In order to be effective mathematics educators, teachers need more than content knowledge: they need to be able to make mathematics comprehensible and accessible to their students. Teaching Key Concepts in the Australian Mathematics Curriculum Years 7 to 10 ensures that pre-service and practising teachers in Australia have the tools and resources required to teach lower secondary mathematics.

By simplifying the underlying concepts of mathematics, this book equips teachers to design and deliver mathematics lessons at the lower secondary level. The text provides a variety of practical activities and teaching ideas that translate the latest version of the Australian Curriculum into classroom practice. It covers the challenges of middle year mathematics, including the current decline in student numeracy, as well as complex theories which teachers can struggle to explain clearly. Topics include number, algebra, measurement, space, statistics and probability. Whether educators have recently studied more complicated mathematics or are teaching out of field, they are supported to recall ideas and concepts that they may have forgotten – or that may not have been made explicit in their own education.

Authored by experienced classroom educators and academics, this book is a vital resource for pre-service and practising Years 7 to 10 mathematics teachers, regardless of their backgrounds and experiences.

This chapter shifts the focus from the “masses” to “elites” and examines state legislative roll call votes on bills dealing with school curriculum. It compares how states have approached the teaching of reading over time, a policy area once highly polarized (“This is worse than abortion.”) but now moving toward bipartisan consensus, to debates about the teaching of history and race. I argue that legislators, like voters, follow the cues of national partisan leaders, and that media narratives and coverage play a big role in how education issues become nationalized. That suggests that efforts by highly divisive national leaders to engage in “leadership” on education issues (akin to Kernell’s “Going Public” strategy) are likely to backfire and turn half of the country against their ideas. Importantly, polarization of education policies is not a one-way ratchet that is always increasing, as the reading controversy shows.

In this chapter, I conclude with a new framework for how to think about reforms designed to improve student academic achievement. My proposal focuses on (1) encouraging voters to care more about student outcomes and (2) shifting political power to adults with the most skin in the game in order to (3) try to align the electoral and political incentives of office holders with the interests of students. Specifically, I recommend holding school board elections “on-cycle” (in November of even years), making student achievement growth information more salient to both voters and parents, and increasing high-quality school choice options. Overall, I argue that future reforms should be evaluated based on how they impact student achievement, not how adults feel about them. Drawing on recent research on housing policy, I conclude that more democracy is not always better and that we should be open to reforms that modestly reduce local control if such reforms are likely to help students.

Most research on education governance begin with the premise that school boards are the natural default and that locally elected school boards must be defended. This chapter demonstrates why this assumption is wrong. I show that: (1) most voters don’t have school-aged kids and thus lack sufficient “skin in the game” to prioritize academic achievement; (2) voters don’t hold school board members accountable for student learning; and (3) local school board elections are uncompetitive, with nearly 80 percent of the turnover driven by incumbent retirements rather than Election Day defeats. Several case studies, focused on school districts in San Francisco (California) and Easta Ramapo (New York) illustrate why broken elections have negative impacts on education quality. At best, school board elections are extremely low-turnout affairs, in which a small and highly unrepresentative group of adults impose their parochial, self-interested, and often uninformed views on the rest of the community. At its worst, school district governance devolves into an absolute clown show, where performative politics takes precedence over serious policy meant to serve the academic interests of students.

In order to be effective mathematics educators, teachers need more than content knowledge: they need to be able to make mathematics comprehensible and accessible to their students. Teaching Key Concepts in the Australian Mathematics Curriculum Years 7 to 10 ensures that pre-service and practising teachers in Australia have the tools and resources required to teach lower secondary mathematics.

By simplifying the underlying concepts of mathematics, this book equips teachers to design and deliver mathematics lessons at the lower secondary level. The text provides a variety of practical activities and teaching ideas that translate the latest version of the Australian Curriculum into classroom practice. It covers the challenges of middle year mathematics, including the current decline in student numeracy, as well as complex theories which teachers can struggle to explain clearly. Topics include number, algebra, measurement, space, statistics and probability. Whether educators have recently studied more complicated mathematics or are teaching out of field, they are supported to recall ideas and concepts that they may have forgotten – or that may not have been made explicit in their own education.

Authored by experienced classroom educators and academics, this book is a vital resource for pre-service and practising Years 7 to 10 mathematics teachers, regardless of their backgrounds and experiences.

Economics is the study of decisions made when allocating scarce resources to satisfy needs and unlimited wants and business is the enterprise engaged in the production of goods and services, usually for profit. Australia needs innovative individuals with a knowledge and understanding of economics and business who question, process and analyse information, make informed decisions and then reflect upon outcomes. With the end of the mining boom, decreases in manufacturing due to offshoring of labour and the depletion of Tier-1 mines, innovation and entrepreneurship are necessary for a prosperous Australian economy in the future. This chapter will: outline where Economics and Business appears in the Australian Curriculum; provide information on delivery and assessment of Economics and Business knowledge and understanding with illustrations of integration with other learning areas; integrate Economics and Business with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and perspectives and Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia; and then explain how Economics and Business inquiry and skills are delivered through the creation and implementation of a business plan.

All young people have rich histories, connections to space, place and significant events, which fuel their curiosity about the world in which they live and provide an excellent platform from which powerful HASS learning experiences can be developed. The HASS curriculum, as presented in the Australian Curriculum, provides flexibility for educators to link learning to young people’s lifeworlds and experiences through culturally responsive and inclusive pedagogies. This chapter challenges you to place learners and contexts at the centre of planning, using co-design principles that value young people’s voice, histories, capabilities and connections with people and place in HASS planning, teaching and assessment. All educational settings are enriched with a diversity of learners, who need to be involved in learning designs from the outset, rather than having their diverse needs planned for after the event. Such universal design approaches to learning need to be embedded from the early years of education.

Young people are learning in a digitally connected world where rapid advancements in technology are impacting the way people communicate and live their lives. Technology is changing the way learners access, apply and demonstrate their learning. HASS educators need to embrace this learning context and understand that the world young people are learning about, and learning in, is a globally connected and highly technological one. The impact of technology on learning and educator practice has been widely researched and recognised in education circles. Education technology refers to the tools learners have available to support learning. This includes information technology, software and other digital tools, hardware tools, social media and communication devices. It is clear that although technology has the potential to positively change the way young people learn, the role of the educator is crucial in ensuring that technology is used in ways that improve learning outcomes. The SAMR model is a well-researched and widely accepted framework for supporting educators to embed technologies into teaching and learning.

This chapter will introduce global education. While global education is not a subject in its own right in Australian educational settings, developing learners’ understanding of globalisation and supporting them to become and be informed, responsible and active global citizens is an aim that sits across the Australian Curriculum. In this chapter, we engage with what globalisation means, as well as the ways in which learners in different educational settings learn about, and for, globally oriented citizenship. The chapter has three main sections. In the first, we set out what is meant by the terms globalisation and global education, and introduce the concept of the globally oriented citizen. In the second, we set out the key building blocks of global education – concepts, knowledge and understandings, skills and processes and attributes. In the third, we explore pedagogical approaches to global education, as well as how global education connects to the curriculum from the early years to Year 10. We also consider how connections can be made across the various learning experiences that constitute global education.