Teacher Magazine (ACER)

Changing school practices means everyone working together – leaders, teachers, support staff, students, parents and the wider community – toward the goal of improving outcomes for students, including their levels of achievement and wellbeing. At Teacher, we’ve heard plenty of inspiring school improvement stories, and in today’s episode we're going to take you through some recent highlights.

Like all episodes of Teacher Staffroom, we’ll take you through these topics, along with other noteworthy stories. We’ll also be posing some questions throughout this podcast, so feel free to pause the audio as you go, gather some colleagues and discuss together how these stories could be relevant to your school context.

Host: Dominique Russell

Sponsor: Bank First

Teachers are asked to respond to new and uncertain situations all the time – from keeping abreast of curriculum and subject knowledge updates to making quick pivots when a lesson isn’t quite going according to plan. Our topic for this episode is teacher adaptability and our guest is Dr Rebecca Collie – a DECRA Fellow and Scientia Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology in the School of Education at UNSW. Dr Collie and colleagues recently published a paper in the journal Teaching and Teacher Education, on their study into adaptability among science teachers in schools across eight countries. We’ll be talking about the study findings, and the research around teacher adaptability. We’ll also talk about the link between teacher adaptability and self-confidence, behaviour management and student self-efficacy. And, there’ll be some recommendations for school leaders in there around the importance of professional learning communities.

Host: Jo Earp

Guest: Rebecca Collie

Sponsor: Bank First

In today’s episode we're joined by Principal Elizabeth Humphries and Assistant Principal Nicole Wilson from East Derwent Primary School in Tasmania. Since 2018, they’ve been on a journey of school improvement which has seen significant progress in student engagement and achievement, as well as staff retention and teacher welfare.

We’ll discuss the steps they’ve taken which have resulted in suspensions at the school decreasing by 75 per cent and fewer staff members leaving the school. A big part of this journey has been the school’s involvement in a Tasmanian Department of Education initiative called Refocus Teaching and Learning, which will be explained in much more detail later on in the episode.

Host: Dominique Russell

Guests: Elizabeth Humphries, Nicole Wilson

Sponsor: Bank First

The content published on Teacher magazine this month has been packed full of contributions and insights from those working in the education community – from teachers and school leaders, to researchers, education consultants and university academics. We're always blown away by the wealth of knowledge and expertise that we’re able to share with you, our readers and listeners. In today’s episode, we're going to whip through the contributions we’ve published, giving you some snippets to come from the articles, videos and columns. We’ll also share some insights from the three podcasts we published this month – one on creativity, another on leadership coaching and one that explores co-creating bullying policies.

Host: Rebecca Vukovic

Sponsor: EnhanceTV

What bullying policies and procedures are in place at your school? Do they focus on a particular age range? And, do you run a specific anti-bullying education program? Our guest today is Dr Lesley-anne Ey, a Senior Lecturer at the University of South Australia. Lesley-anne and her UniSA colleague Professor Barbara Spears have been working with early childhood teachers to identify problems with bullying in their own school context and co-design tailored education and prevention programs. In this episode we’ll be discussing early childhood intervention, the Participatory Design method, and the feedback from the teachers and schools involved.

Host: Jo Earp

Guest: Lesley-anne Ey

We’re going to be talking about leadership coaching today. Our guests are Karen Snibson, who is Principal of Phoenix P-12 Community College in Victoria, and Angela Mina, a leadership coach and executive consultant. They’ve been working together as part of a two year Menzies School Leader Fellowship Program. Now, the focus of the program is on increasing collective teacher efficacy and it uses an ‘incubator model’ where the leadership Fellows are encouraged to trial strategies and interventions within their own school context. We’ll find out a little bit more about the model and the program, but we’ll be delving deeper into the developmental leadership coaching that’s being used, and how it differs from an approach that existing school leaders may be used to. And, of course, we’ll be chatting about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected Karen and Angela’s plans and progress.

Host: Jo Earp

Guests: Angela Mina, Karen Snibson

Sponsor: University of Newcastle, Australia

Which is more creative, the Arts or the sciences? My guest, Professor David Cropley from the University of South Australia, joins us today to discuss this question and to delve into his research into whether any specific differences exist between creativity in the Arts and creativity in STEM. David is an internationally recognised expert on creativity and innovation. He’s appeared on several television programs on the ABC, including Redesign My Brain and Life at 9. The study we’re focusing on today was co-authored by Kim van Broekhoven and Phillip Seegers from Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The study surveyed over 2000 German undergraduate students enrolled in STEM courses and in Arts courses, to explore how creativity differed across the disciplines. In this episode, David takes us through how they conducted the study, some of the key findings, and the practical implications of this research for educators working in the K-12 space.

Guest: David Cropley

Host: Rebecca Vukovic

A few reports have been released lately which point to how we’re tracking across the world when it comes to equality and equity in education. At Teacher, we’ve looked a report showing how the experiences of young people living with a disability and without a disability compare. We also highlighted some resources on Indigenous literacy, in the lead up to Indigenous Literacy Day, which aims to improve remote Indigenous children's educational outcomes.

Like all episodes of Teacher Staffroom, we’ll take you through these topics, along with other noteworthy stories in education. We’ll also be posing some questions throughout this podcast, so feel free to pause the audio as you go, gather some colleagues and discuss together how these stories could be relevant to your school context.

Host: Dominique Russell

We're joined today by Chemistry teacher Chris Buswell from Mountain Creek State High School on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

Chris is passionate about integrating technology into science and leveraging opportunities for students in their local community. He’s worked hard for years towards both of these goals and student outcomes and their post-school destinations are really reflecting this.

As you’ll hear in this episode, Chris has facilitated the use of virtual reality with senior secondary students to help them understand complex chemistry concepts through a partnership with their local university, the University of the Sunshine Coast. He’s also part of a network of schools who have partnered with schools in Papua New Guinea for a program which aims to empower future leaders in STEM. And, of course, he’s doing important work as well with younger students to build those important 21st Century skills.

Guest: Chris Buswell

Host: Dominique Russell

Our guest today is Lisa Seewraj, a teacher at Child Side Playgroup and School in Boyanup, Western Australia, about 200 kilometres south of Perth. Child Side School is an independent, co-educational school covering Kindergarten to Year 10.

The school was founded in 2002, with a focus on relationships, engagement and connectivity. The school’s founders and co-principals Karron McDonald and Leonie O’Connell say they strongly believe that each person’s story matters to them and should matter to the students themselves; they help children value their own story and communicate and advocate it’s worth over and above any reports, grades, scores and other stats and data.

Lisa Seewraj teaches a multi-age class of 23 students across Years 7-10. She does this with a co-teacher who teaches maths and science, and the two teachers are in the class for most of the week. Lisa also teaches these students for the four years they are in this year range. In today’s episode we discuss how she manages the classroom on a daily basis, the range of abilities that she caters for, and how she provides each student with the appropriate level of challenge to progress in their learning.

Guest: Lisa Seewraj

Host: Rebecca Vukovic