Research to Impact Professional Learning

Most of our time is dedicated to the development and delivery of our evidence-based teaching course, Research to Impact that we offer to schools, networks, and systems across Australia.

Our course features:
✓ 4x interactive workshops led by teachers with genuine experience improving outcomes
✓ 2x school visits to showcase daily reviews and lessons at your school and with your students
✓ 2x school visits to coach and support teachers with face-to-face and formal written feedback
✓ Access to a growing suite of resources designed and tested by our team
✓ Strong alignment to the Department’s Teaching for Impact initiative
✓ Choice of a 12 or 24 month cadence.

Places in Research to Impact are limited, so choose from the options below to secure your school’s spot now, and find out why every teacher who completes our course recommends it for other teachers 😊.

Note: We design bespoke professional learning models to suit the needs of various system and network initiatives, and can tailor content to address a variety of topics. Reach out to us with some more information about your context to see if we can help.

Click below to access information tailored to your context.

Early Childhood

The fundamentals of applying high-impact teaching in a K-2 context, with a special focus on the teaching reading and writing in EC.

Primary

A deep dive into the most compelling learnings from Cognitive Science as they apply to teaching in a primary school context.

Secondary

We start with the core learnings from Cognitive Science, but then branch off into custom courses for MESH and Non-MESH learning areas.

We offer various models to fit in with the unique needs of schools.

Professor Lorraine Hammond AM CF, Brooke Wardana OAM, Jordan O'Sullivan, Jared Bussell

Research to Impact is available ONLINE and with blended models that include demonstrations and instructional coaching — Research to Impact ONLINE

Frequently asked questions

We get this question a lot, and we love that so many teachers are keen. Currently, we have an online version of our course that we use with schools separated from us by great distance, and for participants that are absent from live workshops. We are working on content designed for individual teachers online, so check back in with us soon.

The workshops are run by real teachers who connect the research and pedagogical ideas to the classroom practices that they used to drive genuine school improvement. This includes lots of relevant research, examples, stories, resources, and most importantly – live demonstrations of teaching.

Following each workshop, we visit schools to reinforce the course content:

– Workshop 1 focuses on engagement and checking for understanding, so we visit schools where we demonstrate these concepts through the daily review strategy. This initial visit also serves as a preview of Workshop 2, which delves deeper into the topic of daily review.
– After Workshop 2, our team conducts on-site observations and provides coaching to teachers who are implementing daily review in their classrooms, offering both immediate verbal feedback and subsequent formal written feedback.
– Workshop 3 focuses on effective guidance in lesson delivery using the gradual release method. To ensure a seamless transition, we revisit participating schools to demonstrate these practices in action.
– Following Workshop 4, we conclude this cycle with a final observation and coaching session, tailor-fitted to meet the specific needs of each teacher or school.

This comprehensive process unfolds over a period of 12-24 months.

✔ Shaping Minds is comprised of teachers who demonstrate the practices at both the workshops and on school visits.
✔ We commit a lot of time to visiting schools for demonstrations and face-to-face coaching. This respects teachers and enriches our perspective.
✔ We offer both live and online workshops, and both face-to-face coaching and video coaching to cater for all needs
✔ We space our professional learning out over 12-24+ months to support teachers and schools to implement the strategies.
✔ Our course is designed and delivered by real WA public school teachers who have successfully improved student outcomes.

✕ Some providers seem reluctant to do teacher demonstrations. We make a point of modelling everything that we promote.
✕ Some choose to do everything off-site. We prioritise visiting schools and classrooms.
✕ Some providers only offer video coaching. We offer premium face-to-face coaching, and have a video option as a backup.
✕ Some providers focus on one-off PL, but successful implementation needs to be spaced and supported.
✕ Some providers lack real experience leading school improvement, and some have never even worked in schools before.

The Shaping Minds Maths Curriculum that is used by the Catalyst Project and in the resource project led by Ochre Education was developed at a small school in Western Australia. The documents that us teachers shaped over years with our students, and which led to dramatic improvements in student outcomes, are now available for free on our website. While we don’t go too deeply into the curriculum during the course, these documents were a guiding light for us. The strategies in the course were how we delivered the curriculum effectively to our students, so they are emphatically linked.