Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. And today for something a little bit different, I'm joined by a man who's had a few careers I think over the journey, Mr. Rod Bunten. He's been a diplomat, he's been a maths and physics secondary school teacher, and currently he is, well, among other things, um, married to the Governor of South Australia, Her Excellency, the Honourable Frances Adamson.

Rod, thank you very much for your time.

Rod Bunten: Thank you for inviting me.

Dale Atkinson: So can I talk a little bit, first of all, about your journey from diplomat into teacher? How did that happen?

Rod Bunten: It happened because I'd reached a point in my career, and the Governor had reached a point in her career, we were both diplomats, that it made little sense for both of us to carry on, and even less sense for her to give up her career and me carry on with mine.

And I, I'd always considered myself not as a diplomat who used to do physics. But as a physicist who was doing diplomacy. So, I thought, I'll retrain as a physics teacher. There are things I want to teach people. There are things I think young people might need to know. And here's a job I can do anyway.

Dale Atkinson: And what was it about the appeal of teaching that drew you in?

Rod Bunten: Initially, it's two things. Initially, it was about the subject physics, about the fact that students as they learn physics have to reject everything they've ever been taught and hold dear and are good at and take on a new way of looking at the world. And that's, that's a fascinating process to go through and to watch people go through and to help people go through.

But the main reason was that I came from a pretty ordinary background. But I was good at physics. And if you're good at physics, you can go to, you know, Oxford and do physics. And nobody really cares what your background is, can you do physics. It's a lot harder if you're good at English literature because you don't have that cultural wealth of backgrounds that other people have.

So I always thought of physics as being, you know, boxing for smart kids. It's how you get out of the ghetto. And I've had an amazing life through physics. I met presidents, prime ministers, Nobel prize winners, Oscar winners, captains of the Australian cricket team. I'm here, in essence, and I wouldn't be if my talent had lay in the direction of modern languages or, as I say, history and not physics.

Dale Atkinson: I think it's an interesting message at a time when really across Australia and internationally as well, there's really like an outcry for more students to be studying those STEM subjects, to be going into mathematics, pure mathematics into physics. What is it that we aren't doing currently that we need to be doing to encourage some of those younger kids into the discipline?

Rod Bunten: There's two aspects of that. One is how do we get more kids in and the second and specific one is how do we get more women into it. You've got to make it relevant. You've got to make it about them. You've got to make students understand there are people in South Australia, engineers, designing a better mechanism of delivering stints to the heart.

They are going to save tens of thousands, um, or massively improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people a year, more than the most brilliant surgeon will ever do in a lifetime. They're engineers, not biologists. The physical sciences should be seen as something for people who care about the world, as well as people who just enjoy the challenge and fun of that maths-based world.

Dale Atkinson: I guess that's the difference. You've spoken a bit previously about, um, mathematics is a creative art form, rather than perhaps how it's viewed in high school. Certainly the early stages of mathematics is quite formulaic and dictated in terms of the outcomes. How do we present that creativity within maths and physics?

Rod Bunten: There are a number of ways you can do it. So, if you were to look at some of the project-based work, you know, initially, IB Maths was intended to be entirely taught by project. That is to say, the students would just do two years worth of projects. And they would learn the maths on the way as they needed it to solve the problems they were trying to solve.

If you look at Japanese maths teaching, it tends to be a quick five minute exposition of a new element of mathematics. And then the children are broken into groups. Mathematics in Japan is a group exercise. It's not like here where it tends to be a solitary undertaking. You don't want to share with anybody else because you want to be sure that you're the brightest.

It's a group exercise. They're given a group problem. They solve it as a group, other groups solve it, and they critique each other. I quite successfully, um, got people being creative by asking my students to write their own exam paper. Everybody wrote a question, and then everybody answered all of the questions, and then everybody judged each other's questions as to whether they were good questions, whether they were too easy, whether they were too difficult. So it started them thinking about the use of mathematics in quite a different way. But I'd turn it around, I think, and I'd say, well, how do people teach jazz? Because we need to teach mathematics the way people teach jazz.

At the moment, we're teaching mathematics the way they teach, if you like, to be a classical musician in a, in an orchestra, perhaps. We're focusing on accuracy and precision and learning technique rather than expression and creativity and operating with other people and feeding off other people's creativity.

So, that's how I'd love to do it. I totally accept that at the moment no teacher is given the resources to enable to do that. No teacher who did that would be particularly happy with their parents because all parents at the moment care about is that terrible four digit number, the ATAR. Nobody should judge a student on four digits.

Dale Atkinson: One of the interesting things that was discussed at the Maths Summit with maths teachers a bit earlier and a few leaders this year was around the concept of permission to fail for students and while you're talking it just makes me think about that as a, and quite often, maths anxiety is built around the fear that I will get the wrong answer, rather than, you know, I've come very close to getting the right answer and my creativity is being shown in these various different ways.

Is there a way that we can signal to students that, in essence, having a go at mathematics is part of the benefit of it, rather than just being seen as, you know, correct or incorrect.

Rod Bunten: I think there's a broader problem, not just in mathematics. I think it's most acute in mathematics. No teacher wants their student to fail. So all teachers, all school systems, go out of their way to put in place safety nets and scaffolding and support for students to stop them failing. The problem is, if you don't fail, you don't learn resilience. When I was doing teacher training, another mature teacher student who had previously been in the building industry said that he was on a building site and he watched an interaction where an apprentice turned up, uh, first day working on the building site and got there at, um, 8.30am and the subcontractor said, go away, you're fired.

You were supposed to be here at 7.30am, you're here at 8.30am. And the apprentice said, oh, give us a chance. And the contractor said, this was your chance, you're fired. And the trainee teacher said to me, why did he have to learn that lesson for the first time in real life? Why hadn't he learned that lesson in 18 years, 12 years of schooling?

So I think we have to let people fail in all subjects. When you get to mathematics, it gets more acute because there is this, this concept of the right answer. And if you structure a subject, and if you structure the way it's done, and if you structure assessment particularly, so that, that it's all based on right answer, wrong answer things, then people naturally become terribly averse to the wrong answer, because that's the only reward going, is getting it right.

So, a lot of it will come down to assessment, I think, but there are other dimensions as well.

Dale Atkinson: I'm just touching on, uh, the concept of getting it right and definitive answers, one way or the other. Can we move on to science? You've co-written a, a paper about teaching climate change science in senior secondary school and some of the issues and barriers and opportunities that exist there.

As I understand it, your argument Is that climate change should be taught by inquiry rather than transmission, and that the kids, the students, should be taught to make judgments about their claims. Why is that?

Rod Bunten: In science, science, not science teaching, but science as it's done, all judgments are personal.

Scientists stand on the edge of the unknown, hopefully on firm ground, trying to reach for the next firm ground. So, students must learn that knowledge is not perfect, knowledge is not an abstract. The purpose of science isn't to walk up a series of steps to this perfect knowledge, but rather to work out how to get from where we are to the next step.

That's one thing. But the main thing is that, of all the people you'll teach, only a handful will go on to be scientists. But all of them will go on to be citizens. And citizens need to be able to assess and judge claims about science and other things. But claims about science, it might be climate change.

It might be vaccines. It might be COVID transmission. And if you just teach a body of fact, what you are teaching them, the meta learning, is you achieve knowledge in science by transmission from a higher authority. If, on the other hand, you teach them how to make a judgment themselves, you're teaching them meta learning is very different.

There's an old saying, 'Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you destroy an entire ecosystem.' We need to give people the knowledge they need and not the wrong sorts of knowledge. It's really interesting, I don't know whether anybody's talked on this podcast about indigenous systems of learning.

But indigenous systems of learning are based upon the idea that there are safe knowledges for certain levels. And so the bottom level in Pitjantjatjara, and that tends to be the level that is safe for, you know, even people like us to learn. So that's what is sort of told to outsiders. We have a, unfortunately, a system with many wonders, but one of the problems of the internet is that almost anybody can become a teacher of people, particularly young people, not somebody who is trained, not somebody who necessarily has their best interests at heart.

But just somebody with a podcast or somebody with a, an axe to grind and we need to teach students to become their own judges of their own learning. So an inquiry-based approach to something like climate change, and I chose that for my paper because that was a really big issue, the science of climate change, 15 years ago, is a brilliant opportunity for students to learn that.

Dale Atkinson: Now from your experience, um, within the diplomatic service and then moving into teaching, what is the comparative way and what are the benefits of both in terms of how we prepare people for management roles?

Rod Bunten: So I came quite late to teaching as I've said, and I came with an assumption of how managers would be prepared.

So the idea is the diplomatic service, you reach a point in your career about 10 years in where if you're identified or wish to become a manager, there's then a period of extensive training, possibly full time or longer part time where you acquire a whole range of skills to become a manager. In the school system, largely, you sort of organically come up through the system and you organically bid or selected for positions.

And you drift up, drift is, that's a value, uh, laden word, but you, you move at whatever pace up through a system. And the advantages of that, of course, that everybody in a sense knows what is happening and it's quite open and also you are working with people. You are familiar with. The disadvantage seen from outside, a twofold, one, if you're having people just purely selecting the people below, inevitably people think that the best management style is the one they use, but that results in a cloning, that results in an organisation, reinforcing one single way of doing things. And the second thing is teachers, and an education system ought to believe in education, it ought to be so deeply entrenched in the DNA that its response to almost every problem ought to be, can we train to do this better? And if you do management training, you discover there are different management systems, different management styles, but also some very valuable techniques.

So two that served me well as a diplomat, one was an old-fashioned technique called management by walking. The idea being, you know, you want to manage a whole group of people, make sure that every day you sit and see them doing their work and just get a feel for, are they having a good day? Are they having a bad day?

Is the work going on? What are the problems they're facing? And a second is to judge what are the skills and strengths and attitudes of all the people in your team. How do they work together? Do they, do they complement each other? Do they clash? Is everybody on the same page? Which sounds like a good idea but isn't always a good idea.

So, for example, some people, particularly senior managements, often get really excited about answers to the question 'What does this mean for the organisation in three years time?' In many ways, that's what people look for when they're looking for senior leadership. Many other people, and I'm one of them, tend to be quite excited by the answer to the question, 'What does this look like for me on Monday?'

And if when you're exploring problems, and particularly when you're explaining what you're doing, you only look at what does this mean for the organisation in five years time, you will turn off and not engage. The people will go, yeah, that's fine, but on Monday, I've got my year 8, level 3 maths who are just a pain.

Or, for me, in my first year of teaching, every second Friday, I had triple essential maths on a Friday afternoon. You want to learn how to be an engaging and enthusiastic and fun teacher? Try teaching essential maths for two and a half hours on a Friday afternoon every second week.

Dale Atkinson: That sounds like, uh, whoever was sitting at the timetable, uh, didn't like you very much. That seems like an awful challenge.

