B ROADCAST
World-first high-tech
classroom to illuminate
learning
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University of Melbourne and the
Australian Council for Educational
Research – this high-tech classroom will
enable researchers to examine exactly
what happens in classrooms at a level
of detail never before possible.
“The Queensland Brain Institute’s
core business is neuroscience,” said
Chief Investigator Professor David Clarke.
“Our core business here in Melbourne
is education. But there is such a thing as
educational neuroscience and it is part
of our mission to unpack just what that
might mean and how it might inform
classroom teaching and learning,” he said.
“Creating a new and powerful
narrative linking these two fields is a
critical aim of our work.”
CONTINUED PAGE 2
WELCOME
FROM
THE DEAN
As alumni, you know the Melbourne
Graduate School of Education (MGSE)
is a wonderful place to study and work;
full of people who are passionate about
education and determined to make a
difference to the lives of young people.
I am delighted that this commitment
is being recognised with a consistent
number 1 ranking in Australia by the
QS World Rankings by Subject. This
places us among the world’s best in the
discipline of education. I believe that this
not only reflects the level of expertise of
our staff through research and teaching
excellence, it also reflects the quality of
our graduates.
Part of this success is thanks to the
Master of Teaching, which is now in its
eighth year and established as Australia’s
leading teacher education degree. Our
alumni are making a significant impact
in the workforce, as they move into
leadership positions in schools across
Melbourne, and throughout the rest of
the country.
We have been privileged to receive
a number of generous philanthropic
donations in recent months, which mean
we can offer more student scholarships
and fund important work. Jennfifer
Leaper, for example, is supporting
Bachelor of Arts graduates studying the
Master of Teaching; Belinda KendallWhite is giving high-achieving Master
of Teaching students the chance to
carry out social justice research. We are
incredibly grateful for their support, and
for the support of all our donors. If you
would like to support our work, please
visit education.unimelb.edu.au/support
I trust you will enjoy learning a bit
more about what has been happening
here recently, and I hope to see you soon
at one of our free public events. To keep
up to date with what’s happening, please
follow us on Twitter, or keep an eye on
our website. Best wishes,
PROFESSOR FIELD RICKARDS
DEAN, MELBOURNE GRADUATE
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Fo r n e w s f ro m a l l o u r f a c u l t i e s v i s i t u n i m e l b .e d u . a u / 3 0 1 0
W
n
hile it may be pretty obvious
that learning takes place
in the brain, we know
surprisingly little about the neuroscience
of learning. A new high-tech classroom
is helping to change all that.
Our understanding of learning
as a social activity is fairly limited,
particularly in settings as complex as the
conventional classroom. But the Science
of Learning Research Classroom, based
here in the Melbourne Graduate School
of Education, offers an exciting new way
for researchers to discover what is really
going on.
Part of the Science of Learning
Research Centre (SLRC) – a cooperation
led by the Queensland Brain Institute
at the University of Queensland, the
F A C U LT Y U P D A T E
M E L B O U R N E G R A D U AT E S C H O O L O F E D U C AT I O N
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M E L B OU R N E G R A DUAT E S C HO OL OF E DUC AT ION
Illuminating
learning
FROM PAGE 1
The new ‘super classroom’ will
enable researchers to examine exactly
what happens in classrooms at a level of
detail never before possible, providing
an essential research link between
authentic school classrooms and the
clinical laboratories of the educational
neuroscientist.
“Early studies of classrooms naively
tended to focus on the teacher – as though
the teacher could control everything
taking place,” explained Professor Clarke.
“Of course, what he or she does is only
one element of what’s going on in any
classroom at any given time.
“There’s also what the students are
doing, who they’re interacting with, how
they’re responding to what the teacher
is saying, how they are completing their
tasks – the list goes on. Learning is taking
place in all these interactions.”
In the new classroom, researchers sit
behind a one-way mirror to observe the
class. Up to 32 fixed and portable radio
microphones and 16 high-definition video
cameras are controlled by the technical
team to ensure everything the researchers
need is captured – all without distracting
the students or teacher.
The huge amounts of data this project
is generating will provide researchers with
a wide range of opportunities.
“We can now try out new learning
techniques and technologies and study
every aspect of the students’ responses,”
Professor Clarke explained. “We can use
the facilities to demonstrate innovative
new teaching and learning approaches,
and we can live-stream this to anywhere
in the world. We will build a huge digital
database of classroom interactions that
will provide a rich resource for researchers
for years to come.”
The high-tech classroom is capable of
capturing huge amounts of data in real
time, all to a high speed disk array, from
where it can be accessed by the national
Science of Learning Research Centre team,
as well as international collaborators, to
unpack the secrets of effective classroom
learning.
The SLRC comprises 25 Chief
Investigators from nine research
institutions across Australia and is
supported by $16m of Commonwealth
funding from the Australian Research
Council.
A shock
to the system
ALUMNUS PROFILE
P E T E R R O B E RT
A
n
dapting to life in Saudi Arabia
was a challenge for Peter Robert,
but now his clinical teaching
skills are helping deliver a shock to the
education system there.
Master of Teaching alumnus Peter
Robert said he began to acclimatise to
the weather and culture in Riyadh after
he’d been there for about a year.
“It’s character-building,” Peter laughs.
“There are a lot of shocks to the system.
You’ve got between 45 and 50 degrees
every day for eight months of the year,
and there’s no greenery around.”
Peter teaches primary school science
in the desert kingdom, and is part of an
eight-year initiative to boost the status of
teachers and raise academic standards.
“You’ve got a very restricted society
– even men can’t wear shorts outside in
the heat. You can’t show any skin, it’s
just not polite. Restaurants are segregated
between family and non-family.”
Peter enrolled in the Master of
Teaching at the Melbourne Graduate
School of Education (MGSE) in 2011
after a career in biotechnology and
medical research that spanned decades.
