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My professional reflections and documentation

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    • 1. Know students and how they learn.
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  • Professional Practice
    • 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.
    • 4. Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments.
    • 5. Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning.
  • Professional Engagement
    • 6. Engage in professional learning.
    • 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community.

Category Archives: Professional Engagement

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AI in Action

Posted on April 22, 2025 by Jade Peartree
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AI Training Session 

Professional Development at St Peter’s Girls’ School
Date: Friday 24th January 2025
Hours: 1:00-2:00pm (1 Hour)
Presenter: Garth Coulter
Head of Digital Learning and Technologies at St Peter’s Girls’ School

Professional Development Session Overview:

  • Understanding AI
  • AI and the Global Movement
  • AI in Australian Schools
  • Concerns and Safety
  • School AI Policy
  • Workshop Time

Today I attended this PD about AI in Education. It was a fantastic opportunity for staff at St Peter’s Girls’ School to broaden our understanding of AI and explore the potential it has in educational settings. I particularly enjoyed the workshop tasks that Garth prepared for us and the snapshots of resources which we will be able to explore further in out own time.  There are a range of links below worth having a look at. Please enjoy.

AI in Australian Education:

To give more context, the trial included:

  • Reframe tasks for students with special needs
  • Translate content into students’ first languages
  • Provide differentiated learning materials
  • Reduce administrative burdens
  • Support lesson planning

AI Concerns and Safety Report:

  • COVID paved the way for EdTech adoption across Australia (and further)
  • Security and Privacy concerns were raised and elevated after the COVID period due to this spike.

The Centre for Digital Wellbeing (Submission 83, p. 6) identified that:

  • 89% of EdTech platforms potentially compromise children’s safety by:
  • Monitoring without consent
  • Allowing third-party access to data
  • Selling student data

The Australian Human Rights Commission (Submission 65) noted that:

  • By age 13, advertisers have gathered over 72 million data points about children
  • Current privacy protections require strengthening, particularly for children

TEQSA (Submission 33, p. 6) raised concerns about:

  • The risk of GenAI systems becoming “self-contained and self-referential”
  • The need to maintain human involvement in educational processes
  • Ensuring learning outcomes are genuinely achieved

The Commonwealth Department of Education (Submission 48, p. 8) noted:

  • Lack of transparency in development and commercialisation of GenAI models
  • Difficulty in understanding potential effects
  • Need for robust evaluation frameworks

The Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools addresses these concerns:

  • Clear protocols for ethical use
  • Guidelines for appropriate implementation
  • Framework for assessment and evaluation
  • Standards for data protection
  • Requirements for transparency and accountability

School AI Policy:

  • What policy documents currently exist within your school setting about the use and management of AI?
  • I think this is the area that requires considerable thought for future use of AI in schools and considering the protection of students and staff in their AI use.

This is Garth Coutler’s PowerPoint presentation, see link below.

AI PPT

There are are some great videos in the PPT worth watching. I asked for Garth’s permission prior to posting this on my blog.

Useful AI Tools:

Take some time to explore these fantastic AI tools.

Staff Brainstorm Padlet: https://padlet.com/gcoulter_ai/what-are-some-ways-you-ve-used-or-seen-ai-tools-help-with-te-sntrc3bs4hkg584a

CARE: Structure for Crafting AI Prompts

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/careful-prompts/

Open AI:

https://openai.com/

EdChat DECS:

https://www.education.sa.gov.au/parents-and-families/curriculum-and-learning/ai/edchat

Claude: 

https://claude.ai/login?returnTo=%2F%3F

Magic School:

https://www.magicschool.ai/

Translated Videos! Useful Tool for EAL/D

I loved this one and hope to explore this further. I would love to create videos for our EAL/D families, translating language in real time, imagine the benefits of this in Parent Interviews and communications! I work in two IB schools, imagine using this to promote and enhance our global connections! So many possibilities.

https://www.heygen.com/

Translation Video Tool Video

AI Music creator: 

https://suno.com/home

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Garth Coulter for his AI Presentation today, it left me wanting to learn more and engaged my curiosity. Thanks to St Peter’s Girls’ School for creating space in the start of year professional development days to allow staff to learn and engage with this content. Very valuable and important in todays educational settings.

I hope you find these resources as useful as I do.

Thanks

Jade

Posted in 2. Know the content and how to teach it., 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 4. Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments., 6. Engage in professional learning., 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community., AITSL Teacher Standards, Professional Engagement, Professional Knowledge, Professional Practice | Leave a reply

Problem Solving Masterclass PD T1 2025

Posted on January 28, 2025 by Jade Peartree
1

Problem Solving Masterclass

Presented by Dr John West, Mathematics Education Consultant

Thursday 23rd January 2025

9am-1pm (4 hours)

Today I was a little reluctant to participate in Mathematics Professional Development, mainly because I am an EAL/D teacher, and I wasn’t sure if there would be much relevance for me or my students. However, I truly enjoyed the workshop today and was able to see how I could utilise some of the strategies and resources in my professional context.

I highly recommend Dr John West for professional development at your school. His details are above if you wish to contact him to present and work with your staff. I spoke with John after the workshop and he was happy for me to share some of his resources but of course to understand and utilise these resources well, the training is a must!

I am only sharing a couple of activities which I wanted to have ready and accessible for my use, I hope you enjoy them as well.

