Jill Willis – författare

This book is an evidence-based, practical guide to enable pre- and in-service teachers, system, school, and middle leaders to maximise students’ understanding of classroom teaching and assessment, improving outcomes and expanding opportunities for all students.

Developing accessible assessment and pedagogy is especially critical when students have language and/or attentional difficulties; what if there were some simple things schools could do to make learning and assessment easier for all students to understand, from the outset? This book presents robust evidence from world-leading collaborative research in three large secondary schools that proactively designing classroom instruction and assessment for accessibility makes a positive difference for students and teachers. Evidence from eye-tracking technology, classroom observations, questionnaires and interviews with students and teachers, and summative assessment results points to what can change and why these changes are important. Written in the same plain language and humour as its best-selling sister, Inclusive Education for the 21st Century: Theory, Policy and Practice, this new book explains accessibility and why it matters and details processes for designing out barriers in summative assessment and pedagogy. Stories from partner schools about how they spread these gains across the whole school make this an accessibility playbook to drive whole school and system reform.

Teachers, heads of department, principals, speech pathologists, and other professionals will find this text a rich source of professional learning for individuals and teams with discussion prompts for leaders and teachers at the end of each chapter.

This book is an evidence-based, practical guide to enable pre- and in-service teachers, system, school, and middle leaders to maximise students’ understanding of classroom teaching and assessment, improving outcomes and expanding opportunities for all students.

Developing accessible assessment and pedagogy is especially critical when students have language and/or attentional difficulties; what if there were some simple things schools could do to make learning and assessment easier for all students to understand, from the outset? This book presents robust evidence from world-leading collaborative research in three large secondary schools that proactively designing classroom instruction and assessment for accessibility makes a positive difference for students and teachers. Evidence from eye-tracking technology, classroom observations, questionnaires and interviews with students and teachers, and summative assessment results points to what can change and why these changes are important. Written in the same plain language and humour as its best-selling sister, Inclusive Education for the 21st Century: Theory, Policy and Practice, this new book explains accessibility and why it matters and details processes for designing out barriers in summative assessment and pedagogy. Stories from partner schools about how they spread these gains across the whole school make this an accessibility playbook to drive whole school and system reform.

Teachers, heads of department, principals, speech pathologists, and other professionals will find this text a rich source of professional learning for individuals and teams with discussion prompts for leaders and teachers at the end of each chapter.

This book introduces a new wellbeing dimension to the theory and practice of learning space design for early childhood and school contexts. It highlights vital, yet generally overlooked relationships between the learning environment and student learning and wellbeing, and reveals the potential of participatory, values-based design approaches to create learning spaces that respond to contemporary learners’ needs. 

Focusing on three main themes it explores conceptual understandings of learning spaces and wellbeing; students’ lived experience and needs of learning spaces; and the development of a new theory and its practical application to the design of learning spaces that enhance student wellbeing. It examines these complex and interwoven topics through various theoretical lenses and provides an extensive, current literature review that connects learning environment design and learner wellbeing in a wide range of educational settings from early years to secondary school. 

Offering transferable approaches and a new theoretical model of wellbeing as flourishing to support the design of innovative learning environments, this book is of interest to researchers, tertiary educators and students in the education and design fields, as well as school administrators and facility managers, teachers, architects and designers.

This book presents a new framework for how teachers develop their assessment capacity, based on a multi-year study conducted in four countries—Australia, Canada, England, and New Zealand—which focused on student-teacher learning in assessment throughout their initial teacher education programs. It examines how teacher learning is shaped by the complex dynamics of assessment capacity within larger teacher education contexts.  

The framework proposed here identifies four domains involved in cultivating assessment capacity and characterizes assessment learning as always integrating cognitive, philosophical, and moral dimensions with assessment’s social, emotional, and physical dimensions, while recognizing that each capacity is continually shaped by the learning context. The book draws on the survey of teacher education programs in each of the four focal countries and data from student teachers to shed light on how the various pedagogies, program structures, and policies encountered provide beginning teachers with codes for classifying and framing assessment capacity and form a template for developing this capacity throughout their careers.   

Offering suggestions for future research and teacher education practice, the book concludes with an outlook on future steps to cultivate teachers’ assessment capacity.