Rod Bunten: It was fun. We enjoyed it.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's good.

Rod Bunten: I mean, they teach the syllabus, but we enjoyed it.

Dale Atkinson: Well, that's maybe where the creativity comes in, right? Friday afternoon, you've got to try all sorts of things. Can you tell us a little bit about the Governor's priorities around education during her term?

Rod Bunten: Yes, I mean, I have to start off with the obvious caveat that all of your listenership will be aware that none of them voted for the Governor. So the priorities for education are the government's, but the priorities for education inside her time here, uh, very much about leadership and citizenship. It's very much about how can we encourage students, encourage, enable, support students to be active citizens.

From my own personal viewpoint, I, you know, was a secondary school teacher and I always felt a bit that that was the Cinderella service in education. Lots of people get excited about universities, and there are good reasons for that. Lots of people engage in primary schools because for a whole variety of reasons, but I can see the attraction in that.

Secondary schools sometimes look like a bit more hard work and a bit more of a challenge, but I have to say as a teacher that was, I found nothing more rewarding than dealing with 17 and 18-year-olds. For two reasons. One, they all see the world in black and white and that is so refreshing after, as you reach my sort of age, and you tend to see everything in different shades of grey.

But the second thing is, if you, as one of my students were, come to school late because before you get there, you have to drive your siblings to their primary school because mum's a, uh, an addict and dad is absent if he was ever present. And you're 17, you are what is known as a winner in the lottery of life.

And 97% of the people on this planet would change places for you in a heartbeat. But it doesn't look like it, if that's your situation in life now. And it doesn't look like you have much options. But actually, people do. Those people do. And it's really exciting to be working with a group of people where actually the potential is so high.

Can I say just one thing generally about teaching which I, which I learned, and really surprised me, coming from diplomacy. And that is the honesty and collegiality of teachers. Teachers are much more self-reflective of their own performance than almost any other profession I've come across. I was once observing a substitute teacher in a maths class. It's always a tough, really tough job being a substitute teacher. And this class for this individual, who was off task all the time, hadn't gone well. There'd been several interactions, ended up with the individual being excluded and sent off to the level two. And as we left to go different ways, the substitute teacher turned to me and said, I know you've been watching what I did.

I want you to know that's not how to do it. I really didn't handle that kid well. Don't use that as a model. And walked off and I thought, 25 years as a diplomat, I've been in meetings with ambassadors, ministers, prime ministers, councillors, all sorts of people. Never once did we walk out and the leader of the delegation go, 'Oh, didn't do that very well, did I?'

Everybody always tries to find an excuse to externalise failure, if you like. Teachers don't, they know that it's a performance art, you don't always get it right, you go into the staff room, you seek support from your colleagues, and normally you get it, you dust yourself off, you go back and think, I'll do it better next time. That's a great thing.

Dale Atkinson: So just as a final kind of reminder to all the educators and teachers out there, you can actually request a visit of the Governor and you can request to visit Government House if you go onto governor.sa.gov.au to check it out and we'll have those links in the show notes for everybody to access as required.

Mr. Rod Bunten, thank you very much for your time.

Rod Bunten: Thank you. It's been great fun.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all Elders, past, present and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education and today we're joined by Dr Jennifer Buckingham who is the Director of Strategy and Senior Research Fellow at MultiLit. Jennifer, thanks for joining us.

Jennifer Buckingham: You're very welcome. Thanks for inviting me.

Dale Atkinson: Well, it's good to have you here because you are involved in discussing the research base behind the teaching of synthetic phonics at our Literacy Summit. And the title of your presentation is From Sounding Out to Sight Words, the Teaching of Synthetic Phonics. And it's looking at the large evidence base describing how children learn to read words and the tools and strategies that primary leaders and teachers can use to develop efficient reading for all students.

Can we just start by talking a little bit about what the reading brain is?

Jennifer Buckingham: Sure. It's a really important concept for teachers to understand, and it's really just a shorthand term for the neurological network that is created when we learn to read. So children are not born with that network in place, it has to be created through teaching and learning.

And we need to make connections between parts of the brain that aren't connected in a way that it needs to be, in order for children to make the connection between print, speech and meaning. So, we do that through repeated exposure and practice with connecting letters to sounds, with decoding words, and then over time those words become stored in memory as letter strings, and those letter strings, which we otherwise call words, then become connected to meaning.

With lots of practice, that process becomes really fast and we start to recognise familiar words on sight. So, it feels effortless, but that has to happen in a really intentional way, there's no alternative to that. It has to happen in every student's brain, it just will happen at a different rate for different children.

So we create the reading brain through teaching and learning and there are types of instruction that make that more likely to happen, and to happen quickly, and to be successful.

Dale Atkinson: What are those types of instruction that make it more likely to happen?

Jennifer Buckingham: The instruction that is most effective is explicit and systematic.

And systematic synthetic phonics is a very explicit and systematic way of teaching children to decode words to read. So it is the method that is most aligned with the reading research on the reading brain and on cognitive processes and on successful reading acquisition.

Dale Atkinson: What is it that teachers need to be focusing on in the classroom when they're engaging with children on this stuff?

Jennifer Buckingham: Teachers need to focus on the connecting of the letter sounds in those very early stages of reading. So, um, getting children familiar with the alphabet and teaching in a very systematic way how the letters in written language, connect to the sounds that they hear in spoken language. And that's sort of something that we do really without thinking about it too much, but it's a brand new idea for a lot of kids.

So, beginning readers need to have that explained to them very carefully and taken through that alphabetic code in a really methodical way, but at the same time, making sure that they are developing their vocabulary because that's the other very important aspect of it. There's the code and the written word and then there's the language, and we need to connect those two together for children in order for them to be able to read.

Dale Atkinson: What does that experience look like for the child that you're teaching? What are you trying to kind of instil in them over a period of time?

Jennifer Buckingham: Yeah, so from the beginning stages we're connecting the alphabet to the sounds in speech and we're building up their understanding of how those sounds come together to make words. And those represent words that they know the meaning of, that they've learned, and also new words that we're teaching through vocabulary.

And it's a very systematic process starting with a few letters and sounds to begin with and adding some more. So over the first year of school, it's amazing, you know, how much code students can learn and how much language they can learn at the same time. A systematic and an accumulative process.

They're not teaching, you know, one set of content and then forgetting that before they move on to the next one. It's picking up the previous content and integrating that with the new content that they're learning. By the end of about the second year of school, you'd hope that children were pretty familiar with all of the alphabetic code and they're decoding fairly well, and they've got a really good developing vocabulary.

So then by the time they then get into the third year of school, you're starting to work on things like fluency and reading comprehension. But laying that foundational groundwork of being able to read words accurately and with some automaticity is essential for that next process to take place.

Dale Atkinson: Now the teaching of reading and language seems to be a strangely contested place at times.

What do you say to teachers who, and leaders, who might say, you know, look, our children don't learn like that. We tend to approach it more through, say, levelled readers or other approaches. What's the message there?

Jennifer Buckingham: Well, levelled readers use an approach that's less effective because they're based on a disproven theory of reading, which is the three cueing method.

And the three cueing method encourages children to use context cues to try and work out what an unfamiliar word might be. So it might be the overall meaning of the sentence or it might be whether, you know, it sort of makes sense in terms of the syntax. And they're taught to do that before they attempt to decode it using phonics. So using that, that three cueing approach has been shown to be inefficient and has a really high error rate. And it's much higher than the error rate than when students use decoding as their first strategy if they've been taught a systematic phonics approach. So when children are learning to read using levelled readers, that can give the impression that they're reading, but what looks like successful reading is often just good memory for whole words.

It's not building that neurological network that I mentioned earlier and that skilled readers need. So, our brains have a limited capacity for remembering whole words, and so a student who can't decode will hit a level that they can't get past at some point. As I mentioned, some children will learn to read no matter what the teacher does, but because there are individual differences that arise from having an advantaged tone background or just a stronger predisposition to learn.

And so those students who do eventually manage to learn to read using these less effective methods, such as levelled text, often have poor spelling because they haven't learnt that code. Um, and also they would have learned to read more quickly if they'd had that really effective explicit instruction.

So there's, there is an opportunity cost for those students who would have been learning to read earlier and could have been really building up their vocabulary and those other great things that we want.

Dale Atkinson: That is so insightful and incredible. I'm the father of a nearly six-year-old and one of the things that is very apparent about her and some of her little friends is just how incredibly powerful their memory is.

But while you're talking, it just makes me think about the superficial learning of memory and the difference between that and actually understanding the sub layer of what you're trying to engage with, which is what we're trying to achieve with this, isn't it?

Jennifer Buckingham: Absolutely, because knowing the code and how it works can be generalised then to every word that they read.

And we still use that even if we don't necessarily know we're doing it. So we as skilled readers most of the time are just reading words on sight because they're words we've seen a thousand times. And so we just, we're familiar with them. But if we see a word that we're less familiar with, or it's a brand new word, we will go back to using that decoding strategy.

And we have that. And you don't lose it. But for children, it really has to be painstakingly built and so that they will always have that and take it through their life.

Dale Atkinson: And where can people, obviously, you know, the research base that you've engaged with at a really deep level is available, I think, on your website, five from five.

What sort of resources and other activities and support is available on that website?

Jennifer Buckingham: The five from five website is a really great starting point for teachers who want to know more about scientific reading research and it provides it in a really accessible way. But it also is a great resource for teachers who are looking for ways to upskill their practice or to look for references and up to date research.

So it's got a really wide range of uses for teachers wherever they're up to in terms of their understanding of the science of reading and of systematic synthetic phonics instruction. So there's information on there for parents as well. That has been developed so that there can be a better partnership between teachers and parents, and all have a good understanding of what's going on when children are learning to read.

Dale Atkinson: As a parent myself of a child who's nearly six, what are the types of things that the parents should be doing in terms of supporting the classroom teaching that's going on?

Jennifer Buckingham: One of the best things that parents can do with children is read with them and whether that's their home reading books, which in the early years of school will hopefully be decodable books until they have become proficient in that particular skill.

But also, you're reading a wide range of great children's literature and having fantastic conversations about language, about the alphabet, about words and really building up their vocabulary. It's such an important thing for parents to do because there's only a limited time as we know in school. So, teachers are using that time in the most effective way possible, but there's a lot of time outside of school where children can be really engaging with literature and learning lots of words and word meanings and background knowledge and that's a really fun thing for parents to do with children as well.

Dale Atkinson: So really the parental role is less explicit instruction and more just helping to engage enthusiasm for reading and reading practice.

Jennifer Buckingham: Yeah, absolutely. So, supporting what's going on in school in terms of reading instruction and if there is some homework, if there's some practice to be done around tricky words and things like that, then yeah, definitely following the guidance of the classroom teacher.

