Happy New Year from the Teacher team! We hope you’re having a restful break these school holidays and that you can take some time to recharge for the new year. We’re dropping into your podcast feed to share a quick update for 2026.

It has been an exciting year of Teacher podcasts! In this annual wrap-up of highlights from 2025, the team at Teacher select their favourite episodes and discuss why the episodes resonated with them and Teacher listeners. They also chat about how they put the podcast together, how they select guests for each episode, and give a sneak peek of what’s to come in 2026.

Hosts: Jo Earp, Rebecca Vukovic, Dominique Russell

In a Teacher exclusive, Minister of Education and Research for Estonia Dr Kristina Kallas joins editor Jo Earp for this special podcast to talk about setting teachers and students up for success, the early years foundations for its impressive PISA performance, and the next big challenge – AI in education.

Host: Jo Earp

Guest: Dr Kristina Kallas

As we head into the last month of 2025, many of you might be starting to turn your mind towards the beginning of the next school year. A big part of getting ready for a new year is, of course, setting up your learning spaces. Whether it be how you’ll set up your own classroom, the school library space, or even outdoor areas, there’s plenty to consider. We’ve published a range of new content on the topic of learning spaces recently at Teacher. In this episode, we'll bring you up to speed on it all. Don’t forget, like all of our other episodes of Teacher Staffroom, we’ll be posing some questions for you throughout this podcast, so you can 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

It's Episode 64 of our series on School Improvement and the topic is something that we're really passionate about at Teacher – school libraries and encouraging students to read for pleasure. So, it could be the main library, classroom book collections and displays. It could be something like small reading corners and nooks around the school. How do you go about creating a fresh and welcoming space for all students? What kind of things inform your decision when it comes to new stock or just re-promoting existing titles that you’ve got? We've got 3 great guests for you – Mali Jorm, Madison Dearnaley and Tracy Kelly, who will be sharing their tips. We'll be chatting about what the latest research says about strategies to encourage reading for pleasure and of course the importance of student voice. And we'll be sharing personal and student book recommendations.

Host: Jo Earp

Guests: Mali Jorm, Madison Dearnaley, Tracy Kelly

It is important that teachers feel confident to respectfully and effectively address religion and beliefs in diverse classrooms. But it can be difficult, particularly for early career or beginner teachers, to know where to start. Recently, Informit – in partnership with RMIT University and the Australian Council for Educational Research – held a free professional development webinar on this very topic. In that webinar, ACER's very own Pru Mitchell, Manager of Information Services, interviewed Professor Peter Sherlock, Executive Director of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture at Charles Sturt University. In today's podcast, we sit down with Peter to follow up on some of the key themes to come from that webinar. In particular, we discuss why it's important for schools to engage with religion and belief systems, how teachers can engage students in meaningful conversations about religion in a respectful way, and the resources available to help teachers to build their confidence in this space.

Host: Rebecca Vukovic

Guest: Professor Peter Sherlock

Earlier this month, Australia’s results from the Teaching and Learning International Survey were released. The OECD’s TALIS is the largest international survey of teachers and leaders, delving into teachers’ professional practices, school learning environments and working lives. Here at Teacher, we covered the results in several different formats. In this episode we’ll run you through the highlights, including an overview article of key findings on staff wellbeing, collegiality and mentoring support; and an infographic that shares some teacher views on the use of AI. We’ll also share an audio grab from our podcast episode with lead author of the Australian report, Dr Tim Friedman, who shares insights on the theme of wellbeing. Of course, we’ll also run through all the other highlights from this month on Teacher that we wouldn’t want you to miss. We’ll be posing questions throughout the episode so we’d encourage you to take a few moments to pause the audio, gather some colleagues, and consider how you could use our content to inform your own practice.

Host: Rebecca Vukovic

In this episode of our Research Files podcast series, editor Jo Earp talks to ACER’s Dr Tim Friedman about the latest Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). We’ll be focusing on the theme of staff wellbeing and looking at some of the protective factors when it comes to levels of teacher job satisfaction and stress.

Teacher editor Jo Earp finds out how the Aspect Learning Improvement Collaborative is using a mainstream learning framework developed by Dr Lyn Sharratt, adapted to suit an autism-specific education setting. We’ll hear from Lyn, Aspect Education's Deputy National Director Karilyn Gumley and principals Kaye Perry, Joanne Tidsdell, and Michelle Zikmundovsky.

It’s well known from the research that high quality teaching and leadership teams learn from each other's practices. Recently on Teacher, the leadership team from Warriapendi Primary School in Perth, Western Australia, wrote 3 articles for us all about the journey they’ve been on to build instructional capacity in literacy to improve student outcomes in the area.

Today’s episode of Teacher Staffroom will bring you up to date with the insights they shared in those articles, and we’ll also share some of my other recent highlights from our content – which, by the way, is freely accessible at any time over at our website, teachermagazine.com. Don’t forget, like all of our other episodes of Teacher Staffroom, we’ll be posing some questions for you throughout this 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

Sponsor: Monash University's Let's Talk Teaching podcast