Building strong, purposeful relationships with staff, students and school communities is a trait of highly effective principals – but what happens to that relationship dynamic when expected ways of working suddenly change?

‘Feedback is identified as one of the most powerful strategies to progress student learning.’ Today’s article explores the nature and impact of high quality feedback, and shares how one school’s focus on teacher feedback on students’ writing is driving real change and improving outcomes.

'The school curriculum should embody a society’s vision for its future and play a vital role in achieving that vision.' Professor Geoff Masters AO reflected on this during his review of the New South Wales curriculum and on a study visit to Estonia.

In Leading Improvement in Mathematics Teaching and Learning, Emeritus Professor Peter Sullivan curates high-impact teaching strategies and practices to help school leaders achieve improvement goals. This extract for Teacher’s bookshelf is on choosing classroom tasks.

In Principled, Dr Paul Browning draws on his own research and more than 20 years of school leadership experience to offer advice on ‘the 10 key practices that can help executives build and develop skills to become more trustworthy leaders’. This extract for Teacher readers is taken from the chapter titled ‘Offering trust’.

The introduction of the Learning Specialist role, as part of the Victorian Government Schools Agreement 2017, has allowed experienced teachers to support colleagues to improve their practice, while still being able to remain in the classroom. In today’s reader submission, Nicole Kelly, a Learning Specialist at Ararat Primary School in Victoria, shares her experience.

Year 10 gifted and talented students at St Matthews Catholic School in regional New South Wales collaborated with academics at the University of Sydney on a research project. In today’s episode we speak with Professor Patrick Brennan and Brooke Colley about how the collaborative nature of this project strengthened students’ STEM skills in areas like data analysis, experimentation and scientific writing.

Students can play an important part in co-decision making within a school that can impact not only their learning, but that of other learners also. In the Northern Territory, students have been leading change projects in their schools for the past four years.

This week, Teacher has been sharing reader stories on their school’s response to the pandemic. This final instalment is written by Michael Rosenbrock, Assistant Principal at Wodonga Senior Secondary College, on the border of Victoria and New South Wales.

‘While schools will be gradually re-opening in China by mid-April, they’re closing around much of the rest of the world. How well are we prepared? OECD’s TALIS survey offers some insights,’ Andreas Schleicher, the organisation’s Director for Education and Skills, writes in his latest Teacher column.