What do you know about the history of cognitive science? How familiar are you with the savage battles between "behaviourism" and "mentalism" that took place in the mid-20th century? Would you believe that a book review by Noam Chomsky played a pivotal role? And what does any of this have to do with teaching today? Quite a bit, actually, or so Benjamin Riley will try to persuade you in this provocative session.

Grattan Institute is about to publish a guide on how to implement great maths teaching in primary schools. The practical, easy-to-follow guide complements Grattan Institute’s recent report, The Maths Guarantee: How to boost students’ learning in primary schools. In this presentation, Amy Haywood and Nick Parkinson will share Grattan’s summary of the evidence base and distil lessons from seven case study schools that have successfully translated the evidence into practice.

Join them to hear the practical steps your school can take to embed evidence-informed maths teaching in every classroom.

Screening assessments like DIBELS are increasingly used in English. But what about for maths? This session outlines the experience of Docklands Primary School in using Acadience Math, an example of universal screening assessment. Learn more about the assessment and how it can be used to support school improvement.

This session showcases the highly structured approach used at Serpentine Primary School to support emergent writers in the lower primary years. With a strong focus on oral language, syntax, picture sequences, and macrostructure icons, students are guided from sentence-level writing to rudimentary narratives and information reports. Polly Anderson will share the clear, replicable instructional routines that underpin this approach, including how she differentiates for different writing abilities and gradually removes scaffolds to build independence.

In this session Heather will go back to first principles and explore why knowledge matters and what is meant by a knowledge-rich curriculum. She’ll discuss what this means for teachers and especially the implications of adopting a knowledge-rich curriculum for lesson design. She’ll consider some of the most common pitfalls when trying to adopt a knowledge-rich approach, for example, moving onto task design without clarity about content choices at different levels of granularity.

The first session showed that great teaching is not just about delivering content, it’s about adapting instruction based on student understanding and misconceptions. This session will examine how teachers can use real-time feedback to guide their teaching, making learning more effective and targeted. Using insights from cognitive load theory, spaced learning, and scaffolding, we’ll discuss how to respond to student needs, address misconceptions, and adjust instructional strategies on the spot.

How do we know students truly understand rather than just recognizing material? This session tackles one of education's most crucial challenges: accurately assessing student comprehension in real-time. Drawing on research from cognitive science, this session will explore effective strategies for formative assessment, including retrieval practice, diagnostic questioning, and the use of misconceptions as learning opportunities. Participants will leave with practical techniques to make student thinking visible and adjust instruction accordingly.

This session will explore Teach Like a Champion's latest guidance on reading pedagogy with a practical look at building knowledge to increase reading comprehension.

Participants will learn about four key tools that allow for strategic and purposeful use of background knowledge:

1) embedded non-fiction texts

2) embellishments

3) knowledge organisers and

4) vocabulary as knowledge.

If you are someone who knows the importance of building background knowledge but are not sure exactly how or where to start, or just want to see it in action, then this session is for you. You'll see some fantastic footage and walk away with some classroom ready actions.

This session will unpack what is included in explicit Maths lessons that aligns with the VTLM 2.0. We'll look at evidence-based instructional models that we can draw upon to ensure that our practices align, as well as what this looks like when we are planning and teaching.

Key points included will be:

• Review practices

• Explicitly teaching new content

• Guided and independent practice

• Developing fluency

• Assessing within lessons

Join us for an engaging session on ‘An introduction to bar modelling’. This session is designed to help teachers enhance their classroom strategies by pairing bar models with abstract calculations, improving students' clarity in problem-solving. Learn how bar models can become the essential scaffold between concrete manipulatives and abstract concepts, solidifying core mathematical understanding for all learners.

We will also explore using bar models to explore effective methods that illustrate structural connections between various mathematical concepts, fostering a more cohesive and meaningful learning experience. Gain practical tools that will elevate your teaching practice and ensure all students can engage with and succeed in maths!

Join us for a webinar exploring how the new book Harnessing the Science of Learning can transform your educational practice. This essential guide, crafted with insights from Nathaniel Swain—Senior Lecturer in Learning Sciences, instructional coach, and founder of Think Forward Educators—bridges research and practice to empower educators. The stories of change interspersed in this volume, and expert contributions from international thought leaders complement the book’s actionable strategies for teaching, literacy, mathematics, and curriculum. Through real-world case studies, discover how small changes can drive significant impact. Whether you're well-versed in the learning sciences, or just curious, this session will equip you with the next steps to elevate your instruction and student outcomes.

An overview of the new Victorian mathematics curriculum, a planning guide from yearly overviews to individual lesson plans, and how Ochre Education's curriculum materials can be utilized to support curriculum planning.

What does the Science of Learning look like in the Primary Science Classroom? Primary School is an essential part of the explicit knowledge building students need engage in to become scientifically literate. This talk will share the recommendations from the E4L Toolkit and the Education Endowment Fund from the UK, and support teachers to make decisions on how to engage with Scientific vocabulary, Science Inquiry and Common Misconceptions.

During the talk, we’ll share how Science Inquiry differs from Inquiry learning, how you can make small adjustments for big impact, and why Formative Assessment and Responsive Teaching are vital to success in Science.

Simplifying phonics with fidelity: guidance for all students and especially those with disabilities, neurodiversity’s and trauma backgrounds.

“Simplifying phonics with fidelity” aims to cut out the fluff and target the important skills and concepts that all students need when learning to read. Charlotte will unpack the tried and tested methods that have shown to have the most impact after four years of implementation of structured literacy including systematic synthetic phonics instruction (SSP) at Lake Colac School. This session will provide a good base if you are starting to implement SSP in your school and also a check-in for fidelity for those already on the SSP journey.

