Australia’s classrooms are a rich tapestry of cultures, experiences and backgrounds. This chapter explores the diversity of learners and provides opportunities for reflection as a teacher in building positive and inclusive learning environments. A range of diverse needs and approaches are explored, including learners with disability, gifted/talented and English as additional language/dialect (EAL/D) learners in alignment with the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2018).

In this chapter the focus is on literacy and oral language development for bilingual learners, but all semiotic systems, including Auslan, the language of the deaf community, should be recognised and respected as a first language, the language which is the basis for developing literacy in any language.

This chapter and the preceding chapter describe the various ways in which you might manage your classroom. Chapter 9 introduced some of the main theoretical frameworks for classroom management and how these connect to teaching and learning practices. In this chapter, we extend the discussion by considering classroom management in relation to creating engaging and motivating learning environments. Engagement and motivation are essential to young people’s success in various educational contexts, including early years, primary and secondary settings, and they can only occur in positive teaching and learning environments. Establishing and fostering such environments through effective classroom management is a source of concern for many preservice teachers, and will continue to be as teachers progress throughout their career. This chapter provides an overview of various proactive strategies that serve to promote positive teaching and learning environments along with strategies for responding to student disengagement or off-task behaviour. Positive student–teacher relationships will also be described as an essential component for engaging and motivating students’ learning.

Chapter 2 examines how to position equity and trust at the heart of relationships, communication and respect for one another. It introduces the imperative to develop emotional literacy as a primary basis for positive management outcomes. The chapter explains how to use concepts from positive education – that is, the application of successful insights from psychology to education – in order to support more equitable inclusion for individual, multicultural, and Indigenous students and student groups. The chapter imparts management strategies for student engagement designed to integrate instruction and inclusive management. It reminds readers about the impact of communication, whether it be verbal or non-verbal, and how essential communication is for building a reciprocal and mutually respectful learning environment that results in fewer management issues.

This chapter focuses on how to explore opportunities to partner with families in articulating support systems around child health and wellbeing. In particular, it explores how students and educators can reach out to families and build the necessary partnerships to successfully support parents in their parenting and caring roles, with the aim of impacting positively on children’s family lives, health and wellbeing.

Taking up the definition of a model posited in Chapter 1, models can follow different purposes. This chapter introduces nine general purposes: theory development, generalisation, theory testing, understanding (of systems and their dynamics), explanation (of observed phenomena), prediction (of the system dynamics), decision support (for the derivation of ‘good’ policies and strategies), communication (of knowledge and information) and education (of students and young researchers); and two more technical purposes: integration of knowledge and mediation between scales. These eleven purposes are demonstrated using modelling studies from the literature in the disciplines of physics, ecology and economics. Further, a model may be general or specific, and it may be used for positive analysis (‘what is’) or normative analysis (‘what should be’), or a mixture of both.

Chapter 4 examines the tone of presidential discussions of Supreme Court cases, focusing on why presidents discuss cases in positive, negative, and neutral lights. We argue that presidents alter the tone of their remarks about the Court’s decisions in an effort to build public support for their presidencies, shape how the public views the constitutional issues at play, and influence the implementation of the Court’s decisions in the bureaucracy and in Congress. For example, a president happy with the Court’s decision can praise the decision and assure the country that he will take all steps necessary to ensure it is implemented. Conversely, a president displeased with a decision can criticize that decision and encourage Congress to take action to alter or reverse the decision, thus signaling that the fight over the case has not ended. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find that presidents criticize cases they disagree with ideologically; those that declare laws unconstitutional; and those decided by minimum winning coalitions. Conversely, presidents tend to praise salient Supreme Court decisions that support their preferred ideological positions.