Recorded live at the National Education Summit in Melbourne, Teacher’s Deputy Editor Rebecca Vukovic is joined by Jonathan Heard, a Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research for this School Improvement episode. They discuss the importance of having a shared definition on what critical thinking is, the connection between critical thinking and information literacy, and provide some key takeaways for teachers, teacher librarians and school leaders.

Following the release of the PISA 2025 results last week, Dominique Beech is joined by Dr Jonas Bertling, Research Director of ACER Implementation and Reporting and co-author of the report sharing Australia’s PISA 2025 results, to unpack the 2025 findings and the implications for educators.

The latest OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results have just been released. In his latest Teacher column, OECD Director of Education and Skills Andreas Schleicher shares some of the early data and insights, including the changing landscape of reading performance and translating scientific talent into scientific ambition.

EDUtech has just wrapped up for 2026, and the Teacher team were in Sydney for the 2-day conference to have conversations with the education community and hear from both local and international speakers. Read our insights here.

What do ‘friend’, ‘cost’ and ‘privacy’ have in common? They’re all past winners of Oxford’s Australian Children’s Word of the Year. Now we can add ‘vitamin’ to the list, with the latest research highlighting an increase in students writing about self-care. Find out what else made the shortlist, and about some of the changes in the rankings of the 100 highest-frequency words, in today’s article.

In this episode of our Research Files podcast series, editor Jo Earp talks to ACER’s Dr Tim Friedman about the latest Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). We’ll be focusing on the theme of staff wellbeing and looking at some of the protective factors when it comes to levels of teacher job satisfaction and stress.

In this exclusive extract from her new book, Connecting Whole-School Literacy: Building Capacity from Leadership to Classroom Practice, author Hayley Harrison explores the vocabulary, reading skills and writing demands of students in a secondary school context, how teachers should consider their complexity, and why it is important to set high expectations for student writing.

Our latest edition of Teacher’s Bookshelf features the open-access resource Teaching Reading Comprehension in a Digital World: Evidence-Based Contributions Using PIRLS and Digital Texts – a collaboration between the IEA and researchers from the Dutch Centre for Language Education. This extract is from the chapter on good practices for teaching and shares an example from Talbot Senior National School, Ireland.

As a teacher, you’ll likely remember your first few years in the profession and the support that made a difference to you. But what does the research say about how schools can best support early career teachers? Ebony Malzek from Monash University joins Dominique Russell in this podcast to discuss new research in this area. 

‘Teachers and parents can help to foster social-emotional functioning among students, which is important for their healthy development more broadly.’ In this reader submission, Rebecca J. Collie and Richard M. Ryan share findings from their recent study that examined the role teachers and parents play in relation to students’ social-emotional competence.