Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Teacher Staffroom from Teacher magazine, the resource for K-12 educators published by ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research. I’m Dominique Beech.
In our latest reader survey – which we run annually to give our audience the opportunity to let us know about their experiences in the education sector and how we can better support your professional practice through our content – you let us know that you’d like more content on the topic of curriculum implementation. We’ve been hard at work having a look at this on Teacher in the first few months of 2026, and in today’s episode of Teacher Staffroom I’m going to take you through some of my highlights from recent weeks. Don’t forget, like all of our other episodes of Teacher Staffroom, I’ll be posing some questions for you throughout this podcast, so you can feel free to pause the audio as you go, gather some colleagues, and discuss together how these stories might be relevant to your school context. Let's jump in.
We’ve had 2 standout episodes in our School Improvement podcast series go out recently – the first was all about preparing trainee teachers for the classroom, and the second delved into reading and writing instruction once you move on from phonics in the classroom.
First, let’s recap our episode on preparing trainee teachers – this was an interview from our Teacher editor Jo Earp and, from St Columba Anglican School in New South Wales, Principal Allan Guihot and Director of Professional Learning, Chris Delaney. Their school is a member of the award-winning Teaching School Hubs program from Independent Schools New South Wales. The program brings together schools and partner universities to provide teacher trainees with regular school experience, under the guidance of a teacher mentor, while they complete their qualification. It was really interesting to hear about the program and how it works at the school. One question Jo asked Allan and Chris was all about the importance of providing support to the mentor teachers during the implementation process of a program like this. Here’s a short snippet of what Chris said in response:
Our goal is to give the trainee teacher a real experience of what school looks like. So, for the mentor who has that trainee with them, they're going about their day and it's pretty much as usual and they've got a shadow for that one day a week, if you like, who is the trainee teacher. And so, when they're on playground duty, if they've got a staff meeting, if they've got a professional learning team meeting, whatever that teacher has on for the day, the trainee goes along to that to get the full experience. You know, coaching a sporting team before school or after school. It's the whole gamut of that teacher experience that we're looking to offer the trainee.
So, reflecting on what Chris said in that clip, here’s a question you can have a think about: if you were a beginner teacher entering your school tomorrow, what aspects might feel overwhelming? How could teacher mentors and other induction support help?
Now, before we move on, I want to quickly bring your attention to that other standout episode of School Improvement we published just a few days ago – my interview with Mandy Nayton, CEO of the Dyslexia-SPELD Foundation in Perth, Western Australia, and CEO of SPELD [Victoria] in Melbourne. Our conversation covered a lot – everything from why phonics instruction is so crucial, to the importance of morphology, vocabulary and word study. Whether you’re an early years’ educator or you work in the secondary space, there’s something for you in the episode, because, as we know, literacy instruction is relevant across the board. Here’s a short snippet from our conversation on why phonics instruction is relevant to students across K-12:
It's absolutely relevant to anyone who is learning, well, to be fair, any alphabetic system of writing, you need to understand what the underpinning code is for that written language. And so what we do see are students in upper primary and in secondary who are struggling to read accurately and fluently. And essentially that is what the code provides. It provides access into accurate and fluent reading so that we can look at a word on a page, we can lift it effortlessly from the page, and all of our attention and focus is on reading comprehension rather than decoding. So if we have a student in the upper primary years who is struggling with reading – and sometimes that is interpreted as a problem with reading comprehension – it may be that their underlying issue remains that they struggle to decode the words on the page.
That was Mandy Nayton there.
Over in Victoria now, and Teacher deputy editor Rebecca Vukovic delved into the topic of curriculum design and implementation with Literacy Leader at St Theresa’s Primary School, Jackie O’Connor-Croydon. In partnership with Deakin University, Jackie co-designed a program for K-6 which focused on Australia’s Great Southern Reef and local freshwater environments. She did in order to strengthen science learning in the school. What started as a program for years 3 and 4 was extended in 2024 to a vertical and horizontal knowledge-rich unit all about the Great Southern Reef; and now it was for all students at the school.