But really, it's, you know, a great role of parents to be developing vocabulary and knowledge about the world. And all of those things contribute to children's reading comprehension.

Dale Atkinson: So with the five from five website, how does that fit in with the best advice papers and the big six components of reading that have been produced here in South Australia?

Jennifer Buckingham: Well, they're very closely aligned in terms of content, which is not surprising given that they draw on the same evidence base. So sometimes there's little, slight differences in terminology, but the language is largely really consistent and certainly the recommendations are as well.

Dale Atkinson: Now, SA's Literacy Guarantee with the Phonics Screening Check, the coaching, the professional learning that that sits there is obviously, you know, heavily engaged with phonetical awareness and synthetic phonics and evidence-based reading instruction.

What do you think our next steps as a department and as a public education system should be?

Jennifer Buckingham: Well, South Australia's been a national leader in terms of literacy policy around the early reading instruction in schools, and the Literacy Guarantee and the Literacy Guarantee Unit have definitely been at the centre of that. I know that teachers around the state really value the support that's provided through the unit.

So my advice would be to not lose that momentum around exemplary phonics instruction. It's really easy to sort of feel as though, okay, we understand this now, we don't need to focus on it as much, but results in the year one phonics check have improved since it started, but they could and they really should be a lot higher.

Those results show that the work isn't finished yet. There's a lot of great achievement, but we still have some work to do there. And I'd also advise that not taking your foot off the pedal around phonics instruction, but also paying attention to vocabulary and building knowledge through primary school.

They contribute to reading comprehension. So when you have a state full of fabulous little skilled decoders, they will then also be able to read for comprehension and enjoyment.

Dale Atkinson: The escalator we want all those little kids to be on, really.

Dr. Jennifer Buckingham, Director of Strategy and Senior Research Fellow at MultiLit. Thank you very much for your time.

Jennifer Buckingham: My pleasure. All the best.

Dale Atkinson: Dr. Buckingham's presentation is available on plink. That presentation's name is From Sounding Out to Sight Words, the Teaching of Synthetic Phonics.

And there are another 9 presentations from experts available there. The Literacy Summit presentations are all on plink. There's 10 in total. They provide educators with the opportunity to strengthen their knowledge about literacy improvement in preschools and schools. They're all aligned to department policy and that includes the literacy guidebooks and best advice papers.

So thanks very much for listening. Looking forward to your company next time.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all Elders, past, present and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education and today we are joined by Natasha Chisholm who is the Senior Project Officer for the Workabout Centre at the Department for Education. And by Jacob Turner, who is a man we have to be nice to because he works for the Australian Taxation Office and is a former graduate and person who's come through the Workabout Centre program.

First of all, for those who are out there who don't know what it is, Natasha, what is the Workabout Centre?

Natasha Chisholm: The Workabout Centre is a school to work transition model. So when we're talking to students and families, we basically say our jobs are to help Aboriginal young people stay in school, complete SACE and then ultimately achieve a successful post school pathway.

So we run a whole different range of programs that's going to support a student's school retention and then give them opportunities to explore training and career pathways.

Dale Atkinson: So, before we came on air, I was having a look at the website that you guys curate, which is available for parents and for students to look at, which is workaboutcentrecareers.com which you can go and look at and explore, and people should definitely have a look at that. But the broad range of activities that are available and the pathways that you make available for students to explore is pretty incredible. Can you tell us a bit about the scope of the work?

Natasha Chisholm: The scope of our work is really driven by our young people. We'll have a lot of generic programs we sort of run, so things like barista, white card, first aid, all those small little qualifications that help a young person go into a training environment for the first time, start actually exploring what they do and don't like. And then we might, depending on student interests, look at individualised programs.

If we have a group of students who really want to explore university, then we might work with the university to create a program that's specifically for them. We do a lot of work readiness as well, so those basic entry level employability skills. And we do a lot around that essential identification as well.

So birth certificates, tax file numbers, which Jacob's now an expert on, getting bank accounts, Medicare cards, all that identification that a young person's going to need once they leave school as well. And even in school, once they get a job. Last year, we started a lot of volunteering programs as well. So it's really driven by that student demand.

Plus what's happening out in the community and, and with the industry, we just try to, yeah, match that all up and create opportunities.

Dale Atkinson: So you've got a group of 120 students, I think you said that you're working with this week. What's the experience that they're enjoying at the moment?

Natasha Chisholm: So that's year 10 students from across the state. I think we have maybe about 20 school sites involved in that. That's for the ACE program, so ACE is Aboriginal Career Education. It's the third year of the program, so those year 10s during term 1 to 3, undertake a couple of career education workshops with our team, and then they come together a couple of times throughout the year to explore pathways.

This week is all about picking your individual industry, so we have 11 groups across 9 different industries. So each day, the students are bussing out to their activities, like our animal care group today is going up to Mylor to Animals Anonymous. We have three different trades groups going out to do bricklaying, carpentry, other various industry tours.

Our health support group today is going out to the TAFE SA Dentist School at Gillies Plains. So it's really about them learning, trying hands on activities, and learning more is this pathway really for me. And then next week, when students are going back to do subject selections, the aim is that they're able to make more informed and educated decisions about their pathways.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. I'd imagine that's incredibly helpful, which is probably a good time to throw over to Jacob. In terms of the experience that you had, how did that help you clarify the work pathway that you wanted to take?

Jacob: My original plan was to go to university up in Queensland, James Cook University. And the whole idea was, what am I going to do for work while I'm there?

And I had no skills. I was just like, yeah, cool, I'm going to go to uni, that's it. Without thinking about what I'm actually going to do while I'm there. Enter Tash, where she's like, oh, you know, we've got barista courses, we've got this, we've got that. And Cairns, which is where the university is based, is a huge tourist destination.

So, my idea was, I'll go be a barista. When I did the barista course in year 9, which I think I was the youngest out of the group at that time, and then from there it was just starting to look into all these other places I can go. So the barista course, I did a white card, so I can go work on construction sites, which I ended up using for like stage setup and takedown, things like Adelaide 500, the Queen concert that was in Adelaide a couple of years ago. And then I ended up doing a kitchen operations course for a year, learning how to cook. Not just for a career, but also just being an adult.

Dale Atkinson: Just for life.

Jacob: Yeah, that's it. But a lot of it was kind of coming out your shell, being around, being put into these practical situations that you wouldn't get in school.

We'd do a coffee morning here at the Education Department. So, you know, we'd be downstairs, we'd have to talk to people, we'd have to be loud, we'd have to be fun, charismatic and whatnot, which we weren't used to. We're all, you know, 13, 14, 15. That ended up leading into cafe jobs, restaurant jobs, and then into sales.

I ended up not following my plan and going up to uni, but yeah, being able to speak to people, those, those skills that you kind of get as a by-product of doing these other courses that really helped build my communication and being able to get into a Federal Government job at 19, which I was the youngest there at the time and, you know, have a chat to some of my other mates and they were just learning those skills that were just getting those jobs.

So, yeah, I think that was a big takeaway of. Working with Tash and the Workabout Centre, you get all of the skills that they primarily teach, but then also the life skills that comes with it that you don't really notice until, yeah, you do it and you grow up and go, Oh, I learned that really young compared to, you know, them, them, and them.

Dale Atkinson: While you're talking, what it makes me think about is you end up with a, quite a safe space to explore all of your options, really. Tash, is that kind of the aim of what you're going after?

Natasha Chisholm: Absolutely. So, Workabout Centre is a team of Aboriginal people, which is quite unique. And no matter what we're doing with our young people, it's a culturally safe and supportive environment. That's first and foremost. So even when we're engaging non-Aboriginal trainers and businesses, we do a lot of work beforehand to ensure that this is going to be the right environment for our young person. And we could have a group of 10 different kids together and they want 10 different pathways, and we'll support them to explore that.

But that just fills my heart with joy hearing Jacob talk about that, his experiences now and what he learnt. That's the takeaway though for me and the rest of my team as well. It's not, yes, this is our jobs, but we're actually supporting our community and our future leaders. And yeah, that's added bonus I think for us.

But one of the key things we say that works for Workabout is we don't say no. And what we mean by that is when a young person comes to you and says, I want to explore this pathway, or I want to do this job. And even though we might know it's unrealistic, we don't say no, we say like, yep, let's explore that together.

Let's find out what's the first steps in that. It's about letting that young person grow and learn for themselves. Actually, maybe that is unrealistic or it's not going to work out for me or it's, there's no opportunities there, but what is there? So we like to go on that journey with them.

Dale Atkinson: I think the interesting thing about what Jacob was talking about in terms of the breadth of your experience and the, the variety of avenues that you kind of explored, which is you don't really know how one thing leads to the next, do you? Like the journey from being a barista to working for the tax office is not direct, but you had, I think a bit of a plan and a bit of a way to explore it. Would that be fair to say?

Jacob: Yeah. You know, before that plan was in place, I had no idea what I was going to do, but I believe actually my plan at that time was drop out and be a sparky.

And then Mum once again was like, oh yeah, you might need some other skills before you get into that. You know, Workabout Centre came along and that's when I just started prodding around and looking at what options until I found that plan and then looking at what options help directly with that plan.

And, you know, as I said, it doesn't always go to plan and, but it all kind of works. To doing a barista course, it wasn't just how to make coffee, it was how to talk to people, how to build those relationships with people very quickly. You know, it takes two minutes to make a coffee and you've got to really make a good connection because at the end of the day, that's what people come back for.

They come back to see the barista. Even if your coffee is a bit, how you going.

Dale Atkinson: I think that's very true. I know, speaking on behalf of the entire department workforce that when the Workabout baristas come in, we are very grateful for the, for that.

Natasha Chisholm: We get a lot of that feedback, yeah.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, no, it's terrific.

I think one of the things that sort of strikes me is that there's a bit of a wraparound here, Tash, in terms of what the student experience is. Can you talk about what that one-to-one experience and support from you looks like?

Natasha Chisholm: Yes, as I mentioned before, like, we take a really individualised approach because there might be some students who need more support, one on one support.

There are other students who prefer that we work with them in smaller groups. I think it's important to mention, like, we're not a full-time program. We're not a flow program or alternative learning, but we are there to support our young people when they need us. So someone like Jacob started in year 9, but then he also engaged with us year 10, 11, 12, and obviously several years post school.

So students can come in and out of Workabout Centre programs and services as they need that. There'll be some students where we might take a step back and do behind the scenes work a lot because the ASETO and the Aboriginal education staff in their school have that really great relationship with the young person and the family, and we might just be able to provide supports on the, I guess the outside of that, and just come in when we're needed.

And then there's other times where our coordinators might be that key person for our young person, and they're the number one contact and we're drawing in other services as they're needed. So again, it's all student driven. Like I said, we can put the opportunities out, but it's a young person's decision if they want to engage.

