To celebrate 10 years of Teacher magazine online, we’ve been reflecting on the publication’s impact, including milestones and highlights from the last decade. Our columnist contributors recently shared some of their favourite pieces, and in a podcast episode last month the Teacher team discussed our decade of podcasting. In today’s article we look at trends from our reader survey, including your most requested topics and favourite formats.
Our 10th Teacher reader survey has just wrapped up and the team is busy working through all of your responses. Yes, we do read every single one! It’s been a central part of the publication from the very beginning – we want Teacher to be as useful as possible, and the fantastically detailed survey feedback that we get from you is an important part of our planning.
This year we refreshed the survey, but one of the questions that has been with us right from the beginning is to do with the topics that you’d like a bit more support and guidance on, and would like to see covered in Teacher in the future. It’s interesting to look back at how your responses have changed (or not) over the years.
Teacher wellbeing has been the standout – featuring in the top 3 most popular topic requests overall every year. That feedback really has helped shaped the publication and our thinking. We know how important student wellbeing is (and that’s always been another hot topic, by the way), but staff welfare can sometimes be overlooked. As well as ensuring we kept returning to the issue in our content, in 2020 we explicitly started asking about teacher wellbeing in the survey.
From the thousands of survey responses that we’ve received over the last decade, 3 more themes that have featured on the most popular list consistently are leadership, literacy, and behaviour management. We introduced a behaviour management podcast series in 2017 in response to your survey requests.
It’s also interesting to look at how the topics have changed over the years.
In 2023, Artificial Intelligence started being mentioned a lot in your feedback, not just as an area you wanted more information on, but also how it might assist you with tasks like admin and planning. To reflect the growth of content on this topic, we’ll be introducing a new tag for Artificial Intelligence and updating our archive to make related content easier for you to find. Teacher shortages and how schools are responding to the challenge was also a theme from 2023.
In the early days of the survey (2015 and 2016) lots of you wanted more articles about design and use of learning spaces, and teaching and learning in the early years. And in 2017, trauma-informed practice appeared in your survey feedback for the first time, along with inclusive practice.
Leading, and implementing, change were big topics in 2017 and 2018. There were also similarities in the themes you wanted to see more content across the next 3 surveys – with gifted education, literacy, numeracy and supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students high up on the lists of most common requests.
If you’ve taken part in the Teacher reader survey, you’ll also know that we ask you about your favourite content format. It’s really pleasing to hear that you like all the different formats, but it’s clear from your feedback that our short articles are the runaway favourite – many of you love the fact that you can access a quick, but informative summary in your busy working day. Podcasts and infographics are also near the top of the list, while this year you’ve told us you’d like to see even more reader submissions in the future.
We love hearing about what’s happening in schools and how you and your colleagues are working to lift student achievement and wellbeing. If you’d like to find out more about submitting an article, take a look at our quick guide for contributors.
As I mentioned earlier, we want Teacher to be as useful as possible, so there’s also a spot in the survey to tell us how you’re using the content. It might be as a prompt for discussion and reflection (we know from the survey that many of you pick a piece of content to share at your weekly staff or faculty meetings), or it might inspire you to bring something into your own context. For example, one survey participant got in touch to let us know how a Teacher podcast episode on a school in the Northern Territory that uses co-teaching to improve student outcomes, inspired a transition to co-teaching.
Thanks for all of your feedback over the years! Of course, you don’t have to wait for the survey to get in touch with suggestions, requests, or to share your success stories. Contact the Teacher team at any time by emailing teachereditorial@acer.org.
