Last Wednesday, I split my time between Woodville High School and Allenby Gardens Primary. I was assisting large numbers of teachers at both schools to assign ESL Scales. It is encouraging to see this important work being shared within schools and not just considered to be the "work of the ESL Teacher". Assigning accurate ESL Scales allows the school to have confidence in this data to better allocate resources and track student progress. It also builds teacher capacity in terms of language. Typically teachers only have to be involved in the scaling process for a couple of times before they realise that this sort of language needs to be explicitly taught not just assessed. At Woodville High ESL, English and Science teachers were involved. At Allenby Gardens the whole school seemed to take part. The school has long seen the value in regularly assigning ESL Scales and not just to their ESL studnets. Each term they assign ESLScales to all their students as another way of tracking student progress.

Indicators of when scaling is working well in a school include:

• having an agreed and documented process
• identifiable leaders of the process
• support for staff to undertake relevant training
• release time to complete some of the scaling
• a colleagiate approach to assigning Scales
• some form of internal moderation
• an easy process for recording the Scales and sharing them with others.

During the week, I also prepared for the next meeting of the group writing the Yr 8 English Genre Project. Individual writers have been creating drafts of various resources that will be discussed by the whole group tomorrow. There is interest from central office about the group presenting the final resources at the Literacy and Numeracy Expo in August.
I also used the time last week to continue to organise Thursday's training session about the needs of refugee students and their families and the some of the services available to them. Registrations have been slow but I am confident it will still be a valuable session for those who are able to attend.
Today, I re-worked Session 3 from Tactical Teaching: Reading so that it is more aligned to the widespread understanding of genres and text structure in DECD schools. Many DECD teachers already have a deeper understanding of the topic than that presented in the TTR course. I have also taken the opportunity to align it the Australian Curriculum Literacy General Capabiliy elements (e.g. Gramar Knowledge). This is a more rigorous and relevant framework than the one promoted in the orignal course.

Hello again. It is nice to be acknowlegded once in a while. The Literacy Secretariat recently obtained some data about its website. It makes very interesting reading. For the year ending April 2012, the site had about 77 000 visitors who viewed 214 000 pages. 67% of the visitors were from Australia. No surprise but there were 8 000 visitors from the UK, over 2 000 from each of the USA and Japan and even 151 from Pakistan. Obviously they come for different reasons but the work of the ESL team features very highly in regards to what they took from the site. The three top downloads were all created by the ESL team! Over 6 000 visitors downloaded the Persuasive Writing resource paper. About 3 000 took the Procedural Writing and Explanation Writing papers. Many other ESL resources were also downloaded in large numbers. If you are yet to visit the site yourself go to www.decd.sa.gov.au/literacy/
Despite the work of the ESL team being in demand, corporate salary cuts have been announced. At yesterday's ESL Team meeting the recommendations of the review was presented. The review acknowledges that those positions to be cut are simply those whose tenure is first to expire. Therefore, one of the two ESL psychologist postions will finsh at the end of this school term. There has not been a 50% reduction in the number of new arrivals with psychological needs. The other recommendation is that two of the eight ESL consultant positions not be re-advertised for next year. These are primarily the people who created the most popular resources on the Literacy Secretariat site as well as other resources and training and development to meet the needs of 12% of the students in ECD schools. This is unlikely to be the end of the changes because these cuts will also be followed by a round of "1 in 7 cuts" and then another round of cuts in response to the recent state budget. The ESL team may be very small by the time all these cuts take place.
In the meantime schools are in the midst of assigning ESL Scales. It is rewarding to see so many teachers becoming more familiar with language in this process. This "backdoor" literacy training enables some teachers to then begin explicitly teaching the language that makes their students' work more written-like.

I have started delivering what will be my last training about how to assign an ESL Scale. On Tuesday afternoon I presented the first part of this training to teachers at Underdale High. I'll finish it this Tuesday. I still have a couple of sessions to come about moderation of ESL Scales but I am very much looking forward to using the new document from next year. Ten years is a long time for any curriculum document to last. Over the next couple of weeks principals will be asked to decide if their school wants to take part in the trial of the new document in week 4 of next term.
Tuesday was also the first meeting of the writers of the joint regional and Literacy Secretariat genre project. We used a unit planner to decide what we the desired results, the links to the Australian Curriculum, what would be evidence of student learning, success criteria and how students will reflect upon their learning. As you can see from this sequence "backwards design" is one of the underpinning principles of our curriculum writing. Other resource to be developed over the next few weeks are a year planner, a teaching and learning cycle, an assessment rubric, a student checklist, an annotated model text and an example of a lesson plan. This is ambitious but the writers are keen to develop ample useful teacher-friendly resources.
Australian Curriculum was also the theme of this term's Secondary ESL Teacher Network meeting on Wednesday evening. About 20 teachers were introduced to the AC Literacy Continuum and its links to the document that will replace the ESL Scales. They also investigated the Year 7-10 part of the AELD Teacher Resource and considered its use in schools.
"Refugee Week" will be celebrated in late June so I have been organising a session for Thursday 21st June when teachers and leaders can view relevant resources and listen to a couple of outside agencies speak about what they think are the needs of refugee students and the services they provide for this group. Look out for the flyer in the next couple of days!
Thursday I was one of a dozen or more who participated in a training session with Dr Peter White from the University of NSW. The focus was conjunctions. As usual it was highly informative and has implications for how we support students to successfully compose certain genres. In the near future there may also be an announcement of a very exciting proposal involving both the university and DECD.