So, what did this look like? Well, as Jackie explains it, the unit was a 10-week learning experience where classes engaged in structured, cumulative learning that prioritised disciplined vocabulary and authentic inquiry. The unit also included many learning opportunities for students through external partnerships. Here’s a bit of what Jackie had to say:
We partnered with Greater Western Water, who offered a free incursion to teach students about the importance of water and provide them with a basic understanding of the water cycle. We visited our local waterway Koroit Creek and were facilitated in providing students with knowledge of their local environment and how the ecosystems rely on that environment.
There’s plenty more to learn from the article – so I encourage you to head to our website, teachermagazine.com, to read the full piece. Now though, here’s a question for you to reflect on: Think about a unit you’re teaching in your own context. In what ways could a knowledge-rich curriculum – with a strong focus on disciplinary vocabulary and high quality literature – enhance students’ understanding of the topic?
Another example of school-university partnerships that we featured on Teacher this month is related to AI. Teacher editor Jo Earp spoke with Professor Ken Purnell, Head of Educational Neuroscience at CQUniversity, about his work with schools on the responsible and effective use of AI in the classroom.
The article delves into the skill of ‘master prompting’, which Ken calls a new form of literacy, and he defines it as learning to ask the right questions of AI. In the piece, he reminds readers that responses from general conversational AI tools contain inaccuracies roughly 30% of the time. Here’s a quote from Ken:
AI is world-renowned for its decency on medical-related things, but for general things it’s just a predictor: What does Jo want? What does Ken want? And it tries to please us. That's why you have to be a smart prompter and start to interrogate, and you’ll suddenly find that it will actually answer you much more truthfully.
He also provided readers with 5 tips for prioritising human-in-the-loop engagement when using AI. The tips touch on principles like remembering to ‘question, rather than accept’ and counting the cognitive and environmental costs of AI use.
On this article, I was really interested to hear from a reader of ours, Naomi, who left a comment sharing her thoughts. It was an important reminder for me on the power of bringing forward different perspectives. Here’s what Naomi said:
I don't really agree that master prompting is a completely new literacy. When you consider internet searching or even searching databases for research, it's about knowing what to enter into the search box. Using the right search terms is similar to knowing what to ask AI. So, I think it's just an extension of existing information [literacy] and digital literacy skills, rather than a separate literacy. The main thing is that users need to read the output. And this is just critical literacy.
So, this conversation brings me to a question for you to reflect on: How confident do you feel in your own ‘prompt literacy’? What small steps could you take to strengthen it this term?
Of course, while we talk about the implementation of programs in this episode, it’s not only relevant to students – there are many programs being undertaken in schools that are implemented specifically for teachers. One example we looked at recently is teacher wellbeing programs over in the UK. It was explored in the latest episode of our regular podcast series, The Research Files, and Teacher editor Jo Earp spoke with Dr Alexandra Hennessey. Here’s a short clip from the episode where Alexandra explains how some of the case study schools were prioritising wellbeing for staff.
So, in terms of looking at the staff wellbeing – if you think about it at the top level, there was the senior leadership. So, they were prioritising it, they were making staff wellbeing roles, they were thinking about specific leadership roles and kind of a bit more dissemination of leadership, so it isn't just all coming via kind of the traditional headteacher, deputy headteacher. They were just, they were dividing up those responsibilities a little bit more. They had Wellbeing Charters that very much incorporated staff as well as students in that. So, there was some very higher up strategic kind of thinking going on about how we recognise teachers' roles, how we give them more opportunities for learning and development and support them.
So, on this, here’s a question for you to think about: How do you ensure wellbeing supports and programs are adapted to better meet your school’s context and needs, rather than adopting a one‑size‑fits‑all approach?
Well, that’s all I have for you today. Thanks for listening. I’ll leave the links to the full articles and podcast episodes I mentioned today in the transcript of this podcast, which you can find under the podcast tab at our website, teachermagazine.com. We’ll be back with a new episode very soon.
Teacher magazine is published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.
