‘In classrooms, silence is often interpreted as lack of ability or confidence. But in many cases, it reflects a lack of safe, structured opportunities to participate.’ In today’s reader submission, senior secondary teacher Manisha Pundir explores 5 structured classroom routines that she’s used to help build student confidence to participate in classroom discussions. 

As a grade 1 teacher Haylea loves making learning fun through singing, dancing and creativity. But outside the classroom, she has found another meaningful way to support young people: becoming a foster carer.

The results from the second cycle of the OECD’s Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS 2025) have just been released. Here we share more about the focus and innovative assessment design of IELS, and an overview of the findings on how children are faring at the very start of their learning journeys.

In ‘The Relational School: From Behaviour Management to Cultural Transformation’ Sue Chandler shares how schools can go from not only valuing relationships but actively supporting them. This abridged extract for Teacher readers is taken from a chapter discussing change fatigue and building staff readiness.

‘Seating is not just about where we sit, but how the built environment dictates our capacity to learn.’ In today’s article, teacher and designer Andressa Bassani reviews 3 of the most common seating layouts educators use when the lesson requires whole-class instruction. 

Our guest on today’s podcast is Kayla Borg from St Mary’s Primary School in Whittlesea, Victoria. She shares how she went about co‑designing a podcast lesson for her year 5 and 6 students in partnership with the eSmart team at the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, what her students learned from this experience, and why real‑world, student‑led digital learning can have such a powerful ripple effect across the entire school community.

To address staffing concerns and improve language provision in primary schools, an innovative program known as TCL (Teachers as Co-Learners) supports the provision of languages through daily allocation of 15-minute chunks during the school day, run by a classroom teacher with the support of a language assistant. 

New research shows students recognise bullying to be intentional and emotionally harmful behaviour, and they want to help, but many don’t feel able to intervene. In this article we speak to Dr Aneeza Pervez about the implications of these research findings for schools, specifically when it comes to anti-bullying program design.

As a school, establishing partnerships that tap into external resources and expertise can enhance student outcomes. At Findon Primary School, a partnership with CSIRO has engaged students with the aviation and aerospace industries and even supported the design of a whole-school STEM program. Find out more in this article. 

Participating in professional learning can be energising and inspiring, but introducing what you’ve learned into your own practice – and sustaining it over the long term – can be hard. Taking small, simple steps on a regular basis was a key feature of what endured for teachers in a recent Australian research study of music-based approaches to nurture wellbeing.