I am delighted to be sharing this fortnightly news and insight blog, offering short summaries of the latest news and studies, reports, and opinions across the education arena. If there is a topic, report or event you would like QELi to explore, please email your thoughts to marketing@qeli.qld.edu.au.

Neil McDonald
Chief Executive Officer, QELi

Attracting high achievers to teaching

Australia’s top teachers should be able to earn $80,000 a year more, and top school-leavers should get $10,000-a-year scholarships if they take up teaching, as part of a $1.6 billion blueprint to boost teacher quality and student performance. The Grattan survey of nearly 1,000 young high achievers (aged 18-25 and with an ATAR of 80 or higher) found that more bright young Australians would take up teaching if it offered higher top-end pay and greater career challenge. With this higher-achieving teacher workforce, the typical Australian student would gain an extra six to 12 months of learning by Year 9. Peter Goss and Julie Sonnemann explain in the recent Grattan Report, ‘Attracting high achievers to teaching’. Hear more from Peter Goss.

Ode to the poem

Memorisation can clash with creativity and analytical thought. Rote learning can be seen as mindless, drone-like, something done without really thinking about why we’re doing it and what the thing we memorise might mean. But in this article from The Conversation, Veronica Alfano, Research Fellow, Australian Catholic University, suggests there is great value in memorisation as well. Internalising a poem need not be a rote process. Done right, in fact, it is an intellectual exercise that illuminates the structure and logic of the text.

A new way to assess social and emotional skills

Field trials of a new measure of social and emotional skills from the OECD have just been completed, reports Dr Sue Thomson, ahead of a Research Conference 2019 presentation. Though large-scale international assessments can influence national education policy, they sometimes fail to capture the underlying traits that really matter. Read more in this article published by ACER. 

Edtech can’t replace poor instruction

In this article, Matthew Lynch from thetechadvocate.org summarises the findings of a new OECD report, ‘Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connections’, which has found that investing heavily in ICT for education doesn’t lead to appreciable improvements in student achievement in reading, math or science. It is also evident that students must be taught how to use their critical thinking skills in order for them to do meaningful research online. And, no surprise, the report points out that reading literacy is as essential as digital literacy.

How climate change will transform business and the workforce

Our planet is already feeling the effects of climate change, but it’s also poised to cause irreversible shifts in the ways we work, and the skills that employers need. Amanda Ruggeri explains more in her online article for the BBC, ‘How Climate Change Could Transform The Workforce’.

Ethical leadership

Teachers are facing increasingly complex and challenging social situations, including the proliferation of social media and students set to turn 18 years old while still in Year 12, making the use of ethical intelligence more crucial than ever before. This week, the QCT released a suite of Professional Boundaries resources to help teachers ensure that their behaviour remains ethical and professional. Read more here