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.
As we start to turn our minds towards the end of this school year, at Teacher, we take the time to invite you, our audience, to share your feedback with us. Our annual reader survey launched this month and it’s open until 6 November 2026. It gives you the opportunity to let us know what you’d like to see more of at Teacher, which type of content you like best, and more about your experiences in education. The team have been reading your responses as you’ve submitted them over the last fortnight, and in this episode I’m excited to give you a glimpse of what themes are emerging from your feedback so far. I’ll also be bringing you some other highlights from what we’ve published this month – many of which are article submissions we published written by our Teacher readers. As always, I'll be posing some questions throughout the episode so feel free to pause the audio, gather some colleagues, and discuss together how you might respond to these prompts in your own school context. Let's get started.
A question we ask in our reader survey is what topics you’d like to see covered by us in the coming year. It’s a bit too early to share the results for the survey that’s currently underway, but the past few years you’ve told us loud and clear that you want more content on AI.
Earlier this month we published a piece written by Jill Fitzsimons, Director of Teaching and Learning at Loreto Toorak in Melbourne. In the article, Jill reflected on the fact that a strict AI policy was not the most effective approach for their school context, and she shared that their focus was firmly on what it now means to ‘know’ something at school.
Jill explained recent changes that have been made to the curriculum in Humanities, Performing Arts, and Library activities. It was really interesting to see some concrete examples of what’s happening in a school. Here’s what she had to say about professional development for staff in the area:
Through regular whole staff professional learning, as well as discussions at a faculty level, staff are continually reflecting on the potential impact of AI on their curriculum and assessment tasks. This ongoing professional discussion is now regular practice. Staff are consistently building in more opportunities for students to make the learning visible and to highlight the scaffolding of their learning. Staff understand that students can safely use AI built into our current educational applications highlighted in our Loreto Toorak Accredited Digital Toolkit. These specific applications have carefully integrated AI tools for student use in the educational setting and have been developed with strict guardrails in place. Staff have reported feeling more confident knowing that the applications we have available for staff and students at Loreto Toorak are safe to use. Therefore, staff are able to teach our students effective use of AI through such resources.
So that brings me to a question for you to think about. As AI tools continue to evolve, what opportunities do staff in your school have to discuss, test and refine approaches to curriculum and assessment?
Another recent highlight for me was publishing an article written by Jo Jolly, Principal of Parkhill Primary School in Melbourne. Jo succinctly brought together a reflection of the journey the school has been on for the past 3 years to reshape their culture and their approach to instruction. Specifically, they implemented Science of Learning based instruction – utilising research around cognitive load theory, explicit teaching and retrieval practice to inform how they designed lessons. As for the culture work, this involved refreshing their uniform and logo and rolling out school-wide expectations and Daily Review routines for P-12.
What I loved most is reading about the impact these significant changes have had on student outcomes. Here’s what Jo shared with us:
Our 2026 NAPLAN data show genuinely outstanding achievement across the school. In year 3, 83% of students achieved strong or exceeding results in reading, 89% in numeracy, and 83% in writing – great results across every key learning area assessed. In year 5, the growth has been even more striking: 100% of our students achieved strong or exceeding results in reading, 97% in numeracy, and 83% in writing, with no students in year 5 requiring additional support in reading, numeracy or writing.
Considering this story from Jo, here’s a question for you to think about. As a school leader, what evidence do you use to assess whether the culture and instructional strategies currently in place at your school are supporting staff and improving student outcomes?
Another article written for Teacher by an educator this month was a piece titled ‘Six ways to build stronger school-community partnerships – lessons from a Churchill Fellowship’. It was written by Dr Luke Steller. Luke is a Questacon Regional Leader for the Northern Territory and a 2024 Churchill Fellowship recipient. As the title of the article suggests, in this piece he shared 6 practical ways educators can build stronger school-community partnerships alongside some questions for reflections around what this might look like in your own school context.
The 6 ways are drawn from visits Luke conducted to 19 programs across the world – in places like Hawai‘i, New York and London – to see how schools and community organisations connect learning with local knowledge and priorities. Of all the strategies Luke shared in the piece, point 4 is the one that really stuck out to me – focus your engagement. Here’s what Luke had to say for this point:
No school can meaningfully involve every group in its community in every learning experience. The aim is not to represent everyone at once, but to understand who your students are, including noticing who is missing, and invest properly in the relationships that matter. The New York Hall of Science is based in Queens, New York, one of the world’s most linguistically diverse areas, where more than 100 languages are spoken. Its approach included identifying communities that were strongly represented in the surrounding neighbourhood but underrepresented in its programs. They then concentrated on building a deeper relationship with that particular group, rather than trying to engage everyone at once. Schools can apply the same thinking. Compare the cultural, linguistic, and community experiences represented in school activities with the demographics of your students and local area. That can reveal where some groups are highly visible while others, despite being a significant part of the school community, rarely appear in learning experiences or partnerships.
