With the help of Erika von Aspern, I think I have solved the problem of people not being able to post comments on my blog. The default settings only allow google account holders or blogger members to post comments, but I have changed the settings so that anyone can leave a comment.
Just click on "comment" at the bottom of any of my posts and a field appears into which you can type your comment. Then click "publish". If you want your name to be recorded as the author of the comment, add your name to the comment. Otherwise I will not know who sent it, because anonymous while appear as the author.

I had three relaxing days of annual leave last week. Port Elliot and surrounds are beautiful even in mid-winter.
This week along with other regional officers I attended a meeting with Anna Lewkowicz from the group managing the Middle Years Development Instrument. It is intended that Yr 6 students will go online to complete a survey about those non-academic factors that are relevant to their learning and participation. This wellbeing data will be fed back to schools and regions so that strategies can be put in place before the students reach high school. The organisers seem to have considered the needs of ESL students who might be surveyed by translating consent forms and encouraging the use of BSSOs. The data should be disaggregated for groups like NESB students so it could make for interesting reading later this year.
Monday evening I attended the ESLE meeting to give feedback about the draft senior years EALD curriculum. The group was small but the comments and questions were very thoughtful. We felt that on some occasions it still reads like an English course and that the achievement standards assess cognitive development and not second langauge development.
On Tuesday I showed the draft Year 8 English Genre Project work to the regional director and assistant regional director. Both were impressed with the quality of the work and want it promoted through principals. They are also keen to see the accompanying PowerPoint so that teachers have a clear process for planning, teaching and assessing writing in the Australian Curriculum.
I attended the reference group meeting for the Literacy Levels on Tuesday afternoon. The draft shows progression from one Level to the next through well described indicators and good use of examples.
Yesterday, James Dekort from Le Fevre High worked with me to create the PowerPoint that will accompany the Year 8 English Genre Project. It might seem odd that an ESL consultant is putting so much energy into an English resource. However, the process will be valuable to ESL teachers as well. Later this term we will do something similar for Science. The explicit teaching of genres across the currciulum is something that ESL has always supported if not led.
I understand that people are having trouble posting comments. I am not very IT savy but will try to find a solution. In the meantime, emails are welcome ross.hamilton@sa.gov.au . I am able to track the number of views my blog gets. It is now well over 200 so I know somebody is out there!
Best wishes for term 3.

Last week was the first week of school holidays so I was able to attend to some of the work that had started to "pile up" during the term. I marked two different sorts of work. Firstly I "marked' TESMC participant reflections on Between Module Readings and Between Module Activities from the course. It is pleasing when participants see how the practical and theoretical parts of the course come together to support their teaching. I also marked some Year 12 work from Edward John Eyre High School. In one of my weaker moments I agreed to analyse the use of certain langauge features in A and C grade student texts. Art, Psychology, Chemistry and PE texts were analysed. I looked at the use of non-human foregrounding (starts of clauses), evaluative langauge and nominalisation. While foregrunding did not appear to have a significant impact on the grades, A grade texts did use more nominalisation and evaluative language and the choices were, on the whole, more sophisticated. The school can use this to help inform their decisions about what teaching they should prioritise as part of their whole school literacy agreements.

I also worked with some of the other ESL consultants to organise the trialling of the Literacy Levels next term. Nearly 40 schools have shown interest in being part of the trail. This is a wonderful response. I also spent a great deal of time coordinating the Year 8 Genre Project. It is nearing completion. It will be presented to regional English teachers on 9th August and then to staff across DECD at the Literacy Expo in late August. I have also begun my preparation for the TESMC course to be run next term at Kilkenny Primary School. There will be 30 participants so it is best to start early.

In closing, I want to acknowledge Kate Prescott whose position as an ESL Psychologist finishes at the end of this week. This is not a result of the quality of her work or a diminishing number ESL new arrivals with psychological issues. Rather it is a result of budget savings through corporate staff cut backs. Thank you Kate for your caring and expert work. Best wishes for the future.

In the last couple of weeks, I have given seven sites some intensive support to assign their ESL Scales. These schools include primary and high schools in Western Adelaide, Port Augusta and Whyalla. On most occasions I have only been making minor adjustments to some of the Scales already assigned. I think this is a sign a of the quality of the previous tarining about how to assign Scales and the professionalism of the etachers involved. Participation in voluntary regional moderation helps schools to have accurate Scales history for their students and therefore schools can have confidence in this data when tracking student improvement and prioritising resources. In addition these sites should have very few concerns if they are randomly selected for inclusion in the external moderation process. Each year 40 schools are notified which 10 sets of evidence they need to send for moderation. After moderation each school and regional office is sent the results. These show the percentage of Scales that were confirmed at each school and a comparison to the region and the state.
To coincide with Refugee Week I organised a professional learning session at the Aboriginal, Multicultural, Languages and Learning Resource Centre. The resource centre staff had a range of resources about refugees on display. After teachers had the chance to look at these, two speakers from the Australian Refugee Association spoke about the services they provide. In particular, we learnt about the expansion of homework clubs into the southern suburbs and that senior students can underatke Flexible Learning Options (FLO) through ARA as a way of completing their SACE. We also heard from Ker Wol Mading, one of the DECD CLOs, who spoke briefly about some of his personal experiences growing up in Africa and the important work of the CLOs.
Last week I attended the Settlement Council of Australia (SCoA) national conference here in Adelaide. It was sobering to hear the state minister for Multiculural Affairs deliver a very emtional and sincere speech about the plight of asylum seekers. It was also refreshing to hear from someone as eminent as Professor Graeme Hugo who presented current immigration statistics. These debunked many of the ignorant claims made in the media and general population about the negative impact asylum seekers supposedly have upon Australia. However, I felt disappointed that at a two day conference entitled "Creating our Future" very little was said about children with a migrant or refugee experience and that the important day to day role that schools play, sometimes in partnership with agencies and NGOs,  in the settlement of students and their families was not even acknowledged.

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.