Schools don't need to pay for a new state-of-the-art playground or roll-out an expensive and convoluted "21st century" program to start building resilience in their students. Just go old school.It's called a 'junk playground' - and it's free and easy to implement. For young students to build resilience they need to take risks every day. A junk playground, designed well, allows children to 'go out on a limb' without the branch snapping underneath them.A junk playground helps students to build resilience by simply, and safely, taking lots of risks. (And the irony in all that risk-taking?... they ..read more

Teacher friends of mine who have dived the Great Barrier Reef tell me it was well worth all the effort, expense and courage to make the dive. Many described their up-close encounter with the reef as "unforgettable" and "totally worth it".I can't tell you much about scuba diving but I can tell you about the rewards for teachers when we go deeper into our thinking, learning and reflecting on practice.I have attended a lot of education conferences in my time but last year's IOnTheFuture event - 'Into the Deep' - was by far the most relevant and inspirational I've experienced.Speaker Libby Woodfin ..read more

True story...I was struggling. I was behind in report writing, short on sleep, and trying to soldier on with a bad case of the man flu. I was sitting in the staff room looking blankly at my laptop screen, brain... dead... Anita the Year 4 teacher waltzes effortlessly in and pirouettes her coffee mug into the top rung of the dishwasher. Mmm, I muse. She has a much heavier workload than me. "Anita, how do you do it?" She closes the dishwasher door, looks up at my tired expression, and with a wry smile, a twinkle of the eye and a flick of her wrist she mimics knocking back what I imagine is a g ..read more

FYI: The new Australian Teacher Workforce Data initiative (ATWD) is being implemented by AITSL in partnership with the federal Department of Education and Training, all state teacher regulatory authorities and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).The survey is for both new and experienced teachers. The data collected will be used to answer the following questions:How many teachers do we have nationally and locally and what are they qualified to teach?How many hours are spent on teaching, preparing to teach and non-teaching activities?How many ITE students get jobs?How effectiv ..read more

With digital media being increasingly used to intimidate or inflict harm on others any opportunity for our young people to learn how to employ technology for positive ends is to be applauded.The Australian and NSW K-8 Design & Technologies curricula highlight that the chief goal of delivering the syllabus is to empower students "to create preferred futures". The implication here is that our young people don't need to be helpless (or angry) victims of circumstance. If they see something wrong in the world they can do something about it.I especially enjoy teaching students in the Years 5 to ..read more

Empathy... "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another".I was with a group of Year 5 and 6 teachers discussing STEM projects and design thinking. The consensus within the group was that students should start off a design project by 'empathising' with a user or consumer and then move on through the rest of the design process after that.But one teacher pointed out that she felt most of her students were incapable of putting themselves 'in someone else's shoes'. When it comes to recognising other people's needs "they couldn't care less", she said.That's a problem. Without the abi ..read more