Part 2 in this series on advancing handwriting, narrative writing and critical thinking with chalk will now introduce the reader to: Orthographic-integration In terms of developing skilled and efficient handwriting automaticity, and correlated creative narrative content, research undertaken by Suzanne ...
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Phonics can pull Australia out of its reading rut, but parents need to play their part: Opinion
It’s hard not to be alarmed by the state of reading in Australia. Since 2000, our students have dropped from 4th to 17th place in the PISA survey of global reading results, and foreboding reports on the national state of ...
More »PETAA ‘committed to supporting teachers’ as NSW joins SA in implementing mandatory phonics checks
The Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) has committed to supporting teachers after New South Wales joined South Australia in introducing mandatory phonics screening checks in primary schools from 1 December 2020. The association has a long history of involvement ...
More »Here’s to the educators, leaders and schools who somehow thrived in 2020
2020 will go down as one of the most disrupted and challenging years for Australian school communities. Yet, despite the substantial pressure and constant changes many endured, some have not only survived 2020 hopefully intact, but have continued to thrive ...
More »Chalk, talk, teach, write, read, achieve, repeat: part 1
Write, erase; write, erase; write, erase. Practise, practise, practise, achieve. Repeat. Here we have the universal imperative actions of gross and fine motor skills and the power of sequence learning, which leads to robust handwriting skill efficiencies developing, with associated ...
More »More funding is not the answer to lifting Australian student achievement: new report
A new report has found that Australian student achievement has continued to decline despite being one of the highest spending countries on schooling in the world. In a report by the Centre for Independent Studies’ (CIS) Glenn Fahey, titled Dollars ...
More »Soft skills key for the careers of tomorrow: Dr Alexia Maddox – Podcast
EducationReview · Soft skills key for the careers of tomorrow | Dr Alexia Maddox A new study conducted by Oxford University Press surveyed 1000 recent graduates and found that 88 per cent of them believed “soft skills” were necessary to ...
More »What the 2020 word of the year tells us about students’ experiences of the pandemic
The Oxford Australian 2020 Children’s Word of the Year (CWOTY) is ‘virus’, shining a light on how deeply the COVID-19 pandemic, remote learning and school closures have impacted students this year. To come to this decision, children’s language experts analysed ...
More »Kids who lie: How schools are raising young people addicted to avoiding blame
Practice makes perfect, or so they tell us. And so, it astounds and troubles me to my core that we continue to raise kids in homes and schools where the art of lying is something that’s practiced so heavily that our ...
More »ACER CEO on the problem with the current school curriculum paradigm
An article written by ACER’s CEO Professor Geoff Masters has drawn attention to an issue relating to one of the common paradigms of school culture: the year-level school curriculum. As he states in his article, “the role of the curriculum ...
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