The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) recently released resources to support school leaders to lead a whole school approach to classroom management, building on AERO’s foundational classroom management resources for teachers.

AERO’s Principal Teaching and Learning Specialist Cate Whiting will share the evidence base behind the foundational classroom management resources and explain how the new professional learning resources can support school leaders to foster a shared understanding and consistent application of evidence-based classroom management approaches across the school. Plans for further guidance and tools to be released next year will also be shared.

The purpose of this seminar is to offer a scientific ‘lens’ through which educators can critique the evidence for different teaching approaches in mathematics and numeracy. Principally, Dr Siobhan Merlo will discuss how working memory load can be managed effectively to expedite learning.

The following topics will be explored:

1) Understanding our cognitive hardware and how we learn

2) Optimal conditions for learning

3) Our cognitive software – Biologically Primary and Biologically Secondary Knowledge

4) Implications for instruction and the way information is presented

Over the last 7 years, No More Marking have used Comparative Judgement to assess over 2 million pieces of student writing from across the globe. In this webinar Daisy Christodoulou will share what they have learned about students' writing from these assessments, and how you can use these insights to improve your students' writing.

Drawing from and extending on Bjork’s ‘Desirable Difficulties’, this talk looks at the establishment of a classroom environment that embraces the uncomfortable – from counter-intuitive but highly effective teaching techniques to the promotion of successful, but ever so uncomfortable, learning habits.

Embarking on a Churchill Fellowship in 2023 to investigate best practices in mathematics teaching at a primary school level, Liana visited 6 countries in 7 weeks: Singapore, Japan, Finland, Estonia, Canada, USA. The presentation focuses on her experiences and looks at the commonalities and differences between primary mathematics education in Australia and abroad.

This presentation provides a critical analysis of the empirical evidence surrounding the use of Genre Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)-based pedagogies in K-10 education, particularly regarding their impact on reading and writing outcomes. Despite their widespread adoption in educational curricula, initial teacher training, and literacy practices, the effectiveness of these approaches in improving student outcomes remains uncertain.

There are two items at the top of just about every primary literacy teacher’s wish list: 1. Scope and sequence documents, 2. Word lists. Leaving 1. aside for a moment, what’s the problem with word lists? Why does linguist and school coach Lyn Stone never create or issue them? Find out why Lyn finds herself saying, ’The best word list is a book!’ everywhere she goes. Leave this talk with a much better chance of never having to seek a word list again.

Writing is a potentially powerful lever for deepening knowledge, improving reading comprehension and analytical thinking, and enabling all students to access grade-level material. But it’s also the most difficult thing we ask students to do. To unlock the power of writing instruction, we need to: (1) make writing less overwhelming by starting at the sentence level if that’s what students need; (2) teach grammar and writing conventions in the context of students’ own writing; and (3) embed writing activities in the content of the core curriculum—in any subject and at any grade level. This presentation will provide examples of effective activities.

Teaching Fractions Using an Explicit CRA Approach: How to bring research-based pedagogy into daily practice and transform a student’s understanding of fractions, decimals and percents.

Spelling Mastery is the renowned Direct Instruction Spelling Program that is proven to transform spelling results in all types of students. This unique evidence-based program approaches spelling through strategies, patterns, and rules. The straightforward lessons in Spelling Mastery combine phonemic, morphemic, and whole-word instruction to make spelling easier to learn, and teaching students to mastery.

The Phonics Lesson Plans team in the Victorian Department of Education will present to Think Forward Educators on the new approach to reading in F-2 in Victorian government schools. This session will provide deeper insight into the announcement on reading along with the systematic synthetic phonics approach. The department’s Phonics Lesson Plans team will discuss the resources they are planning to provide as part of the English Lesson Plans for F-2. Join to hear more and to ask questions!

Join the all-star team of Toni Hatten-Roberts, David Morkunas, and Ollie Lovell for an action packed hour of both in-depth theory and practical ideas for improving your primary mathematics instruction. Covering everything from well-embedded instructional routines, to cognitive load considerations, and the why and how of structuring systematic reviews of learning, this session will leave all attendees with multiple practical strategies to try in their classroom tomorrow. Towards the end of the presentation, Toni, David, and Ollie will also provide information about the Explicit Mathematics Program, a highly structured F-2 mathematics program, tailored to all State and Territory curriculums, that will be released in 2025.

Explore the differences between discovery-based learning, problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, explicit instruction, and direct instruction.

Discuss the learning theories that drive inquiry-based learning and explicit instruction.

Explain why inquiry-based learning rose to popularity.

If you no longer use benchmarking systems in literacy instruction, how do you listen to your students read?

Karen Woods from Templestowe Heights Primary School wrote a TFE Journal article about this common dilemma facing teachers. This webinar will expand on the ideas in the article and Karen will be available for questions.

We are convening a panel of Victorian government school teachers to discuss their views on these new policies and the potential impact.

The panel will address questions such as:

Do you support the new policies?

Do you think a phonics/explicit teaching mandate hurts teacher workload?

What has your experience been with phonics/explicit teaching? What has you experience been at schools that do not have these approaches?

What support and resources do schools need to implement this effectively?

Spelling is an essential transcription skill for writing, as well as a visible word-level language skill that supports reading and vocabulary learning. It is also a complex word-formation process. While the importance of explicit instruction in spelling has become widely accepted, Tessa discusses why educators should consider a nuanced approach to explicit spelling instruction so that all students can thrive in their learning.