Knowledge base for teaching

In today’s episode of Teacher Staffroom, we’re going to be talking about teacher planning, drawing on 3 articles written by educational leader Michael Rosenbrock, as well as some of the other highlights from Teacher this month.

So far in a 3-part series on teacher planning, educational leader Michael Rosenbrock has looked at how teachers can pro-actively plan to tackle student misconceptions in STEM and support them to build and use their vocabulary in science and mathematics. In this final article, he explores how teachers can best plan to make effective use of manipulatives and representations to help students build understanding.

In our latest expert Q&A we talk to Kristy Osborne, a physicist, former pre-service teacher and Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) about the science concepts that primary students struggle with and why it’s important for teachers to identify and address student misconceptions early on.

‘Deliberately planning to support students to build and use their vocabulary is critical to ensuring that students can both access the curriculum content and effectively demonstrate their understanding.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock shares what this might look like in practice for maths and science teachers.

‘Teacher knowledge of misconceptions and explicitly planning to uncover and address them is vital for supporting student learning growth.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock looks at how teachers can pro-actively plan to tackle student misconceptions in STEM, and steps though an example from the forces and motion topic in physics.

‘At Dromana College we had an issue with only a few teachers having the confidence to write a decent rubric…As a school, we therefore came up with our own guidelines on how to construct rubrics for years 7-10.’ In this reader submission, Assessment and Reporting Coordinator Jodi Wilson shares how the Victorian secondary school has been helping teachers to improve their own rubric design skills.

The newly-released Education at a Glance 2022: OECD Indicators reports on the state of education in OECD and partner countries. In this infographic, we take a look at the duration (in years) of initial teacher education for teachers in public institutions around the world.

‘PD needs to be well-designed, selected, and implemented so that the investment is used well.’ In our latest reader submission, Hannah Matthews and Susannah Schoeffel from Evidence for Learning share the mechanisms of professional development, and how schools can consider the overall quality of PD programs for their school setting.

Research analysing data on 1.3 million students and 50,000 teachers in the United States has demonstrated a positive impact on student academic achievement and behavioural outcomes when they are taught by the same teacher twice. Dr Leigh Wedenoja shares more details with Teacher in this article.

In this episode in our Action Research series, we hear from Sarah Durack, a secondary Science and Mathematics teacher based in Sydney. Sarah shares her experience of combining researching part-time with a full-time teaching job, and shares some of the findings from her study on school to university transition.