My name is Rochelle Dickson, and I am a senior project advisor for the Numeracy and Stem education Unit for the Department of education. And we're also joined by Sam, who's also from the Department of Education, Dr. Janelle Hill, who is the academic lead for the mathematics Education micro credentials and Banu who is also here supporting from Charles Startt University.
So today's information session is discussing the mathematics education micro credentials that are beginning in semester 2 2026.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we are all meeting today. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I am speaking from in East Melbourne, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present.
I also acknowledge the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and Nations across Victoria and Australia from whose lands participants may be joining us today. I recognise their continuing connection to Country, culture, knowledge and community, and honour the rich diversity of First Nations peoples across this continent.
In today's session, we plan to go over the context for the development of the maths education micro credentials or MEMC, discuss the course eligibility requirements, the structure and time commitments for both courses, how MEMC one and MEMC two align with the Victorian teaching learning model two point zero and the Victorian curriculum two point oh specifically for mathematics. The content covered in both courses and pathways from completing these micro credentials towards a master of education or master of inclusive education at Charles Sturt University. We will also cover the funding options available, and answer any questions. If you do have questions throughout, feel free to pop them in the chat and Sam or Banu will answer them or raise them for myself and Janelle.
So the context for the development of our micro credentials is the understanding that mathematical knowledge is highly cumulative. So understanding that if a student does miss one concept, it can affect everything that comes after. And this is why we're focusing on developing skills in MEMC one. From level one to level seven to build that cumulative knowledge. The primary school teachers lay our foundations for future student success. A recent report shows that 28 % of primary school teachers do not feel confident to teach upper primary maths topics. That was from a report in the Gratin Institute in 2025, and is something that we seek to address through this micro credential. Data from AITSL shows that one in three secondary teachers are teaching mathematics out of field, so that means that they're not math trained teachers but are teaching mathematics anyway. And that data is backed up continuously by the school staff survey results. And these things do have significant impacts on student learning outcomes, on teacher well being, and on the school communities. We know that when teaching out of field with a lack of confidence it does lead to increased student stress, teacher stress, sorry, and impacts on student learning outcomes.
So, in response to this data, the Department of Education has partnered with Charles Sturt University to provide these maths micro credentials that we're here to discuss today. If you are a teacher, why should you consider participating in the maths education micro credentials? The idea is that these will strengthen mathematical content knowledge to build confidence in teaching. So they are built around the essential maths content knowledge that develops from level one to seven for MEMC one and then through from level eight to ten. You can develop a deeper understanding of the student level, of the progressions through the levels, improve student outcomes through high quality mathematics instruction. Both courses are highly aligned to VTLM two point oh and including aligned pedagogical approaches, and they use the department developed resources such as the Victorian lesson plans, retrieval resources, and other evidence based mathematic strategies that can be used immediately in the classroom.
These are particularly of benefit for teachers that maybe out of field or early career teachers but also of benefit to primary school teachers seeking to develop their understanding of mathematics progressions. The eligibility requirements, MEMC one is available to primary and secondary school teachers. You do need to be employed during the completion of the MEMC course in a government school. MEMC two is designed just for government secondary schools, so just for secondary teachers. For both of these courses, you do need to have the principles endorsement to participate and they do need to sign an endorsement form online.
The corse structure, there are eight face to face days over the semester. These are delivered in central Melbourne and in regional locations. So for semester 22027, those regional locations are Moe and Bendigo, and next year in 2027, there are also courses available in Shepparton and Ballarat. There are travel allowances available that we'll get to later. There's also online synchronous sessions, so these are delivered simultaneously to all participants from all courses. They run on Wednesdays from 4 to 5 p.m. and there are approximately 11 h of additional course work such as reading and completion of assessment tasks that we'll speak about later, but the idea is that these can be completed flexibly around your existing workload.
All the participation happens during school hours, so there's NO expectation for you to be giving up your, your evenings and your weekends. The face to face sessions are designed to support relationship building and building connections with colleagues. Both courses are highly aligned with VTLM two point oh, so and with the Victorian curriculum two point oh to ensure strong curriculum and pedagogical coherence. The sessions incorporate Victorian lesson plans where you can explore them, you understand how to use them if you wish to, but they also include other evidence based contemporary resources. And Woven throughout these courses, these micro credentials, are the elements of learning and elements of teaching as described in the Victoria teaching learning model two point oh. As mentioned, the Victorian lesson plans are used as a resource and explored as how they can be used to improve math teaching from levels one to ten.
