PWRD Leadership, in partnership with Teach Like a Champion, are proud to present a Teach Like a Champion overview. This overview will unpack the key fundamentals of Teach Like a Champion in the areas of Engaging Academics, Classroom Culture and Checking for Understanding while demonstrating the alignment with the latest evidence.

Ask your questions live!

Our school would like to share how our school - St Mary's Primary in Myrtleford - shifted from failing results across the school to a school achieving excellent results using the science of reading and learning. We would like to share the mistakes we made and what to avoid and the success of where we are at now, five years later.

This session will spend time looking at the research on the concrete-pictorial-abstract framework and how it can look in a maths lesson.

Ask your questions live!

Governments have dramatically underestimated what it takes to plan high-quality lessons every day. Grattan’s survey of 2,243 teachers and school leaders shows that many teachers are planning alone, and buckling under the weight of this near-impossible task. But it needn’t be this way. Grattan visited five schools which have adopted whole-school planning approaches. Come along to hear how they did it, and how their students and teachers are benefitting.

To support teachers in the complex task of classroom management, the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) is developing practical resources based on the most rigorous and relevant research evidence and guidance available from a wide range of research experts and expert practitioners across Australia and internationally.

Transforming lives through learning - this is the purpose of Catalyst, the approach to teaching and learning at Catholic Education Canberra-Goulburn (CECG) that provides professional learning to support teachers to apply evidence-based practice in the classroom.

Catalyst is a significant system-led implementation of the Science of Reading and Science of Learning. Focusing on the teacher as the most important learner, it brings together cognitive science and education, theory and practice, to refine an approach to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment across CECG and improve the outcomes of over 22,000 students.

In this webinar, Ollie Lovell and Josh Goodrich will take you through why it's hard to improve teaching and what instructional coaching can do about it. With plenty of practical examples, hard-won from combined decades of dedicated focus on this important topic, Ollie and Josh will sketch out the active ingredients of instructional coaching (what it is that makes it work), and how these active ingredients address the common barriers to teachers changing habits and practices. Come along to gain a comprehensive and evidence informed overview of the promise, and practicality, of Instructional Coaching.

This session supports educators to understand, identify and support students with maths learning difficulties, including dyscalculia.

There is a lot of information about the “what” of Science of Learning, but still a lack of information about the “how”. Join Lachlan Yeates, Principal at Cranbourne Primary School as he shares the secrets of his success in moving his low-ICSEA school from the bottom of his network to the top in three years. This session will include practical advice around:

Strategies to bring staff on the change journey

Balancing student wellbeing/behaviour with learning

Leadership mindsets

Plenty of time will be provided for discussion, so please bring your questions for what promises to be a fascinating session.

AERO has developed new resources around how students learn to help educators make decisions informed by a deeper understanding of the learning process and implications for teaching. This session will introduce AEROs new model of learning and teaching and explore how it can be used to frame a cohesive, comprehensive, and practical approach to developing practice.

Do you have questions about using Read2Learn materials?

This session will provide an overview of Read2Learn, the rationale and general structure of the materials, and preview a few units.

Project Leaders Shane Pearson and Nathaniel Swain will also answer questions from educators interested in implementing the units.

Samantha and Martin will break down the evidence needed to understand the four strands of the maths curriculum for F-2, provide practical examples of what this can look like in an explicit instruction classroom and outline how and where play can link with this type of teaching and learning.

Christine Jackson will provide an early insight into the SWIF and associated professional learning resources and highlight some of the key learnings from the project.

All resources will be published on AERO’s website and available to all teachers and school leaders in 2024.

Wednesday November 8th meeting

The Bridge Hotel Bendigo

6:30 meal with 7:00 start

Join us for an informative presentation on how our school has undergone a remarkable journey of transformation and improvement in English education using the Science of Reading approach. Our dedicated team, innovative strategies, and commitment to student success have shown promising results.

Change management and cognitive bias: How to coach people through change

There are so many mixed messages out there about teaching primary mathematics. In this webinar, Brendan Lee will clarify some of the misconceptions and provide teachers with an overview of the research to help inform their decision-making when teaching primary mathematics.

Dr Tessa Daffern draws on practical insights from her extensive research on spelling, including findings from an Australian randomised control trial. In this session, Tessa provides examples of how schools she has worked with implement explicit, data-informed teaching to support spelling and vocabulary learning.

We have had some continual interest in the assessment and reporting challenge when moving away from benchmarking assessments and running records, and into structured literacy and explicit mathematics.

The Middle Leaders Forum presents Dr Selena Fisk as the speaker for our next webinar focussed on data – what to do with it and how to use it for impact.

We are following up with a live session the following week at the same time, where participants can collaborate and network in breakout sessions sharing examples of how they’re using data and responding to focus prompts to keep them on track (and use and share the learning from Selena’s session).

The What Works Series will provide Professional Learning by teachers, for teachers.

Each presenter will share what they have learned from implementing evidence-informed maths and describe what it can look like in the classroom.

The Middle Leaders Forum presents Dr Selena Fisk as the speaker for our next webinar focussed on data – what to do with it and how to use it for impact.

We are following up with a live session the following week at the same time, where participants can collaborate and network in breakout sessions sharing examples of how they’re using data and responding to focus prompts to keep them on track (and use and share the learning from Selena’s session).

ACT Branch: Movie Night. Join us for a winter MOVIE NIGHT to watch the documentary "Our Dyslexic Children" (45 min) followed by a live Q & A session with Executive Producer Brett Tingley.

Open to all Principals and Assistant/Deputy Principals. Sarah Kelly will share with interested educators her current school’s change and the experiences that led to their WHY as a school.

Join us for a live Coaching Workshop on implementing the Science of Learning with Dr. Nathaniel Swain and Brendan Lee.

In this session, we will be hearing from real teachers discussing their real-world challenges in implementing the Science of Learning. Dr Nathaniel Swain and Brendan Lee will then guide the teachers and school leaders through some possible solutions, taking an evidence-informed approach.

In this session, we will explore the benefits of integrating ChatGPT into various literacy planning and teaching tasks, and discuss our current understanding of the tool's effectiveness, accuracy, and strategies to make use of this technology. Let’s learn together!

What’s important for math intervention? Sarah Powell is an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her teaching and research focus on word-problem solving, data-based decision making, and effective mathematics teaching.

Bendigo Branch Meeting

We invite you to come along and discuss your successes/ problems/ concerns with other teachers travelling a similar path. We will be focusing on intervention, but will also allow time for more general discussions.

Our focus is students in Years 3-10.

6:30 for a meal (optional); 7:15pm start

Come and network with like-minded Bendigo educators interested in the Science of Learning, to

• Share current experiences, challenges and little wins

• Ask all the questions!

• Grab a bite to eat (optional)