Here are the Problem Solving Strategies we covered today. It was good to go through these but also look at how these strategies can be used together, separately, intentionally for different purposes and even lessons.

G

Guess Who? Guess my number. 

I loved this task, a great start of year activity, gets students talking to each other, working out great questions to ask, process of elimination, lots of alternative approaches and scope to adapt the task for younger learners.

Scrabble Activity:

I particularly loved this scrabble activity. I have many students, many of whom are Chinese, and I was sitting with the Chinese teacher today and we were going over place value and the number system in China. I found that in itself fascinating. I have many Chinese students who love mathematics, numbers and problem solving being a universal language or sorts. I want to adapt this lesson to build English vocabulary using number and problem solving. I thought this could be lots of fun!

Scrabble Activity

This PDF has all of the pages and resources for the Scrabble Activity.

Sqwabble Activities:

Sqwabble

Resources for this on the linked PDF.

Some of the main take-aways for me today were:

  • Try as much as we as we can as educators to dispel the myth of students and people either being good or bad at Mathematics.
  • We want to focus on teaching strategies and problem solving skills instead of focusing on the right or wrong way to solve or answer a question.
  • Always plan lessons by including elements of  fun, tactile resources, provide hands on and engaging materials, plan intentionally with specific skills in mind.

An enjoyable Professional Development experience today.

Staff were provided with all of the resources from today’s presentation as well as a digital copy of this handbook. I am obviously not allowed to share this with you on my blog, but highly recommend getting your hands on a copy for your school and booking Dr John West for some staff PD.

Thanks Dr John West!

Thanks for reading.

Posted in 1. Know students and how they learn., 2. Know the content and how to teach it., 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 6. Engage in professional learning., 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community., Professional Engagement, Professional Knowledge, Professional Practice | 1 Reply

2024 Seesaw Refresh Course

Posted on July 24, 2024 by Jade Peartree
2

Wednesday 24th July 2024: 2 hours total. 

1 hour viewing PD course online, 1 hour blogging, creating social media content and reviewing the Resource Library. 

 

As a Seesaw Ambassador and Certified Educator I am required to do this refresher course every year. It is something I will continue to learn about as I am responsible for training staff at St Andrew’s with their use of Seesaw as a Digital Portfolio. I have been using Seesaw since 2015, and even though I am no longer teaching in a classroom, as the EALD teacher I still utilise this resource and platform.

 

 

What’s New in Seesaw?

  • Creative Canvas & Journal
  • You can modify the time limit on video recordings for students, capping them to a certain time frame for recordings. 
  • New Thousandths cube image for inserts in mathematics.
  • A range of new colours. 
  • Highlights! Great for PTI’s as a way to showcase student achievements like a portfolio! You can simply click the highlights button and it will be added to the highlights folder and you can add teacher notes in there as well. 

 

NEW TOOLS: 

  • Flex cards, like Flashcards but better!
  • Read-With-Me: reading activities to assist beginning readers, reads along with the student, highlights words as they are being read. 
  • Short Answer and Open Ended Assessment options for student responses. A lot of these tools are also auto-graded! This will save you time and it gives you a report with the analysis of the students responses.
  • Reading Fluency Assessment: It collects and automatically assessed the reading examples for you!
  • Focus Mode: Allows you to hide tools that students won’t need for an activity. Makes it easier for students to navigate and use what they need, not play with unwanted tools. 
  • Attach & Grade: Curriculum and Standards can be input by admin and used with assessment in Seesaw. This will log your grades and track student progress. We have not been using this at St Andrew’s yet but it was always something we were going to move towards in the future. 

My Library:

You can now create custom sections to save your preferred or created activities. You can organise and reorder lessons, bulk sort and delete.  If you haven’t been using the Seesaw Library, get onto it, so many great lessons ready for you to use. 

EALD Resource!

This is what I am most excited about exploring! As the EALD teacher at my school, I will be reviewing these resources as a way of providing teachers with  a resource for their EALD students in class. I only work three days in my current role, and am hoping to increase this in 2025. With this resource, teachers can access additional supports and resources via Seesaw! 

New English Language Explorers: Newcomers. Supporting EALD students with Vocabulary practice. 

 

Resource Library: Check out these new resources 

 

My next steps will be to share this with staff and request a Staff Meeting PD session to inform staff on the new Seesaw updates and how we could be using this platform more consistently across the school. 

I must do the following to maintain my Seesaw Certified Educator status:

Share this with Staff who would like to do some online Seesaw PD: 

Get Started Website: This has everything you need to get started with Seesaw

Explore seesaw.com/get-started.
It’s the FIRST place to share with teachers and admin. 

 

Certificate of online course: (1 hour)

Jade Peartree – 2024-07-24

I hope you find this blog post useful.

Please feel free to post questions or feedback.

Thanks

Jade

Posted in 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 4. Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments., 6. Engage in professional learning., 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community., AITSL Teacher Standards, Professional Engagement, Professional Knowledge, Professional Practice | 2 Replies

Types of Specific Learning Disorders SPELD PD

Posted on June 18, 2024 by Jade Peartree
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Types of Specific Learning Disorders SPELD PD Tuesday 11th & 18th June 2024

PD Hours 3:45-4;45pm x 2 (2 hours)

Presenter:

Dr Skye McLennan, Clinical Psychologist, Director of Psychology and Clinical Services.

