Educating Australia : Challenges for the Decade Ahead

Where is Australian schooling heading? What forces will shape its future direction? How ready are students, teachers, policy makers and education institutions for the challenges being thrust on them? With chapters ranging across the landscape of school-age education, this book proposes new, evidence-based directions for change in teaching, assessment, curriculum, funding and system-wide collaboration. It provides a grounded, forward-looking guide to questions that will be central to Australia's educational debates, and our performance, in the years ahead.

Drawing directly on research, innovation and policy analysis at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, this book creates an engaging and rigorous overview of the issues confronting school-age education in Australia, and provides insights and actions to help shape our responses into the future.

Contents

Part 1
Evolving the purposes of schooling

1 Time for a reboot: Shifting away from distractions to improve Australia's schools – John Hattie
2 The changing role of the teacher in a knowledge economy – Patrick Griffin, Lorraine Graham, Susan Marie Harding, Nives Nibali, Narelle English and Monjurul Alam
3 The state of public schooling – Jessica Gerrard
4 Asia Literacy and the Australian curriculum – Fazal Rizvi
5 Curriculum: The challenges and the devil in the details – Lyn Yates
6 Monitoring learning – Geoff N. Masters

Part 2
New pathways to student achievement

7 What is 'school readiness', and how are smooth transitions to school supported? – Frank Niklas, Collette Tayler and Caroline Cohrssen
8 Chinese: More equal than others – Jane Orton
9 Lying on the floor: Why Australia can lead the world in music education – Pip Robinson and Ros McMillan
10 Young people at the margins: Where to with education? – Helen Stokes and Malcolm Turnbull
11 What if you're not going to university? Improving senior secondary education for young Australians – John Polesel, Mary Leahy, Suzanne Rice, Shelley Gillis, Kira Clarke
12 From inequality to quality: Challenging the debate on Indigenous education – Elizabeth McKinley

Part 3
The role and impact of teachers

13 Supporting the development of the profession: The impact of a clinical approach to teacher education – Larissa McLean Davies, Teresa Angelico, Barbara Hadlow, Jeana Kriewaldt, Field Rickards, Jane Thornton, and Peter Wright
14 Creating a third space for learning in teacher education – Helen Cahill
15 Building knowledge about oral language skills into teacher practice and initial teacher education – Patricia Eadie, Hannah Stark and Pamela Snow
16 Aligning curriculum, instruction and assessment – Natasha Ziebell, Aloysius Ong and David Clarke

Part 4
Challenges of system reform

17 Hard-to-staff Australian schools: How can we ensure that all students have access to quality teachers? – Suzanne Rice, Paul W. Richardson, Helen M.G. Watt
18 Collaboration in pursuit of learning – Tom Bentley and Sean Butler
19 Aligning student ability with learning opportunity: How can measures of senior school achievement support better selection for higher education? – Emmaline Bexley
20 Other people's children: School funding reform in Australia – Tom Bentley
21 Improving national policy processes in Australian schooling – Glenn C. Savage

Tom Bentley is a writer and policy adviser on education, social inclusion and economic innovation. From 2007-13 he was Deputy Chief of Staff and senior policy adviser to Julia Gillard. He now works with institutions around the world on how to learn more effectively. Glenn C. Savage is a Senior Lecturer in Education Policy and ARC DECRA Fellow (2016-19) in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne.