After surveying staff to assess where their strengths and areas for improvement lie, Principal Daryll Kinnane of Maningrida College in the Northern Territory began working on the next steps for growing the college as a Professional Learning Community (PLC).

Once a fortnight the Teacher team ventures down to Room 3 – the basement archives at the Australian Council for Educational Research – to bring you education quotes from some of our favourite historical titles.

A new study examines the gender differences in the friendships and conflicts of both girls and boys with autism, relative to their neurotypical peers. In today’s podcast we speak to two of the researchers, Dr Felicity Sedgewick and Dr Liz Pellicano.

Dr Brendon Hyndman from Charles Sturt University shares his latest research into how mobile school playground facilities can enhance students' creativity by increasing the number of play options and variables available during outdoor learning.

In the third article in a series related to ACER’s Communication Student Learning Progress project, Dr Hilary Hollingsworth and Jonathan Heard highlight some of the observations that they’ve made in their early analysis of teacher comments on school reports.

Dr Lyn Sharratt explores three practical learning, teaching and leading approaches – writing to improve critical literacy skills, bump-it-up walls, and collaborative assessment of student work – that each support teachers’ focus on creating critically literate graduates.

At Bradshaw Primary School in the Northern Territory, the use of Professional Learning Communities has included implementing Collaborative Learning Teams (CLTs) in order to improve the reading results of students.

At Warrigal Road State School in Brisbane, the focus on inquiry learning in Science was an identified area of improvement. Lead Science teacher Brett Crawford explains what Science education was like before he began mentoring teachers, and shares details of a couple of his budget-friendly experiments.

What are the most effective ways to improve student learning with a teaching assistant? In today’s article, Associate Director at Evidence for Learning Dr Tanya Vaughan explores this question.

Teachers Leah Carter and Hugo Engele are undertaking a two-year action research project to investigate the impact of physical activity on student writing ability. Here, they share the research aims and what has happened so far.