School Assembly is the podcast that explores what it takes to build a new school from the ground up. We’re following principal Jo Camozzato and her team at Bemin Secondary College, in the Melbourne suburb of Truganina, which opens its doors at the start of the 2024 school year. In this episode, we’re talking about planning.

‘Deliberately planning to support students to build and use their vocabulary is critical to ensuring that students can both access the curriculum content and effectively demonstrate their understanding.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock shares what this might look like in practice for maths and science teachers.

In this episode I’m joined by Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report Director Manos Antoninis to discuss the 6 key messages in the major international study Technology in Education: A tool on whose terms?, including what governments, systems and schools should be thinking about when planning to bring technology into the classroom.

In today’s article we share an update on the Pathways, Engagement and Transitions study, which explores the post-school pathways of young people experiencing disadvantage and how this information can be used to create better support systems, including in school settings.

‘Teacher knowledge of misconceptions and explicitly planning to uncover and address them is vital for supporting student learning growth.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock looks at how teachers can pro-actively plan to tackle student misconceptions in STEM, and steps though an example from the forces and motion topic in physics.

We know that e-cigarette use among adolescents in Australia has quickly become a pressing issue. So, how can educators empower them to say no to vaping, and work towards the prevention of e-cigarette use among young people? In this episode, we speak to the team behind the Unpacking Vaping in Schools Project about their findings so far.

‘My experience as a teacher and researcher in Japan has allowed me to observe and study classrooms in depth. The first thing that caught my attention was the use of chalkboards.’ Dr Shirley Tan shares how the traditional Japanese technique of bansho board writing can enhance teaching and learning in your own classroom.

In this episode of School Improvement, we’re joined by Angeline Aow and Sadie Hollins, 2 of the authors of Becoming a Totally Inclusive School: A Guide for Teachers and School Leaders. We’ll be talking about what we mean by Total Inclusivity, and exploring the Continuum on Becoming a Totally Inclusive School – a 6 stage framework to help schools and educators move from theory to practice.

‘At Dromana College we had an issue with only a few teachers having the confidence to write a decent rubric…As a school, we therefore came up with our own guidelines on how to construct rubrics for years 7-10.’ In this reader submission, Assessment and Reporting Coordinator Jodi Wilson shares how the Victorian secondary school has been helping teachers to improve their own rubric design skills.

In this extract from their new book, Leading Improvement in School Community Wellbeing, Dr Donna Cross and Dr Leanne Lester are discussing the role of ‘wellbeing champions’ in a school setting, and the 4 key elements school leaders need to prioritise when it comes to staff wellbeing.