When the Victorian Department of Education released the Framework for Improving Student Outcomes in 2015 I rejoiced - especially the initiative on “Building Leadership Teams”. This initiative was defined as:

“Effective schools…

A student’s performance is mostly impacted by three communities

1. The School Learning Environment
2. The Student’s Peer Community and their own beliefs about learning
3. The Parental / Family Community

Schools tend to spend most of their time, money and energy working on the School-Student leg. Most of the professional development done in…

Many years ago when I used to teach engineering at university I had a passing interest in the field of shape optimization. It was a fascinating field because the idea of optimization in my particular area of expertise revolved around designing software that could optimize the placement of material so that, for given forces and stresses, the software would design the best and lightest shape of an object to withstand the given input.…

I have been following with much interest the blogs, news articles and debates about teacher rating occurring in the USA. Part of my interest stems from the discussion that is starting to occur in Australia, driven by our Federal Government, about teacher performance and productivity.

I want to…