Newsletter: APRIL 2026

Welcome to our April e-newsletter as schools start term 2. Please share widely amongst your networks and suggest they may like to become a Friend.

Thank you to those Friends of the Foundation who were able to respond to our appeal for donations towards the design and build of a new website.

We are thrilled to announce we have raised enough money to fund this special project. Where we know a donor’s email, we will send a receipt.

To make it easier for anyone to donate, we now have a Make a Donation button on our home page.

Keep an eye on our website over coming months as we transition to our new site. In the meantime, we have made some temporary improvements until our new site is ready.

Yours in literacy,
The Executive and General Committees

Our focus for this e-newsletter is Touchstone 8:

The main purpose for literacy assessment is to inform responsive teaching and provide learners, their teachers, parents/caregivers and school systems with information that informs all stakeholders of progress and achievements.

Authentic assessment that impacts positively on learning is an ongoing process, occurring before, during and after learning and teaching every day. It involves many different strategies to enable the learner to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding.

The most effective assessment strategies are negotiated with learners to ensure expectations are clear, are linked to instruction and provide insights for the learner and the teacher about what learning is next.

Snapshot national assessments and annual standardised tests should not be overemphasised. In-class and diagnostic assessments also provide valuable and timely information about learner progress.

Explore resources and articles related to Assessment below to find out more: 

For school and system leaders

• Exley, B., Hoyte, F., Singh, P. When the curriculum demands personalisation: adaptive professionalism, pre-packaged plans and the teaching of phonics and spelling.

  An excellent case study of one teacher’s adaptive professionalism as she personalises curriculum enactment for her highly diverse student cohort through continual changes to resource selection, pedagogy and assessment.

• Sahlberg, P. (2025, May,25) Test scores out, creative designers in to engage children.

For teachers, pre-service teachers and middle leaders

The following articles and assessment protocols support effective gathering of information on student learning:

• Mackenzie Noella M  Finding out what children ‘know and can do’ with DTWS.
  Draw, Talk, Write and Share (DTWS) is a pedagogical approach resulting from research created by Noella Mackenzie. In this article, Noella describes how DTWS can also be used as a powerful observation process, allowing educators in preschool and early years classrooms to find out what children ‘know and can do’ (Mackenzie, 2011) in terms of drawing, talking and early writing. Used for this purpose, it becomes a systematic, formative assessment task. Article provided by ALEA and first published in Practical Literacy: The Early and Primary Years, 2022
• Dr Nell Duke et al, 2020   Listening to Reading – Watching While Writing protocol
  This is an informal formative assessment tool designed for use during normal daily instruction or after daily instruction when reflecting on pieces of children's writing or recordings of their reading. Christine Topfer and Southern Cross Early Childhood School, ACT have adapted the protocol to meet the specific needs of the teachers and the children at the schools in which they work. Refer link here.
• Adoniou, M. Teaching and Assessing Spelling
  We’ve repeated this article as it is a great spelling resource for all educators.
• Oakley, G. Assessing the comprehension of multimodal text (2002)
  Grace Oakley describes comprehension strategies and suggestions for student assessment. Article provided by ALEA and first published in Practical Literacy: The Early and Primary Years, 2022.

For parents and caregivers

•  Larsen, S. Is the focus on NAPLAN’s ‘top’ schools a good idea?