Evidence-based practice

Six years ago Professor Geoff Masters AO penned a column for Teacher on the ‘big five’ education challenges facing Australian schools. This year, ACER has been running a five-part webinar series exploring each challenge in greater detail, and in today’s podcast, we run you through some of the highlights.

Staff at Cedar College in South Australia are determined to improve the proportion of female students choosing to study Science, Technology, Mathematics and Engineering (STEM) subjects in senior high school. Here, we speak with Digital Technologies and Maths teacher Trudi Wynn about the strategies they’ve employed to entice more girls to consider studying STEM.

How do schools successfully engage and retain students alongside promoting academic achievement? In today’s reader submission Margaret Gurney, Assistant Director-General, State Schools Operations at the Queensland Department of Education, shares research findings on practices common in high performing schools.

In his first video for the new school year, Greg Whitby sits down with Renee Blyth from Xavier College in Llandilo, western Sydney, to discuss how staff have maintained a culture of continuous change at the school.

In this Q&A we speak with Dr Katie Richardson about looking at student assessment data from different angles, identifying patterns in data, and why working collaboratively to interpret assessment data is a useful technique.

In a recent Teacher article, Learning Specialist Jeanette Breen shared how Templestowe Heights Primary School (THPS) in Victoria has improved its writing moderation process. Here she describes a new step that aims to bridge the gaps that still exist for staff, through an assessment process known as comparative judgement.

Professor Geoff Masters AO shares details of a special ACER five-webinar series, where expert practitioners, researchers and policymakers will revisit the major challenges in school education he wrote of six years ago, and ask what progress has been made on each, and what needs to happen next.

In the final installment of our three-part series on small group tutoring, we discuss what effective small group tutoring looks like in practice, the importance of building relationships with students, and why students need to be at the centre of this work.

Small group tutoring has emerged as a key strategy to support students who fell behind in 2020 during remote schooling. In today’s article, we explore how to choose a tutor to best suit your students’ learning needs, the professional learning offered to tutors, and why a collaborative relationship between the classroom teacher and tutor teacher is critically important.

‘In the context of remote learning, it is likely that those students who had already developed metacognitive strategies and skills were better prepared to learn and apply that learning independently.’ Today’s article shares how a senior secondary school is developing metacognition and self-regulation in learners.