Dale Atkinson: And what's the age range that students engage with you?

Natasha Chisholm: It's generally 15 and up. If it's accredited training, sometimes there's minimum ages. We have run events for students as young as year four. We have like a, it's called career walk. So students come and do like little 30-minute activities of actually just starting to learn, Oh, I, I like doing makeup and hair.

I can actually do a pathway in that. So, just starting to, I guess, create that spark for them. But generally our programs will be year 9, 10 and upwards.

Dale Atkinson: And just looking at the website again and the broad range of options and areas that students are able to explore, can you talk to us a little bit about your connections with the tertiary institutions, with the training providers and with the industry?

Natasha Chisholm: Yeah, so when we're working with the universities, we're primarily working with the Aboriginal units in those universities. So, for example, just on Tuesday, we worked with the Yungkurrinthi team down at Flinders University with Indi and Viv, they're amazing. And we said, hey, we've got a group of year 10s coming who want to explore these pathways. What can you do? So they've taken the regional students through the university accommodations, we've gotten them on campus to actually see what it's like to be a uni student for the day. And then they've explored those different faculty areas as well. And we do that with Adelaide University and UniSA have hosted our health group for two days this week.

And those staff are amazing at being responsive to us and what our young people need, they create really engaging and interactive programs. Cause we know that if it has Workabout Centre’s name across it has to be engaging. It has to be interactive. It has to really capture our students’ interest. So that's why we work really closely with those people to ensure that that's going to happen.

With our RTOs, we work with a really wide variety. And again, We'll do a lot of that background work, maybe with the trainers to gather, you know, what's your experience working with Aboriginal young people, maybe actually support them to look at how they're going to deliver and what's their alternative assessment methods and do we need our stuff in there as support as Aboriginal people when there's a non-Aboriginal trainer.

It's the same with industry, for example, with Kmart, their indigenous recruitment officer has been great, and he works with us a lot to identify where there's local employment opportunities. So then our coordinator can go out to the school, target some of those young Aboriginal people, prep them up for interviews.

And we've had a lot of young people get jobs with Kmart through that industry connection.

Dale Atkinson: Well, it just sounds like there's nothing that a student can't dream of that you aren't able to kind of at least give them some concept of how to achieve that thing.

Natasha Chisholm: I would like to think that, like, we hear that you can't be what you can't see and dream big and all of those sorts of things.

I just think we should be empowering our Aboriginal young people in our community at every opportunity. Showing my age, I didn't have a lot of these opportunities. I was in a regional school as well; I didn't have a lot of opportunities to explore these certain things. And we didn't have school-based traineeships and apprenticeships at the time.

I didn't work when I was in high school. So I really value this, and we can bring this to our young people now. We'll do everything in our power to make that happen for them.

Dale Atkinson: What would your advice be, Jacob, to other young Aboriginal kids who are thinking about various different careers and, or maybe even don't know what they want to do?

Jacob: Just have a crack at everything. You know, if you don't know, it's harder to research into it than just do it. At the end of the day, it's, it's a job. You can go work at a place for a couple of weeks, if you don't like it, you can get a different job. I know growing up, it was very much like, oh, it's very hard to get a job.

It's very hard to get this, that. If you've got your head screwed on, it's not as hard as people make it out to be to bounce from one job. You know, you can try being a barista for six months here if you don't like it, go work in the kitchen for six months. If you don't like it, go work as an administration officer somewhere for six months.

Like, that's okay to do. You don't have to nail it on your first shot. Some people get lucky and they do. You know, some people work at the same place for 14 years. And absolutely love it. Yeah, and other people, they don't find what they love until, you know, they're 30, 40. And that, that's, that's fine.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, might even go higher on that number. I think that's good advice.

Natasha Chisholm: Because there's so much pressure on young people to, you know, know what you're doing after year 12. It's okay if you don't, I think you make a really good point, Jacob, like, just try different things, as long as you keep doing something, keep moving forward.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Natasha, how do people find you?

Natasha Chisholm: Me personally? No. For staff in schools, our Aboriginal education teams in secondary sites are our key people, and they're often connected to their local Workabout Centre coordinator. So we have three metro coordinators, and then we have three coordinators who are covering regional areas. So they can reach out to those people.

We do have a page on the internet and the intranet as well, with all of our contact details. We have a generic Workabout email address. That you can go to, which is education.WorkaboutCentre@sa.gov.au and that'll come through to me and we'll send that out to the relevant coordinators. We have a Facebook page that you can keep up to date with and you can message us through that.

And then we also have the careers page that you were referring to earlier. Oh, we're on the 15th floor in the education building, so come say hi.

Dale Atkinson: There are a lot of open doors on all platforms. So it's, I guess there's a message for our educators, but there's also a message for any Aboriginal young people who are thinking about entering the workforce in the next three to four years, that the program's there to explore and navigate career options and possibilities. They can help you to make informed career choices beyond school. There's the opportunity to take up school-based employment opportunities that can increase the likelihood of students finishing year 12, completing SACE, all these sorts of activities.

But most important of all, I think, was what Jacob touched on in his conversation earlier, which is the opportunity to develop the broadest possible range of skills, capabilities beyond just work skills, but life skills and expand your horizons as a human being. It's quite a, quite a program.

Natasha Chisholm: Yeah. You never know where it's going to take you.

Jacob, I would consider a colleague now as well. So Jacob and Zane, another student who's come through Workabout Centre, came out to one of our career expos earlier in the year as stall holders. So that was great to, a proud moment for me, yeah, to see some of the young people we've worked with over the years actually now participate in programs in other ways and engage our young people.

Dale Atkinson: Self-sustaining. It's an incredible thing. Natasha, Jacob, thank you very much for your time.

Natasha Chisholm: Thank you.

Jacob: Thank you.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all Elders, past, present and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education and today we are joined by a man who is a clinical psychologist, a family therapist, an author, a speaker. There's a very long list of things in front of me here, Andrew.

Andrew Fuller, thank you very much for your time.

Andrew Fuller: Feel free to keep going.

Dale Atkinson: Well, it does say here you've worked with more than 4000 schools and more than 500,000 young people, which is incredibly impressive.

Andrew Fuller: I get around.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. And your area of expertise really is around helping young people to self-regulate.

The idea of metacognition and their ability to stop and think. What is the most common mistake that teachers and parents make when they're confronted with a child who's struggling to self-regulate?

Andrew Fuller: Well, I guess the major issue is to believe that they can self-regulate, really. In fact, I don't particularly believe in self-regulation, I believe in co-regulation.

So that people learn to self-regulate eventually, hopefully, not everybody, through being co regulated. So we actually calm ourselves or enthuse ourselves in our relationships. Basically, we know that dopamine is one of the things that of course drives an up regulation and that's really driven partly by challenges, problem solving, quizzes, puzzles, estimation games in classrooms, all that kind of stuff, but also about the strength of the connections.

So, our social interactions are really important. Also, when we are upset, cranky, distressed, and so on. Some of us can sort out our stuff, and that's kind of cool if you can do it, but many of us can't, and so it's only when we're with somebody that we trust, respect, or have some kind of sense of connection with, that we can start to calm ourselves down.

So again, we co regulate.

Dale Atkinson: So the idea really is about building relationships between educator and child and helping to establish that before you reach a kind of crisis point where there is a young person who's topping out and feeling really kind of agitated and not in a good space.

Andrew Fuller: Well, really at the centre of any great school, any great life, any great experience, are relationships and so if you don't have the relationships there, people can't learn.

So we only learn really when we're within the company of people who we trust and feel safe with. And so without that, no learning exists in a school. So the core business of any school is if you can get the relationships right, then the learning follows, and the behaviour also follows that.

Dale Atkinson: Can we talk a little bit about metacognition? What exactly is metacognition?

Andrew Fuller: Well, a long time ago inscribed on the temple of Apollo in Delphi in Greece was the words 'know thyself'. And how wise that was to know thyself is a critical feature of an aware life. And so knowing yourself, of course, is critical for your learning, knowing how you learn best what your learning strengths are, what distracts you and so on, so we can talk about it in terms of learning.

But it's also true of wellbeing. So that essentially all of us, I think, have our ups and downs in terms of our practices of wellbeing and self care, I don't know about you, dale, but you know, I look after myself most of the time, but there's a few days, the party went a bit long or whatever happened, right?

So you're going to go, whoa, okay, I now need to pull back. And so basically, we need then to think about how do we help that conscious part of ourselves to be aware of that. Now, it's an interesting kind of phase to understand because it's not just a cognitive awareness of yourself. I mean, that's important, but we also need to be aware of under what conditions we function best.

So it's not just about kind of having the awareness it's going, okay, what are the features that I need to replicate in order to function best? Am I better after six hours sleep, or ten hours sleep or what works best for you? Am I better if I catch up with people regularly every day or am I better if I have sometimes where I don't catch up with many people at all?

So it's finding out that wonderful, curious mix that is individual to you about the conditions under which you thrive best.

Dale Atkinson: And how is that something that an educator can help to develop and build that self-awareness in a young person?

Andrew Fuller: Probably the most critical word to think about is what. And so partly when we're looking at kids or anyone who's not functioning very well, one of the first thoughts is not why is that occurring, because we can all theorize about why you're like this, but what's happened to you really? What's, what's going on? Now, maybe I may know that, or I may not know the answer to it, but speculating on what's, what's happened to that person that they are distrustful or feeling weary or feeling annoyed or angry or irritated by what's going on. And then partly the other question is the same word as saying, so what's going on for you? You know, you're not normally like this. How can I help? And so understanding that, is it critically important? Because we live in a world of why. Why aren't you ready on time? Why aren't you, you know, kids are thrown, and people are thrown, that why question all the time.

But what, is a much kinder response, I think.

Dale Atkinson: Why is it so important that we talk to young children about the way that their mind works and how this can help them?

Andrew Fuller: One of the most essential things that any of us can do in our lives, and we really don't have this as a major process in schools, which is a great, great shame.

If we can help people to understand how their brains work, we can improve their lives dramatically. We can improve basically their learning outcomes easily, but we can also improve their emotional lives, the richness of their relationships. So knowing, metacognition is knowing yourself and part of knowing yourself is knowing your brain.

In the last year particularly the amount of research on neurobiology of learning and neurobiology of basically wellbeing has been through the roof. It's really recent research and so what we need then to start to do is to think about how we could help people to get their hands on that research, use it in their classrooms, but also use it with young people to go, okay, so this is what's going on when, when I feel like I want to procrastinate, for example, what's going on in my brain?

Why might that be occurring? And what can I do that's different that's going to shift that state?

Dale Atkinson: You've worked with more than 4000 schools. Among those schools, are there any that you, that come to mind where you think, wow, they have done, an incredible job or are doing an incredible job. And what were the things that really captured you and really twigged your brain around that?

