Invited Panel & Sessions: Professional Learning Stream
Friday 14 February
9:30-11:00am
Panel Discussion with invited guests:
Victorian schools strive to provide all students with the best possible education, no matter their circumstances, and at the same time value the health and wellbeing of every student. This conversational panel session discusses the vision, purposes and approaches of The Education State strategy in Victoria that sets out aspirations for Victorian schools in the coming years.
- Marcia Devlin – Interim CEO, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority
- Anne Looney – Executive Dean, Institute of Education, Dublin City University
- Steve Cook – Principal, Albert Park College
- Student TBC
11:30-1:00pm
Parallel Sessions with invited guests
A: Education Futures for School Leadership
J-C Couture, Stephen Murgatroyd and Roar Grøttvik
Given our shared global challenges, young people deserve schools that are agile, adaptive, and responsive to many possible futures. Driven by the imperatives of equity and inclusion, this session presents practical, evidence-informed strategies, real-world examples, and uses cases of futures thinking applied to school staff development and change strategies.
B: Podcasting in Education – What is it and how
Will Brehm, University of Canberra & FreshEd Podcast
Description: This workshop focuses on podcasting in education. It explores the types and functions of podcasting, situating the medium at the nexus of research, art, and entertainment. Podcasting offers an important medium through which scientific impact and knowledge dissemination can reach new and wider audiences. It also has several limitations around who is allowed to speak and in which language. The workshop will use various examples of podcasting to initiate a conversation about the promises and perils of the medium in education and provide space for participants to brainstorm ways podcasting can be integrated into their teaching and learning practices.
C: Achieving Equity through Excellence – Going Deeper
David Hopkins, Tony Mackay, Pasi Sahlberg, Andy Hargreaves, Carmen Montecinos, Pinkie Mthembu and Jim Spillane
This Symposium follows on from the ‘Innovate Session’ at ICSEI 2024 in Dublin that was designed to generate debate and discussion around the theme of ‘Achieving Equity through Excellence’ in educational systems. The colleagues contributing to the session situated themselves in the middle of that triangle whose vertices are comprised of policy, research and practice. The outcomes of that session have recently been published[1].
The proposition underpinning the Innovate Session and the argument outlined in the paper was that there can be no national educational excellence without stronger equity of outcomes – equity and excellence are inseparable. The Innovate Session principally focussed on case studies outlining the current policy context in Australia, Canada, Chile and Scotland, rather than strategies that actually enhance social mobility and school improvement.
The purpose of the 2025 Melbourne Symposium is to address this lacuna, from the perspective of school improvement and leadership research and practice. In particular, there will be a more explicit focus on the practices to be utilised by instructional leaders at the school and meso-levels to ensure equity and excellence. The Symposium will be divided into six segments as follows:
- Introduction and outlining the challenge – Tony Mackay and David Hopkins
- Brief case studies of school improvement practice from Australia (Pasi Sahlberg), Canada (Andy Hargreaves) and Chile (Carmen Montecinos)
- Unleashing Greatness Interactive Case Study – David Hopkins and Tony Mackay
- Respondent Critique – Pinkie Mthembu and Jim Spillane
- Facilitated discussion – Tony Mackay
- Implications for leadership and school improvement – David Hopkins and Tony Mackay.
[1] Achieving equity through excellence in the world’s educational systems. C S E Occasional Paper, July 2024, Centre for Strategic Education, East Melbourne VIC 3002.