I'd now like to introduce Dr. Janelle Hill. She is a lecturer and researcher in mathematics education at Charles Sturt University with expertise in equity, participation and effective mathematics pedagogy. She has extensive experience as a qualified primary and secondary mathematics and science teacher and teachers in initial teacher education. Janelle currently leads and contributes to several mathematics micro credential programs, including those supporting out-of-field teachers, providing her with direct insight into the challenges and growth of these educators. So Janelle I'd like to pass over to you.
Excellent, thank you so much for that introduction. So hello, everybody. I'm Janelle and I'm really looking forward to working with you all. Before I moved into my role as an academic, I spent many years exactly where you all are in the classroom teaching maths and science, to both primary and secondary students. And I also spent time teaching in Victorian government schools in 2023 and 2024. So I know firsthand how busy school life is and I know those moments where you're just looking for the right way to help a student to finally click with the concept. So my main goal for this program is to make sure that everything we do is practical and grounded in the reality of your classrooms and your students. So I'm especially passionate about supporting teachers who might be stepping into maths from other subject areas as I know how much of a learning curve that can be. So I'm here to support you through this journey and really looking forward to our time together, helping you realize just how wonderful maths can be.
So if we jump through to the next slide, thank you. I just wanted to have a sort of go through the two courses. So MEMC one and two share a very similar goal of boosting teacher confidence, but they focus on very different stages of the student journey and the curriculum. But they've been designed so that any teacher can take part. So you don't have to be currently teaching maths to benefit from enrolling in these MEMC micro credentials. So MEMC one, which is available for both primary and secondary teachers, is designed to strengthen your conceptual understanding of maths from level one through seven. So this is particularly crucial for supporting students as they make that big transition from primary to secondary school, but it will also help teachers to support students who are working below their expected level in maths and helping them to really understand key mathematical concepts.
MEMC two, which as mentioned is only available to secondary teachers, covers levels eight to ten. And that will help teachers to support secondary students as they master, more complex mathematical concepts. But whichever one you choose, the three key areas of mathematics content knowledge, specialized mathematics knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge are the focus and they're all directly aligned to the VTLM two point O framework.
So if we jump into the next slide, let's take a little bit of a closer look at what the face to face days actually look like for MEMC one. So all of these sessions are highly practical and hands on. In the 1st two days, we'll start by unpacking key concepts of number, really focused, working on how conceptual understanding and procedural fluency work together. We'll also spend time building confidence in additive and multiplicative thinking. Then days three and four we move into the wonderful world of fractions. So we explore rational numbers and decimals with meaning and connecting these to proportional reasoning and pre algebra. And our goal here is to help teachers see and teach those beautiful connections between all of these key ideas.
And then if we go to our next slide, we have a look at our second half of MEMC one. So we shift our focus to measurement and geometry and data. So days five and six, we explore things like links between place value and measurement conversions, 2D shapes, 3D objects, key ideas around area perimeter, and volume, and what they all mean and how they're all linked to each other.
Day seven we move into data and chance and explore variation and probability in ways that actually makes sense for the classroom. And then finally in day eight, bring it all together, moving from conceptual understanding toward true mastery focused teaching, and it's a great way to wrap up the face to face component and reflect on how your practice has evolved throughout the process.
If we jump into the next slide, for those of you who are interested in MEMC two, as mentioned, the focus is on the secondary years. So in this micro credential we start day one by connecting the four operations to Algebra ensuring that teachers and students have a solid foundation. Days two and three are a dive, we sort of dive deeper into proportional reasoning, advanced place value, and ideas such as indices. By day four we're really fully immersed into Algebra and exploring equivalence, equation solving, and linear growth with meaning. And we know that Algebra can be a hurdle for many students and teachers. So we do spend a lot of time looking at evidence based ways to make these quite abstract concepts much more accessible and engaging.
And then if we look at our final slide here for MEMC two, days five and six, we have a focus on linear and quadratic relationships as well as principles of geometry and geometry proofs. On day seven, trigonometry and Pythagoras’ Theorem. But we look at them conceptually ensuring that teachers have the tools that they need to help students see the why behind the formulas. And then we conclude on day eight with statistics and probability, and in those, in that day we look at how to lead data investigations and importantly how to. Help students identify misleading representations of data in the real world.