Andrew Fuller: The 4000 schools that I've worked with, and I've had been very honoured to work with all sorts of different schools, I can tell you that the things that really differentiate great schools are not programs or processes or even really things that they've imported or the knowledge and the wisdom of the staff in many cases.

It's the culture. The culture is around relationships. So having distilled this with 193,000 young people, what I boiled those three features down into were three words that basically when people connect with one another, when they protect one another and when they respect one another, people thrive. So the CPR of wellbeing, connect, protect, and respect.

And I think if you think about your own life, it's with the people that you connect with, the people you feel safe with, and the people ultimately you feel respected by, are the people that you're most comfortable sharing yourself, being aware, being creative, and being exploratory in your life.

Dale Atkinson: And I guess those moments that you reach a point of sort of psychological safety, that's where you're, you're confident to be a learner, confident to open yourself up to other experiences and to be open to gaining new learning. That's where it all kind of fits in.

Can we talk a little bit about the resilient mindset, which you've touched on with the CPR stuff? What does that look like as an individual?

Andrew Fuller: We've heard a lot over the years about fixed and growth mindsets, and the research has moved beyond that to a three-factor model. And if you think about it, these are driven by the challenges that we meet and our capacity to meet those. So we've all had times where the things that we have to do exceed our capacity.

I've got so much on, I don't want to begin, I don't want to, we get frazzled, we become anxious. So we enter an anxious mindset. There are also days where your incredible capacities are not fully appreciated by other people. Dale, I know that's very hard to imagine, but it possibly happens from time to time.

People don't enjoy that joke or that mediosyncratic sense of style that you have, and you get a bit dismissive. You become a bit avoidant. You say to yourself, well, what's the point? The point, nobody listens what I have to say. Nobody cares what I think. Right? And so we become into that avoidant mindset, but it's the balance between the challenges and the capacities that give you this sweet spot.

And that sweet spot is a bandwidth that we call a resilient mindset. And it's only when you are in that bandwidth that you can learn things. Other times you're either too anxious or too avoidant to learn a damn thing. And so it relates exactly to learning, but it also relates to your immunological functioning, because we know when you're in that bandwidth, your immunity actually is heightened and your longevity also increases, so basically you live longer and you're healthier physically.

So part of the art of running a school, running a family, running a community, running a classroom, is trying to have the bulk of people in that bandwidth most of the time. And being observant of the people who are either in the anxious or the avoidant mindset and thinking about what do they need from me in a relational sense to feel safe enough to get back into that bandwidth.

So it's not basically going, 'Oh, right now, Dale, you're in the avoidant mindset and you need to fix that.' Because you can't, you actually, you're going to fix it partly by having a kind adult who helps you to kind of, he looks like he's been feeling like he's been a bit neglected or overlooked. I'll ask him a question, include him and that kind of stuff.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the great challenges for, uh, principals and leaders within schools and preschools is finding time within a very crowded space for all of the things that they need to do from, you know, curriculum design to the leadership piece to these relationship type skills that you're talking about here.

What should they be prioritising in terms of how they're working with their educators in this space?

Andrew Fuller: For any educator to have a happy career, they need to have a good time with the people they're going to spend most time with. And those people are their students. So if you get the relationships right with your students, then you're going to be a happier person.

If you're a happier person, that's that becomes a bit contagious, right? So it's very clear to me where your number one priority is. Actually, when you're at work, if I get those relationships right work becomes a joy because of course, you know, people are kind of relating to you, they're vibing off you and things are going well.

Now, that's not going to happen all the time. We know kids are kids and life is life. But by the time you get into my classroom and you're welcome, that's great to see you, how's things, all that kind of stuff. And basically, I believe in you. I know you're a smart kid. We're going to get even smarter this year. We're going to do all that kind of stuff. That makes an incredible difference, not only to you as a learner, as a student, but to me as an educator, it just makes my job a joy.

Dale Atkinson: Maybe this is something that's a bit self-evident, but we don't really stop and think about these things sometimes. Can you talk us through the characteristics of a good relationship and what some of the warning signs of an unhealthy relationship might be so that people can really think and reflect on that?

And what you can't see, listeners, is he's just checked his watch. Yeah, can you talk us through some of those things?

Andrew Fuller: There are five major features to a quality relationship, and the first one is trust. It's hard to imagine a good relationship without a degree of trust. But trust alone, while kids are desperate for it, people are desperate for it, we all rely on it, is never going to be sufficient because we all get things wrong.

We'll say things sometimes we don't mean or upset people we don't mean to upset. And so we have to have forgiveness. Now, forgiveness is often a misunderstood concept because, of course, sometimes people hear forgiveness and go, it's sort of an anything goes kind of world, but actually forgiveness is holding people to a higher level.

It's actually saying, you know, you're more than this situation, it's actually, let's go and help you fix it, because that's what we do here, if we stuff something up, we fix it. But, you know, I know that that's not who you are as a person. Then the third part is integrity. Being who you say you are and doing what you say you'll do, which is a big-ticket item in all aspects of life.

The fourth one is hope. In a world that often wants to rid people of hope and spread anxiety and despair, being somebody who sides as the antidote to that. Being hopeful for his or her students, being hopeful for the world in terms of its capacity to overcome difficult times, is a remarkable statement.

Some might say it's a bit rose coloured glasses, but it's actually important to really tune ourselves to what's hopeful in the world and the great breakthroughs that are occurring, and there are those. And the last feature of the five is kindness. Now, I think that everybody knows when they're kind. And I think also everyone knows when they're not kind.

Put those five features into any relationship, a romantic relationship, into a work relationship, into a relationship between you and your students. Trust, forgiveness, integrity, hope, and kindness, and you're there.

Dale Atkinson: It's a challenge for the listeners, I think. Trust, forgiveness, integrity, hope, and kindness.

That's what we should be going after in all of our relationships.

Andrew Fuller: Try it out in your romantic partners, my friends.

Dale Atkinson: Andrew Fuller, thank you very much for your time.

Andrew Fuller: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: And we're also joined today by Kathryn Mahadeva, who's an occupational therapist with South Australia's Education Department's Self-Regulation Service. Catherine, thank you very much for joining us.

Kathryn Mahadeva: Thank you. Thanks Dale.

Dale Atkinson: While we were listening to Andrew talk there, you were nodding on a lot. What was resonating with you? specifically?

Kathryn Mahadeva: Well, our service is very much to support educators in schools to promote the regulation of students. We believe that that's essential for students to feel safe. The metacognition, being self-aware and understanding their emotions, their inner feelings, and being able to tweak their arousal levels, their attention, their emotions, and consequently their behaviour for the situation at hand. We very much believe in that occurring through relationship, so co regulation, and, yeah, our service is there to support schools with that whole process. We've got OTs and psychologists and also educators involved in our team.

Dale Atkinson: So what does the support look like? Is this a hand holding exercise with the staff out in the schools? Is it about training them up? Is it everything in between?

Kathryn Mahadeva: Well, essentially, when a school is interested in our service and puts through a request, we meet with the leaderships. So we very much want to be intentional, join them on a journey.

So their developmental journey of where they're going in terms of supporting the regulation of students, fitting in with their site improvement plans or their PQIPs and very much the culture of where they're heading and what they want to develop in that way. So we do planning and then we provide professional development opportunities.

So that's workshops, that can be either stand alone, sort of shorter, or it can be more of an in-depth process. And so the types of topics that we cover include relationships, so co regulation, the role of that in supporting emotional literacy development in students, the sensory processing as being an important part of understanding arousal levels, and also we look at thinking strategies and also educator self-care because we know that it's important for adults in the young people's life to be regulated themselves and having that inner self awareness and being able to therefore provide the safe environments and the co regulation for the students. We also do very much some follow up supports because we believe that the workshops alone are not going to make a sustained difference necessarily.

And so we're looking at translation into practice. So reflective practice through coaching and just unpacking what does that mean in everyday life in the classroom.

Dale Atkinson: So as a principal or leader out on a site, what are the kind of things that they might be observing that should be a little trigger to them to think, oh, actually, I might give Kathryn and the team a call?

Kathryn Mahadeva: Well, it really is a matter of what they're seeing in terms of the students. We're interested in data.

We encourage schools to collect data too, but they may be more informally noticing trends. But because we know that the academic outcomes, the learning is going to be based on students feeling safe and being emotionally regulated. It can be anything from student wellbeing that triggers this, or it might be even the engagement, attendance, all of this is, is related to how regulated students are. So there can be many, many ways in which we see that this situation needs support and addressing and building within a school.

Dale Atkinson: So I guess sometimes asking for help can be an act of vulnerability. There can be some anxiety around that process.

What would your message be to, to principals who might be like, oh, I'd love some help, but also I'm a bit anxious about how that might be perceived centrally or by my bosses or plenty of those sorts of things.

Kathryn Mahadeva: Well, I hope that we exude the fact that we're enthusiastic and warm. Essentially, we believe in relationships. So it's very much we, we want to foster that sense of safety ourselves. And we know that for all humans to be vulnerable and to grow we need to feel safe. So, it's very much a philosophy of our service.

Dale Atkinson: It's baked into the ethos.

Kathryn Mahadeva: Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: Kathryn Mahadeva, thank you very much for your time. She's an occupational therapist with the Self-Regulation Service with the Department for Education.

You can find out more about the self-regulation service on EDi and they'll also be in the show notes if you want to make contact and learn a bit more. Kathryn thank you for your time.

Kathryn Mahadeva: Thanks Dale.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all Elders, past, present and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia.

My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. And today I am joined by the Senior Lecturer at Flinders University in Health and Physical Education, the Outdoor Education Lead, Joss Rankin. Thank you very much for joining us.

Joss Rankin: Thanks for having me.

Dale Atkinson: Now, outdoor education. What is it?

Joss Rankin: It's a really broad term and it depends in what context sometimes we're talking about it. Outdoor education most commonly is thought of as the subject area at schooling and it's to do with learning in outdoor spaces, um, it's connections with environment, it's an understanding of cultural perspectives of those spaces that we're in and often connected with the adventure activities.

So when we think of outdoor education sometimes we might say I went kayaking or I went bushwalking or mountain bike riding. And that's a nice starting point sometimes, but yeah, outdoor education more broadly definitely connects with activity, people, environment and cultures.

Dale Atkinson: So my recollection as a child of outdoor education was, as you say, some of those outdoor activities and learning the skills around those outdoor activities. But what are we trying to link them to when we take kids outside?

Joss Rankin: Yeah, great question. When we take kids outside and we're learning in the outdoors, we can think about what the broad range of outcomes are that we might actually be looking to achieve. So when we talk about outdoor education in the Australian Curriculum, it's, it's not actually a subject area independently on its own from foundation through to year 10.

