In 2017, 5019 educators from primary and preschool settings across Victoria, Australia took part in joint professional learning around effective transition to school processes. Upon registering for this professional learning workshop, participants were invited to identify the most significant challenges associated with transition to school. The…

Design thinking is often proposed as an educative strategy to enhance growth mindset, problem solving, and creativity, but there are very few evaluations of the impact of experiential design thinking programs. The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether an online design-thinking workshop provided to outdoor education staff could…

There are increasing demands for teachers to continue to improve the quality of education. This focus is evident in the Early Childhood Education and Care sector in Australia where the professionalisation agenda is tied to teacher professional learning. While the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL) has strengthened expectations…

Play, while complex, is essential for children's learning and development. It is well established in the literature that there is a strong link between children's pretend play abilities and their language skills, particularly in relation to the use of language in social contexts. For many children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH), pretend…

In order to graduate as professional engineers in Australia, engineering students undertake internships as part of their degree programmes. The heart of a productive internship programme is the relationship between the workplace supervisor and the student, yet there are significant gaps in the knowledge about the nature and type of professional…

Improving schooling outcomes is a preoccupation facing school leaders globally. At the heart of such an agenda is the school leader's capacity to make professional learning decisions that best support the professional learning needs of their teachers. Thus, this paper investigates the extent to which principals' control to make professional…

Similar to many other OECD countries, contemporary policy approaches to teacher professional learning in Australia are tied to the standardisation of the profession and characterised by compliance and performativity regimes of teacher participation in prescribed modes, types and quanta of professional learning. In this paper, we argue that such…

Beyond the notion of decision-making of career choice just being rational, this article proposes the primacy of 'affect' in the decision to become teachers over time. The article explores the becoming of immigrant English language teachers as an identity formation process, focusing on the lived experiences of 16 English language teachers since…

Professional standards for teachers have become a near-ubiquitous policy tool in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries in efforts to improve teacher quality and student outcomes. The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers differ from teaching standards implemented in comparable countries, with its system…

This practice report argues that, in a higher education system where publication is a key performance metric, existing resources, such as textbooks, can be used and modified to make engaging and valuable professional development resources for researcher/educators -- both students and academics. The report outlines a series of writing workshops…

Many countries have a diverse early childhood education and care (ECEC) workforce, comprising educators with a range of qualifications and backgrounds. This diversity creates challenges for professional development, as educators with different qualifications (including university degrees and vocational qualifications) may have different strengths…

In 2019, the Australian higher education regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), commissioned a team of academic integrity experts to design and facilitate a series of national workshops, with the aim of increasing academic integrity knowledge and building a culture of integrity across the higher education sector.…

It is difficult to identify direct causal relationships between school-based professional learning initiatives and changes in the participating teachers' competencies or their students' learning outcomes. This paper contributes a novel approach to examining the impact of such school-based professional learning by integrating the constructs of…

Professional development (PD) was examined among faculty members to identify enablers and inhibitors, and the coping strategies used to mitigate these. Three faculty members in the field of Kinesiology, at different career stages (early, middle, and late career), were recruited to participate in semi-structured phone interviews. Guided by…

Digital technology has long been ubiquitous in many communities within Australia and internationally, thereby requiring suitable digital proficiencies. While a majority of Australian children experience digital literacies as part of their everyday lives, limitations in access disadvantage others. In educational settings, there is a clear need for…