CPL Podcast

Rose Dixon suggests practical strategies to meet the needs of your students…

“We need this extra special training to actually meet the needs of these special students…

There is no cure for Autism … that doesn’t mean that we can’t create Autism friendly environments where people with Autism can grow and flourish…

…the LAST and the Leaning Support Team are the people you go to first… it’s much better to start this planning, if you can, the year before… and you are going to have a much better day if you put this planning in.”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Kristy Pugliano and Alexandra Johnson explain why all students need to study the Creative Arts…

“Visual Arts is subjective and students can have an opinion and have it valued… we encourage difference and we encourage diversity… People are inspired by creativity and more often than not that is what employers are looking for too…

I expect students to be engaging in the art world and anything I expect of them I expect of myself also… I practise my own art as much as I can.”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Jenny Williams and Sandra Rowan explain what you can do to create a classroom where students are focussed on thinking...

“I think a good place to start is to think about what our students are like now and what being in a classroom used to be like. I went to school in the sixties and the pedagogy around learning was very different to what our understanding is now… where the emphasis was on learning facts and memorising content.

… we are trying to make sure that we are teaching very explicitly and systematically, as still considered key components of what a teaching program should look like, but also making sure that we are offering to students the sophistication and full range of outcomes that the syllabus addresses.

… the syllabuses reflect our increased understanding of the importance of being a thinker and training our students to think and not just to do a worksheet or a task but to critically and reflectively think.”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Margaret Vos encourages all secondary schools to offer History Extension…

“It’s a course which is incredibly valuable… it’s important for the continuation of history as a discipline … and because you get students who love history in your History Extension classes you have great discussions.

… It truly is an extension course where they take the skills they’ve learned in Year 11 and especially in the Historical Investigation… and they become very passionate.

…It’s not just more history, it’s about historiography and the history of history… and it allows students to be life-long learners and to realise that having half of your brain in the past is not something unusual, and there are like minds out there that love it just as much as you do.”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Eddie Woo and David Watson love teaching mathematics and you can too …

“I became a Maths teacher because of my Year 12 Maths teacher… they came across as good people teaching good things… since then, I’ve been thinking about the power of exploration in Maths and the beauty of not always having to have the right answer.

…in Mathematics it’s like oh, this makes sense now and it’s something I’ve seen all the time in my everyday life and now I know why...

Connecting students’ learning to their own context and showing the relevance of that… it’s not “fake world” learning… what I think might be a good place to begin is to find a local problem, something that’s pressing on you ... to solve a problem that matters.”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Beatrice Taylor began teaching in 1911 after just 6 weeks training. She was only 17 year old. Beatrice reflects on her experiences teaching at the outbreak of World War One, supervising classes of 70 students, and other oppressive conditions and demands of her times…

“I felt delighted. The children were simply gorgeous… I can see them all so plainly… they were as enthusiastic as I was…

There was another teacher in the room with me. I was talking against another teacher all day and it was exhausting… the boards were all uneven with cracks between them and it was freezing…

We were always reading and studying and you didn’t mind…‘You must have been teaching then when World War One began?’ Oh, yes! That was when the real horror began!”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Dan Sprange knows the power and potential of engaging Science lessons…

“We often sit at the front of our classrooms and think, yeah, we’ve covered that it’s all good, but if we were to sit in the minds of our students, we might see a very different picture…

We need to aim for durable knowledge and make time for students to understand… we are looking for high cognitive, high operative and high affective… it’s the process of working something out…

There is a skillset that goes with releasing responsibility to students… teachers that do this well have really high expectations for students. ”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Tom Alegounarias tells the story of the teaching standards in NSW and why they can be useful for teachers…

“It is not possible to codify what constitutes quality… but we needed to build a discourse of professionalism beyond a simple statement … and articulate what values we will protect.

You cannot enter the profession without having recognised teaching qualifications, as defined by teachers… there is a constant tension between describing and articulating what might constitute quality and teaching … and being seen as a potentially punitive statement of surveillance and containment.

The only people who understand these values and can put these into practice are teachers, and that’s our value and our strength…”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Dr. Jennifer Lawless and Jonathon Dallimore discuss what to do with the new Stage 6 Ancient and Modern History courses and see much to be excited about…

“I hope a lot of people will be willing to try some of these new topics and I think they will … In terms of the topic flow, the cores do an important thing in setting up the flavour of the course… This new Core for Modern revamps the flavour of Modern History for a new course and a new generation.

… Some of the areas teachers need to stop and think about are the skills and the concepts and how we are trying to integrate some of those higher-order concepts a little more specifically… it is quite easy to introduce these...

We tend to start Year 11 as a clean slate and it is important to look back at the end of Year 10 and consider the step up to the new Year 11 outcomes too….”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts

Les Perelman makes the case for teachers to do their own research into teaching writing…

“If you think about most professions, think about medicine, they don’t have outside social scientists come in and do their research for them… It is absolutely essential that we do the research for our discipline because we know what the research is supposed to do and we know the questions we want to ask.

…We need to ensure that the things being measured are actually the things we want to measure… this is also about giving teachers language to critique studies which might be reliable but not valid...

The single most important thing to consider when looking at someone else’s research is scepticism. You should start with a null hypothesis and they should have to convince you. You should also always ask: ‘who is funding this research?’

When doing research, the most important thing is to think about the questions you have about your own teaching… All teacher research should be collaborative and teachers should see themselves as both professionals and intellectuals.”

Note for listeners: This episode was originally recorded for the JPL Podcast, hence the references to the JPL Podcast throughout.

For information about contributors and the JPL Podcast, as well as Journal of Professional Learning articles and Centre for Professional Learning courses, please visit our website www.cpl.asn.au/podcasts