SPELD: https://speldsa.org.au/

The slides and resources within this post have been created by Dr Skye McLennan, and she has given permission for this content to be shared on my blog.

Session 1: Tuesday 11th June 2024.

Types of Learning Disorders covered in this session:

  • Dyslexia
  • Dysgraphia
  • Dyscalculia

Processing weaknesses are common:

  • working memory
  • executive functioning
  • Processing speed

Commonly co-occur with developmental disorders:

  • ADHD
  • ASD
  • Anxiety

Recommended Podcast:

Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

 

Reading Intervention for Children

How to Teach Blending: 

What about sight words? Visual memory is memorising the sequence of letters to identify sight words. Teaching high frequency words identifying the parts that are not decodable.

The 4 Stage Reading Chain:

  1. Phonological Awareness: Awareness of the sounds (phonemes) within spoken words. (Early childhood, ELC/ Kindy)
  2. Phonics: Decoding, the relationship between individual sounds (phonemes) and the letters that represent them (graphemes). Structured synthetic phonics programs.
  3. Fluency: Repeated reading, model fluency first, they read it, time them and record them. Do it again 4 times in a single session. Improve speed. Improves comprehension. Must read aloud, make the text short and repeat it, individual task.
  4. Comprehension

 

Reading Comprehension: 

Students at risk here are EAL/D students, students with language disorders. Explicitly teaching the vocabulary.
More than 10 words a week is too much. Teaching multiple times over a week is important.

Audio Books help build vocabulary. Vocabulary needs explicit instruction.

Written Expression:

The process of writing is very complex. A child is having to access a variety of strategies and tools to create a text.

If a child is struggling with writing, we need to identify which area or areas they are struggling with. See diagram below.

 

Handwriting Heroes:

Session 2: Tuesday 18th June 2024.

Maths Intervention:

Consistent approaches and language used within schools is key.

Accommodations & Adjustments for Students with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD’s):

Working around the problem allows the student to access learning tasks. Reasonable adjustments are a legal obligation under the Disability Discrimination Act. Many children who have Specific Learning Disorders (SLDs) also have other mental-processing weaknesses. These need adjustments too.

– Working memory

– Executive functioning

– Attention

Reading Accommodations:

Word: Read aloud function.

 

Assistive Technology Recommendations:

See attached PDF: instructions to assist with accessibility.

Assistive Technology – how to use built in free functions

OCR readers. Converting readable text to audio.

Writing Accomodations:

Dictation software, voice to text, etc

Dragon is a paid software package, see link below.

https://voicex.com.au/speech-recognition-solutions.html

Touch typing programmes are recommended. Use a full size keyboard not small iPad ones.

Maths Accomodations:

Executive Functioning Accomodations:


This PD was very informative and useful.

Hope you find this content useful also.

Thanks

Jade.

Posted in 1. Know students and how they learn., 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 4. Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments., 6. Engage in professional learning., Professional Engagement, Professional Knowledge, Professional Practice | Leave a reply

IB Approaches to Learning Professional Development

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Jade Peartree
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IB Approaches to Learning 2-Day Professional Development

St Andrew’s School: Tuesday 23rd & Wednesday 24th January 2024 (15 hours)

Presenters: Vicki Shaver & Renee Rehfeldt

Over the last two days I participated in this IB Workshop about the Approaches to Learning. Here I have outlined what was covered over the two days, as well as some useful resources and some of my reflections and wonderings. I hope you find them useful.

Overall purpose of workshop:

What skills positively influence and support a student’s approach to life-long learning?

All IB programmes develop the approaches to learning (ATL) skills categories of communication, social, self-management, research and thinking.

Engagement with this workshop will support:

  • Developing a deeper understanding of ATL as a way for students to acquire and use skills developed over time in order to access learning.
  • Considering contemporary research in order to apply metacognitive strategies throughout the learning process, with an emphasis on assessment as learning.
  • Designing the curriculum to encourage students to build these skills.
  • Reflecting on how developing cognitive, affective and meta-cognitive skills using a variety of strategies may increase the capacity of learners to become self- regulated and intrinsically motivated.

DAY ONE:

This is the link to the Padlet which has so many great resources. It will remain online for us to access. Check it out, it has IB documents, additional resources and an area all about Thinking Skills, we (teaching staff) can add to the padlet and share our plans as well.

Padlet: https://padlet.com/norrisv/ib-approaches-to-learning-cghlu6rpda6pedcg

 

Communication & Social Skills Task:

We began the day with a fun activity that required the use of the Approaches to Learning (ATL) Skills including: thinking, communication, social, self-management and research. We did a BreakOut EDU task, requiring us to break into the box by code breaking in our table groups. There were a series of challenges which we solved as a team. This was a great activity that you could do with your class, and update it to get students to create their own break-out challenges for us or peers. Enjoyed this one.

 

As a group we were asked to create a visual poster that showed how the ATL and Learner Profiles relate. This was a tricky one, but we had many creative responses. 

Self-Management Skills:

Decision making as a class, understanding that our actions have a flow on effect. I loved this idea of making decisions and seeing the outcomes of those decisions through the “What Should Danny Do?” Book series. There is also a series called “What Should Darla Do?” as well.

We brainstormed all of the ways we teach and foster self-management skills in our classrooms, including setting routines, expectations, roles and responsibilities of the students, mindfulness and reflective tasks etc.

