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How to break the cycle of educational inequity

Three minutes
Teach For Australia Thursday, June 1st, 2017

The audience heard from a panel of speakers featuring teachers from the SBS documentary series Testing Teachers. The panel consisted of:

  • Teach For Australia Associates, Kitty and Emmanuel.
  • Principal of Melton Secondary College, David Reynolds.
  • School Education Program Director at Grattan Institute, Peter Goss.

Sir Rod Eddington opened the evening and introduced Emmanuel and Kitty. They each reflected on their first year of teaching.

“The documentary highlighted for me my biggest challenge…when you’re teaching, you don’t know when you start being a parent and when you start being a teacher,” Emmanuel said.

“What do you do when a student is facing issues at home, and how much support can you give them?”

Teach For Australia Melbourne Documentary Event

“Something that I was learning very steeply through my first year, was what kind of barriers students face. They’re more vast than you could even anticipate prior to becoming a teacher,” said Kitty.

Teach For Australia Melbourne Documentary Event

Emmanuel and Kitty were then joined on the stage by Teach For Australia Founder and CEO Melodie Potts Rosevear, David Reynolds, and Peter Goss.

Melodie briefly explained the core mission of Teach For Australia:

“We’re trying to bring in additional leadership alongside others to work on the wicked problem. Firstly, as teachers, for a two year commitment at an inequitable school, but more in the long-term as leaders: leaders within the classroom, leaders at a school level, and leaders at a system level,” she said.

Teach For Australia Melbourne Documentary Event

Those three layers – the classroom, the school, and the system – were all present in the panel. They answered audience questions, and discussed the role of school leaders, how to support regional schools and systemic lessons from abroad.

Having lived in Rwanda as well as refugee camps in Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe as a child, Emmanuel related the benefit of the communities he grew up in.

“The child raised by the village…this child’s parents are not in the best place to support them — who else can come in and support this child? Who else can come in and check how they’re doing? If there’s one thing that’s important as a child, it’s having an adult person who is important in your life,” he said.

Teach For Australia Melbourne Documentary Event

David Reynolds also highlighted that in some communities, school isn’t just about learning.

“There’s a challenge, particularly in communities like Melton, to develop that systematic approach to high quality instruction in the classroom while also managing the challenges that individual students bring into the classroom. [We need to] get the students’ well-being needs and their learning needs working in tandem, with the teacher astutely using the relationship part of their work to leverage learning in the classroom.”

Peter Goss mentioned the big question he is frequently asked:

“‘Is there one thing you would do to change things?’ Of course there is no magic bullet. But there is one thing that I would do: invest in our most expert teachers to keep them in the classroom, teaching other teachers, and working across schools.”

Teach For Australia Melbourne Documentary Event

Sir Rod Eddington closed the evening with a poignant remark:

“The problem of educational inequity is not just something we can leave to the headmasters and the teachers because they do wonderful work already. It’s a collective community responsibility — we must give them the support they need to do the great work they do.”

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