Australian educators tour District 30

Valley Stream District 30 hosted a delegation of Australian educators on Sept. 30 who toured its three schools to see what techniques and technologies the district’s teachers employ.

The three-person team hailed from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development in Victoria, Australia’s most densely populated state. The department administers 399 schools, as there are no local school districts in Australia. The team stopped in San Francisco and Denver before arriving in Nassau County, where they also visited schools in Rockville Centre and Mineola.

“We’re really looking for effective strategies and outcomes,” said Bob Stephens, the deputy regional director for the North-Eastern Victoria region, who is in charge of accountability and improvement.

Their focus in District 30 was math instruction. The team visited classrooms at different grade and instructional levels, including intervention sessions designed to address individual students’ weaknesses, general instruction and advanced instruction, as well as an academic enrichment program for grades three through six that teaches financial literacy.

As the delegation listened, teacher Ilissa Epstein asked her financial literacy students how they might improve the investment portfolios they built over the course of the class.

“I would try to diversify,” one student said.

Roxanne Garcia France, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, said students benefit from an array of techniques, including technology integration that features computer programs and iPads, that are designed for each child. “It creates individual learning paths,” she said.

Teacher Regina Tyler said that the iPads her first-grade students use give her more freedom to work with them one on one. “It gives me time to work with individual children while other students are learning,” she said.