Problem Solving skills:

Blob Classroom Resources: Where do you sit in the tree of learning? Reflective Tools. https://www.pipwilson.com/2015/08/blob-tree-download-materials-schools.html

 

This or That? Would You Rather?

For me, as an EALD teacher, this task was really relatable and useful for the communication skills of my students. I will be using these more often in my lessons with my students. Mainly, this sort of task assists with conversation skills and explaining one’s thinking.

Thinking Skills:

We did a Mathematics lesson using these templates for year levels. We were encouraged to make the thinking visible by prompting thinking times at different stages of the lesson.

Junior Primary: Shark_Bait

Year 3-4: Cover_the_Floor__Gr_3_

Year 5-6: Packing_Sugar__GR_5_

Research Skills:

Information Literacy, Media Literacy & Ethical Use of Media/ Information.

We did a group activity determining the best after school snack. We had to use facts to back our opinion of the best after school snack. This process was them opened up, where people tallied their preferences for after school snacks and questioned the facts. With the data, we discussed what we could do with out students to teach them about facts, how to be more specific and clear with our facts, how to compare the facts.

What does it mean to be principled? Academic Integrity, is doing the right thing, the honest thing on your work.

Wonderings:

How will displays support ATL Skill development? Teacher created and student created? Start of year set-up, visual posters, activities that engage students in those skills, having provocations, discussions, spaces to explore and learn from. How will students be invited to create and be seen to own their learning space?

How will our learning spaces & digital spaces support our students with their ATL development? I am looking into this with my “Seesaw” Hat on, how can we make the ATL Skills visible as tags on learning tasks consistently across the school? We have Digital Portfolios on Seesaw, and I feel we need to continue our learning and development of that space to reflect our IB culture and values.

How will initial routines support ATL Skill development? Consistency and use of the ATL language and visual representations across the school, will assist in this process. Students will begin seeing, using and understanding the language and applying this to their everyday lives.

Take Aways:

Split Screen Learning Goals: 

I’m glad this come up for me again, it was something I have wanted to use in my lessons at the very beginning of the lesson to set the tone and then reflect on at the end of the lesson. Yes we are learning about this content today and we are also focusing on these skills today.

Split_Screen_Learning_Goals_Who_We_Are_Inquiry

For the last part of day 2 we were given time to reflect on our own class planning and which ATL skills we would be intentionally focusing on and teaching in our first unit of inquiry. As the EALD teacher, I spent this time reviewing my planners from previous years and looking at how the ATL skills could be highlighted or evident in my planning. I also spent this time working alongside Year level teams to see what their focus areas would be to support this learning with my students.

As always, having this time at the start of the year to reflect on our teaching skills and creating processes to support teaching and learning in our school settings is appreciated and valuable.

Thanks to Vicki Shaver and Renee Rehfeldt for running the 2-Day workshop and providing many useful resources for us to access. Most of the resources on this blog post have come from them, including all of the Padlet resources on the link above and images from their presentation.

Much appreciation.

Posted in 1. Know students and how they learn., 2. Know the content and how to teach it., 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 6. Engage in professional learning., 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community., AITSL Teacher Standards, Professional Engagement, Professional Knowledge | Leave a reply

IPSHA EALD Collegial Group Meeting Term 3, 2023.

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Jade Peartree
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 Seymour College: Wednesday 13th September 2023, 1:00-4:00pm (3 hours PD) 

Presented by:

Mingxia Wei- Head of Languages & Director of International Programs at Seymour College

Trish Tynan- EAL/D Specialist at St Peter’s Girl’s School & IPSHA EAL/D Coordinator.

It was a lovely afternoon visiting Seymour College and having the time to listen to how the EAL/D programme is delivered in their setting. It was particularly interesting to hear about their enrolment processes and how they specifically cater for new arrival students. Many parents prefer to have their children join the mainstream classroom and receive additional after school tutoring and EALD classes after school. There were many teaching and admin staff available on site to assist with translations and adapting to Australian school and community settings, which are quite different in comparison to Chinese settings. It is always a great insight and pleasure to learn how programmes are run in varying settings across Adelaide.

LEAP Level Moderation Activity:

How often should we be doing LEAP levels? Twice per semester using two samples of writing genres. This means four times per year, which can be a challenge, the levelling process takes a considerable amount of time and many of us (EALD Teachers) are doing this alone, we do not have a team and classroom teachers have not been trained on how to do them.

So, how do EALD staff manage to do this LEAP levelling in their own times/ non- teaching times? Some teachers request release days to LEAP level, others use their NIT or take lessons to do assessments with students each week.

In this session we were given three writing samples from Year 2 students and were asked to level the samples. This was a good opportunity for us to analyse samples of writing and look at the writing leap level rubrics to identify specific indicators to accurately level these students.

Using the Writing rubrics gives you a snap shot to quickly identify the LEAP level, however, it is important to use LEAP Evidence grid to identify the specific areas where students need support, their writing focus areas to further develop their English writing skills.

See attachments of the LEAP text type rubrics below and the LEAP evidence  to inform teaching and learning grid.

1 learning-english-achievement-proficiency-leap-informative-texts

1 learning-english-achievement-proficiency-leap-recounting-narrating-texts

1 Persuasive and Evaluative texts

01 LEAP-Assessment-Monitoring-Recording (dragged)

Today, there were many rich professional discussions around how we cater for the needs of our EALD students in our own school settings. As always it was a pleasure to attend the IPSHA EALD Collegial Group Meeting.

