Richard Smith

This book is about designing the effective classroom curriculum. The authors argue that an effective classroom curriculum should be the goal of every teacher in every classroom around the world: effective that is for every student, not just those who find school easy! But how does one go about designing a classroom curriculum that is effective? What are the essential ingredients and how should these ingredients be organised for teaching effect? What role does Technology play in such classroom plans?
In this book Lynch, Smith and Howarth provide an insight into these questions by providing a text that focuses on classroom teaching diagnostic and design strategies. Their intent in writing such a book is to enable the classroom teacher to develop, teach and assess a classroom curriculum where learning success for all students is the central goal.This text is compulsive reading for the teacher who wants to make a difference in their classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to compare measures of socio-economic status (Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage values (ICSEA)), school performance, school funding and school readiness in
terms of their impact on student performance. In this respect, the paper tests the proposition – given research that suggests the teacher is the important ingredient in improved student learning performance – that a
school principal who has strategically worked to “ready” their teachers for a whole of school teaching improvement agenda will generate increased student learning results when compared against those who have not, and further, that this improvement will occur irrespective of the circumstance of the socio-economic circumstance of the school.

This article reports the findings from a study that compared states of 'teacher readiness' with the learning performance of students. The central proposition is that high states of 'teacher readiness' in a school would be an indicator of improvement in whole of school student learning. This proposition is based on research evidence implicating the teacher in student learning outcome success and the key role played by school leaders. As an adjunct to this proposition we also sought to compare ICSEA values 1 and funding levels per school in an attempt to identify other improvement considerations. The findings of this study indicate that high levels of 'teacher readiness', as defined by the ACE approach, are associated with effective teaching and improvement in student outcomes. The study also drew attention to the idea that ACE focused leadership within a school has more impact on student achievement outcomes than external factors, such as school funding or even the socio-educational positioning of the school. 1 ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage values) is a scale of socio-educational advantage that is computed for each school in Australia. ICSEA was developed to enable fair and meaningful comparisons to be made on the basis of the performance of students in literacy and numeracy as reported by the national testing regime known as NAPLAN (ACARA, 2013).

In 2016, we published a paper entitled 'Readiness for School Reform'. This paper provided an insight into the concept of 'School Readiness for Teaching Improvement' by providing an account of an underpinning theory complete with an examination of an associated process and a reporting format. In this paper the premise of 'readiness' is further explored by examining the concept of 'alignment' in a school. More specifically, the paper provides an insight into a series of considerations and steps for developing alignment in a school's staff.