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As the name suggests, ‘foundation skills’ are crucial to future learning. The Association of Independent Schools New South Wales (AISNSW) has been working with 38 of its schools on a targeted early years program that aims to help students in Kindergarten to Year 2 master key literacy and numeracy skills. The initiative has been led by the association’s Head of Student Services, Lisa Ridings. She joins us now to share what’s been happening in the program and the impact it’s already having. Guest: Lisa Ridings Host: Rebecca Vukovic

Thanks for downloading this episode of Teacher Staffroom, where we catch you up on the latest evidence, insight and action. And just like that, we’re already into a new school year and already in the full swing of things here at Teacher magazine. Throughout this episode, we're going to be sharing some of the highlights of the past month and giving you a bit of an overview of what we’ve been working on. But remember, there’s links to all the stories we mention in the transcript of this podcast, so if you’d like to delve deeper into any of the topics, you’ll find everything you need at teachermagazine.com.au. Host: Rebecca Vukovic

Our guest for this episode of The Research Files is Dr John Munro, a Professor of Educational Psychology and Exceptional Learning at The Australian Catholic University. He is also a trained primary and secondary teacher and a registered psychologist. We sat down in Melbourne to talk about gifted learners – in particular, how to identify these learners, how to understand their learning needs and how to encourage them to reach their potential in the classroom and beyond. John offers some really interesting insights and practical strategies for teachers as well.

Building positive relationships is at the centre of the behaviour management strategies used by Dapto High School. The additional focus on boys’ wellbeing has seen the school volunteer for the Top Blokes mentoring program and create a new staff role – Boys’ Mentor. Our guests for this episode of Behaviour Management are Dapto High School’s Deputy Principal Daniel Inness and Boys’ Mentor Andrew Horsley. They’ll be taking us through the mentoring approach, how it works alongside some of the other behaviour management strategies at the school, and some of the savings it’s led to – in time and money. Interviewee: Daniel Inness, Andrew Horsley Host: Jo Earp Sponsor: Monash Education

In this special episode, we take a look back over our favourite moments from the podcasts we published throughout 2019. With dozens of episodes to choose from, this highlights reel takes you through some of our fascinating guests and thought-provoking conversations.

The team at Teacher have spoken to a lot of interesting educators this month, and some great practical pointers for the classroom have come out of these conversations. In this episode, we’ll be looking at some budget-friendly science experiments for both primary and secondary students; some engaging mathematics activities perfect to finish off the term; and some implications for classroom educators of some new research that’s been published. Host: Dominique Russell

In this special episode, we're delighted to be joined by the two recipients of this year’s Prime Minister’s Prizes for Excellence in Science teaching. Sarah Finney, a Grade 3 and 4 classroom teacher at Stirling East Primary School in South Australia was named winner for primary school teaching, and Dr Samantha Moyle from Brighton Secondary School, also in South Australia, was named winner for secondary teaching. Both educators are remarkably dedicated to harnessing curiosity about Science in their students, and providing them with authentic, real-world learning experiences. Interviewees: Samantha Moyle and Sarah Finney Host: Dominique Russell Sponsor: University of Melbourne's Graduate School of Education

It’s been another exciting month here at Teacher magazine and we're thrilled to share with you just some of what we’ve been working on here at the publication. Today, we're shining a spotlight on the podcasts we’ve published this month, because they’re packed with some really practical strategies that you could apply to your work in the classroom. In this episode, we’ll also be highlighting some of the interesting research that we covered, as well as sharing more about a new monthly series we launched here at the magazine. Presenter: Rebecca Vukovic

Scoresby Secondary College in Melbourne’s east is on a mission to improve instructional practice by embedding student voice in the school’s improvement cycle. To do this, they’re using the Scoresby Secondary College AMPLIFY model, which are seven interrelated steps which synthesise a range of student voice and agency literature, as well as research on reflective practice and leadership. The goals of the model are simple: to support teachers, students and leaders to work collaboratively with the full range of student perspectives; and, to clearly define what collaborating with students for improvement-related processes looks like. For today’s podcast, we headed out to the school to sit down with Murray Cronin, Head of Curriculum and Pedagogy. We discuss how the school has engaged students in decision making and improvement-related processes, and the impact that student voice has had on school culture. Murray also goes into quite a lot of detail about the AMPLIFY model and how they’re going to further develop i

How can we teach and assess general capabilities including critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, and problem solving skills? This is a challenge that teachers are faced with in 21st Century classrooms. A project, funded by the Centre for Assessment Reform and Innovation (CARI) at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), is working to develop an assessment framework for measuring and monitoring these skills in the classroom. Through a combination of curriculum-oriented assessment tools, learning progressions, and professional development, the project aims to equip teachers with the skills to integrate teaching and assessing of general capabilities into their classrooms. Here to discuss this today is Dr Claire Scoular, a Research Fellow at ACER and the person charged with leading the project. In today’s episode, she shares more about the assessment tool that’s been developed, and we discuss some practical ways teachers can measure these skills, as well as some the challenges invo

