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Planning for Reading and Exploring Texts: The Personal Response
Now that we’re well and truly clear of the Year 12 exams, most schools in Victoria have turned their attention towards the new Study Design and preparing students for 2023. Whether your school has a head start or step up program or not, chances are you’ll be planning your approach to the new Personal Response…
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What is a ‘Critical Friend’?
As I’m moving towards further study and consulting next year, the most popular service I’ve been asked about has been the ‘critical friend’ role mentioned on my website. It’s an exciting and interesting role because it allows me to work with very diverse schools and requires an ongoing relationship with schools rather than just a…
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Aligning 7-10 with the new VCE English and EAL Study Design
Before beginning this article, I need to point out that I absolutely do not recommend turning the 7-10 curriculum into a “mini VCE”, or a funnel that only points students towards the senior certificate. There are many varied pathways students can take through secondary school, and the VCE is only one of them. When I…
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VCE English and EAL: Assessing the new Crafting and Creating Texts outcomes
In all of the Professional Learnings I’ve been running recently related to the new Study Design, the assessment question has cropped up more than any other. We don’t have a sample examination yet; and we won’t get one until well into next year. But the VCAA have provided us with Unit 3 and 4 Performance…
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Your Faculty Needs a Strategy
Strategy can be tricky, but it is an essential part of improving results and driving change in schools. It’s likely that your school has a strategic plan, but if you aren’t bringing that plan down to the faculty level it is unlikely that it will be implemented. At the end of the day, what happens…
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Using Comparative Judgement to Assess Writing
If you’ve ever formally assessed senior English (at least here in Victoria), then you’ve used comparative judgement to assess writing. Comparative judgement, as the name suggests, is an assessment method based on comparing responses to determine their overall placement on an assessment scale. It’s an effective method supported by research, much of which is outlined…
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Why write?
This is an early extract from our book Practical Writing Strategies, which will be published in 2023 by Amba Press. The elephant in the room Most of the time, we get students to write so we can assess them on their knowledge. Simple. It’s a sad truth that the main purpose of most writing in…
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Teachers as Writers: Term 4 Professional Learning
Last term I wrote a three part series of posts reflecting on the importance of teachers as writers. In part one I talked about writing for an audience – whether that’s students, teachers, or the general public. Part two focused on the various kinds of writing teachers might engage in, from classroom modelling through to…
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Review: Simple Tools by Martin Jorgensen
When I first received a copy of Martin Jorgensen’s Simple Tools I expected a book filled with suggestions for apps and digital tools to use in class. In fact, there are only a few recommendations for tools scattered throughout the text. What I found instead was a much more purposeful and systematic method for selecting…
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AI and Creativity: A Conversation with Tom Barrett
Last week I had a great conversation with Tom Barrett about the future of creative AI tools in education, including AI writers and AI image generation tools. We’re both optimistic about the potential for these technologies in the classroom, as long as they are adopted from an ethical, playful, and creative stance. Check out the…