Autumn 2026 Quarterly Newsletter
Signals
Lucky Dip
Young learners want their people to be proud of them and say nice positive things to
boost them up. Who would’ve thought it?
Please just say you’re proud of me
Knowledge-rich curriculum… You cannot escape this movement at the moment. And
perhaps why would you want to… knowledge is the building blocks of so many of the
other things we value, like skill development and critical thinking.
An international survey of what’s going on in teaching!
The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) – Australian Report
The TL; DR:
- Teacher shortage perceptions surged: 42% of secondary teachers and 36% of
primary teachers were in schools where principals said shortages were hurting
instruction - Australia is one of the highest AI-using systems: about two-thirds of secondary
teachers used AI in their work in the past year - Stress is high: over one-third of teachers reported a lot of stress, and nearly half
had poor wellbeing on the WHO-5 measure - Bullying is a major issue: 37% of secondary teachers were in schools where
bullying on school grounds was a regular issue (I am surprised this isn’t 100%!?) - About one in five teachers under 30 plan to leave teaching within five years (I
believe this is one of those things people say but is there follow up research to
show they, did it?)
There’s definitely a whiff of low and no-tech in the air. Jared Cooney Horvath’s book
‘Digital Delusion’ is a bestseller at the moment. And this from Edutopia about
technology as distraction. Oh, and lets write by hand! What is old is new, it seems.
I just love this because if you asked anyone what they hated about university, you
invariably hear “group tasks”. Because there is always a slacker and always someone
doing all the work but being too bossy about it. Sound like a normal workplace, does it
sound like a normal workplace, anyone?
An interesting analogy for learning that reminds us that retrieval practice is a good
idea, from the Effortful Educator.
Harvard Project Zero have redone their website! It is their education research and PD
hub. Lots of good, free stuff there.
Are you freaking out just a little bit about AI? I know I am. This interesting read
questions whether efficiency is actually the best thing ever and any cost.
If you are an education data nerd (guilty as charged), some legend developed a
database of databases of over 100 publicly available school, tertiary and population
data sources at the national, state and territory level.
Do you hate the manosphere? Me too. Learn about it here, it might help us defeat it.
Alex Quigley, no relation to the manosphere, has an interesting take on 8 reasoning
why learning fails. I don’t like that term, let’s just say he meant “Why sometimes they
don’t learn”.
Happenings
Events Worth Your Time
The Learning Game Playground
Things are heating up with our learning game festival! We have a full roster of speakers,
including none other than my pal Rachel Parker! She of chief Lego Education Australia
fame, and the now famous Ukraine play project she helped spearhead. We’ll have 15
tables of unique games, plus loads more learning games to borrow on the day. There
will even be prizes! And polaroid photos to take home.
In total there will be 50+ games to play, 15+ game designers to meet and collaborate
with, 7 talks. Fun will be everywhere…
Still looking for a few more exhibitors so if you or someone you know has a learning
game idea they’d like to share, get in touch!
Tickets can be purchased for just $15 (or free for under 18s) here.
Professional development is one of those things we all do, but there are questions
around how good it is. Here Peps has an interesting suggestion… public rehearsal
practice!
The Age Education Summit is on again. Why not attend and shock everyone because
there was an actual teacher in attendance! I am being cheeky of course, but it is
disturbing, as always, how few if any are speakers (especially female) from the
coalface… Ooooh Jac Manison will be there. Nice!
The Breakdown
One big idea, made plain
Splitting up a subject into skills
It is really common to make a big mistake right at the start of trying to make a
progression or rubric – splitting up the thing into discrete subskills.
One big problem is that people think two different things are two different skills, when
they are the same skill displayed at different levels of quality.
So, you might see evaluating something listed separately from analysing it, when
actually it might be the same underlying task performed at a higher level of quality.
Another big problem is that two different skills get mushed into one row of a
progression. That is also a problem because, when we assess, we want to assess things
individually. That makes it easier to mark and easier to give students direction about
what to do next.
And if two skills are mushed into one cell, what if they did one well but not the other?
Where do you place them?
You need to spend a lot of time and mental energy getting the division right. It causes
major headaches for the progression or rubric later if this step has not been done well.
Sometimes in my work, people will show me something at the end and say, “Can you
give me feedback on it?” And yes, I can give feedback, but it would have been way
more helpful, quicker and more efficient if they had engaged me earlier in the process,
so we could make sure the subject was divided up properly.
Of course, there is also the problem of granularity. How many skills is the right amount?
There is no perfect rubric. You could take the same domain and divide it into any
number of skills. So what is the right number? That is the Goldilocks zone.
I would think about practical considerations. Don’t have so many skills that the rubric
becomes impossible to mark with or use for feedback. That is too finely grained. But
make sure it is finely grained enough that each skill, row or column is obviously
discrete.
Don’t rely on published curriculums and assume they divide the domain properly. I
haven’t seen many that do this well.
Use the professional judgement of your teachers and subject leaders. When writing the
actual assessment rubric, I think two or three people is best. But for dividing up the
subject into sub-skills, a bigger group can be a good idea.
SketchPad
Visual Ideation
I came across this and have been using it in most AI threads now. A major problem with
AI is that it tends to agree with you too much. You can be sucked into a vortext of
mirrors where every idea you have is good. This helps combat that:
Badly Drawn Lines
We Don’t Do Learning Styles
This interesting survey report indicates how many parents seem to be okay with
phones being allowed in class. I guess not enough of them have read / been
indoctrinated by Jonathan Haidt or Jared Cooney Horvath!
This Season’s Progress
What I’m Trying Right Now
New website
It is almost complete! Sneak peak of its awesomeness:
That will be a real test of whether a person’s appearance ends their career LOL.
Lawless Lab
I am testing various vibe-coded things at my random app site:
At the moment there is only a game me and Charlie my 7 year old son made, and
consultant calculator for the amazing business coach Kathy Rhodes… Most recent one
is a teacher reflection questions one called “Q4T” – questions for teachers. Next I’m
making one to make a WFH person’s life less monotonous!
That’s it for autumn! I hope you do okay, sweeping up all the leaves. Our fig tree has
gone nuts. If you only do one thing this Autumn, make it getting a ticket to the
Learning Game Playground!
Thank you for reading this, and if you didn’t want to, sorry! Unsubscribe options are
below.
Byeeee
Ben 🦄