What are the persistent teaching dilemmas you find yourself thinking about in your spare time and circling back to time and again? Professor Brianna Kennedy from the University of Glasgow joins the podcast to talk about a 2-stage process for cracking persistent challenges in the classroom, how teachers can use it in practice, and the impact it has on student learning and engagement.

Host: Rebecca Vukovic

Guest: Professor Brianna Kennedy

Find out more about Brianna’s work on Instagram and Facebook: @solveteachingdilemmas and her websites: briannalkennedy.com & www.gla.ac.uk/schools/education/staff/briannalkennedy/

As a teacher listening to this episode, I’m sure you remember your first few years in the profession – the unique challenges you faced and the support that made a difference to you. But what does the evidence say about how schools can best support early career teachers? New research from academics at Monash University has uncovered specific factors that support early career teachers’ sense of belonging at school. Four main themes emerged: teacher collaboration, relationships with colleagues, supporting early career teachers through their early-career journey, and getting early career teachers involved in school decision making. The lead author of the report, Ebony Melzak, joins me for this episode of The Research Files. Ebony is a psychologist and PhD candidate. Together, we’ll go through each theme in detail, what the research says, and how it might look in different school settings.

Host: Dominique Russell

Guest: Ebony Melzak

Thinking about your own school, how are you helping students understand the many opportunities and pathways open to them, and the training or further education requirements they’ll need to reach their career goals? We know schools play a crucial role in supporting post-school pathways, and recently at Teacher we’ve been exploring many facets of careers education. Today’s episode of Teacher Staffroom will bring you up to date with this coverage, 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

Today we're joined by Pauline Martinot, a medical doctor who specialises in child health and prevention. Dr Martinot pursued a research career in cognitive neurosciences on the developing child and did her PhD at NeuroSpin CEA Paris Saclay. Today, she works as an AI medical and scientific Director at Doctolib in France.

Dr Martinot is also the lead author of the groundbreaking study that points to the first year of school as the time and place where a maths gender gap emerges in favour of boys. The results of this study were published in the paper titled Rapid emergence of a maths gender gap in first grade, published in Nature last month. The paper reports the results of a 4-year longitudinal assessment of language and mathematical performance of all French first and second graders, representing over 2.6 million children. The researchers found that boys and girls exhibited very similar maths scores upon school entry, but a maths gender gap in favour of boys became highly significant after just 4 months of schooling and reached an effect size of about 0.20 after one year. In this episode, Dr Martinot joins us on the line from France to share how her colleagues went about conducting the study, some more key findings, and the impact of this research on schools and teachers around the world.

Host: Rebecca Vukovic

Guest: Dr Pauline Martinot

Associate Professor Brendon Hyndman is our guest today. If that name sounds familiar to you – Brendon was actually the guest in our first episode of The Research Files all the way back in 2014. After recently taking a pause from academics and spending time working back in the classroom, Brendon is now Associate Dean Academic in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Charles Sturt University, where his main research interest is on the more informal learning and behavioural experiences of students at school. An obvious example of this is school playground experiences – and so our conversation today is all about setting up for healthy play spaces and behaviours in a school setting.

As you’ll hear Brendon share in this episode, the impact of healthy play spaces can be profound on students’ feeling of belonging, physical activity opportunities, ability to take risks and intellectual stimulation, just to name a few examples there. He also shares plenty of practical considerations for teachers and school leaders this space.

Host: Dominique Russell

Guest: Brendon Hyndman

Welcome to Episode 11 of Series 3 of School Assembly – yes, we’ve actually reached the final episode today! So, School Assembly – if you don’t know – that’s the podcast where we find out what it takes to build a school from the ground up. And, for the last 12 months we’ve been following Dan McShea, Foundation Principal of Notre Dame P-12 College in Bells Creek, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. It’s the final episode and that’s where we get a chance to reflect on the journey but also the podcast experience. We’ll be finding out about Dan’s expectations going into the role compared to the reality; there’ll be the usual key learning, challenge and achievement, what’s planned for the next 12 months, and there’s also an invitation to visit!

Host: Jo Earp

Guest: Dan McShea

Today we’re talking all things maths – as it’s something we’ve published quite a bit on this month. In this episode, we're going to run you through the highlights, including an article on the International Mathematical Modeling Challenge where we speak to the teacher advisors of the Australian winners about the benefits for students, and their own practice. As always, we will be posing questions throughout the episode so feel free to pause the audio, gather some colleagues, and chat about how these articles can be used to improve or inform your own practice.

Host: Rebecca Vukovic

Music education is an important part of primary school. It’s got a range of benefits, of course, not only for students’ music learning, but for improving their capacity as a learner more broadly, and there are benefits for their wellbeing too. In Episode 101 of The Research Files we're joined by Dr Rebecca Taylor, a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research. We’re going to be exploring survey data from 2 reports into music teaching and music education in primary schools – they’re all about the ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘how’ music learning is delivered. Our chat certainly provides some food for thought in terms of what you’re doing in your own practice and maybe the supports that you need; if you’re a school leader, maybe what expertise exists within the staff and what their PD needs are.

Host: Jo Earp

Guest: Dr Rebecca Taylor

Last month we brought you news of a major OECD report on the state of global teenage career preparation. So, in this follow-up podcast we’re going to be sharing an example of how one school here in Australia – Fairhills High School in Victoria – is doing some great work in the area of careers and pathways education.

Host: Jo Earp

Guests: Bill Exton, Liz Rundle

We’ve reached the penultimate episode of Series 3 of our podcast series School Assembly. Teacher editor Jo Earp talks to Notre Dame P-12 College Principal Dan McShea about distributed leadership and developing a leadership pipeline in a new school. Dan also shares his biggest challenge, key learning and proudest achievement since last month’s episode.

Host: Jo Earp

Guest: Dan McShea