So we can actually look at it as experiences embedded in other subject areas, or we can look at it as a pedagogical approach. So if you're talking about that idea of developing skills related to the outdoor activities, often it's because we do have that subject in existence, although it's not on its own learning area, we might utilise outdoor education as a subject for the achievement of outcomes in a range of areas. So the outcomes can be connected to things like our cross-curriculum capabilities, our cross-curriculum priorities, or if we're using it to achieve outcomes in other learning areas like mathematics or geography or science, we can view it as a pedagogical approach and we might talk about that more specifically as outdoor learning.

So the way we go about the teaching and learning as opposed to the subject that has its own defined outcomes specifically.

Dale Atkinson: What are the advantages of taking children outside in terms of that pedagogical approach?

Joss Rankin: It's a really big question. And it's one I explore a lot with my students. And if we can think about, I guess, the domains of learning. So if we think about we can achieve outcomes that are physical, cognitive outcomes, social outcomes, affective outcomes, that question of what are the benefits, we can actually start to now categorize them into those domains of learning. I've got a colleague at Flinders at the moment, Kate Ridley, that's looking at what are the reasons in which we might embed movement generally in learning outside of Phys Ed or outside of outdoor education.

And there's really strong mental health outcomes that are being shown through research. We can also look at those social interaction outcomes. It's an interesting one because that, that idea of social competence is a cross curriculum capability, but it's not necessarily something that's always explicitly taught.

There's this misunderstanding that maybe because we've got people to work in groups that will develop those social outcomes, but those in a sense are skills themselves and students need to have challenges and experience what it's like to work with others and disagree and come up with common understandings and hear opinions.

So what are the advantages or what are the outcomes that we might achieve? We can look across that spectrum of there are personal advantages. There are advantages for social interactions. There are advantages for affect and stimulating different emotions, whether that be joy or being uncomfortable or a range of those sorts of things.

And I think for me, one of the biggest advantages of taking students outdoors is we often talk about this idea that we want students to connect learning with the real world and what better place to go for the real world than out into it.

Dale Atkinson: So what's happening in a young person or a child's brain that's different when they're in the classroom, as opposed to when they're outdoors?

Joss Rankin: When they're outdoors, we've got an opportunity to stimulate what we might refer to as embodied learning. So we don't have to be outside to stimulate embodied learning, but inherently doing things in different spaces that allow people to move and collect and share and show, um, encourages people to embody their learning.

And when we go right back to, say, John Dewey in the 40s talking about some of those foundational educational theories, we actually understand really clearly now that through embodiment, our mind makes sense of our experiences. So by engaging my body in what's going on, I make sense of what I'm learning in relation to me.

And a really simple example, I was talking about this with someone last night, is that I can tell you that a rose thorn is sharp. And you can understand that it is, and I can tell you that it's going to hurt, and you can think, okay, well, maybe I don't want to do that, but there's going to be a little bit of intrigue.

And until you go and touch that rose thorn, you don't understand what it feels like necessarily. And I think that's the example that comes to my mind because I have a three-year-old child at the moment. And, and I've said that many times, mate, that's sharp, watch out. And he'll go, yep, daddy, I won't touch it. And inherently then I'll hear the scream.

Dale Atkinson: That's the difference between sort of knowledge and experience, isn't it?

Joss Rankin: Yeah. This ability for people to have an experience with the knowledge that we're trying to engage them with and make sense of it in their own life world.

Dale Atkinson: I would imagine for educators sometimes the idea of moving a learning experience from indoors where there's a controllable environment and known parameters for these kids and taking that outdoors is a challenge. What is it that teachers should be thinking about and being brave with to make that step?

Joss Rankin: Yeah, it's a really good point. It's not necessarily the standard to take our learning outside.

If we think about the space that I work in, in, tertiary education, a lot of the lessons that training teachers experience are in indoor places. So in their training, they are getting used to and getting comfortable with classrooms and tables and the ability to bring a PowerPoint up. And it's often also been their experience coming up to that point.

So it's this cycle of what appears normal and what do I feel comfortable with? And the challenges often are that going outside is different. So the weather is unpredictable. The equipment isn't in beautifully aligned boxes on a shelf. I'm not a hundred percent sure that students are going to stay in a particular space like they might stay on the floor or at a desk.

They don't necessarily always do that anyway, but here's that idea of we're trying to create students who are inquisitive, are creative, want to know answers, want to challenge ideas, and the outdoor environment presents us with that. So I think the question was around what should we kind of be aware of in, in facing those challenges.

And you mentioned the word brave, and I think being brave is a really big part of it because uh, things won't always go exactly the way that I've planned. But if they have, we're working in a teaching and learning environment that is always predictable. And if I'm asking students to be creative and to challenge ideas, I actually don't want to end at that predictable point because we haven't created something new, we haven't challenged an idea because we've got to exactly where I thought we would get to. So if we've got an idea around the outcome that we'd want to achieve, not necessarily the product of that outcome, that can be one thing that helps that level of comfort to go, I understand where I want this learning episode to go, this day to go, this week to go, with how students engage and reminding ourselves that the content, the answer or the end point, that's just one little piece of the puzzle in terms of the outcomes that we are actually trying to achieve. And layering what we're doing outside with a range of other outcomes in the first place and just starting simple.

I want students to interact, and I want them to be inquisitive about a concept to start with. That might be what helps us feel a little bit safer and a little bit braver to do this.

Dale Atkinson: So if you're an educator who, um, is considering this for the first time or has had some experiences that weren't necessarily great in terms of taking the kids outdoors, what's a great way in for them?

Joss Rankin: I think start simple. Just have one idea or one concept that you want to play with and talk with a peer, a colleague, about how you're going to use this as a pedagogical approach. So for instance, if you're working with a group of students on the concept of number or sorting, maybe just start with using the outdoor spaces or natural pieces of equipment in the first place.

So maybe actually you bring a piece of the outdoors in rather than spending $150, $200 of your classroom budget on perfectly aligned blocks that have 10 of each colour and these sorts of things. Go outside and collect a bunch of things that are presented to you. Grab some rocks, grab some sticks, grab some leaves, grab some blades of grass, grab some rubbish potentially as well and look at those concepts just with that equipment and realise that actually the environment presented you with the opportunity to use those things as equipment and to, to explore the concepts. The idea of working with a colleague can be nice because they can be there as a critical friend as well. And when things don't work perfectly, like it gets a little bit windy and blows the kids equipment away, you can just take a second to have a laugh with each other as opposed to panic and look at how that actually has now changed the parameters for the way that the student understands that concept. One of their groups has blown away. Maybe that presents a conversation about the properties of that leaf or that stick or that whatever it might have been.

So start simple. Just go, what is the concept I'm working with? Can I use things from the outdoors and bring that in to start with? Or do I feel brave enough to go and use the spaces as well?

Dale Atkinson: And in wellbeing terms, what is the experience that young people are having, children are having when they're going outdoors, how does that aid with their wellbeing?

Joss Rankin: There's a range of really simple and really complex outcomes. So a few things that go on in the brain when we move, we actually stimulate new areas of the brain connected with, you know, releasing endorphins and these sorts of things that just generally make us feel a little bit better. I think there are greater opportunities in the environment to be able to connect socially.

I think structured classrooms sometimes can be a little bit restrictive in the amount of people we can engage with. And if we can promote good social interactions, we feel better about ourselves. In those groups and those translations into making friends in the classroom to connecting those ideas with what I do when I'm on the playground becomes really interesting as well.

There's also that idea that simply being in green spaces actually promotes well being too. So there's little bits and pieces that all start to come together in terms of simply being outside, being amongst green spaces and natural environments, embedding movement into what we do to stimulate a good sense of wellbeing, promoting social interactions, and seeing myself as a learner in the real world.

It's amazing how often we might explore a concept on a playground with a child and then go for a walk at lunchtime and see if any of those kids are trying to continue to explore that learning. They don't always, but it's quite interesting to see how often they will replicate those ideas if they realise that they exist in those places that they play as well.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, what an incredibly affirming type thing that is for an educator. You're obviously out and about in schools quite a bit and engaging with teachers. Are there some activities and some behaviours that have just blown you away in terms of like, wow, that is the most incredible thing. That is what all educators should be doing.

Joss Rankin: Yeah, there's some really great stuff that educators are doing. When there's a permission to explore and try something that might not work, there's a real sense of freedom. And I've seen some really interesting things that have been set up. And for me, some of the biggest wow moments have actually been about the reactions of the children.

When you ask that question, my first memory isn't necessarily of a particular activity, but it's of the response. And I remember doing some work with some schools down south and we were looking at these ideas of embodiment, the way that we might express our understanding through our movements. And we were doing a lot of things with musical patterns.

So a representation of repeating patterns and looking for those patterns in the music and then representing them with coloured dots. So for instance, every time we heard a clapping stick, there'd be a red dot. Every time we heard the kick drum, there'd be a blue dot, making that visual representation of what the repeating pattern was and how that translated to the music. And we were having some conversations with the children at the end and there was a really interesting conversation with, I think it was a year two student and he said, I really like body learning. I said, do you mate? What do you like about body learning? He said, oh, people don't usually come and choose to be in my group and play with me, but when we do body learning, they do. And I get a chance to work with my friends. And it was just one of those moments where you go, oh, this is for this kid about feeling connected and feeling safe at school, and it was a really interesting one.

Dale Atkinson: That's such a powerful thing in terms of the nexus that we're all going after in schools between, you know, learning social safety, wellbeing, what an experience that would be for the young man.

Joss Rankin: Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: Incredible. Now, what sort of conversations, you know, say you're working in an environment where outdoor education is not facilitated, uh, encouraged, isn't something that has been habitually in, in place. What sort of conversations should educators and teachers be having with their leadership teams around how to bring this into place? What are the main selling points?

Joss Rankin: I think the starting point is to define some of the differences and understandings. So if we're talking about saying, hey, I think outdoor education would be really valuable in this environment, and we get a response that says, no, I don't think so. I think explore that a little bit further.

So there's a little bit of work to do in defining the differences between outdoor education as a subject and outdoor learning as an approach to explore a range of outcomes from a variety of learning areas. Embodied learning as a pedagogical approach. And then we can also talk about cultural responsiveness.

So an understanding of different ways of going about learning. And if we can explore those differences in the first place, we might actually find that the initial no is a response to something like risk aversion. I don't want us to do outdoor education because we don't have the skills, we don't have the risk management, the prior experience with bushwalking or kayaking.

And we can say, ah, actually what I'm talking about is the ability to use outdoor learning as a pedagogical approach for these reasons. So step one could just be defining those differences and clarifying what we're actually talking about. And then step two might be looking for opportunities to engage with it.