Thanks Trish Tynan and Mingxia Wei for hosting us this afternoon.

 

Posted in 1. Know students and how they learn., 5. Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning., 6. Engage in professional learning., 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community., Professional Engagement | Leave a reply

IPSHA EALD Collegial Group Meeting Term 1, 2023

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Jade Peartree
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St Peter’s College EALD Collegial Group Meeting

Wednesday 22nd March, 2023. 1:00-4:00pm (3 hours PD)

Presented by Trish Tynan (St Peter’s Girls),  Arasmia (Ari) Hanna  & Julia Procopio EALD Teacher’s (St Peter’s College)

Today I attended the IPSHA EALD Collegial Group Meeting at St Peter’s College, presented by Ari Hanna , Julia Procopio (EALD Teachers at St Peter’s) and Trish Tynan (IPSHA EALD Collegial Group Coordinator from St Peter’s Girl’s College).

Here is the PDF for the presentation and some of my notes and key take aways from the presentation.

EAL-D Meeting 22 March 2023.pptx

Wellbeing issues/ concerns with EALD families:

  • Family separation, father’s/ mother’s still in China or working abroad.
  • High and varied expectations at home from school
  • Lots of co-curricular or additional tutoring.
  • Sleep issues, exhaustion from translation and additional processing
  • Counselling- change of culture, adjusting to Australian culture and expectations
  • School wide activities, making sure these are communicated and translated
  • Celebrating events from their culture

Suggested strategies to support EALD families wellbeing:

  • Translation resources, digital resources with subtitles, printed newsletters with translation options, WiChat groups, Seesaw translation. (We already do this at St Andrew’s, but there is always opportunity for improvements in some areas)
  • School liaison officer to oversee community inclusion, parent morning teas for EALD families sharing stories
  • Intensive English Language Programmes being included like LOTE lessons not as a learning support role.
  • Parent Interview Booking system with an option to select or provide a translator.
  • Celebrate mother tongue, celebrate our differences and acknowledge in whole school events. (We do this well at St Andrew’s)

Refection for my school setting: I realise we have a great focus on student well-being in general, but how are we specifically catering for EALD student wellbeing? These factors are very much a concern for many children in the EALD community. What can we offer as a way of further supporting wellbeing for our students and families?

Mother Tongue Classes: St Peter’s College have begun a programme to support and foster mother-tongue language within the community. Teacher: Shelby Baker: sbaker@stpeters.sa.edu.au.

These classes assist in these areas:

  • Students can be proud of their own identities (both EALD and Non-EALD)
  • Limiting or removing a deficit view of any student regarding their cultural background
  • School wide activities to bring everyone together and break the language barriers (food, music, dance…)
  • Whole school celebrations Eg of Chinese New Year, to highlight the significance and importance of celebrating everyone.

At St Andrew’s we have Mandarin lessons as the additional specialist language being taught, however, we do not provide a mother tongue class, this is so much more than language learning. I wonder if there is an opportunity for such classes to exist in our setting as a co-curricular elective, with a pure focus on celebrating and learning about our community’s cultures.

Trish Tynan Presenting:

  • EALD students and NAPLAN: Parental permission of student exemption, students can also be withdrawn, parent consent and awareness. These assessments can be such a challenge for our students, if their parents wish for them to participate, we need to ensure they are given enough support and considerations leading up to these tests.
  • Start a OneNote for EALD plans and sharing lessons, photo content etc.
  • Legislation: Entitlement of every child that they can access the curriculum. Inclusion and equity. If our school doesn’t have a programme for these students, we are not compliant. Are we providing enough support for these students. We are mandated by the AITSL Standards: 1.3 Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and economic backgrounds. 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities. 7.2 Comply with legislative administrative and organisational requirements.
  • Early Intervention for EALD in the ELC.
  • Polyglot students, a person who speaks, writes, or reads a number of languages.
  • Enrolment processes, international enrolments via zoom. Trish has one day a week to do enrolment processes, she has at least three enrolments on these days every week at St Peter’s girls.

St Peter’s Girls Setting:

  • EALD Support usually begins Week 4, Term 1, after all assessments and letters have gone home to parents. (We have a similar system at St Andrew’s).
  • The EALD team has three staff members and a coordinator. EALD teachers have teacher assistants to support and create resources.
  • The EALD coordinator has one day a week to simply focus on enrolment interviews and assessments.
  • EALD is a subject, not just a support programme. It is a language, it should be offered during language learning times (Mandarin). St Peter’s Girls, it is a subject which is advertised to parents as an additional area to get families in. As a subject, it is assessed and reported on.
  • Parents agree to enrol students into EALD subject as a condition of assessments prior to beginning.
  • Early EALD Intervention Programme in ELC. (This is something I would love to explore and bring to St Andrew’s setting).

Questions/ Wonderings:

  • When are EALD assessments (LEAP Levels) due in Independent Schools? Leadership in independent schools are not collecting this data or placing value on it. In DECS schools, this data is mandated and monitored. Functional Grammar, consistent approach across the school. You can use the LEAP levels with all students.
  • Are your staff aware of LEAP Levels? LEAP levels should be known across the school, classroom teachers can be using these documents across the board, not only for EALD students.
  • Is the student just EALD or is there something more going on? The information shows that there is an overlap between EALD & DLN (Diverse Learning Needs). We had discussions about how we address our suspicions with parents about students needs beyond EALD concerns.

