Teacher Magazine (ACER)

Teacher Magazine is a free digital resource for K-12 educators, published by ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research, and its podcast carries that work into audio. It is less one show than several strands in one feed. The Research Files is built around published research. In one episode, Jo Earp talks with Dr Alexandra Hennessey of the Manchester Institute of Education at the University of Manchester about how UK schools adopted the WellSchools framework, a project the Youth Sports Trust started in 2020. The detail is about how schools organise the work: senior leaders creating staff wellbeing roles, spreading responsibility beyond the head teacher and deputy, and writing wellbeing charters that cover staff as well as students. A series on school improvement goes into individual schools. At St Columba Anglican School in Port Macquarie, on the New South Wales North Coast, principal Alan Gio and Director of Professional Learning Chris Delaney explain their part in the award-winning Teaching School Hubs program from Independent Schools New South Wales. Trainees spend a day a week in the school while juggling university commitments, and the goal, in the school's telling, is trainees who are 'thriving and not just surviving'. Reading instruction gets close attention. Dominique Beach's conversation with Mandy Natan, an educational and developmental psychologist and CEO of the Dyslexia Spelled Foundation, moves from phonics scope and sequence to inflectional suffixes to the Latin roots and Greek combining forms behind much of the content vocabulary in maths and science. Beach mentions picking up a new word along the way. Teacher Staffroom works differently. Rebecca Vukovic and Dominique Beach each present an episode here, rounding up highlights from the previous four weeks on the Teacher website: podcasts, columns, infographics and articles. Reader feedback shapes it openly. One episode shares comments left on an article by Victorian teacher and designer Andressa Bassani about four design principles for classrooms. Another answers the magazine's annual reader survey, in which readers asked for more on curriculum implementation. It brings together Mandy Natan on decoding in the upper primary years and a literacy leader at St Teresa's Primary School who co-designed a K-6 program with Deakin University on Australia's Great Southern Reef and local freshwater environments. Links to everything mentioned are left in the episode transcript on the magazine's website. The feed also carries a podcast special. In it, Rebecca Vukovic travels to St Mary's Primary School in Whittlesea, Victoria, to hear STEM specialist teacher Kayla Borg describe how Year 5 and 6 students co-designed a podcast lesson with the eSmart team at the Alana and Madeline Foundation. The students worked from the four C's (content, contact, conduct and compulsion) and grouped themselves around themes such as social media algorithms and screen time. The strands share a habit of specifics: named schools, named programs, and the people involved explaining how the work was done.