Take a Seat - Make a Friend - Try this in a School?
A beautiful video from Soul Pancake called "Take a Seat - Make a Friend". We think this would be a brilliant exercise for a Primary or Elementary school to help children get to know each other, make friends, and appreciate diversity. This is great. Take 5 minutes and enjoy this. Read full article
Parent Article for Primary School Newsletters
We have developed a quality parent-communication tool for schools in the form of an A4 one-page article for parents that can be easily inserted into your regular school newsletter. As parents are the first and enduring educators of their children, there is great reciprocal value for a school when it shares new ideas and research with families. See details and a sample. Read full article
Free Talk in Sydney - 'What is Good Education for Girls AND Boys?'
Santa Sabina College Principal and Gender Education Expert, Dr Maree Herrett invites you to a free talk about gender relations in education. Read full article
Bullying Prevention Starts at Home
Supportive parent involvement together with warm and affectionate parenting, are part of the scaffolding required in children’s lives to reduce the chances of them becoming a bully, a victim or both. Last month, researchers at the University of Warwick and Kingston University published findings from a large-scale analysis of research on bullying and victimisation of children and produced more evidence of the importance of parenting programs to bolster children’s wellbeing. Read full article
NAPLAN is not Running According to PLAN
Opinion: “I’ve had enough of the NAP and enough of the PLAN.” So spoke a seven year old I met last week whose year three class is busy getting ready for NAPLAN – the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy test – which will be taken by the vast majority of years three, five, seven and nine students in Australian schools next month. NAPLAN is supposed to tell us how we're tracking on the three Rs, but a study commissioned last year by the public policy research Whitlam Institute at the University of Western Sydney shows that the test is having unintended outcomes. Read full article
Education in Australia - Why We Should Never Return to the 3 Rs
Opinion: Ongoing calls for a rejection of “intellectual fads” and a return to “more traditional teaching methods” seem to be ramping up in the education debate. But if these advocates were talking about rejecting advances over the past sixty years in medicine, no one would take them seriously. So why then is it acceptable to champion simplistic and archaic methods when it comes to education? We should never, and in fact we cannot, return to the three Rs of reading, writing, and arithmetic for a couple of very simple reasons. Read full article
Mindfulness Training at School Reduces Depression in Teenagers
A study published last month in the Mindfulness Journal, found that a mindfulness program integrated into school hours, can prevent and reduce symptoms of clinical depression in high school students...The researchers found that six months after the study, the mindfulness students with clinical depression symptoms showed significantly greater reductions in depression compared to their control group peers. Read full article
Australia Gets a B Minus on Report Card - Health and Wellbeing of Young Australians
This morning at Parliament House Canberra, Ms Elaine Henry OAM, Chairperson of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY) launched ARACY's second Report Card on the Wellbeing of Young Australians. Describing Australia as "middle of the road" when it comes to children's health and wellbeing in Australia, the Report Card identifies areas of concern in areas such as child poverty, infant mortality, and youth participation in education and employment. Speaking at the launch, Dr Norman Swan, also a board member of ARACY highglighted income inequality and early childhood education as significant areas of deficit in Australia's policy and practice. Read full article
I'm Not Sure About Testing Student Teachers for Emotional Intelligence
I'm very happy and optimistic about some of the changes the Federal government is proposing to teacher training. Teachers should, I believe, be more highly trained, paid and respected in our society - along with the medical profession, they are pretty much the linchpin of a successful society...If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I believe emotional intelligence education is important. So why would I baulk at the suggestion that new Australian teachers are to be tested for emotional intelligence? Read full article
What Makes Teenagers Stand Up for Bullying Victims?
To bully, 'bystand' or 'upstand'? This is the question that adolescents who witness bullying behaviour are processing at the time of an incident. New research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education discovers why teens at school don't always stand up for bullying victims, even though they want to. Read full article
