planning as an Act of Belief
What makes Danielle and De's approach so powerful is not the grids or the documents, though those matter. It is the belief embedded in every planning decision: that every child, regardless of ability or background, deserves access to ambitious, joyful, purposeful writing experiences.
One student, Riley — dyslexic and living with ADHD — wrote to his teachers at the end of the year: "I didn't realise I could write like this. Nobody's ever had that trust in me before." That moment didn't happen by chance. It happened because two teachers planned, with extraordinary care, to make it possible.
Listen to the podcast here