EALD Resources to explore and share:

  • WordReference Multilingual Online Dictionary: https://www.wordreference.com/
  • ABC Education: https://www.abc.net.au/education
  • iSL Collective: https://en.islcollective.com/
  • Storybox Library: https://www.storyboxlibrary.com.au/
  • ABCYa: https://www.abcya.com/
  • British Council Learn English Kids: Online English Courses for EALD Families https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/
  • Unite for Literacy: https://www.uniteforliteracy.com/

Next EALD Meeting: Wednesday 13th September, Term 3 Week 8.

As always it was a pleasure to have professional discussions in the area of EALD learning with passionate teachers across the independent school sector. It was wonderful to attend St Peter’s College for this meeting. I was also fortunate to be able to catch up with an old friend and colleague (Paul Huebl) who gave me a tour of the school grounds. What a delightful afternoon!

Posted in 1. Know students and how they learn., 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 6. Engage in professional learning., 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community., AITSL Teacher Standards, Professional Engagement | Leave a reply

EAL/D Collegial Group Meeting Term 3, 2022

Posted on September 21, 2022 by Jade Peartree
2

EAL/D Collegial Group Meeting.

Term 3, Wednesday 14th September, 2022.

PD Hours: 1:00-4:00pm Presentation Time, and additional hours for creating content for this presentation, research and preparations. 

Trish Tynan, an EAL/D specialist and IPSHA Network Hub President, from St Peter’s Girls School and myself, Jade Peartree, EAL/D Teacher, from St Andrew’s Primary School, have collaborated to present at the 2022, IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Group Meeting.

Please see the agenda attached below. We presented about all things EAL/D in the Independent School Sector including:

  • Data Collection and Assessments
  • Enrolment Processes for EAL/D families
  • The Teaching & Learning Cycle
  • Quality teaching and assessing using LEAP levels (Learning English: Achievement and Proficiency) and ACARA National Literacy Learning Progressions, using Moderation Benchmarks.
  • Sharing Digital Tools and Resources  we can use with EAL/D students, including examples like Seesaw, Lexia, and Humanoid Robots.

Agenda 14.09.2022 IPSHA EAL-D Collegial Group[59] copy Here is the attached agenda of the presentation.

Here is the PDF attachment to the presentation that Trish Tynan and I created for the IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Group Meeting:

EAL_D Collegial Group – Sept 2022

This was my first time presenting to the EAL/D community. I have had previous experiences running professional development opportunities about digital technologies but this was different. I have been an EAL/D teacher since 2020, I am new to this area of teaching and learning and Trish Tynan has been my mentor for the last few years. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to collaborate with Trish and gain insights into the EAL/D profession. I have learnt a lot from Trish, especially in regards to our school processes for enrolments and the importance of data collection.

Whilst the PD itself was only 4 hours, there was a lot of behind the scenes work. Trish and I had multiple Zoom meetings to go over the content for the presentation. We created the Google Slide together and discussed the areas we would cover individually. Time was allocated to go over our own documentation, provide samples and evidence ready for the participants to view and engage with. We also set up digital files for our participants to have access to once the day was over, including assessment tools, the curriculum documents like the ACARA National Literacy Learning Progressions and the LEAP Level documents.

The experience for me was reaffirming that I am developing and building a solid EAL/D Programme within our school context. The feedback from my EAL/D colleagues was positive and supportive.

Below is the link to the LEAP Level documents which we use in the EAL/D Programme, and I have also attached the assessment tracking sheets. My next goal is to share these documents with all teaching staff at my own school. These would assist with planning, teaching and assessing for the benefit of our EAL/D students.

https://www.education.sa.gov.au/schools-and-educators/curriculum-and-teaching/curriculum-programs/english-additional-language-or-dialect-program

LEAP Recording and tracking sheet Levels 1-6 Oral RecordingTracking sheets

LEAP Recording and tracking sheet

Oral LEAP Recording Template – fillable

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog.

Appreciate your feedback.

Jade

 

Posted in 1. Know students and how they learn., 2. Know the content and how to teach it., 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 6. Engage in professional learning., 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community., AITSL Teacher Standards, Professional Engagement, Professional Knowledge, Professional Practice | 2 Replies

IPSHA EAL/D Hub Meeting Term 3, 2021

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Jade Peartree
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IPSHA EAL/D Hub Meeting 

Wednesday 8th September 2021, 1-4pm 

Presented by Fiona Howat, Literacy Coordinator, EALD Teacher  R-6 at PAC.

The IPSHA EAL/D Hub Group meet twice a year. Fiona Howat from PAC hosted our meeting this September, 2021. It was lovely to reconnect with EAL/D colleagues from varying school settings across the state. We had the opportunity to discuss how our EAL/D students and families have been handling the pandemic and ways in which we have supported them in our schools. This is especially significant for the EAL/D community as many family members are overseas and being heavily effected by COVID. The inability to travel, visit their loved ones and the separation many families are experiencing is immense. We had important discussions about student well-being and mental health as well as discussions around the mental health of family members and teaching staff.

