It’s our first episode of Teacher Staffroom for 2025, and there’s plenty to take you through today to catch you up on content that’s kicked off our publication schedule for term one here at Teacher.

For the last 6 months, Series 3 of our School Assembly podcast has been following Dan McShea, Foundation Principal of Notre Dame P-12 College on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The big day finally arrived, and in this episode Teacher Editor Jo Earp checks in with Dan on how that first day of the new school went.

Previous exposure to similar mathematics tasks that appear in assessments significantly increases student mathematical self-efficacy and confidence, a new Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) report highlights.

New research published in the Australian Journal for Education examines the coping strategies teachers use to deal with stress and trauma. The study explores how this can impact a teacher’s ‘compassion satisfaction’, where they experience pleasure and fulfilment from helping others, or ‘compassion fatigue’.

The winner of the 2025 Global Teacher Prize has been announced. Mansour Al Mansour from Saudi Arabia has walked away with the US $1 million prize. One Australian teacher was a top 10 finalist this year – Brett Dascombe, a Senior Geography Teacher from Wavell State High School in Brisbane. In this special podcast episode, Brett shares how he exposes his students to real-world, project-based learning by embedding geospatial technologies like GIS, drones and remote sensing data into the geography curriculum.

The winner of the 2025 Global Teacher Prize has just been announced. Mansour Al Mansour from Prince Saud bin Jalawi School in Saudi Arabia has walked away with the US $1 million prize. Mansour was recognised for his strategic vision and unwavering belief in his students' potential, and for building an inclusive and innovative learning environment.

In his first Teacher column for 2025, Professor Geoff Masters AO poses these questions: will schooling be different for children born this year, and if so, how? He then offers 3 suggestions for how learning at school might evolve by 2040.

‘Educational provision includes what students learn … how they will be taught … and the culture in which they will be taught ... Gifted students benefit from the opportunity to interact with differentiated versions of each of these.’ Professor John Munro explains 3 areas of differentiation, and shares examples of what this could look like in the classroom.

‘What we've done is aimed to answer the questions about how to enact global citizenship and what does it look like when you do it well?’ In this episode of our Global Education podcast, Dominique Russell is joined by ACER Senior Research Fellow, Rachel Parker, to unpack the new Global Education Monitoring Toolkit. 

In today’s Q&A, Teacher speaks with the National Excellence in Teaching Awards 2024 winner of the Founders’ Principal for Leadership Award, Angela Phillips from Westminster School in South Australia. She chats about her work to establish engaging professional learning opportunities, increase the number of Highly Accomplished and Lead Teachers, and her latest initiative – a Micro Rewards scheme for staff.