Services overview
Our Services
Wordsmart consulting offers a number of services designed to make your professional life easier and your English and curriculum literacy teaching even better:
- Stand-alone professional development workshops.
- Complete custom solutions to your English and/or curriculum literacy needs. This service is designed for promoting long term change or if you would like assistance with identifying your needs.
Included here are: - a. Advice and support on communicating plainly with parents and students.
- b. Commissioned teaching/learning resources.
WORKSHOPS AND PRESENTATIONS
We are happy to assist you with your professional development needs for English and Literacy.
Our workshops come in two forms:
- Ready to present
- Request a special topic
Ready to present
These workshops and presentations have already been developed and delivered successfully. Provided in our events section is an abstract of each workshop, suggested timing and a PDF version of the PowerPoint:
Click here to see the workshop abstracts
If you are interested in any of these, please contact us.
Request a special topic
You can negotiate topics and modes that suit your individual or the school’s needs. We can work with whole schools, Faculties, small groups of teachers, regional clusters, other professional networks and organisations.
If we are unable to meet your needs, we may be able to locate someone who can.
Possible topics
- Cross-curriculum literacy demands
- Years 1 to 10 English syllabus and implementation issues
- Years 11 and 12 English syllabus and implementation issues
- Aligning planning, teaching and assessment
- Unit planning, including the use of “Big Questions” as an integrating device, and catering for individual differences
- Task design and the development of common, cross Faculty task sheets
- Teaching language basics, including Functional Grammar
- Critical literacy – theoretical and/or practical issues
- Boys and literacy
- New technologies, new literacies
- Plain English task sheets and reports
- Other topics by request
Possible modes
- Lecture style
- Interactive workshop
- On-going series
- Workshop + mentoring
custom solutions
Complete custom solutions for your English or curriculum literacy needs
- Do you need assistance raising the literacy standards of your students?
- Do you need help implementing the demands of the English syllabuses?
- Do you need help meeting the literacy demands of other syllabuses?
- Would you appreciate advice on communicating plainly with parents and students, especially in your reports?
- Would you like to commission resources for your particular circumstances?
To help you bring about lasting change, we offer four change modules. You can select those that best suit your needs and budget.
Contact wordsmart consulting now. Click here
Survival Manual
Finally, a book arrives that will make the lives of English teachers easier. Packed full of helpful information and practical, creative ideas, the first volume of Secondary English Teaching: A Survival Manual will be launched on Saturday March 17 at the English Teachers Association of Queensland’s first seminar for the year.
Resources
The ‘Three Level Guide’ was introduced in the seminal text, Learning to learn from text: effective reading in the content areas by Bert Morris and Nea Stewart-Dore (Addison-Wesley, 1984).
Links
The internet is a vast library of information and ideas for English and curriculum literacy teachers. To help you use it more efficiently and effectively, wordsmart consulting will review sites on a continuing basis and add them to this page.
The Smart Word
Subscribe now to The Smart Word, our independent bi-monthly eZine for anyone interested in English and curriculum literacy.
Articles
Critical Literacy, fairness and hope?’ (November 2005)
Discover what makes Critical Literacy worth fighting for, why it strengthens teaching of Standard Australian English and much more.