Expertise

Recruiting career changers into teaching has become a strategy to address teacher shortages in hard-to-staff schools. In today’s article we speak to Dr Babak Dadvand from La Trobe University about his research that aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of how career change teachers navigate challenges in these schools in the early years of switching to the profession.

‘[Do] teachers need to be trained therapists? A resounding no. Teachers can provide the best support to students impacted by trauma by developing positive relationships, implementing evidence-informed classroom practices, providing effective instruction and managing the classroom environment so that all students, including those affected by trauma, can thrive,’ Dr Lorna Hepburn writes in our latest reader submission.

‘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.

Convened by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), Research Conference 2023 will explore how to improve the continuity of learning from birth to 12 years. It’s a big topic made compelling through the latest research from experts in early childhood and primary education.

There is significant demand for teachers in the UK right now with numerous opportunities for educators in all subjects. There are fantastic opportunities for teachers who are newly qualified or for the most experienced, for those specialising in Primary, and Secondary opportunities for professional development and accelerated career progression are available for all.

While ChatGPT can save students time from searching through textbooks or online databases, the AI-generated content is not always accurate. Steve Brophy from Ivanhoe Grammar School in Victoria assigned students the task of testing the fallibility of ChatGPT with the lesson activity: Would you lie to me?

It is widely acknowledged that teaching is a stressful job, and the global events of the past few years have added an enormous amount of extra pressure on those working in education. In today’s episode we share some of the pieces we’ve published on the topic of teacher health and wellbeing.

New research from the University of Newcastle has found that early career teachers deliver the same quality of teaching as their more experienced colleagues. In today’s episode we’re joined by the lead researcher on this project, Laureate Professor Jenny Gore, to talk about the study, why the team decided to do this research and how the findings are both surprising and counterintuitive.

‘The default assumption has been that being a generalist is what primary school teachers prefer, or else they would have become secondary teachers.’ In our latest reader submission, Dr James Russo shares the findings of a study asking generalist early years teachers at schools in 2 Australian states if they’d rather be subject specialists.

We’ve highlighted the work and expertise of many in the past few weeks at the magazine, and in this episode, we bring you up to speed on these stories. We also pose some questions throughout, so you can gather some colleagues and discuss how these stories might be relevant to your school context.