KQED News Mind/Shift – Katrina Schwartz
“The northern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, are home to some of the city’s poorest residents, including about 80,000 schoolchildren. Many families are recent immigrants to Australia, moving to find work in factories located in the northern outskirts of town. Unemployment is high in parts of this region, but other parts are fairly affluent. If these conditions sound familiar, it’s because lots of school districts serve similarly divided communities and have similarly stagnant results from traditional approaches to improving education. For decades, the school system of this region tried traditional top-down approaches to improve student achievement in its schools, but saw few results. That pattern began to change when Wayne Craig became the region’s director (like a superintendent) and began emphasizing a simple message: Students should be literate, numerate and curious. From his work as a teacher and school principal Craig knew that lasting school change comes from teachers, so he focused the regional school improvement work on improving teacher instruction.”(more)