A lot of professional learning quite rightly focuses on the global, big-picture ideas of teaching and learning, but what about a small, everyday practice of successful teaching. In this series of vignettes, EAL teachers showcase a single activity, idea or resource that they find to be effective in the EAL classroom, and discuss how and why it works. This vignette is generously contributed from Rosemary Abboud, Dandenong North Primary School. It focuses on an Arrange and Describe activity which she uses with primary-aged EAL students. We thank Rosemary for donating her time and expertise.

There is a wealth of EAL expertise out there! Why not share it with the EAL community? We are keen to showcase this practice of teachers in primary, secondary and adult sectors. If you would like to contribute a vignette about an activity you find to be effective in the classroom, please email plcoordinator[at]victesol.vic.edu.au

Download (PDF, 177KB)

Please note that this arrange and describe activity is widely and freely available from a variety of online sources.

Dr Anne Keary has generously shared a number of recordings used in the education of pre-service primary school teachers at Monash University.

They cover topics including advice for planning and programing, getting to know learners, behaviour management and how schools have adapted to remote learning.

Michelle Andrews, EAL Teacher Preston North East Primary – Planning

Michelle shares with us an insight into the planning of teachers at Preston North East Primary School. She shows the viewer her school’s Individual Learning Improvement Plan document, highlighting the importance of setting goals and planning lessons in a way that involves students and families.

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Mairead Hannan, Assistant Principal, Collingwood English Language School – Getting to know your learners

Mairead discusses the processes in place for getting to know newly-arrived students at Collingwood English Language school. She takes the viewer through the student profile documents used, highlighting information that can be useful to gather, such as: socio-lingual context, language background, visa codes, nationality, cultural group, position in family, siblings, religion, prior learning, settlement services involvement, and well-being. Mairead also reflects on the need for teachers to not assume anything about their learners and emphasises the need to ask questions to get as good a picture of the student’s prior learning as possible.

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Rosemary Abboud, Dandenong North Primary School, Developing Programs

Rosemary describes the range of programs running at Dandenong High School, including the EAL program and the transition program.

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David Rothstadt, Principal, Noble Park Primary School

David talks about how he and the staff at Noble Park Primary School have adapted to remote learning over the last 18 months. He highlights the flexibility and sheer hard work of teachers to get online programs up and running in a short amount of time, and how teachers supported each other in the transition. David concludes that one of his key learnings from these uncertain times is that the value of face-to-face teacher/student relationships cannot be underestimated or replaced by technologies.

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Various Presenters on Behaviour Management (edited version)

VicTESOL acknowledges and thanks the Faculty of Education, Monash University, for providing these videos.

Thursday 3 June, 2021, 4-5pm

Online Event – Presentation and Conversation Rooms

This was an opportunity for teachers who are at a similar stage of their careers to share practice with teachers from other schools and institutions. A big part of this session was EAL resource sharing with Jennifer Peck from the Languages and Multicultural Education Resource Centre (LMERC) and and Eileen Wan (Blackburn English Language School). They presented on LMERC’s online and physical resources. This session was for pre-service teachers and early-career teachers (0-2 years) of EAL students, and teachers who are new to teaching EAL students.

Click here to access LMERC’s website.

 

Download (PDF, 3.56MB)

 

Some suggested resource links from participants in this session included:

Tuesday 8th September 2020

Download (PDF, 2.17MB)

If you expect to work with EAL/D learners in your teaching career, then you will want to be familiar with the EAL/D Elaborations of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. In this webinar, Jenny went through some of the thinking behind the document and showed how it can serve teachers both in their preparation and their practice.  As convenor of the original writing group, she aimed to bring the EAL/D Elaborations to life, and to answer questions from the participants.

This webinar was aimed at Initial Teacher Education students and pre-service teachers.

Please click here to access the EAL/D Elaborations of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

Dr Jenny Barnett worked for many years in TESOL teacher education at the University of South Australia, offering pre-service and in-service courses with a focus on inclusive pedagogies and curriculum design. Her research interests have centred on learning and teaching English in settings ranging from multilingual city schools to remote Indigenous communities and South East Asian universities.

https://docs.acara.edu.au/resources/EALD_Learning_Area_Annotations_Maths_Revised_February_2014.pdf

In this workshop, Dr Sue Ollerhead discussed the important role that students’ home languages play in their classroom learning. She explored the rationale for using translanguaging as a pedagogical approach…

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