The professional learning program
The project involved a two day workshop each term, with classroom practice after each workshop, followed by review and feedback. The program aimed to support teachers to develop skills in classroom strategies to support all their students to succeed, and in selection and analysis of curriculum texts to plan lessons. From the teachers’ perspective, the sequence of development began with practising the strategies with the support of detailed lesson plans, followed by initial text selection and lesson planning, then learning high level tools for discourse analysis of curriculum texts, and finally assessment of students’ writing using these tools. From the perspective of teaching the syllabus to students, the sequence began with engaging students in reading literature and writing stories, followed by interpreting the theme or message of literary texts, and writing texts with a message, and finally critiquing literary texts, including verbal and visual texts, and writing text responses. These four stages in teachers professional learning are set out as follows.
| 1 Engaging | 2 Interpreting | 3 Critiquing | 4 Assessing |
| Principles of scaffolding literacy and use of detailed lesson plans | Selecting and analysing stories, to identify messages in thematic stories, and analyse how messages are constructed | Linguistic tools for analysing texts in detail to plan lessons across the curriculum. | Applying linguistic tools to assessing students’ writing development |