General capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities, literacy, critical and creative thinking, digital literacy, ethical understanding, intercultural understanding, personal and social capability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, Sustainability

In this chapter, we draw on the cultural-historical ideas explained in Chapter 7 and Vygotsky’s work on crises and turning points in development to discuss primary and middle school-age children and how they can be supported as agentic learners taking forward their social situations of development. Support and challenge come through how environments are structured and through interactions and relationships, which involve family members, teachers and the other professionals. Key to becoming agentic learners is children’s use of cognitive tools such as literacy and numeracy, which enable them to engage with the knowledge that is valued in society and address the challenges presented to them. We explain that supporting the competent use of these tools involves taking the child’s perspective to understand their motive orientation and giving care-full relational guidance that demystifies the demands on them. We consider how digital tools and processes such as Assessment for Learning can develop learner agency. We introduce Hedegaard’s work on the double move in pedagogy and the Radical-Local initiative, which builds on Davydov’s work. Both are elaborated in Chapter 9. We conclude by discussing a cultural-historical account of resilience, which focuses on enhancing children’s agency and its importance for social inclusion.

Chapter 20: Reading Assessment. Reading assessments are used for many purposes, but all appropriate uses of assessment begin from an understanding of the reading construct, an awareness of the development of reading abilities, and an effort to represent the construct in assessment tasks. This chapter first presents a straightforward framework that categorizes the many uses and purposes for assessment. The chapter then outlines and describes a number of major options, though not a comprehensive set, under each category in the assessment framework. These assessment options are equally applicable in both L1 and L2 contexts, though important L2 tests and assessment practices are noted where relevant. The third section considers a number of reading-assessment innovations and challenges. The fourth section addresses two further important issues for reading assessment: Consequences of reading assessment and teacher training for reading assessment. The chapter closes with implications for teachers and for instruction.

This chapter introduces the framework of a model of inclusive pedagogy that consists of four key dimensions: attitudinal inclusion, academic inclusion, linguistic inclusion and social inclusion. We illustrate the issues through reference to teacher data elicited at the project secondary schools. We discuss the prevalence of linguistic diversity in English schools that makes teachers’ knowledge about such language diversity essential to effectiveness in the classroom and, in light of this, we identify key forms of ‘bilingual assistance’ which support EAL pedagogy. The final section of the chapter presents an outline of a teacher knowledge framework which we argue needs to form the basis of teacher professional development in the EAL context.