So maybe you do have a really resistant group who don't want to explore that. So maybe test some ideas at lunchtime. Go and engage with children on the playground or in the sandpit and prompt them with a few questions. What are you doing? What are you exploring? What are you noticing? And then start to record some of that information for yourself and look at the ways that they are engaging with ideas.

And I'm going out on a limb here and saying I think actually we'll have some realizations along the way because over and over and over again, we see these positive outcomes from outdoor learning, from embodied learning, from an ability to be creative and explore ideas.

Dale Atkinson: Where can teachers go for more information?

Joss Rankin: Lots of different places, thankfully. The Australian Curriculum actually has this really hidden little space of information. We're very good at finding the learning outcomes connected to areas, the capabilities and the priorities. But if you type in and search for Australian Curriculum connectors, these are pedagogical approaches that can be used to explore the outcomes across the curriculum.

Outdoor learning is one of the Australian Curriculum's curriculum connectors. And that's a really good starting point for going, what is outdoor learning? How can it be applied to our curriculum to achieve learning outcomes? And it's also got a little bit of a research bank that starts there. If you want to get more interested in particular areas, you can search for things like forest schools as a concept.

And there's a lot of stuff that comes out of the UK that looks at this idea of outdoor learning from an early learning setting or what they refer to as forest schooling in some instances, but also revisiting some of that stuff that's through kind of initial teacher education around John Dewey's concepts of embodied learning and what that actually allows students to do.

 But thankfully that initial in through the Australian Curriculum, I think is a really strong one because it's, it's part of what we, we've got as our curriculum.

Dale Atkinson: That's great. We'll include some of those links in the show notes. Joss Rankin, Senior Lecturer at Flinders University, Health and Physical Education. Thank you very much for your time.

Joss Rankin: Thanks for having me.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all Elders, past, present and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education and today I am out at Craigmore High School and we're joined by Georgina Davis who is the Student Agency and Pastoral Care Leader at Craigmore High School. Hello Georgina.

Georgina Davis: Hello.

And we've also got Elliot who is a student leadership group member. He's in year eight.

Elliot: Hello.

Dale Atkinson: And finally Ellie who's a fashion design student in year nine.

Ellie: Hi.

Dale Atkinson: Thanks very much for joining us. So the reason we're out here is we're going to talk about student agency. What it is, how to get it, how to activate it and what to do with it when you've got it.

First of all let's have a quick chat with Georgina Davis. Georgina, can you tell us a little bit about Craigmore High School?

Georgina Davis: Yeah, absolutely. So Craigmore High School is a category 2 public school in the northern suburbs. We have years 7 to 12 here and we have an extremely diverse range of students from ATSI, EALD backgrounds and many different other backgrounds to be really honest.

So yeah, really diverse school with lots of fantastic students, over a thousand students on this site.

Dale Atkinson: Can you tell us a little bit about your journey as a school in terms of seeking to activate student voice and agency. What, what were the motivating factors behind it?

Georgina Davis: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so student agency has been a major part of Craigmore High School for a long time now.

I think even before I started teaching, to be really honest, and currently it sits with me as the Student Agency and Pastoral Care Leader, which is a new role this year at our site. Previously, it has sat with curriculum areas in regards to co-agency and students designing their curriculum. It's also sat in areas of leadership groups, which or other ad hoc programs where staff have volunteered to do those things.

And I think at the moment we're really working on refining that program and refining those curriculum areas and making sure they're really visible to all our staff and that they're able to understand the importance of student agency in our site for all staff.

Dale Atkinson: Now when I talk to my friends who are not educators about student agency, inevitably they always say, why would you bother asking kids about what they want to learn? So, what's the answer to that question? Why do we engage with students in this?

Georgina Davis: So student agency is a multifaceted approach to teaching and I think there's many, many, many wonderful approaches or reasons why you should use student agency. The reason that we use student agency, or I personally think student agency is really, really important, is it gives students an entry point and an engagement.

It's the same way that if you're at home and you are, okay, I've got a list of things to do right now, and one of them is clean the toilet, mop the floors, walk the dog, or baking. And baking is my passion. I love baking. I know which one as an adult I'm going to go to first. Which one is my interest? Which one am I going to be willing to engage in?

Which one am I willing to actually get some learning out of as well? Yes, I could probably learn how to effectively clean a toilet, but I don't really want to do it, so I'm probably going to rush it. I'm probably not going to do it really well. I'm not going to really pay attention. But if I, okay, I really want to bake a red velvet cake, I really want to refine the skills that I need.

Whether it be whisking eggs or making the best possible icing for that cake. I'm willing to have an entry point in that. I'm willing to engage in that. Students are willing to engage in things that they are interested in. They're not willing to, and I don't blame them, not willing to engage in things that they have no interest or stake in. Why bother?

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I'm totally up for the baking over the toilet task to be honest with you. So let's talk about how you actively activate that. What does that process look like?

Georgina Davis: So at Craigmore High School, student agency is a multifaceted approach. It very much is multifaceted at this site. So the first thing is your stereotypical student agency group.

So your leadership group, which I feel like most schools would have these days, is our first sort of port of call. However, we've really made an effort to diversify those student agency groups. So making sure that I'm not just got your stereotypical student leaders, the kids that want to be there and are happy to have leadership attached to their name.

We've also got different groups. So for example, we have the Charter Ambassador Program, which we're about to start running, which gives students an opportunity to look at the charter and what impacts them and what makes them happy, safe and well, and that they get to involve themselves in that. We also run the Australian Refugee Association group and I have a group of girls that work to really make their voices heard in regards to the refugee space.

So it's a really diverse range of students in those leadership groups. We're also looking at forming an ATSI group to support Aboriginal learners at our site. So that's the first sort of facet of it. The other area moves towards the curriculum side. Now within curriculum there's two approaches again.

The first one is subjects that have been specifically designed with student agency at the focus and they would be at our year seven and eight level passion projects. So passion project was designed for students to explore their passion and that was designed with student agency at the focus. So that's our middle school version of agency in a curriculum subject and if you move towards SACE, we obviously have the new EIF and AIF pilots currently running through, where student agency is once again at the forefront.

And I suppose the third part of student agency at our site is looking at our curriculum areas. So your maths, your HASS, your English, your science. And in those areas, co-design is used to support student learning. So they should have a say in what they are learning in those subjects.

Dale Atkinson: What difference does that make in that last bit around the co-design? What difference does that make in terms of engagement for the kids?

Georgina Davis: Yeah, so I think it goes back to even what I was just saying before about the baking example. If you're willing to engage in that, the results are going to be more authentic. The outcomes are going to be better because students are willing to put the effort, willing to put the time in.

So if you've just got say two designated lessons a week, which we do at CHS, and say you want to do this really, really big project, you're obviously going to have to engage outside of school. I'm only going to engage in that if I have agency in it, if I have some sort of stake in it, if I have something that I'm willing to do.

So students are more dedicated in their learning. The outcomes are much better in that they are authentically learning things that are important to them that they know are going to guide or improve their future.

Dale Atkinson: And what are the, um, kind of metrics, what, you know, in education we are absolutely obsessed with data. What are the metrics in terms of what you're measuring and what you're seeing from, from this engagement?

Georgina Davis: Yeah, so we definitely have to speak to our curriculum leads on this one because within CHS obviously many different, um, curriculum areas. I know specifically, um, if we're looking at our leadership group, so not the curriculum area that we were just talking about, we're seeing an uptake in students actually participating in those leadership groups. The number has grown greatly and it's also diversifying, which is really important. So whereas before we had no students from our disability unit in our leadership group, this year we do. And we're also seeing a range of students from a range of different backgrounds involved in these leadership groups, which previously we may have seen less of.

So it's really good to see a diverse range of students within these groups.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that sounds incredible and very rewarding, I would imagine.

Georgina Davis: Yes, it is.

Dale Atkinson: Which is a good time, I think, to bring in the students, given that this is all about the kids. So Elliot, Georgina spoke a little bit about the student leadership group and you're obviously heavily involved in that.

Can you tell us a little bit about what that experience looks like and the impact that you're having at the school?

Elliot: The student leadership group is pretty much when a whole bunch of students come together and want to make change for their peers and the school, the school environment in general. We come together in this room and have like a list of things that we talk about, sometimes made by teachers, but we host it ourself and the teacher mostly takes notes.

Dale Atkinson: What have you been tackling this year so far?

Elliot: The stuff we've tackled so far is the green team, which is pretty much a way to help the environment around the school. There's been a lot of trash and litter, and lots of children just don't care about the environment. So we put together a group of different students to help clean up the school and educate around the subject.

Dale Atkinson: And what was it that made that one of the things that you wanted to focus on?

Elliot: Ever since I was a kid, I've always like seen bad stuff happening on the news and bad stuff happening to the people around me. And I've always wanted to make some change one way or another, even if it's just in a small school environment.

Dale Atkinson: And does it make you feel like you've got a bit more kind of control over your day here at Craigmore High School?

Elliot: I'm a very controlling person and I like having power over other things and being able to do what I'd like is really rewarding to me.

Dale Atkinson: And do you feel like you've made more connections with the other students here?

Have you sort of expanded out your friendship groups into areas that you wouldn't have expected?

Elliot: Definitely. Lots of the students in the student leadership group I had barely talked to before I joined and now I'm pretty close with them and I can just send them messages about what's happening or just talk to them in the yard.

Dale Atkinson: That's really exciting. Ellie, you were a fashion design student, uh, in year nine. Now, um, we were talking before we came on air about just how old I am. Now there is no, there is no way when I was at high school that there would have been a fashion design program in year nine. Can you tell me what that looks like, how that's happened, and what your experience has been.

Ellie: Yeah, so, originally, I'm going to put this out, originally when I started I was doing visual arts. No interest in jewellery at all. And then I suddenly picked up, I want to do jewellery, I want to make, you know, all these pieces, and my teachers just went, alright. Just do jewellery making, like, I'll help you do this.

So, jewellery making is a lot of like, focus, a lot of, um, of course designing, and you know, making practical things. And really delving into what you want to create as a designer.

Dale Atkinson: And what's been the experience over the last couple of terms? Like, have you been able to kind of create some really incredible things?

Ellie: Oh, yeah, of course. I've been able to fully make three pairs of earrings so far, big thing for me because I've never touched jewellery before I started this. And yeah, really being able to like expand my creativity in that department.

Dale Atkinson: And are you looking to go on with it, a little bit?

Ellie: Of course. I've had a blast.

Dale Atkinson: That's excellent. Can I talk a little bit back with you Georgina about what that experience might look like from a teacher because obviously there is an element of... kind of courage and trust that kind of goes into that sort of approach where you do meet a student on their own level.

What is it in terms of the conversations that you're having with your colleagues to kind of make that really give that permission for them to try something new?

