Brian's Blog

Do you remember the moment that you decided teaching was your career? Some of us maybe still searching for that moment! For me, it was in Year 6, as we did the time honoured “light” unit of work. My teacher was eccentric but in one moment helped to define the direction of my professional life. Wrapped in his white lab coat and armed with 4 D-cell batteries, alligator clips, a jar and one of my pacer leads, he made magic happen! "Let there be light!" In that moment he captivated all of us with awe. I cannot remember the exact details of what he was teaching but I remember the experience of seeing the light illuminate from the bottle. There is a constant tension between what we need to teach and what we as professionals know our students need to know to apply this understanding. Frequently, these two don’t perfectly match and as a result, there is a tension. Teachers often try to find the links to draw correlations between the two but an essential and oft...

This is part two of the Need for Social Justice in Schools series. Headlines such as “PISA shows Indigenous students continue to struggle” (ACER, 2007) reflect areas of real inequity in Australia’s education system. Reports (Thomson, 2008) indicate that Australia's lowest-performing students are most likely to come from Indigenous communities, geographically remote areas and poor socioeconomic backgrounds. These results indicate that in Australia issues of inequity need to be addressed to ensure access to quality education for all students (Thomson, 2008). It is important in terms of equity to consider the choice of knowledge and skills selected for the assessments. To achieve equity the curriculum must include valued knowledge and skills consisting of different kinds of cultural knowledge and experience, reflective of all groups, not privileging one group to the exclusion of others. The goal of assessment must be that students of all groups have equal opportunity to demons...