In this episode of School Improvement, we’re taking you to a school in rural New South Wales where they’ve seen students in Years 5 to 9 read 12 books a year, and a 40 per cent increase in male students reading beyond their assigned texts. 
It’s all because of the reading culture they’ve developed and Head of Middle School and English teacher Alex Wharton has had a key role in this. He’s been named a Commonwealth Bank Teaching Fellow this year for his work, and he joins us in today’s episode to discuss what they’ve implemented at Carinya Christian School to see more students pick up novels to read in their spare time. Alex shares some fantastic insights in this episode, so let’s jump straight in and hear first a little bit about the school context. 
Host: Dominique Russell
Guest: Alex Wharton
Sponsor: Australian Volunteers Program

School Improvement Episode 33: Reading engagement in rural schools

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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 Improvement Episode 33: Reading engagement in rural schools

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