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.