Scotland has recently implemented a new approach to assessing children’s progress in its schools. It’s an online national assessment called the Scottish National Standardised Assessments, or SNSA for short, and it aims to support improvement in classroom practice by providing information to teachers to inform the next steps in learning. All of this is done while still overseeing what’s going on locally and nationally. It’s delivered to students in Primary 1, Primary 4, Primary 7 and Secondary 3 – which in Australia is equivalent in age to Prep, Grade 3, Grade 6 and Year 9. Now, the particularly unique aspect of this assessment is the fact that it places teacher professional judgement at the centre. It’s also been developed to be accessible for students with additional support needs. And, as well as this, the test is adaptive – so, students are presented with questions according to how well they’ve answered the questions previous. To find out more about how all of this was achieved, and how the assessment i

Welcome to the first ever Teacher Talks, a podcast event hosted by Teacher magazine, and proudly brought to you by our podcast supporter, the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. My name is Rebecca Vukovic, I’m Deputy Editor of Teacher magazine, and it is my pleasure to share with you the very special interview we recorded in Melbourne in front of a live audience of teachers and school leaders. Our guest, Dr Lyn Sharratt, is a highly accomplished practitioner, researcher, author and presenter. She holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto, and coordinates the doctoral internship program in the Leadership, Higher and Adult Education Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. In this episode, I sit down with Lyn to discuss one specific leadership approach, Learning Walks and Talks. We have a lot to cover in this episode, from building a culture of trust amongst staff for Learning Walks and Talks, to the nuts and bolts of how to do a Learning Walk and Talk effectively and confi

What a month we’ve had here at Teacher magazine! It’s been busy but exciting – and safe to say it’s been packed full of interesting stories and content for our readers. From Research Conference, to Science Week, to our very first live event with Dr Lyn Sharratt – there’s so much we'd like to look back on and share with you. Host: Rebecca Vukovic

ACER’s Research Conference took place this month with the theme – ‘Preparing students for life in the 21st century: Identifying, developing and assessing what matters’. In this episode, we’ll take you to the closing session of the conference – the ‘In Conversation’ between ACER CEO Professor Geoff Masters AO and Neil Selwyn, a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. We’ll share highlights from their discussion about what schooling might look like in 10 years’ time. Now, this session began directly after Neil delivered the conference’s Karmel Oration, so, as you’re going to hear a few references to that talk, it’s important I give you an understanding of what he discussed. Neil’s Oration was titled ‘On with the 21st century! Preparing Australian education for the 2020s and beyond.’ So, it’s clear from that title that he took the conference theme to heart. In particular, Neil focused on what education might look like in 2029. He spoke about how there are often three different kinds of p

If you were to visit any preschool or kindergarten classroom, you’d surely find that shared book reading is a common activity used to facilitate discussions and support a young child’s language and literacy development. A new study, published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, examined the extent to which preschool teachers use different types of questions during classroom-based shared book reading. Researchers from the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas, Ohio State University, the American Institute for Research and Michigan State University all collaborated on this study. They found that only 24 per cent of what teachers said during the shared book reading were questions, and the kids answered the questions accurately 85 per cent of the time. In today’s episode, I’m joined by one of the study’s authors, Dr Tricia Zucker, who is an Associate Professor with the Children’s Learning Institute at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston. We chat about what the main findings were t

These past couple weeks at Teacher have been jam-packed. We welcomed a number of guests – from the eSafety commissioner to the ARIA Music Teacher of the Year – and we also featured a lot of content on the topic of literacy. Catch up on anything you might’ve missed in today’s podcast episode. Presenter: Dominique Russell

A supportive school reading culture is one where there is availability, opportunity, encouragement and support for reading. But how do schools actually go about building this kind of culture in their own contexts? To answer this question, Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University Dr Margaret Merga went straight to the source – teacher librarians – to gain their valuable insights into the factors that enable and constrain the development of a whole school reading culture. The results from this research were published in the Australian Journal of Education in a paper titled, Building a school reading culture: Teacher librarians’ perceptions of enabling and constraining factors. In today’s episode, I sit down with Margaret to talk more about her study and its findings, including the role that school leadership plays in the development and maintenance of a school reading culture. Guest: Dr Margaret Merga Interviewer: Rebecca Vukovic Supporter: QUT Podclass

Keeping kids safe online is a constant challenge for parents and teachers. And it can be easy to understand why it’s such a worry. Data show 99 per cent of Australian parents with children aged between two and 17 report having an internet connection in the home and one in five Australian children have been cyberbullied online between the ages of eight and 17. The statistics on this are clearly alarming, but the good news is there is help out there. My guest for today’s episode is Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who was appointed to lead the eSafety Office in 2017, and charged with the role of promoting online safety for all Australians. Julie has an impressive resume that includes working for the US Congress, Twitter, Adobe and a 17-year stint at Microsoft. In today’s episode we talk about the common cyberbullying incidents that young people report to her office, how her team work to protect children online, and where teachers can find resources to help them to navigate cyberbullying c