In table groups we brainstormed the following: Challenges for our EAL/D Families during COVID: International Community, Challenges to learning, for schools and teachers, challenges faced by students and EAL/D families. This was a great way to see different perspectives and look at ways we can assist people in our schools with the current issues being faced.

We also had the opportunity to read one of the attached articles and discuss our thoughts in groups. I have attached the articles here so I may go back and read the ones I wasn’t assigned on the day, they may be an interesting read for you also:

  • Cheatham & Lim-Mullins 2018 Immigrant, Bilingual Parents of Students With Disabilities Positive Perceptions and Supportive Dialogue
  • Young Hong, Choi, Cheatham – 2021 – (No Title) 
  • Chinese students abroad in the time of pandemic – an Australian view

Classroom experiences need to build word knowledge and world knowledge. 

Implications for students who are English language learners (Crosson et al., 2019)

  1. Expect “uneven” profiles of skills
  2. Vocabulary knowledge is critical- number of words and strength of semantic networks.
  3. Develop metalinguistic knowledge about word parts https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01953/full
  4. Be aware of polysemy in English
  5. Use morphology instruction to reduce the “word learning burden” https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/using-morphology-to-teach-vocabulary/
  6. Apply the same principles of robust, explicit vocabulary instruction that are used for English-speaking students
  7. Remember that being from an EAL background does not preclude the presence of DLD (Developmental Language Disorder)- be curious and seek assessments if need be. DLD info: https://www.childrens.health.qld.gov.au/fact-sheet-developmental-language-disorder/
  8. Explicitly teach the meanings of idioms. Useful resource: https://www.ef-australia.com.au/english-resources/english-idioms/

Vocabulary: As educators and specifically EAL/D teachers, we understand the importance of building vocabulary. What’s useful for EAL/D students is useful for ALL students. Refreshing and exploring words to understand our world and our learning is critical in making connections and expressing ourselves.

Today we looked at the “3 Tiers of Vocabulary” by Christina DeCarbo. Her website outlining the tiers is below.

The Three Tiers of Vocabulary for Classroom Instruction

Semantics Gradient Activity: 

We were all give a word from this attached document:  semantic gradient .docx  We were asked to line up from the lowest sounding word to the loudest. This demonstrated the way in which words can be perceived and how that can change in different contexts. I loved this idea and would love to do something similar with my students, see photo using colour paint cards from hardware stores. You can use this  strategy in many ways,  like creating a list of words more interesting than ‘said’,  or writing synonyms.  

Fiona set up a EAL/D Hub Meeting group on Google Docs to share valuable resources from our meeting. One of the tasks around building vocabulary involved us looking at picture books and targeting specific words within the text to assist students with connecting with the text and making connections with other texts. Here is an example from a book called “The Paper Bag Princess” by David Munsch

The Paperbag Princess.docx

Blank template should you wish to have a try or adapt: Copy of Vocabulary Template

I began doing this with the story Wombat Stew as this was a text my students had recently engaged with to learn vocabulary around Australian animals.

Resources to explore: 

  • Targeted Strategies to Accelerate SAE (Standard Australian English) Proficiency: learning-english-achievement-proficiency-leap-targeted-strategies-to-accelerate-sae-proficiency
  • Writing Revolution: the_hochman_method_09-15-2016-062048
  • https://www.wordhippo.com/ Great Thesaurus and Word Tools website.

 

I hope you find this blog reflection useful, I use this to keep track of my professional learning and gather useful resources, articles and share what I am learning about with my colleagues.

Please leave a comment or feedback.

Thank you

Posted in 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 6. Engage in professional learning., 7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community., Professional Engagement | Leave a reply

Early Years Language & Literacy Development

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Jade Peartree
2

Early Years Language & Literacy Development

Providing Optimal Opportunity for Growth 9:00am-12:00pm

Stephi West: Speech Pathologist

Stephi.west@psychologysa.org.au

I attended this PD on the 12th of August as I am currently working with Reception EALD (English as Additional Language or Dialect) students who are developing their English language skills. This PD gave me some insights into the progressions of language and literacy development, as well as the opportunity to engage with other professionals and share resources.

These are my notes from the PD, I wrote these as a record of my own learning but also to share with colleagues, teachers and parents who wish to understand more about how students learn and what we can do to support them.

Expressive Language vs Receptive Language:

Receptive language means the ability to understand information. It involves understanding the words, sentences and meaning of what others say or what is read. Expressive language means being able to put thoughts into words and sentences, in a way that makes sense and is grammatically accurate.

Language & Literacy rich environments: What can we see/ hear in these environments?

  • Conversations between teachers and students, students with their peers.
  • Sharing of ideas, verbally, visually.
  • Vocabulary, opportunities for new words to be used and displayed in multiple languages
  • Curiosity around language, exploring languages through play, inquiry methods
  • Student voice, how do children contribute to the language rich environment, when are their voices heard? Class meetings, sharing time, student storytelling time, role plays and performance, audio recordings etc.

Bloom & Lahey’s Model: 

https://slideplayer.com/slide/8065939/ 

Setting Goals in these key areas? Form, Content & Use

I found it interesting to note that the main reasons for language delay are middle ear infections in early childhood that have gone untreated or a family history of learning difficulties.

