Is the size of your child's class the optimal size for learning? Are they being given the kind of homework evidence says is useful, if evidence says homework is useful at all?
These are the kinds of questions being asked by a national body set up to make sure Australian schools are using as much evidence-based practice as possible. Their first report is out now.
Read MoreKeen to chart his own path, the first 10 years or so of Dr Nathaniel Swain’s career were spent studying linguistics, then Speech Pathology, a PhD in Education, and then lecturing at Melbourne Uni. Having built a real passion about young people at the margins of society, he is determined that they have excellent learning experiences. Now teaching foundation students in a school in southeast Melbourne, he’s doing some incredible work to ensure that every single student learns to read and write and can do maths from a young age.
Read MoreDr Nathaniel Swain has no qualms that his space might look ‘out of step’ with current layout and design trends.
He is well aware that to the casual observer his classroom might appear different. For starters, desks are arranged in neat, front-facing rows. There’s not a collaborative ‘cluster’ or ‘U’ shape formation in sight. For the teacher, instructional coach and researcher, it’s a simple set up that feeds perfectly into his instructional practice and the learning routines he wants to establish with his prep students.
Read MoreIt is a reasonable assumption that schools will teach our kids to read and write proficiently. But data from national and international assessments reveal a large and persistent group of underperforming Australian students, many of whom are functionally illiterate. So, how well are most schools teaching the foundations of literacy?
Read MoreThe proposed national curriculum also reinforces the primacy of phonics in teaching young primary school students to read, a development that could place pressure on Victoria to follow NSW’s recent cue and move away from its dominant method of balanced literacy.
Nathaniel Swain, a speech pathologist and primary school teacher at Brandon Park Primary in Melbourne’s south-east, said the current Victorian curriculum has “mixed messages around how we want early readers to decipher text. They have phonics in there, and they have some of the foundations in there, but they have a whole lot of other stuff thrown in there as well,” Dr Swain said.
Read MoreNathaniel Swain, a teacher and speech pathologist, said he struggled to hear quieter students when they wore masks. “Quieter kids will also tend to hide behind the mask and not want to speak up and find it difficult and muffled,” he said.
“Students with [English as second language] backgrounds are not as expressive as they might have been without the masks on.” Some struggle to understand. “They need to see the face and the mouth and piece that together with the acoustic information,” he said.
Read MoreNathaniel Swain, a teacher at Brandon Park Primary in Melbourne, said he’d noticed an increase in recent years in the scope of teachers’ responsibilities and the number of administrative tasks they were required to do, with the stress driving some out of the profession. He said his school was in the process of implementing a plan to tackle burnout by creating shared resources and curriculum materials, which would be ready by the end of the year.
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