Student welfare

At Auburn Girls High School in Auburn, New South Wales, students are supported to achieve the high expectations teachers hold for them. Here, Principal Anna Tsoutsa shares how the school has developed and sustained this culture of high expectations.

Large scale research into school break times suggests relatively simple changes to daily routines could drastically reduce teachers’ exposure to UV radiation and risk of skin cancer. Ben Dexter tells Teacher more about the findings.

Andreas Schleicher – Director for Education and Skills at the OECD and long-time Teacher columnist – joins us from Paris for this episode to give his take on all things 2020, talk about the longer term impacts of the school shutdowns and share how different education systems have responded to the pandemic restrictions.

You might’ve noticed we’ve been placing a real emphasis on wellbeing at Teacher recently. We’ve looked at new research into student wellbeing, resilience, and launched a new publication dedicated to educator wellbeing outside of the classroom. In today’s podcast we take you through anything you might have missed.

The annual Youth Survey Report from Mission Australia shows young people in Australia are becoming increasingly concerned about equity and discrimination, and remain affected by stress levels and mental health. Here, we look at the survey findings which detail the experiences of over 25 000 young people in 2020.

‘Through careful reflection, design and planning of daily learning activities, teachers can identify opportunities for teaching resilience in their classroom.’ Dr Sarah Tillott and Dr Michelle Neumann discuss learning activities that foster resilience in the classroom.

‘There are several cognitive strategies that support the development of resilience … these are the skills we want to encourage children to develop in the early years.’ In part two of her series on resilience, Dr Sarah Tillott discusses the adaptive and maladaptive traits of resilience.

Dr Pauline Ho and Dr Katherine Dix share the findings of a systematic review investigating the impact of wellbeing-related interventions on student academic and wellbeing outcomes, including four ingredients for effective implementation and three recommended actions for schools.

‘While this crisis has exposed the many inadequacies and inequities in our education systems, this moment also holds the possibility that we won’t return to the status quo when things return to “normal”,’ Andreas Schleicher writes in his latest Teacher column.

‘Being exposed to adversity is inevitable. How we manage and adapt as a response is what can make the difference between poor outcomes, or outcomes that signify growth from the experience.’ Dr Sarah Tillott explores resilience theory and the brain, and the importance of developing resilience skills from an early age.