Hello and welcome to this podcast from Teacher magazine, the resource for K-12 educators published by ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research. I’m Rebecca Vukovic.
Here at Teacher magazine, we are lucky to have the opportunity to work with experts across all areas of education. We interview them for articles, record podcasts with them, accept submissions they’ve written specifically for our readers, and share exclusive excerpts from their books. This month on Teacher, we have published so many pieces of content from those working in the sector, and I’m excited to share more with you in this episode of Teacher Staffroom. Of course, I’ll be posing questions throughout, so I encourage you to pause the audio, gather some colleagues, and reflect on how you can use these insights in your own school context. Let’s jump in.
This month, we were delighted to welcome Rachael Lehr – Foundation Associate Principal at Dayton Primary School, Western Australia – as a new regular columnist. In her first article, Rachael discusses how strong, positive school cultures are built deliberately, through everyday actions and shared responsibility. She says:
While school culture is often spoken about as though it were something intangible that almost happens serendipitously, like a feeling in the air, a tone in the staffroom, or an atmosphere that somehow emerges just because the ‘right’ people happen to work together, the reality is far more deliberate and intentional. The culture in our schools and organisations is built, reinforced, and sometimes eroded, through the everyday actions of all the people within the organisation. It is shaped through small interactions, quiet decisions, and shared expectations that accumulate over time.
It really is a brilliant article, and I encourage you to go and read it in full over on the Teacher magazine website. I’ll also be sure to link to it in the transcript of this episode. After you read it, consider this question:
What are you doing every day to build and shape a positive culture in your school community?
Moving on, this month we published an exclusive extract from the new book The Children We Leave Behind: How School Could Be Done Differently, written by former Australian Council for Educational Research CEO and Teacher columnist, Professor Geoff Masters. In this book, Geoff discusses how we can unlock every child’s potential, what it would take for every student to learn successfully at school, and how schooling itself leaves some students behind. The extract we shared is taken from the Chapter ‘What Every Child Needs to Flourish’. It includes details of the Fremantle Fast Track Program – an alternative, senior secondary education program that’s part of North Lake Senior Campus in Western Australia.
I’d encourage you to go and read the article in full because at the end, you’ll find an exclusive offer for Teacher readers – you can pre-order Geoff’s book now and receive 20% off at checkout.
Podcasts are such an effective way for us to share new research with you, our listeners. We love having the opportunity to sit down with our guests, to hear them explain the work they do and provide you with practical ways that you can embed this research in your own work as educators.
This month I had the opportunity to visit the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership offices in Melbourne to interview AITSL CEO Tim Bullard for a Research Files episode on improving induction. In the episode, we specifically discuss 2 of their latest Spotlight evidence summaries. Part 1 – Improving Induction for Early Career Teachers explores evidence-based approaches to strengthening teacher induction, while Part 2 – Improving Induction for School Leaders explores the benefits of good induction for school leaders and provides evidence-informed practices to structure induction programs for them.
In this clip I’d love to play for you now, Tim is discussing the importance of mentoring. Importantly, he says that mentors themselves need support to do their role effectively, and AITSL has developed some mentoring guidelines to outline what that quality mentoring actually looks like.
Our mentoring guidelines provide basically some guidance around what quality mentoring would look like. And one of the things we know is that those mentors need time – time to spend with the person that they're mentoring, time to plan for effective mentoring, and also to check in with that person and support their wellbeing. If you think about where we were at the beginning of the conversation, induction and mentoring is about bringing your academic capability to life in the reality of a classroom. So to do that effectively, a mentor needs to be with you, that guide at the side, in your classroom and learning environment, and providing you with that just-in-time support that's going to help you to grow.
That was AITSL CEO Tim Bullard there. After listening to the episode, consider these questions.
Think about your own experience with induction when you first became a teacher. Which elements of effective induction have had the greatest impact on your development so far? As a leader, how is wellbeing addressed during induction, and what steps could you take to better support others as they transition into new roles?
Another podcast highlight from this month was Dominique Beech’s Research Files episode with Professor Alex Bowers, a Professor of Education Leadership at Teachers College at Columbia University. Professor Bowers works to help school leaders use the data that they already collect in more effective ways, and his research focuses on the intersection of effective school and district leadership, data-driven decision making, student grades and test scores, and more. Their conversation delves into some key pieces of research over the years that focus on school leadership and teacher professional development.
In this clip I’m going to play for you, Professor Bowers is sharing an innovative idea for re-organising how we think about teacher professional development.
I think it's true in Australia as well as it is in the United States – is that school level professional development, I have a hypothesis that school level professional development … and we only have 2 kinds. We have one-size-fits-all or completely individualised, neither of which work. And so, my innovation is to say, what if we listen to teachers, survey them on the very specific issues that they have, that they report on their practices around climate – like the 5Essentials survey? And if we then cluster schools together based on the similarities in what the teachers say the successes and challenges are around these issues, we wouldn't have one-size-fits-all, or completely individualised, maybe we have 6 types… and so, what if instead, we use these kinds of pattern analytics with the data that we already probably collect across most of our schools in many different ways (or could easily) and hear and listen to the teachers about what they say these challenges and successes are? And then bring schools together who are similar. And then we can target the professional development to those specific needs.
That was Professor Alex Bowers there. After listening to this episode, think about how you’d answer these questions:
Do you collaborate with other schools in your region? Does this collaboration involve professional learning? As a school leader, how could you provide professional learning opportunities that involve connecting with schools facing similar challenges, rather than treating each school as entirely unique or entirely the same?
Research shows that high quality teaching and leadership teams learn from each other’s practices. We welcome submissions from anyone working in the education sector and encourage the ongoing collaboration of experience and expertise. I have 4 articles I’d like to whip through right now. They were all written specifically for Teacher readers and were published on our website this month.
The first is a submission from Samantha Ephraims, Lead Teacher at Kalkie State School in Queensland, who has an interesting idea on how to address the decline in scientific engagement in young people. In her article she uses the teenage fandoms of Taylor Swift and television show Stranger Things as examples of students mirroring the scientific process, without even being aware that they are doing so. She explains that these fandoms use scientific processes (they pose questions, formulate hypotheses, track variables, test predictions and revise models) to dissect and analyse their pop culture obsessions.
We also published a brilliant piece by Dr Aylie Davidson, a Lecturer in Mathematics Education at Deakin University, where she explains that planning for learning necessitates intellectual and collaborative effort, and outlines what an effective planning [meeting] for maths looks like in practice. Harnessing the principles of the Japanese model of Lesson Study, Aylie also discusses how we should view professional planning as a humanised, reflective practice.
We know how much you all loved her first article published on Teacher earlier in the year, so we have Victorian teacher and designer Andressa Bassani back for another article on seating arrangements. In this new piece, Andressa discusses 3 of the most common seating layouts educators use when teaching a lesson primarily from the front of the classroom – and analyses them through the lens of architectural functionality and student engagement.
And finally, I know that the beginning of a new school year is often front of mind when we think about establishing classroom routines, but this work is beneficial across terms. In a new article published on Teacher, Anna Brady – principal at autism-specific school Aspect Vern Barnett School – shares how each term begins with a deliberate re‑establishment of routines, expectations and supports, and the positive impact this work has on students. I’d definitely recommend you check this one out.
That’s all I have for you today. Thanks for listening. I’ll leave the links to the full articles and podcast I mentioned today, in the transcript of this episode, which you can find under the podcast tab at our website. We’ll be back with a new episode very soon.
Teacher magazine is published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.