Really fascinating insights from Luke there. He also offered some thinking prompts for how this could look in your own school setting. I’ll leave you with one of them for now: Look at who currently contributes to excursions, classroom visits, projects, celebrations, and partnerships, then compare that with the students and families your school serves.
If you’re listening to these school examples from educators in the community and you’re thinking that you have a story to share with us, we’d love to hear from you. We welcome article contributions from educators, whatever your role, school sector, or location. If you visit our website – teachermagazine.com – you’ll find a Submissions and Feedback link when you scroll to the very bottom of our homepage. From there, you’ll find step-by-step instructions for submitting an article to us for consideration. We’d love to hear from you.
Finally, if you haven’t listened to it yet, I cannot recommend more that you take the time to listen to my interview with Professor Miriam Tanti from La Trobe University that went live in our podcast feed on 8 October. In the episode, we talk about the rationale behind a brand-new guide released by her and her colleagues called The Science of Learning and Generative AI. It’s a free guide, and in our conversation we unpacked it, and delved into the intersection of the science of learning and generative AI. Here’s a short clip from the episode where Miriam describes the guide:
And so, we wanted to produce a guide that wasn't just focused on technology. This isn't about how to prompt and how to create an agent. This is about what we already know about the Science of Learning and what effective teaching and learning looks like. So, we use that as our foundation and where can we use GenAI to amplify that or to support learning so that we ensure that cognition – the things that we know that are important for learning, to make learning stick – remains at the heart of all of that teacher teaching practice.
It’s an episode that is resonating with our audience. One of our readers, Elena, left a comment on our website that I’d like to share with you now. Here’s part of what she said:
… Grounding GenAI applications in the Science of Learning is so vital if we want technology to enhance cognitive processes rather than replace them. In language classes specifically, I’m really interested in structured frameworks that make GenAI use meaningful. A while ago I applied some of these principles by having students use AI to curate their vocabulary lists in Quizlet, which really helped bridge retrieval practice with active processing.
To finish this month’s episode of Teacher Staffroom, I’d love to share some early responses we’ve received to our survey. A big thank you to everyone who has taken the time to fill out the survey and share your feedback with us. We ask a range of questions in our survey – about what topics you’d like to see covered on Teacher in the future, to how you prefer to find and access professional resources, and what type of Teacher content you like most.
On future content, one reader gave us some great suggestions. They said:
I would welcome more content that examines complex and sometimes uncomfortable questions facing educators, particularly around the impact of digital technologies on learning, the future of assessment in an AI-enabled world, and how school leaders can translate evidence into sustainable improvements in classroom practice. More longitudinal case studies showing how schools have implemented change, evaluated its impact and adapted along the way would be especially valuable.
We also ask you’ve used Teacher content in your context. One of our survey respondents told us:
I have implemented a 'Thinking Wall' that I read about in a recent article. I used the article about seating arrangements to plan my classroom layout. I have implemented an inquiry sequence I read about.
Finally, for the first time this year, we’re asking you to share how your own teachers had a positive impact on you when you were a student, and how their influence has shaped who you are today. Here’s one response we received:
My teachers were positive role models and good people, and I guess it was wanting to be like them and help children and my colleagues be the best versions of themselves is what has shaped me and continued to inspire me today as a primary educator.
So, if you’re listening to this podcast before 6 November 2026, there’s still time to complete our survey. And, if you’re based in Australia, you will go into the running to win book bundle valued at $550, thanks to our friends at Amba Press. You can find the survey at www.teachermagazine.com/form/reader-survey. I’ll also leave the link in the show notes for this podcast. We read every single response we receive, and we are so excited to hear from you.
That’s all for this episode. 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. And don’t forget to sign up to receive the weekly Teacher Bulletin by following the prompts on the righthand side of the website homepage. That way you’ll have our latest content sent straight to your inbox, so you never miss a story. We’ll be back with a new episode very soon.
Teacher magazine is published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.
