Rebecca Vukovic

Melanie Macmillan, Principal of Warwick Farm Public School, shares how her experience in The Principals’ Centre in Australia: Leadership for School Excellence program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education strengthened her professionally as a school leader, but it also helped her to understand how she could better support the needs of families at her school.

Fostering a sense of school pride and meeting the individual needs of every student are just two priorities for Melanie Macmillan, Principal of Warwick Farm Public School. In today’s article she shares how she focuses on community partnerships, visible leadership and student engagement to achieve those goals.

This month has been has been one characterised by a lot of fear and uncertainty as the world grapples with the challenge of containing the spread of the coronavirus. In this episode of Teacher Staffroom, we do a round-up of what we’ve published so far related to Covid-19, as well as other more general content that we thought would be of interest.

Nine out of 10 teachers from OECD countries and economies are satisfied with their job, but only 26 per cent of them think the work they do is valued by society, according to the latest figures to come from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) report released overnight.

In these uncertain times, how do teachers support students to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic and give them the tools to navigate the challenges we may be faced with? In today’s article, Professor Peter O’Connor from the University of Auckland suggests arts-based approaches to building resilience in students in times of disaster.

St Helena Secondary College in Victoria embarked on a journey to improve the quality and accuracy of teacher judgements on their student reports, in order to better reflect student achievement. We’re joined by Kate Williams to hear about the process and where they’re at on their journey.

Teacher education students are being asked to share what inspired them to study teaching and to consider why their peers may have been deterred away from the profession, in a nationwide survey called Future Teachers Talk.

Warilla High School in the Illawarra region of New South Wales is on its way to becoming entirely self-sufficient with electricity, thanks to fundraising efforts by students. We find out more about the initiatives students have led and introduced and how much they’re saving the school annually.

Professor Paul Caldarella joins Teacher to discuss his three-year project that looked at the relationship between the praise-to-reprimand ratios and the extent to which students focused on class activities.

Teachers and school leaders spend considerable effort and time writing and checking student reports, but how effective are they in communicating student learning? We speak to principal Anthony Hockey about what he found when considering this question in his school context.