Australia Association for Research in Education
What to do when our schools run out of the teachers they urgently need
When faced with a teacher shortage, often schools need to ‘make do’ and ask teachers to teach away from their area of expertise in order to staff classes. That’s called teaching out-of-field and sometimes teachers, put in that position, can feel unsupported and overwhelmed. The issue of teaching ‘out-of-field’ persists in Australia and internationally – …
Australian curriculum review: strengthened but still a long way from an amazing curriculum for all Australian students
There is much to admire in the proposed revisions to the Australian Curriculum, which were released for public consultation this week. I’d give it a B+. The curriculum content organisers and core ideas have been revised to ensure that they are more closely aligned, with some trimming of content to enable greater depth of study. …
Meet our remarkable guardians of play, protecting children from screens
Digital technologies are a prominent and integral feature of daily living and are present in our homes, educational settings and communities. This week research from the Gonski Institute for Education at UNSW revealed parents see digital devices as necessary for their kids’ learning but worry about the distraction and activities they’re missing out on. So how …
My immediate reaction was one of stunned disbelief and shock
Australia’s leading expert in visual methods and learning design wonders if learning designers actually had any hand in the creation of the Good Society resources. Like many members of the public my first encounter with The Good Society Resources was through social media posts and the evening television news. This was designed to be the …
Five questions to ask if you think teaching problem-solving works
Every few decades there is a campaign to include general problem-solving and thinking skills in school curricula. The motivation is understandable. Everyone would like our schools to enhance students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Because it is so obviously important for students to have such skills, these campaigns are frequently successful in including thinking and …
How to do the sums for an excellent maths curriculum
As we await the release of a new Australian curriculum for mathematics, debates about its contents are developing. As is typical with educational debates, the issues are often painted in binary terms: traditional vs progressive, explicit teaching vs problem solving, content vs skills, procedural vs conceptual knowledge. In mathematics education, these debates have existed for …
Why bizarre milkshakes will never replace world-class consent education
The Government would only have had to go as far as Victoria to do better, writes Amanda Keddie. Education academics, women’s rights campaigners and many in between have criticised some of the material in the government’s new respectful relationships resource for schools. Particularly controversial in the Good Society resource is a video of a girl …
Teachers do not want or need another review. Trust is proven to work.
Christine Cunningham, Maggie McAlinden, Michelle Striepe, Christa Norris, Madlen Griffiths, Zina Cordery, Wei Zhang. We are a group of exhausted expert teacher educators from Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia with a long and proud history following in the footsteps of Edith Cowan who did so much to improve the lives of women, the …
There’s an urgent need to teach empathy but not everyone will connect or care
Sometimes our frames of reference are too narrow and limited for us to comprehend alternative ways of knowing and being. Our frames of reference limit our capacity to empathise. So, is it possible to teach empathy? Empathy training has featured in the news media recently as a way to begin remedying the abhorrent sexual misconduct …
Online learning will never be a substitute for face-to-face
In 2020 higher education student satisfaction with their ‘entire educational experience’ hit its lowest point since Australia’s national survey of current students began in 2011. But the detailed survey results, which cover many aspects of student life, paint a mixed picture. Despite an unexpected shift to online learning due to COVID-19 restrictions, satisfaction with many …