In his final Teacher column of the year Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills, shares his key takeaways from this month’s Forum for World Education in Paris.

A regular school day for a school girl in Malawi looks vastly different to what her peers experience in Australia, as Julia Gillard witnessed firsthand during a trip to south-east Africa.

Teacher content draws on the wealth of knowledge and expertise that exists within the education community. This month, we’ve had the opportunity to speak with several experts in education on a range of different topics, and in today’s podcast, we take you through some of the highlights.

In today’s podcast we’re talking with Professor Pauline Taylor-Guy about continuity of teaching and learning during COVID-19, trying to understand and mitigate the impacts on student outcomes, how schools have adapted to ‘emergency remote teaching’, and how the experience could lead to future changes and innovations in practice.

A recent study tracked the reading trajectories of children in Grades 1, 2 and 3. Alongside this, the concerns teachers held in relation to their reading, as well as the support they provided, were analysed. Here, the study’s authors discuss the implications of their findings for educators.

‘[My former students] were proclaiming that “Station Eleven is becoming real!”.’ Here, Ben Tiffen shares how Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel is an opportunity for teachers to choose a study text drawing on students’ recent experiences.

What is epilepsy? How does the condition impact on a student’s learning? And what do school leaders, teachers and anyone with a duty of care in K-12 settings need to know? In this Q&A, Teacher speaks to Wendy Groot, President of Epilepsy Australia, to find out more.

In this article, Professor Chris Matthews from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mathematics Alliance (ATSIMA) shares how mathematics is taught to students at Yirrkala School with a balance of western and Indigenous knowledge.

In his first Teacher article on mathematics from an Indigenous perspective, Professor Chris Matthews introduced the concept of two-ways learning. In this follow-up, he discusses Yolŋu mathematics and the interconnected relationships of Gurruṯu, and shares an activity for teachers and students to explore the connections and patterns in family trees.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented some unique challenges for early years educators as they move to a remote learning approach. In today’s article, Dr Deborah Price discusses some practical ways for embracing the teaching and learning opportunities this new environment provides.