I would like to acknowledge the sad passing of Brien Davies from Adelaide Secondary School of English. Brien was proud of his school and was always ready to share his work. For example, a few years ago he organised for teachers from my previous school to visit ASSoE to meet students and teachers and take way curriuclum materials. I always found him friendly and sincere and in all our conversations he showed he cared greatly about his students.

Last Friday I delivered the first three of nine TESMC modules to staff at Brompton Primary. Despite some of them preferring to discuss spiders and trees at various stages during the day, we had a very productive day. We meet again on 24th April to do modules four and five. One of the teachers gave me some student work to read through so I could give her some feedback. She was a participant in a PD session I'd run earlier in the term at the school about persuasive writing. I can already see that she and her students have given some attention to persuasive language devices and the most appropriate ways to begin sentences (foregrounding). I'm always more than happy to give this sort of feedback to teachers who are implementing new learning from PD I've run.

Today I have used the other side of my brain and started using formulae in Excel to calculate class averages and effect sizes. This suits standardised tests given and then repeated over time. If ESL students are doing TORCH or PAT-R reading tests then it is applicable. I doubt if it is as reliable if you are scaling pre-teaching and post-teaching texts unless they are scaled by the same teacher with a sound understanding of the Scales.

I have also finsihed a draft resource paper about recount writing. The paper had been started by some of my colleagues last year, but needed to be finalised and proofread. Hopefully it will join the other resource papers wriiten by the ESL Regional Consultants and published on the web. They can be found at www.decd.sa.gov.au/literacy >Resouces>Resource Papers.

I have also started to put together teacher resource kits for ESL new arrivals. While the changes to free transport for new arrivals will probably mean a few more than the usual number opt to enrol straight into a manistream school in the city rather than an IELC, the kits are really for schools in Eyre and Western. At the moment there are students who are eligible to attend an IELC in Pt Lincoln, Whyalla and Wudinna, but ofcourse the nearest IELC is between 4 and 8 hours drive from these towns. I intend to keep one kit in this office for Western Adelaide schools to borrow and place two in Eyre & Western, probably Pt Lincoln and Whyalla. I intend to use DECD resources along with a few from our counterparts in Victoria.

I have also been writing my reports. Unlike many of you who are currently writing reports about students I am reporting about my work. This takes various forms. For example, as well as attending a performance management meeting this week I also need to report about what PD I ran this term and how many attendees each session had. This is in addition to reporting about teacher feedback about the PD. For the record about 200 teachers, SSOs etc have attended PD I have presented individually in the Western Adelaide Region. Another 50 have attended PD delivered by me in Eyre and Western. This is on top of PD that I jointly ran with other consultants. This includes the 100 staff who attended the whole day session about NAPLAN persuasive writing, all those who attended either of the two whole sessions about the Introduction to ESL Scope and Scales and the more than 40 teachers who attended the ESL Teacher Induction Day.

In the next couple of days, I intend to deal with my large volume of correspondence and start planning for next term's PD. We have another ERC meeting on Friday. The new version of the ESL Scales will form a big part of our work on the day so I'll probably be able to give you an update about this next week.