This practice guide provides practical suggestions to build positive connections with your students leading to positive teacher–student relationships.

Circulation is a skill that supports and maintains positive student behaviour. Intentional circulation is systematically moving around the classroom and standing in key places to observe and actively interact with students.

Exit slips are an easy way to gather formative assessment data after a lesson or sequence of learning. These exit slips have been developed for you to print and use in your own classes. They ask students to reflect on the lesson and what they have learnt, as well as how they felt about the lesson. As well as providing valuable data for a teacher, exit slips are a great way to help students retrieve information from their memory and commit it to their long-term memory.

The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) has developed a suite of foundational resources for beginning teachers, teachers working in new environments, or experienced teachers who want to refine or refresh specific elements of their classroom management practice. They can be used to individually reflect on and refine one’s own practice, or as shared resources to support mentoring and other collaborative and whole-school approaches to improving classroom management. This user guide explains the resources and provides suggestions for their use.

Clear communication is a skill that supports and maintains positive student behaviour. Clear communication is the use of clear and concise language to set expectations, give instructions and address and correct behaviour. It models positive classroom talk that supports students to understand and do what is expected of them, whilst also supporting a positive classroom culture.

Complex sentences are an important step in enabling students to
produce more sophisticated writing. Mastering complex sentences
allows students to have greater control when communicating.
This guide is intended to provide a starting point for you to approach
the teaching of writing in your classroom. It builds on the knowledge
learnt in the other sentence guides.

This guide provides clear grammatical definitions, and unpacks the features of compound sentences and how they function. The guide also offers, as a starting point, some strategies for implementing sentence-level instruction in your classroom. And yes, compound sentences need to be taught in both primary and secondary classes!

Deliberately pausing is a skill that supports and maintains positive student behaviour. A deliberate pause breaks the flow of verbal communication to gain students’ attention, emphasise a point, or give students’ time to process information, follow a direction or correct disengaged or disruptive behaviours.

This is a printable version of the activity in the user guide. It gives examples of how each domain in the learning trajectories contributes to the holistic outcomes of the EYLF V2.0.

It invites you to collect examples within the context of your service. You may then revisit and reflect on the examples, individually and with colleagues, to deepen your knowledge and understanding of the learning trajectories and EYLF V2.0 Learning Outcomes.

This guide will help you use AERO’s early childhood learning trajectories in your practice. The learning trajectories are designed for teachers and educators working in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services for children in the years before school. They can support ongoing professional learning for individuals and entire ECEC services and teams.

The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) defines literacy as ‛the capacity, confidence and disposition to use language in all its forms’. It can include talking, listening, viewing, reading, writing, music, movement, dance, storytelling, visual arts, media and drama. Children develop a wide range of literacy skills in the early years, from infancy through to the start of school, which form the foundation for reading, writing and communicating. Early literacy approaches aim to promote the development of these foundational skills.
Evidence-based practices for promoting early literacy in early childhood care and education settings are listed. Some of the examples offered may not apply in all contexts and/or may be more suitable for particular learners or age groups.

The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) describes numeracy as the capacity, confidence and disposition to use mathematics in daily life. Mathematics involves understanding about numbers and quantity, operations, patterns, space, measurement and shapes. Numeracy is the application of these mathematical concepts, with skills developing along trajectories from birth. As children’s mathematical capabilities grow, they are increasingly communicated and applied to solve real-world ‘problems’ and build numeracy skills. In the context of early childhood education and care, these problems may include how many cups we need so that every learner has a cup for their water, who has built the tallest tower, or how to make and extend a pattern made with musical instruments.
Evidence-based practices for supporting learners’ early numeracy development
in early childhood education and care settings are listed. Some examples
offered may not apply in all contexts and/or may be more suitable for particular
learners or age groups.

A strong sense of belonging in the early years has fundamental benefits for children and flow-on effects for their learning, development and wellbeing. This guide outlines best-practice approaches for improving a sense of belonging and connectedness in children aged birth to 5 years. Educators and teachers working across diverse early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings can use the guide to support their practice and inform their future planning.

A positive sense of belonging at school has fundamental benefits for children and young people and flow‑on benefits for their learning and engagement with school. This guide makes recommendations based on the best available research evidence on fostering a sense of belonging in primary school environments.

A positive sense of belonging at school has fundamental benefits for children and young people and flow-on benefits for their learning and engagement with school. This guide makes recommendations based on the best available research evidence on fostering a sense of belonging in school environments.

This guide makes recommendations based on the best available research evidence about how early childhood services with 3-5 year-olds can engage with families to enhance children’s early learning and development.
1 It sets out ‘promising’ and ‘not promising’ approaches drawn from multiple studies which have measured the effects of different strategies. While there is room for improvements in the quality of available research evidence,
2 these approaches provide ‘best bets’ for guiding practice. This guide also sets out next steps for early childhood services and practitioners to consider how the findings are relevant to them.

There is a great deal of evidence that families play a critical role in their child’s early learning and development. This resource details strategies for engaging families from culturally diverse backgrounds, families with English as an additional language, and families from refugee backgrounds by elaborating on the ‘promising approaches’ outlined in AERO’s family engagement for early learning practice guides (which target early childhood services with 3 to 5 year-olds).

There is a great deal of evidence that families play a critical role in their child’s learning. This resource details strategies for engaging families from culturally diverse backgrounds, families with English as an additional language, and families from refugee backgrounds, elaborating on the ‘promising approaches’ outlined in AERO’s family engagement for learning practice guides.

There is a great deal of evidence that families play a critical role in their child’s learning. This resource details strategies for engaging with families of children in out-of-home care (OOHC) to support children’s learning outcomes. These strategies elaborate on the ‘promising approaches’ outlined in AERO’s family engagement for learning practice guides.

The promising approaches include:

- recognising and supporting family engagement in learning at home
- supporting two-way, positive communication and providing light touch updates about learning
- promoting a literacy-rich environment at home (primary school guide)
- collaboratively planning and problem solving with families.

There is a great deal of evidence that families play a critical role in their child’s learning. This resource details strategies for engaging with families of children in out-of-home care (OOHC) to support children’s learning outcomes. These strategies elaborate on the ‘promising approaches’ outlined in AERO’s family engagement for learning practice guides.

The promising approaches include:

- recognising and supporting family engagement in learning at home
- supporting two-way, positive communication and providing light touch updates about learning
- promoting a literacy-rich environment at home (primary school guide)
- collaboratively planning and problem solving with families.