Schools are special spaces; where the affordances of physical design come together with values, purpose and culture, and where school staff work hard to set students up to lead fulfilling lives. But what do schools look like before the hustle and bustle of students and teachers on the grounds? And what is involved with building up a school community from scratch?

In this brand new podcast series, we’ll follow Principal Ray Boyd and Associate Principal Rachael Lehr as they navigate the exciting and challenging journey of building a new school community from the ground up. We’ll be touching base each month for updates and reflections on their progress as their new school, under the planning name of West Swan (Dayton) Primary School, is built in the newly developing suburb of Dayton, located in the eastern metropolitan city of Swan in Perth, Western Australia.

In this episode, we catch Ray on the road while he drives around sunny Dayton, getting us up to scratch on what’s happened over the past 7 months, since the journey began.

Host: Zoe Kaskamanidis
Guest: Ray Boyd

School Assembly Episode 1: The journey so far

Education

Training

Language Courses

Higher Education

K-12

Educational Technology

In the final episode of our 3-part miniseries on world-class learning systems, Jo Earp and Professor Geoff Masters discuss how schools and communities in British Columbia, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong and South Korea are working together to best meet individual student learning and wellbeing needs.
Host: Jo Earp
Guest: Professor Geoff Masters
Sponsor: Grok Academy (grokacademy.org)

Special: World-class learning systems – meeting individual student needs

Our guest for Episode 90 of The Research Files is Dr Sharon Wagner, a casual academic and researcher at Western Sydney University. She recently co-authored a book chapter with colleague Professor Loshini Naidoo titled 'Engaging parents of refugee backgrounds in their children's education: insights from Australia'. This particular chapter draws on data from 2 different Australian studies, covering Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania, and importantly the participants were families and educators – so there’s a really interesting exploration of the topic from those differing perspectives. So, we’ll be chatting about things like parent-teacher interviews, education jargon, language barrier, system expectations and lots more. 
Host: Jo Earp
Guest: Dr Sharon Wagner

Engaging parents from refugee backgrounds

School Assembly is the podcast that explores what it takes to build a new school from the ground up. In Episode 8 of Season 2 we catch up with Bemin Secondary College Principal Jo Camozzato to talk about meeting student needs – including differentiation, subject choices and external partnerships to bolster staff expertise.
Host: Jo Earp
Guest: Jo Camozzato

School Assembly S2E8: Meeting individual student needs

We know that supporting a student’s welfare is a priority for teachers, leaders, and school staff. But what this looks like can vary based on a school’s needs and context. Recently at Teacher, we’ve been looking at new research into a number of aspects of student welfare – from anxiety, to menstruation, to vaping. In this episode, we get you up to date on this latest research news. 

And, like all episodes of Teacher Staffroom, we’ll be sharing some other highlights with you, and we’ll be posing some questions throughout the podcast, so feel free to pause the audio as you go, gather some colleagues, and discuss together how these stories might be relevant to your school context. 

Host: Dominique Russell

Supporting student welfare – vaping, menstruation and anxiety

It’s well-known from existing research that boys tend to have more positive attitudes towards STEM than girls do at school. We also know that students’ perceptions of the classroom environment have a powerful impact on their engagement and their learning outcomes. 

A new study has investigated the classroom experiences of boys and girls participating in integrated STEM projects (or iSTEM) to see how they differ, and also to better understand how the classroom experiences of females might impact their participation in STEM. Specifically, the research team were eager to understand the emotions of the boys and girls in the classroom and how this could play a role in their learning and engagement. 

It’s the first time classroom emotional climate has been considered in research on gender differences in STEM learning. So, in order to investigate this, a research team from Curtin University in Western Australia needed to develop and validate a new research tool. In this episode we're joined by the lead author, Rekha Koul, to find out more about the process of developing and validating this tool, and, of course, their research findings.

Host: Dominique Russell
Guest: Rehka Koul

School Assembly Episode 1: The journey so far

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