Professional learning

Melanie Macmillan, Principal of Warwick Farm Public School, shares how her experience in The Principals’ Centre in Australia: Leadership for School Excellence program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education strengthened her professionally as a school leader, but it also helped her to understand how she could better support the needs of families at her school.

This month has been has been one characterised by a lot of fear and uncertainty as the world grapples with the challenge of containing the spread of the coronavirus. In this episode of Teacher Staffroom, we do a round-up of what we’ve published so far related to Covid-19, as well as other more general content that we thought would be of interest.

‘While schools will be gradually re-opening in China by mid-April, they’re closing around much of the rest of the world. How well are we prepared? OECD’s TALIS survey offers some insights,’ Andreas Schleicher, the organisation’s Director for Education and Skills, writes in his latest Teacher column.

Nine out of 10 teachers from OECD countries and economies are satisfied with their job, but only 26 per cent of them think the work they do is valued by society, according to the latest figures to come from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) report released overnight.

St Helena Secondary College in Victoria embarked on a journey to improve the quality and accuracy of teacher judgements on their student reports, in order to better reflect student achievement. We’re joined by Kate Williams to hear about the process and where they’re at on their journey.

Teachers and school leaders spend considerable effort and time writing and checking student reports, but how effective are they in communicating student learning? We speak to principal Anthony Hockey about what he found when considering this question in his school context.

Assumption College in Kilmore has been implementing a curriculum reform initiative called ‘myMAP’ for the beginning of the 2020 school year. In today’s Q&A, Vaughan Cleary, Deputy Principal of Learning and Teaching, explains how it works in practice and supports students on their individual learning journeys.

The Association of Independent Schools New South Wales (AISNSW) has been working with 38 of its schools on a targeted early years program that aims to help students in Kindergarten to Year 2 master key literacy and numeracy skills.

Can student voice offer insights into how schools can improve reading achievement? A new Australian study examining the link between secondary students’ attitudes towards school and reading performance has found that experiencing bullying has a strong relationship with how students perform on the NAPLAN reading assessment.

Educators across New South Wales converged on Sydney to take part in an annual accreditation panel organised by the Association of Independent Schools NSW that involved assessing applications from their colleagues seeking recognition as Experienced Teachers.