Every other week, two types of articles about online exams seem to come out: either students are being caught cheating remotely, or students (and some teachers) fear that the online vigilance of remote exams has the potential to be taken ...
More »Opinion
Bringing dissections into the 21st century – opinion
Dissection is an often contentious topic, but it remains a fundamental skill for any student looking to pursue the fields of nursing, veterinary science and dentistry to name but a few. Skills learnt in dissections help students to better prepare ...
More »Preventing teacher burnout through shared responsibility – opinion
Building interpersonal resilience has become a prevalent topic for school leaders in recent months, especially for those desperately trying to support a workforce that is suffering ‘burnout’ at a much higher rate than we have seen previously. Of even greater ...
More »Leading teacher wellbeing: the next school improvement frontier – opinion
Walk into any school and you will find teachers who are smiling, chatting happily with students and who seem to be enjoying each day. Scratch below the surface though and what you may notice is that these teachers, who on ...
More »Curriculum review? Teacher education review? Balancing the equation correctly – opinion
The school year has commenced and already there has been a flood of media coverage related to mathematics. The most interesting and important information relates to the pending release of the mathematics curriculum review as announced by ACARA in 2020. ...
More »The sum of all fears: how maths anxiety is crippling our kids – opinion
Forget snakes and spiders. In primary school, my biggest fear was long division. I still vividly remember the feeling. A gut-wrenching stress triggered by symbols that refused to make sense, numbers that seem to appear from nowhere, and concepts that ...
More »The furniture in your classroom is more important than you think: opinion
Over time, we’ve understood that traditional classroom furniture and traditional classroom design simply no longer facilitates the most effective, engaging and productive learning environment for students. Studies have highlighted that the physical classroom environment has a direct relationship with the ...
More »2021: A new and better educational landscape?
Amidst the school shutdowns of 2020, more than a few of us pointed to teachers’ improved relationships with technology as a silver lining. Surely, after a year of wrangling kids in video calls, teachers would no doubt emerge as digital ...
More »The Screen Time Budget: How teaching parents how to budget screen time can help negotiate the minefield of kids and technology
Last week, after discussing how much time was being spent in front of Minecraft, my eldest came back at me with a frustratingly good observation: “But Dad… it’s educational!” He wasn’t wrong. As a high school maths teacher, I’d ordinarily ...
More »Building a resilience culture in our schools: opinion
As we begin the 2021 school year across Australia, most school leaders cut their 'holidays' short and were back to work planning and engaging in professional learning long before they were scheduled to. If we are honest, many never really ...
More »