Within the contemporary higher education landscape, maintaining student engagement and retention has become of critical concern to universities. Universities have mostly responded to this concern by implementing institutional engagement and retention initiatives by professional university staff. Thus far, however, the role that teaching academics…

Focusing on teachers' practices amid a national curriculum 'implementation' project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers' everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case…

This article considers the ethical dimensions of efforts to develop professional practice with others, informed by literature on the ethics of intervention in education. Data are presented from three studies with workplace teams in early childhood education in Australia and New Zealand that have employed double stimulation within Change Laboratory…

This paper presents reflections on an international field trip for Indigenous students enrolled in an Education degree at a university in Australia. The field trip was co-developed with staff, students, and community partners of a Canadian university, as a pilot project to prepare Indigenous students for work in various cultural contexts. This…

Qualifications frameworks are tools for describing qualifications of an education or training system by classifying them into levels. Each level provides a clear description of what the holder of a qualification knows, understands and is able to do. They are important tools for making qualifications transparent and comprehensible, within and…

This paper details a six-step model for coaching online teachers that has been successfully implemented at an Australian university. Drawing on three fields of literature -- online teaching, community of practice theory and coaching programs -- the model involves: (1) on-boarding and goal-setting; (2) coaching conversations about online teaching…

Getting it Right from the Start (GIRFTS) is a research study that aims to implement a response to intervention (RTI) framework in early primary school (Foundation and Grade 1) to improve oral language and reading. RTI is a multi-tiered conceptual framework that supports student learning through delivery of high-quality classroom instruction, early…

Background: Knowledge brokers in higher education are described as requiring a broad range of skills and characteristics, leading to both role conflict and ambiguity. Although existing studies report broad concepts regarding the role of knowledge brokers, the activities that they actually perform to broker knowledge are not systematically reported…

This article reports and extends on an emerging initiative presented at the 2018 STARS Conference (Auckland, New Zealand). Many universities are invested in student mental health, but solutions can be hindered by concerns about the fit, cost, effectiveness, or sustainability of diverse initiatives. We argue that university staff looking to support…

Neoliberal theories--whether the new public management, principal-agent theory, or performance management--have provided the rationale for sweeping reforms in the governance and operation of higher education. This paper expands our understanding of neoliberal theory and practice by examining a leading neoliberal reform: performance-based funding…

Feedback from companies forming a community of practice in Tasmania, Australia, is that there is a need for a framework for self-directed action learning within each organisation as well as across the action learning community. Senior management report that there is a 'falling away' after a facilitated action learning intervention concludes and,…

In 2009, Skills Tasmania approached the authors to deliver their Lean Action Learning programme in Tasmania. This programme had run successfully in South Australia for some five years. For Tasmania, a requirement was that participants in the programme be eligible for a nationally recognised VET qualification on completion of the programme. This…

The Australian Council for Educational Research's submission to the Australian Government Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training's Public Enquiry into Adult literacy and its importance highlights the importance of these skills to Australia's well-being and economy, and calls on the government to continue participation in an…

Implementation is the process by which interventions are put into practice and is critical to outcomes. Issues related to implementation for social and emotional learning (SEL) have largely focused on fidelity to the programme, dosage, clarity of guidance and the characteristics of the facilitator, although attention has also been paid to…

Communities of Practice are an increasingly common tool used to support novice academics in higher education settings. Initiated in 2015 at a Western Australian University, TLABs is an acronym for 'Teaching and Learning for Level A and B' academic staff and was designed to build a community of practice to mentor junior academics; help them develop…