The practicum component of pre-service teacher education courses is an important part of preparing students for the profession. A recent Australian study shines a spotlight on the highs and lows of the practicum experience from the perspective of pre-service drama teachers. The findings have been published in the Australian Journal of Teacher Education and lead author Dr Christina Gray, from Edith Cowan University, is our guest in this episode of The Research Files.

A new study from academics at Queensland University of Technology has found there’s a gender gap when it comes to the behaviourial skills of children starting school. Professor Sue Walker joins me in this episode of The Research Files to discuss the study findings and the implications for educators and parents.

By building strong professional learning communities (PLCs) school leaders can improve not only the quality of teaching, but also student outcomes. So, what does an effective PLC look like and how do you go about building one? My guest is Dr Lawrence Ingvarson, a Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). He’s developed ACER’s Professional Learning Community Framework (PLCF). The framework covers five key domains: professional culture; leadership; a focus on student learning, wellbeing and engagement; a focus on improving professional knowledge and practice; and teachers who think systematically about their practice and learn from experience.

To whet the appetite for the 2017 Excellence in Professional Practice Conference, we speak to both keynote speakers – Professor Stephen Dinham and Professor Nan Bahr – and revisit the EPPC archive to share our favourite snippets from interviews with previous presenters.

Tiina-Maija Toivola joins us from Helsinki to talk about the award-winning Me & MyCity program that gives 6th Graders a chance to spend a day in their chosen profession and learn more about being a consumer and citizen.

In this month’s Research Files we discuss the findings of a three-year project in New Zealand that included analysis of pretend play – where students give voices to toys, objects and digital characters – and early literacy practices.

My guest today is Cath Apanah, Acting Assistant Principal and Head of senior school at Montrose Bay High in Hobart, Tasmania. She joins me today to discuss how her school has been using data to inform their strategic plan, the process they undertook to improve student writing and how they went about upskilling staff to use data effectively. By using data, the staff t Montrose have not only been able to track student strengths and weaknesses, but it has become a powerful tool for teachers to better understand their impact on student learning.

The Grattan Institute released a report that says as many as 40 per cent of school students are unproductive in a given year. Teacher magazine sat down with the report’s co-author Julie Sonnemann to discuss the four school level recommendations that came out of this research.

Videoconferencing technology has changed the face of distance education, but teaching to a camera rather than face-to-face requires additional skills. In this episode, Teacher magazine is joined by Nicky Rehn, Assistant Professor of Education at Ambrose University in Calgary, Canada. Rehn and colleagues Dorit Maor and Andrew McConney, from Murdoch University in Australia, have studied how educators delivering school lessons by videoconference can best build a classroom presence and rapport with their remote students.

What kind of leader are you, and is your leadership style truly effective? After looking the UK’s performance in the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study and comparing it to other countries, Dr Alex Hill and his research team decided to find an answer to the question: Why does the UK still lag behind its peers, despite investing more than them? In the process of this research, the team studied over 400 leaders from schools in the UK – the results of which have been published in the Harvard Business Review. In doing so, the team identified that there are five different types of leaders: surgeons, soldiers, accountants, philosophers and architects. Dr Alex Hill, Co-Founder and Director of The Centre for High Performance, joined me on the line from the UK, to discuss why there are five different types of leaders, but only one type that is truly effective.