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.
AI tools are becoming more embedded in students’ lives. As a result, teachers, leaders and school systems are asking: What does this mean for teaching and learning, and how should we respond? At Teacher, we know this is a topic that educators are seeking practical support on, and so this month, we’ve published a range of articles to help. In today’s Teacher Staffroom episode, I’ll take you through the key highlights, along with a few extra pieces that you won’t want to miss. Let’s dive in.
Earlier this month we published an article that explored AI as a tool for assessment feedback. In the article by Teacher Editor Jo Earp, she writes that ‘AI offers new possibilities for feedback while also raising important questions about quality, accuracy, teacher oversight and, crucially, whether the feedback improves the learner, not just the piece of work they’ve been tasked with completing’.
The piece unpacks key messages from a recent webinar exploring the implications of AI for assessment feedback in schools. Hosted by the Australian Council for Educational Research, the session featured expert insights from Dr Fabienne van der Kleij and Professor Therese Hopfenbeck. Here’s a quote from Dr van der Kleij where she’s urging educators to think about the fundamental purpose of feedback – improving the learning, not what students produce. She says:
‘If feedback focuses on fixing students’ work for them, then we’re missing the point. … if our underlying model of feedback is flawed, AI simply helps us make problematic practices more widespread.’
After reading the article, consider these questions:
When you give feedback, what is your primary goal? How do your students typically respond to feedback? What evidence do you have that they understand and use it?
In early June, the Teacher team were in Sydney for the 2-day EDUtech conference, which brought together educators, school leaders and EdTech providers across K-12, higher education, and the vocational sectors. While there, we heard from national and international speakers, met with teachers and school leaders, and engaged with so many Teacher magazine readers. We loved meeting so many of you in person! It was also wonderful opportunity to hear from educators about the issues important to them – and unsurprisingly, AI featured heavily.
Following the conference, in an article on Teacher, we shared some of our highlights, including snippets from the keynote presentations and some of the panel discussions. We also published a podcast special, where we reflected on our personal takeaways, as well as some of our conversations with educators on the ground. It was also really nice to include some audio snippets from the presentations. In fact, there’s actually one I’d like to share with you now.
It’s Professor Rose Luckin, Founder of Educate Ventures Research. Professor Luckin is a recognised expert on AI in education, and her session was titled ‘An education ecosystem for 2030’. In this clip, Professor Luckin is talking about trusting students in their use of AI.
Really interesting piece of research came out a couple of weeks ago in the UK where their higher education thinktank, Wonkhe, had analysed 19 UK university AI policies. And one of the things that they'd identified was that in no policy does anybody say anything about trusting students. So, we go back to that enforcement rhetoric again. The message is about we don't trust you. No wonder students are anxious about being incorrectly accused of using AI because the rhetoric doesn't trust them. Now, I don't know about universities in the UK. I know TEQSA holds probably more than 203 since I wrote this slide a couple weeks ago. But there isn't a similar study for me to look at. But it would be interesting to see. My instinct would be that I suspect very few, if any of them, say explicitly, yeah, we trust you or we're going to support you to use the technology critically. Because, if we get the assessment right, of course we can trust students because we're not encouraging them to use the AI in a way to increase their grades and reduce their learning.
To round off our coverage at EDUtech, we also published a video of the popular Australian STEM Video Game Challenge presentation hosted by Lisa van Beeck, ACER Research Fellow and Project Director for the challenge. In her presentation, which we recorded in full exclusively for Teacher readers, van Beeck walked delegates through the challenge itself and highlighted the suite of teacher resources designed to support it. She also shared the research driving the initiative. So be sure to check out the article, the podcast and the video over on the Teacher magazine website.
Still on the topic of AI in schools, this week we published an article sharing findings from new research involving almost 4,000 students aged 13-18 in the UK that captured their perspectives on the role of AI use for schoolwork. Interestingly, the findings show that appropriate use of AI is a grey area for students – for example, only 44% think it is cheating to use AI to complete all of their homework, and almost one in 5 (18%) also believe it is cheating to ask an AI tool to give them ideas or tips for their homework. There are so many interesting findings from this research, so be sure to check it out.
Moving on from AI in schools now, this month Associate Principal Rachael Lehr published a new column where she shares insights from mindset coach and author Ben Crowe about the ‘dreaded “E” word’ – expectations. It’s a brilliant piece where she reflects on what it means to hold high expectations in ways that give purpose and build aspiration for staff and students, rather than add pressure or burden. Her column has received high praise from our readers too. One person commented on the article:
‘Hands down, the most poignant piece on the balance between a drive to achieve/succeed, and the opportunity to grow and develop I have read. The agile and forward-thinking approach you have toward the development of your students and staff at Dayton PS is admirable. Yes, I'm also a supporter and advocate of Crowe's approach and the alternative wisdom he presents us all, often in the form of a challenge. Thanks for the tremendous read, personal insights, and vulnerable reflections.’
If you’d like to read Rachael’s column, as always, you’ll find a link to the article in the transcript of this episode over on the Teacher magazine website.
This month I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr Dan Cloney, Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research, to unpack the findings from the 2025 Early Learning and Child Well-being Study, or IELS. IELS is the first internationally comparable study designed to measure how children are learning and developing at age 5 and Dr Cloney is the Lead Researcher for the project here at ACER. In this podcast, we unpack some of the key findings to come from the study, explore what made the assessment design unique, and discuss why it is so important to ensure every child arrives at school with the strongest possible foundations.
I’d love to play you a short clip from the episode now. It’s Dr Cloney explaining the skills and attributes a 5-year-old student is asked to demonstrate in the foundational learning dimension of this study.
One thing that we observe in IELS is that children come to the start of school – these are 5-year-old children, typically around the start of school – with quite a range of abilities. So, there are children who are in literacy, for example, quite confident speakers. Others are just beginning to use their expressive language. What we do is we really want to make sure we have an assessment that can meet children where they're at. And so, in literacy, for example, we introduced an adaptive design in 2025. It means that children who are just emerging in their literacy skills tend to work with shorter sentences and more simple ideas. Children who are more capable have more literacy skills; they're working with longer texts, listening to longer, more complex stories. And we're asking them to do things like draw inferences about what they've heard, even though the information is not obvious or just there on the page for them.
And of course, tax time for the 2025-26 financial year is here in Australia. Every year, we publish an article to support teachers and school leaders during this time, and it always proves super popular amongst readers. In this year’s article, we draw on expertise from the Australian Taxation Office and tax services company H&R Block, to hear more about teacher returns for 2026 – including claiming fuel costs, implications for teachers using social media for work, and more.
That’s all I have for you today. Thanks for listening. I’ll leave the links to the full articles and podcasts 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.