How can we create flexibility in the use of vocabulary in the classroom? Routines in the classroom can sometimes be limiting as we tend to have repeated dialogue, which leaves less opportunity for the use of new vocabulary. The same language, same instructions, same responses from students continue. So, let’s try to change our routines a little, change the guiding questions during sharing times, use different vocabulary each week to begin your sharing times. Story times could be read by the teacher, an audio book, by a student or visitor/ parent.

The Screen Debate:

It’s important for families to spend time together, parents are the first people in a child’s life who influence their lives. When we talk about children developing receptive and expressive language skills, this starts at home. Every interaction, conversation, instruction, routine etc impacts this development. As we know, parents and their children are using screens more often than before (television, iPads, tablets, phones, laptops, computer games etc). This has meant that families are having less interactions and conversations, children are not developing those receptive and expressive language skills to meet milestones as they are having less opportunities to do so.

My perspective:

I am a parent, my son is almost 3 years old and he will watch videos on my phone or iPad, he also watches television and movies. Sometimes I will watch these with him and talk about what we have watched. I also like to watch a show or film that relates to a book we have read and then we role play and play games related to that book afterwards. I am fortunate to be working part-time this year, so I have the time to create activities and play with my son. I am not Early Childhood trained, but have been an educator of young children for 16 years now, and I know the importance of play with children and how much learning occurs through play. I believe it’s a balancing act, we will have screens in our lives and it’s how we use them, when we use them and how often this occurs that matters.

To give you some perspective on my experience, I woke up this morning at 6:30am with my son bright eyed and ready to play. He has played with his toys, we have read 2 books, eaten breakfast, which he helped me to make (banana pancakes, yummy). Now I am blogging at 8:30am whilst my son is watching nursery rhymes on my phone! It has given me 20-30 minutes of uninterrupted working time; I am guilty of using a screen/device to babysit so I can get some work done. I won’t finish this blog post today, it’s likely I will post it in a week’s time after 3 attempts to complete this post (EDIT: On my third attempt I finally finished)! Parents face this battle of finding a balance and sometimes screens help us to find some balance. There is no such thing as a perfect parent, but I think being aware, mindful and balanced when it comes to our use of screens is extremely important. We don’t have screens at the dinner table, we have outdoor play times, inside play times and varied activities to keep my son engaged. I do worry about my son’s obsession with the iPad and my phone, I limit his time as he gets really upset when I take it away, I use a timer and verbal warnings so he knows that his time on the screen is almost over, this helps. This could be a whole blog post on its own, to be continued… drop me a comment if you feel this needs to be explored further.

What are Language Development Tasks?

Tasks that assist and encourage language development. You need to know the stages of Language Development to know where to begin and what stage to teach for your child/ student. Stephi was reluctant to use age-based milestones to show the stages of speech and language development, as this varies so much for students, however, as a parent and an educator, I like to know what typically should be achieved at a certain age. I found this website with a graphic that I think is useful:

I need more hours in my day to explore these hierarchy graphics. I want to understand them in more specific detail and how I am prompting my students through their learning. I am also interested in the language processing hierarchy, starting from the bottom, I understand the stages but would like to provide examples of how students do these things and demonstrate where they sit on this graphic.

 

The Essential Ingredients to ensure student language and literacy development:

  • Relationship, building connections with your learners
  • Fundamental Skills of Communication
  • Bloom and Lahey’s model:
  • Zone of Proximal Development: pitching learning at the right level for that child’s learning ability and progression.
  • Intent and Motivation for learners

Other personal notes of interest:

  • As educators we need to be careful not to assume the prior knowledge of our students.
  • Fine motor skills are not assessed or found in the curriculum, it’s an assumed skill, not being able to use scissors, draw a circle, use of screens, not knowing how to draw or hold a pencil etc. If a child cannot do these things they cannot begin writing, they need to develop their fine motor skills, pre-writing skills.
  • Learning to read and then reading to learn. Focus on comprehension, purposes of reading, for enjoyment, finding information, learning a skill, history, art appreciation etc. Too often we are focusing on word recognition, decoding strategies and reading words on a page instead of our purpose for reading. There is a place for both, obviously, but we need to teach all skills to assist with students seeing themselves as readers.
  • Early years. Spend time exploring our reality/ our environment. What can you see, hear, smell? Talk to me about what you can hear, see, smell? Etc. Model and provide alternative vocabulary when describing what you can see, hear and smell etc.
  • Language is not just about what we say. Explicitly teaching body language, eye contact, facial expressions, body gestures, hand gestures, posture. Awareness of self, then awareness of others. Social stories.

Resources to explore further:

Casey Caterpillar for fine motor development, kinaesthetic process.

Phonics through songs, starting with the child’s own name to introduce letters and print. About Casey the Caterpillar by the creator Barbara Brann: https://barbarabranneducation.com.au/about-casey-the-caterpillar/

Literacy Teaching Tool kit birth to 5 PDF attached: lttusermap-ec. A fantastic resource, see the PDF or visit the link below. I will be using this.

https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/Pages/default.aspx

https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/readingviewing/Pages/litfocusphonological.aspx

I hope you have enjoyed reading my blog, I hope you have learnt something new.

Here is the PowerPoint presentation from the PD: Early Years Language and Literacy

Please leave me feedback in the comments below.

Thanks

Jade

Posted in 1. Know students and how they learn., 3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning., 4. Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments., 6. Engage in professional learning., AITSL Teacher Standards, Professional Engagement | 2 Replies

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