Teach Starter

Teach Starter comes at teaching from several directions at once: hands-on classroom technique, research-led guidance, personal stories and the culture students bring through the door. The tone is warm and collegial. The most practical material is in 'Phonemic Awareness Activities'. There, Bron talks with Holly, a Teach Starter blogger and experienced early years teacher with an interest in phonics research, and the two go through sound skills one at a time. Phoneme categorisation, for instance, asks a child to hear dog, dad and rug and explain why rug does not belong. The episode notes that picture cards and visuals can still support a skill that is about listening, and it points teachers to activities on the Teach Starter blog, including a beginning sound sorting task. The weightier material is trauma-informed practice. Michael shares a webinar with Dr. Emily Berger from Monash and Professor Karen Martin from the University of Tasmania in the podcast feed, so the session can be heard on a train or in the car as well as watched on YouTube. A companion bonus episode answers questions the live session ran out of time for. The advice is concrete: pick a moment when the child is calm, work with them inside a good relationship, and stop trying to reason with a child who is dysregulated. One speaker also wonders whether, when one or two children in a class are really struggling, others take their behaviour as a kind of permission. Vivian Roszkowski's episode moves from method to life story. She is a Sydney primary teacher who got in touch to share how she became a teacher, and Bron hears about years of displacement, school in Australia without English, and an HSC completed at a senior college at the cost of her social life. The episode ends on a short conclusion: kids are resilient. The show also looks past the curriculum. 'Climate Change Education: Last Word (for now!)' is framed as final thoughts after COP26. In it, one contributor sets out a way to break an overwhelming issue into small daily actions, such as where you buy your coffee, alongside getting the facts right and adapting the lessons for children. 'Squid Game(s): Tips for Teachers' has Bron and Jill, neither of them keen on the series, mapping where children were meeting it: Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and even a world in Roblox. They note that the YouTube Kids app will not show it, and that parents may come to teachers asking what to do. Across episodes, the show points back to its own resources, from a behaviour collection full of reward systems to the phonics blog. Each episode closes by inviting teachers to send a voice message or email about what is happening in their classrooms.