If we jump on to the next slide here, so in addition to the face to face days of MEMC one or MEMC two, we also have eight 1 h online sessions for each of the different MEMCs. So these do happen on Wednesday afternoons from four to five and in those yes, you do have the opportunity to connect with teachers from all over Victoria. So these sessions are interactive and very practical where we explore VTLM two point oh implementation through the elements of teaching, like exclusive modelling, guided practice, how to monitor progress using checks for understanding, but. Each of the sessions has specific reference to the conceptual topics that you will have just covered in the face to face sessions. And they're a great way to stay connected with your peers and also get really quick actionable tips that you can use in your classroom the very next day.
And I'll just also jump in there Janelle, to add that when you look at all of these, you can see how closely they link to VTLM two point oh with the elements of teaching scattered throughout and references to all of the department resources that exist already. Thank you, Janelle, and I'll go to the next slide.
Thank you very much much. So we know that teaching maths, particularly if it's not your original area of training, can sometimes be challenging. And so that's why we've built in extra layers of support for teachers. So 1st you'll have access to our research informed wellbeing module that's designed specifically for teachers. In addition, you'll be part of a vibrant community of practice. So this will be an online space where you can share ideas and learn from colleagues across Victoria as well as guest lecturers and academics who will come in and. I'll chat to you all and provide more information. And then finally, we've got leadership packs, so these are resources for your school leaders to help them to support you through this MEMC journey and ensure that your new learning has a lasting impact on your score.
And then if we jump to the next slide here, so I'll just talk quickly about, the assessments. So again, don't let the word assessment stress you out too much, but to gain credit towards postgrade study, there are some small assessment tasks to complete, but they are designed to be highly practical and directly related to your teaching. Graded satisfactory/ unsatisfactory, so that sort of takes away a little bit of the stress, but you start with a self audit of your current mathematical understanding, and then you move into tasks such as adapting Victorian lesson plans to suit your particular context or planning micro teaching sessions based on the topics that you would like to explore in more detail. But the focus here is on professional noticing and instructional decision making in maths teaching, and these are critical skills that will serve you well long after the course is finished. So Rochelle, would you like to add anything to this?
I'd just add that, as you said, these are compulsory if you wish to grain credit towards a masters, which we'll talk about with the accreditation in the next part, and also to add that one resubmit is permitted for each of these assessments as well.
So in order to gain accreditation for towards the master of education or master of inclusive education at Charles Sturt University, you need to complete both MEMC one and MEMC two and receive a passing grade for all of the assessments included in that. Attendance requirements are also required to gain that credit.
In terms of funding options, schools will receive eight days of CRT coverage for every participating teacher to ensure that participation and that schools are supported to release teachers for those eight face to face sessions. There is also travel reimbursement available. That's for teachers whose schools are more. More than 100 km from the nearest face to face location. And for successful applicants, we will notify them of the if they're eligible to claim for travel expenses. Those teachers will be able to claim up to $640 for each two block day of travel, and that would include claiming expenses such as petrol, train costs, accommodation, meals et cetera.
That's the end of our formal presentation for today. If you have any questions, you can contact either the MEMC address for the Department of Education or for Charls Sturt University. However, we're also willing and happy to take any questions now. So if anyone does have any questions, please feel free to put it in the chat or to unmute your microphone and ask.
And thank you very much for your attendance today. We appreciate your time. Yes, we will make this recording available, so I will send it out to all participants once we get it up, we should be able to get it live onto the ARC website, and then we're happy for very happy for you to share it with any, any colleagues who didn't register for today.
So thank you very much for coming. I do want to strongly endorse this program. I think it is a really exciting opportunity, for teachers to develop their mathematical knowledge, but also to develop connections with colleagues from around the state to share their mathematics journey with them.
We don't have any upcoming options for integration Aids at the moment. If we do have anything coming up, we can share that information. At the moment, this is the only course, but I will make a note of that if anything does, is upcoming.
Well, if there's no other questions? And yes, I definitely agree that it all education support staff are extremely valuable and schools would not be able to operate without them, and definitely an important resource to upskill for their assistance in the classroom as well. If there's no further questions, we might end this year and we will make the recording available, but thank you again for your attendance and your participation today. If you do have any further questions, please feel free to contact us on either of those email addresses. Thanks for your time, everybody.
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