How can we teach and assess general capabilities including critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, and problem solving skills? This is a challenge that teachers are faced with in 21st Century classrooms. A project, funded by the Centre for Assessment Reform and Innovation (CARI) at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), is working to develop an assessment framework for measuring and monitoring these skills in the classroom. Through a combination of curriculum-oriented assessment tools, learning progressions, and professional development, the project aims to equip teachers with the skills to integrate teaching and assessing of general capabilities into their classrooms. Here to discuss this today is Dr Claire Scoular, a Research Fellow at ACER and the person charged with leading the project. In today’s episode, she shares more about the assessment tool that’s been developed, and we discuss some practical ways teachers can measure these skills, as well as some the challenges involved in doing so. Claire also shares some of her early analyses of data to come from the trials completed in schools across Australia. Interviewer: Rebecca Vukovic Guest: Dr Claire Scoular

Childhood and adolescent anxiety is something many classroom teachers will come face-to-face with, so it’s important to understand what a teacher’s role could be in identifying and managing anxiety. Are there behaviours a teacher could be observing in the classroom that might be typical of anxiety? How can a classroom educator help to reinforce the work of a student’s psychologist or therapist? And, what can teachers do to make their classroom more comfortable and accommodating for students experiencing anxiety? To discuss all of this, I’m joined in today’s episode by Dr Rowena Conroy, a clinical psychologist who works with children, adolescents and families at the Children’s Private Medical Group in Victoria. We sat down together at the National Education Summit in Melbourne after her presentation on student anxiety. Presenter: Dominique Russell Interviewee: Dr Rowena Conroy

As Global Teacher Prize finalist Sarah Mathews once said, ‘numeracy is everyone’s business.’ In this episode, we dive into the stories of educators around Australia who are being so innovative in the way they engage students in mathematics. We’ll take you to a mathematics-based action research project, an exciting new video series, and research indicating student thinking behind their subject selection in senior secondary school. All of that, as well as a quick wrap up of some of the other content you might have missed from us recently. We’ll be posing some questions throughout, so it’s a great opportunity to sit down with your colleagues to discuss how these stories could be relevant or helpful to your school context. That’s this episode of Teacher Staffroom.

Scotland has recently implemented a new approach to assessing children’s progress in its schools. It’s an online national assessment called the Scottish National Standardised Assessments, or SNSA for short, and it aims to support improvement in classroom practice by providing information to teachers to inform the next steps in learning. All of this is done while still overseeing what’s going on locally and nationally. It’s delivered to students in Primary 1, Primary 4, Primary 7 and Secondary 3 – which in Australia is equivalent in age to Prep, Grade 3, Grade 6 and Year 9. Now, the particularly unique aspect of this assessment is the fact that it places teacher professional judgement at the centre. It’s also been developed to be accessible for students with additional support needs. And, as well as this, the test is adaptive – so, students are presented with questions according to how well they’ve answered the questions previous. To find out more about how all of this was achieved, and how the assessment is assisting teachers on the ground, we're joined in this episode by David Leng. He’s a professional adviser to the Scottish Government Learning Directorate. And he’s played a huge part in the development, implementation and continuous improvement of the assessment. Interviewee: David Leng Host: Dominique Russell Podcast supporter: James Cook University

Welcome to the first ever Teacher Talks, a podcast event hosted by Teacher magazine, and proudly brought to you by our podcast supporter, the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. My name is Rebecca Vukovic, I’m Deputy Editor of Teacher magazine, and it is my pleasure to share with you the very special interview we recorded in Melbourne in front of a live audience of teachers and school leaders. Our guest, Dr Lyn Sharratt, is a highly accomplished practitioner, researcher, author and presenter. She holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto, and coordinates the doctoral internship program in the Leadership, Higher and Adult Education Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. In this episode, I sit down with Lyn to discuss one specific leadership approach, Learning Walks and Talks. We have a lot to cover in this episode, from building a culture of trust amongst staff for Learning Walks and Talks, to the nuts and bolts of how to do a Learning Walk and Talk effectively and confidently. What’s also really exciting about this episode is you’ll be hearing from several audience members who had the opportunity to ask Lyn their questions about Learning Walks and Talks, in a way that was specific to their school contexts.

What a month we’ve had here at Teacher magazine! It’s been busy but exciting – and safe to say it’s been packed full of interesting stories and content for our readers. From Research Conference, to Science Week, to our very first live event with Dr Lyn Sharratt – there’s so much we'd like to look back on and share with you. Host: Rebecca Vukovic

ACER’s Research Conference took place this month with the theme – ‘Preparing students for life in the 21st century: Identifying, developing and assessing what matters’. In this episode, we’ll take you to the closing session of the conference – the ‘In Conversation’ between ACER CEO Professor Geoff Masters AO and Neil Selwyn, a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. We’ll share highlights from their discussion about what schooling might look like in 10 years’ time. Now, this session began directly after Neil delivered the conference’s Karmel Oration, so, as you’re going to hear a few references to that talk, it’s important I give you an understanding of what he discussed. Neil’s Oration was titled ‘On with the 21st century! Preparing Australian education for the 2020s and beyond.’ So, it’s clear from that title that he took the conference theme to heart. In particular, Neil focused on what education might look like in 2029. He spoke about how there are often three different kinds of predictions when we speak about predicting certain things for the future – the probable, possible and preferable – and how it’s important we try to stick to speaking about probable futures, rather than a future that is possible or preferable. This led him to speak about the role of an educator during the times of climate change, the rise of online education and how we can best prepare students for careers of the future.

If you were to visit any preschool or kindergarten classroom, you’d surely find that shared book reading is a common activity used to facilitate discussions and support a young child’s language and literacy development. A new study, published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, examined the extent to which preschool teachers use different types of questions during classroom-based shared book reading. Researchers from the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas, Ohio State University, the American Institute for Research and Michigan State University all collaborated on this study. They found that only 24 per cent of what teachers said during the shared book reading were questions, and the kids answered the questions accurately 85 per cent of the time. In today’s episode, I’m joined by one of the study’s authors, Dr Tricia Zucker, who is an Associate Professor with the Children’s Learning Institute at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston. We chat about what the main findings were to come from the research, whether the questions teachers were asking were too simple for students, and how teachers could improve their questioning practices to ensure children are given the appropriate level of challenge. Guest: Dr Tricia Zucker Interviewer: Rebecca Vukovic Podcast supporter: Seven Steps to Writing Success

These past couple weeks at Teacher have been jam-packed. We welcomed a number of guests – from the eSafety commissioner to the ARIA Music Teacher of the Year – and we also featured a lot of content on the topic of literacy. Catch up on anything you might’ve missed in today’s podcast episode. Presenter: Dominique Russell

A supportive school reading culture is one where there is availability, opportunity, encouragement and support for reading. But how do schools actually go about building this kind of culture in their own contexts? To answer this question, Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University Dr Margaret Merga went straight to the source – teacher librarians – to gain their valuable insights into the factors that enable and constrain the development of a whole school reading culture. The results from this research were published in the Australian Journal of Education in a paper titled, Building a school reading culture: Teacher librarians’ perceptions of enabling and constraining factors. In today’s episode, I sit down with Margaret to talk more about her study and its findings, including the role that school leadership plays in the development and maintenance of a school reading culture. Guest: Dr Margaret Merga Interviewer: Rebecca Vukovic Supporter: QUT Podclass