LLEN members collaborate in school staff development day

LLEN member and Kenmore State School principal, Ingrid Freeman recently invited Helen Harper and Pauline Jones to Kenmore State School’s staff development day.

The theme of the day was Teaching with Intent: Formative evaluation and text selection, with key messages about the reading-writing link and working with literary texts in primary English. Using the teaching learning cycle as a shared context, Helen gave a presentation on text selection and then took the staff through a close reading and how to prepare for it. Pauline examined how response texts develop across the primary years, using rich picturebooks as mentor texts. Teachers then set to work on their units of work for this term, considering these in light of the curriculum, the texts they select, their teaching practices and students’ needs.

Kenmore State School has been working with David Rose in Reading to Learn for over 10 years with good evidence of its success*. Staff are committed to ensuring that curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are aligned and support their students’ literacy development. To that end, they have undertaken significant professional learning around functional language theory and genre-based pedagogy. 

Pauline commented:

“It was so nice to see the depth of teachers’ knowledge about language and their teaching expertise put to work in discussions and analysis activities. And then the more experienced teachers supporting newly arrived teachers”.

Helen added:

“we were so impressed by Kenmore State School’s commitment to embedding their English program firmly within the theory of language. We were delighted to be part of their project.

 *(see chapter 2 in Acevedo, C., Rose, D., & Whittaker, R. (Eds.). (2023). Reading to Learn, Reading the World: How Genre-based Literacy Pedagogy is Democratizing Education. Equinox).