Free Talk in Sydney - 'What is Good Education for Girls AND Boys?'
Santa Sabina College Principal and Gender Education Expert, Dr Maree Herrett invites you to a free talk about gender relations in education. Read full article
NAPLAN is not Running According to PLAN
Opinion: “I’ve had enough of the NAP and enough of the PLAN.” So spoke a seven year old I met last week whose year three class is busy getting ready for NAPLAN – the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy test – which will be taken by the vast majority of years three, five, seven and nine students in Australian schools next month. NAPLAN is supposed to tell us how we're tracking on the three Rs, but a study commissioned last year by the public policy research Whitlam Institute at the University of Western Sydney shows that the test is having unintended outcomes. Read full article
Education in Australia - Why We Should Never Return to the 3 Rs
Opinion: Ongoing calls for a rejection of “intellectual fads” and a return to “more traditional teaching methods” seem to be ramping up in the education debate. But if these advocates were talking about rejecting advances over the past sixty years in medicine, no one would take them seriously. So why then is it acceptable to champion simplistic and archaic methods when it comes to education? We should never, and in fact we cannot, return to the three Rs of reading, writing, and arithmetic for a couple of very simple reasons. Read full article
Let's Read - The Australian Government's Call to Families of Young Children
A National Early Literacy Campaign launched this week in Australia aims to see all Australian children gain the foundation skills for language, literacy, and ultimately, learning success. Let’s Read is an Australian Government initiative developed by Royal Children’s Hospital’s Centre for Community Child Health, to be implemented by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and The Smith Family. The campaign delivers this important message - reading with children aged 0-5years is probably the single-most important activity parents can do with their children to enhance their child’s future ability to read and write. Read full article
Giving Students with Autism a Creative Chance
At the Creativity Project event in Sydney last week, Professor Sandra Jones takes the stage, followed closely by her co-presenter, author, Lincoln P. Jones. Their topic is 'How educators can help and inspire young people and develop their creativity' and they have travelled a journey to find those answers together. Read full article
I'm Not Sure About Testing Student Teachers for Emotional Intelligence
I'm very happy and optimistic about some of the changes the Federal government is proposing to teacher training. Teachers should, I believe, be more highly trained, paid and respected in our society - along with the medical profession, they are pretty much the linchpin of a successful society...If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I believe emotional intelligence education is important. So why would I baulk at the suggestion that new Australian teachers are to be tested for emotional intelligence? Read full article
Emotional Intelligence Tests for Teachers? Tougher Training? Experts Respond.
Trainee teachers would be tested for literacy, numeracy and emotional intelligence under a suite of teacher training reforms released by the Federal Government today. Under the plan, the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) needed to enter a university teaching course may also rise. Four education experts respond to the plan... Read full article
Creating Room to Read
The inspirational story of a former Microsoft executive's quest to build libraries around the world and share the love of books. What's happened since John Wood left Microsoft to change the world? Just ask six million kids in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. In 1999, at the age of thirty-five, Wood quit a lucrative career to found the nonprofit Room to Read. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world," he strived to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the nonprofit sector-and succeeded spectacularly. Read full article
You’re Only Ever as Happy as Your Unhappiest Child
Last year, my twelve year old son went through a tough time at school. It happened in grade six, his final year at the tiny local primary he’d attended ever since he started prep… attended, that is, until we pulled him out in grade five, when our family decided to spend a year living in the north of Australia. Up until this time Declan had loved school, and was close to pretty much all the nine other boys in his year level, with whom he’d always shared a class...When we left everything was perfect, but when we returned everything had changed. Read full article
Inspiration - a Teacher's Belief Helps an Angry Child
I had just one year of teaching under my belt and was taking classes towards my master’s degree in special education. Though barely qualified to teach students with challenging behaviour disorders, I quickly assessed that academic training wasn’t going to make me a successful teacher...Vince’s mother repeated the words that seemed incomprehensible, unbearable, and repulsive to my ears.Vince killed his kitten that afternoon. Read full article
