Teacher Staffroom is an opportunity to change the pace a little, and really take some time out with your colleagues to discuss what implications the content we’ve covered recently could have for your own school setting. You’ll hear me posing some questions throughout the episode, so you can chat about your thoughts with co-workers, and let us know where those conversations end up.

Imagine knowing you have a one in 10 chance of winning US $1 million. Well, that’s the reality for Rooty Hill High School teacher Yasodai Selvakumaran. Yasodai has been an educator for the past nine years and has won a slew of awards throughout her career. But this year, she has found herself amongst the top 10 finalists for the 2019 Global Teacher Prize, an award that recognises one exceptional teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the teaching profession. Yasodai is a Humanities teacher and a Leader in Professional Practice at her western Sydney school. She’s passionate about her job and the students she works with. She joins us today to talk about her interest in social justice, how she connects with students from different backgrounds and how she uses her lessons to help students to understand the world around them and their place in it. We also discuss her approach to personalised learning plans and how to go about building confidence in students.

Our guest today is Dylan Wiliam – Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at University College London. He’s a former school teacher, over the last 15 years his academic career has been focused on the use of assessment to support learning, and he now works with teachers all over the world on developing formative assessment practice. We caught up with him in Melbourne to talk about effective questioning in the classroom. Over the next 20 minutes, he’ll be explaining what’s wrong with the traditional teacher approach of ‘I’ll ask a question and you put your hands up to answer’, sharing a classroom display technique called ‘the parking lot’, and describing how to plan your lesson around checkpoints that he calls ‘hinge questions’.

Welcome to the first episode of a new series. Our podcast subscribers have told us that they love the option to listen (and learn of course) during the daily commute, while they’re out for a walk, taking a break with a cuppa and even doing the household chores (apparently we make a particularly good soundtrack for cooking and hanging out the washing). So, with that in mind, we’ve decided to introduce another way for you to catch up with all things Teacher.

My guest today is someone I originally discovered on Twitter. Craig Heeley is an educator living in Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England, and this year he landed his first ever Head Teacher role at Lemington Riverside Primary School. Over the past few months, he’s been sharing his experiences in the new Head Teacher role on Twitter, and he’s been mustering up lots of engagement and encouragement from educators around the world that are keen to follow his journey. I catch up with Craig in today’s podcast to talk more about the strategies he’s employed to get to know the staff, parents and students in his school community. We also chat about navigating challenges as a school leader, the role of mentoring and what he’s looking forward to most about the coming year. Before we launch into the discussion though, I ask Craig to give listeners a brief overview of his career as an educator and how he came to be Head Teacher at Lemington Riverside Primary School.

Our guest for this episode is Dr Joann Fildes, Head of Research and Evaluation at Mission Australia. The charity describes its Youth Survey as the nation’s “largest online annual ‘temperature check’ of teenagers aged between 15 and 19”. In 2018, 28 000 participants across the country shared their views on a range of topics - including school education, their personal wellbeing and who they turn to for help. As you’ll hear later in the episode, Mission Australia works closely with schools to get students involved, and data can be used to inform future planning. The latest data show stress, school or study problems, and mental health are the top three personal concerns for young people. When asked who they’d turn to for help, more than one third said a teacher or school counsellor. We’ll be discussing the role schools and educators can play in providing support and information for students, and creating an environment where they feel they can access that support. A reminder that for help and information you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800 or visit beyondblue.org.au.

My guest today is Dr Jeff Thomas, a lecturer in the Master of Teaching and Graduate Certificate of Education at the University of Tasmania. Jeff’s research and teaching interests include the relationship between engagement and classroom behaviour, and reengagement approaches for disengaged students. With the start of the school year fast approaching here in Australia, many teachers will be busy preparing for those first, initial weeks in the classroom. And according to Jeff, the beginning of the year is an amazing opportunity to engage students, to build relationships and to establish explicit expectations around student behaviour. But, he says, it’s important to plan for positive behaviour. Our discussion today covers many different areas including how to plan for that positive behaviour in your classroom, which routines are critical to establish in the initial weeks of the year, and practical things to keep in mind when responding to particularly challenging behaviours as they arise in class.

A new study examines the gender differences in the friendships and conflicts of both girls and boys with autism, relative to their neurotypical peers. In today’s podcast two of the researchers, Dr Felicity Sedgewick and Dr Liz Pellicano, join us on the line from the UK.

Welcome to this special end of year edition, where we take a trip down memory lane and select some of our favourite podcast moments from 2018. We’ve actually published 26 episodes this year, including a special to mark our 100th, so it’s been a difficult choice.

Our guest for today’s episode of the Research Files is Dr Carol Newall, a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at Macquarie University. She joins us today to talk about a study she led which investigates how a child’s gender impacts an adults’ perception of their ability and their enjoyment of Science. The 80 adult participants in this study were all Macquarie University students, 20 of whom were education students and 60 were studying psychology. These adults were given a fictional profile of an eight-year-old child with the task of teaching that child over Skype. Each child’s fictional profile was experimentally manipulated depending on whether they were boy or girl, and the stereotypes associated with that gender. For example, one child liked tea parties and the colour pink and another liked climbing trees and the colour blue. As Dr Newall will explain in today’s episode, the results from this study revealed that participants rated girls as less academically capable than boys in Physics, and they delivered less scientific information during their teaching module when they believed they were teaching a girl.