After graduation, Peter accepted
a position at Riyadh Schools in the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Riyadh Schools comprises eleven
separate schools with over 3,400
students and 780 staff in the Saudi
capital. The Board of Directors is
chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed
Ibn Salman Ibn Abdelaziz, and many
of the schools’ pupils hail from royal
or influential families.
In 2012, the schools’ leaders employed
the Boston Consulting Group to devise
a plan to raise academic standards and
transform the schools into the highest
performing in the Middle East.
For more information, visit slrc.org.au
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M E L B OU R N E G R A DUAT E S C HO OL OF E DUC AT ION
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N E W S U P D AT E
E A R L Y L E A R N I N G F O R D I S A D V A N T A G E D F A M I L I E S The 3a program sets out four daily
activities:
• Turning random and spontaneous
events in the day into opportunities for
educational talk (called Language Priority)
• Interactively reading books to children
every day, either one-on-one or in pairs
(called Conversational Reading)
• Playing educational games every
day that introduce and progressively
build children’s school readiness skills
(called LearningGames®)
• Infusing positive emotion and
educational content into the day’s
necessary and repeated routines
(called Enriched Caregiving).
The Alfred Felton Bequest provides
grants in support of catalytic projects
taking place in Victoria
MASTER OF TEACHING (SECONDARY) INTERNSHIP
This year sees our first cohort of Master
of Teaching (Secondary) Internship
candidates working in schools across
Victoria while completing their studies.
The candidates are working in paid
internships for three years under the
mentorship of experienced school staff,
with extensive support from MGSE clinical
specialists and transition coaches.
Candidates have been carefully
matched schools that have vacancies,
typically in hard-to-staff subject areas
such as maths, science, and languages.
The next intake for the Master of
Teaching (Secondary) Internship will
commence in August.
Broadcast_Education_2015.indd 3
Launched last year, the University of
Melbourne Network of Schools is a peerled collaboration between diverse schools
from across Victoria.
With representation from Government,
Independent and Catholic sectors, the
network provides an opportunity for
primary and secondary schools to work
together to improve student learning.
In 2014, the network chose to focus
on a range of issues including feedback,
data and evidence, writing and improving
high performing students’ outcomes. In
2015 there are two networks, comprising
seventeen and nineteen schools
respectively. There are two groups in each
network – a leaders’ group and a success
coordinators’ group – who each meet
at least eight times a year to work with
each other and researchers here in the
Graduate School.
Schools interested in joining the new
network group commencing in 2016
should contact Katherine Henderson at
[email protected] or
(03) 9035 6302.
EVENTS
Join us for our ever-popular Dean’s
Lecture Series, covering some of the
biggest issues in education today. In 2015
we are hearing from some of our very
own leading thinkers; email [email protected] to join the
mailing list and keep up to date. We also
run free seminars on a wide range of
topics throughout the year. Check out
our website for the latest listings.
STAY IN TOUCH WITH
MELBOURNE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF EDUCATION
WEBSITE
education.unimelb.edu.au
YOUTUBE
EducationMelbourne
TWITTER
@EduMelb
ADDRESS
234 Queensberry Street
The University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010
Fo r n e w s f ro m a l l o u r f a c u l t i e s v i s i t u n i m e l b .e d u . a u / 3 0 1 0
Thanks to a generous grant from the
Alfred Felton Bequest, MGSE is helping to
establish a highly effective early learning
program for disadvantaged families in
Broadmeadows. The Alfred Felton Fellow in Early
Childhood Education, who will be
appointed this year, will work with
vulnerable families attending the
Dimboola Early Learning Centre to
implement the Abecedarian Australia
Approach (3a), an early learning program
based on the work of MGSE staff member,
Professor Joseph Sparling.
Research shows the approach has
positive immediate effects on vulnerable
children’s early development as well as,
importantly, long-term effects that include
improved rates of university graduation
and improved health in young adulthood.
NETWORK OF SCHOOLS
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M E L B OU R N E G R A DUAT E S C HO OL OF E DUC AT ION
Leadership skills from
the desert to the department
A L U M N U S P R O F I L E LO U K A PA R RY
E
n
ducators are coming from all over
Australia to study instructional
leadership, even if it means a 4am
start, a five-hour drive and a flight from
Alice Springs.
The kids in Mimili didn’t want to ask
Louka Parry’s name when he first arrived
in the tiny community in north-western
South Australia. They just wanted to know
how long he was staying.
“To me, that said: “I want to know if
you’re going to commit to the community
before I make any commitment with you,”
Louka reflects.
That first day in town, when questioned
by a little boy, Louka’s answer was that
he’d be around for two years, and then
Broadcast_Education_2015.indd 4
he was going travelling. “So of course two
years became three, then four then five,”
he remembers. “It was somewhere that
I made a huge connection with; it’s been
a fantastic journey.”
Louka’s experience in Mimili inspired
him to study the secrets of leadership.
“When I landed in the middle of
Australia, I was very fortunate to have
a great leader at that school and she
developed my capacity in a big way,”
Louka explained.
He decided to study a Master of
Instructional Leadership that was offered
in weekend intensives, even though it
meant a formidable commute.
“Initially, it was a 4am wakeup,
a five‑hour drive to Alice Springs then a
flight to Melbourne,” he said.
“So it was quite a logistical challenge,
but one of the benefits was the intensive
modules so you can continue to work in
your school setting.”
Louka was one of an increasingly
large cohort of professionals willing to
travel interstate to study the Master and
Professional Certificate in Instructional
Leadership. More than 40 per cent of
enrolments over the past two years have
been interstate students.
Louka is now working as Manager of
Literacy, Primary Years at South Australia’s
Department of Education and Child
Development.
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