Georgina Davis: It's a really individualised thing. So I can say all I want to be honest, but I think a lot of our staff have a lot of really great tools in their toolkit to do that. Megan Hill is Ellie's teacher and Megan is fantastic at co-design and as you can hear already, she's done some wonderful co design with Ellie so far. I think it's really about starting the conversation with students. Because it can seem quite scary to release the reigns a little bit because as a teacher you're like, okay, I need to have my learning assessment plans, I need to have my unit plans, lesson plans and I also need to make sure that this all comes back to the Australian curriculum.

So your hands are fairly tied to start off with and then you have students and you're like I really want to engage them in this and I really want to do this and you're hesitant to start. Most people are 100% and I totally get that but I think if we look at the outcomes as I was talking about before, it's easier for you to teach a class where you're not having to run up against behaviour because you won't have behaviour in your classroom if students are actively engaged and if students are doing things that they have chosen, say like Ellie making earrings, the behaviour is going to be at an all time low.

So it's really about me helping staff create that conversation or start that conversation, really starting to sort of discuss their interests. Things they don't like as well, and like really anything. So having that conversation to start off with is the starting point.

Dale Atkinson: Back to you Ellie. You've obviously had this great opportunity and experience of, of doing jewellery design within the fashion space. Have you been able to think about, uh, other areas that you might want to expand into and, and use to engage your education?

Ellie: Personally, at the moment, my HASS class, we were focusing on, in the beginning, wasn't interested in that. It was like, basic, you know, World War stuff. And my teacher has said to us, she's gone up to us and said, Hey, what do you want to learn about next semester?

Is there anything you're interested in? And this has really got me like, oh, okay. Like, this is something I can have a voice in. I can pick what I want to learn. And it's really helped me personally stay like, on track. I want to come to school now because I have a voice.

Dale Atkinson: So Elliot, in terms of, uh, next steps and directions for the student leadership group, you spoke a little bit about some green initiatives. Are there some other things that you're looking to tackle in the back half of 2023?

Elliot: We're working on having different clubs and lunchtime activities, because the very first thing thing we discussed in the leadership group was there being nothing to do at recess and lunch and lots of groups just walking around having no idea what to do.

So we want to set up like student run clubs where students can pick whatever they're interested in, that being like chess or theatre or gaming. And like set up a little room at recess or lunch with obviously a teacher present so they can just do what they'd like and express themselves in a little room with people that want to be there.

Dale Atkinson: It's such a different approach to like teachers telling you maybe you guys might like to play some soccer at lunchtime or something like that. Do you feel like the ability to kind of come up with those ideas yourselves is important?

Elliot: Yeah, a lot of lunchtime activities has just been this is happening at this time, come here, or this is going on in this room. And I feel like having the opportunity to like have students pick what they want to do and like how they do it is really good.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's exciting, isn't it Georgina, in terms of being able to unlock the passion in the kids, but also give the teachers maybe a little bit more freedom to kind of engage with students in areas that might be interest from outside.

Georgina Davis: Absolutely. It's definitely, and it was a question asked of me this morning actually around like how rewarding this is. And I said, my favourite part of my job is like building relationships with kids and having a chat. And now in my role, I just do that all the time.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's pretty exciting. So I mean, I asked the students about their plans for the back half of this year and you've sort of ran through at the start of the pod just about some of those things that you're looking at in terms of climate ambassadors and the Australian Refugee Association group and other groups like that.

Where are you planning to take this?

Georgina Davis: So you've heard that we've got a couple of different leadership groups. I really want to expand that, driven by student interest. So SLG is something that, like, leadership group is something that us as teachers are like, we need a leadership group. I really would like to throw that back to the kids and see what that they feel there needs to be leadership in regards to.

I did mention earlier about the ATSI leadership group and that's about diversifying our leaders. And I think it's really important to hear Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices throughout our site as well as in many other facets of our learning. That's why that exists and why it should exist.

And I think setting up more leadership groups where students get that say is part of what I'm going to do. Chatting to our principal, Sarah, I think I'd also really like to make this learning and the student agency learning more visible across the site. I think for new staff coming in, and we have many wonderful ECTs at our site, it's really hard coming into a new site, whether you're a brand new teacher or you've been teaching for 20 plus years and trying to understand the lay of the land.

And I think student agency has always been at the forefront of our school, but I think providing staff with the strategies, facilities to understand what the key components of that are and how to do it within their classrooms because it looks very different at a HASS level to a student leadership level.

They're both student agency but they look very different. So I think making the learning more visible for others is something that I'm really keen to work towards and really delving into those specific curriculum areas, HASS, English, etc. to really understand the excellence that's happening in their areas and making that visible to everyone.

Dale Atkinson: And where do you go for your own learning in this area in terms of the networks that you tap into and perhaps the knowledge of colleagues?

Georgina Davis: Yeah, absolutely. So, firstly, knowledge of colleagues is, would be my first thing. We have after school on a Thursday when the kids leave early. Um, we obviously have from 2.30 to 4.30pm and throughout this time, we have used that time for lots of literacy intervention for our school because that's something really important to our site. But I think I'd really like to tap into the wonderful student agency that's happening throughout our site and allowing others to present on their ideas.

So I think to be really honest, I think your first, and you'd be silly not to, is looking at staff here that are already doing it because we've already heard of the wonderful examples in Megan's class already. Why would we not go speak to Megan?

Dale Atkinson: And are you comfortable if people come and speak with you?

Georgina Davis: Oh, absolutely. Go ahead.

Dale Atkinson: Excellent. Alright. Well, we might make some of those details available, uh, either through us or, um, up on the notes in terms of contacting Georgina, which would be great. I guess we've got a bit of time for one final message. So I guess my final question to all of you is, what difference has the activation of agency made in terms of, for you Ellie and Elliot?

Elliot: I'm a lot more confident about my schoolwork. Having like, most of the time it's just a task sheet with like a list of things we have to do. And the rest is completely up to us. So I love just decorating my little slideshows or PowerPoints or whatever I have to do. And having the choice to put in a lot of effort or put in a little. Or paint this one colour, paint it another. I just love that.

Georgina Davis: Sounds great. Ellie?

Ellie: Totally agree. This has just been something that's, you know. Like I've said before, it just allowed me to get more motivated, just in general, coming to school. I'm like, alright, you know, I can choose what I want to do, I'm gonna go for it. It's like, I'd be silly to throw away the opportunity. Yeah.

Elliot: I'm a lot more happy coming to school if that means I get to do whatever I want instead of following a script that a teacher gives me.

Dale Atkinson: I get the feeling, Georgina, that that, what they just said there, is essentially the motivator for you, is that right?

Georgina Davis: Yeah, 100%. That is the first and forefront motivator. The other thing also, if I was adding my two cents, is it's, like, it's easier as a teacher. I know it might not seem like that, like you have to go into a classroom, you have to then like work backwards and have a chat to the kids, but, If you're not up against students that don't want to do the work, and I don't blame them, some of the curriculum, it can be a little bit tricky to either understand or get through sometimes.

If we're facing up against that, sometimes it's really important we then then have these agency, these discussions to help our students, which in all fairness makes my job a lot easier because I don't have to behaviour manage. I don't have to do any of those silly things I don't want to do. I can just have a chat. This is what we're doing. What do you want to do? Okay, let's do that. That's your lesson. It's so much easier.

So whether you're either baking a cake or

Dale Atkinson: making some earrings or changing the world through green initiatives, the more control and agency you've got, the better. Thank you very much. This has been a great chat. Georgina, Ellie, Elliot. Thank you.

Georgina Davis: No worries.

Ellie: Thank you for having us.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we're getting a little bit introspective, we are talking about the Perspective survey and how it might be used to improve various different areas, including communication, change, voice, how we can, um, use the process of asking people how they feel about various different aspects of their school experience and how that translates into change in a school environment.

And we are joined by a couple of principals. Karl Robs from Port Lincoln Junior Primary School, hello Karl.

Karl Robst: Hi, how are you?

Dale Atkinson: Good, thank you. And we are also joined by Kirsty Amos, who's the principal at Parafield Gardens High School, and one of her teachers now recently promoted to B1 leader, Beth Pontifex.

Kirsty Amos: Good morning.

Beth Pontifex: Good morning.

Dale Atkinson: Let's talk Kirsty about your school. Can you tell us a little bit about Parafield Gardens High School?

Kirsty Amos: We are a relatively large metropolitan high school. We've got approximately 1,250 students and the demographic is quite, um, diverse. We have up to 50 languages spoken in homes.

We have four or five main languages other than English, and we have a very broad spectrum of socioeconomic status. It is a wonderful school. It's a really inclusive school. We celebrate diversity. And our teaching staff and our ancillary staff is just as diverse as our students and our community. So I feel really proud and privileged to be there.

Dale Atkinson: It's a very large, very complex metropolitan setting.

Kirsty Amos: Yes.

Dale Atkinson: Which I think Karl probably, um, leaves you at the other end of the spectrum. Can you tell us a bit about Portland Lincoln Junior Primary?

Karl Robst: Oh, absolutely. You would think that Parafield Gardens High School and Port Lincoln Junior Primary School could be poles apart on this one, we're actually, um, very unique. As a junior primary school, we actually the last junior primary school in South Australia with our foundation of the year 2 students. We have 260 students on average. Uh, a very broad socioeconomic backgrounds with our families. And being rural South Australia comes with its unique challenges, but also those positives as well.

As a JP school, one of our positives is that real singular focus of education for foundation of year 2. Everything from facilities to staff development has a whole school, JP Design, it's actually quite a, a wonderful spot to work.

Dale Atkinson: So two schools, two very different settings. Um, but the reason we've brought you both together today, um, is to talk about the Perspective survey, which is a survey that we undertake where we invite all our teaching staff to respond, to let us know how things are going onsite and how things are developing, and able to track some of the progress and those sorts of things. Now, one of the three focus areas that we are looking at as a department is around communication, change and voice.

And the reason you are both here today is because you've both been able to deliver some pretty impressive growth in the era of positive feedback around the communications. So we're going to explore a little bit about how that came about. So firstly to you, Kirsty, your communication score between 2020 and 2022 improved by 17%.

Can you tell us how that feels when you see that result?

Kirsty Amos: Oh, well, it was, I was definitely looking for an improvement, but we started from a fairly compromised spot and we've still got a fair way to go, but I was really, really pleased. I was probably a little bit anxious before the results came out because I thought that we had improved, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure of that.

But we had worked really, really hard. Not just me by any means, the whole leadership team, but actually the whole staff. So talking to each other and supporting each other and making sure that if we have a problem, going back to check in, is a really important aspect of what we do. So to have the affirmation that we had made quite a significant improvement in a relatively short period of time was good.

And it meant that we could keep doing things that we were doing, but also look for other ways to get better.

Dale Atkinson: So what was your immediate reaction back in 2020 when you got the initial results? What did that feel like?

Kirsty Amos: Uh, that didn't really feel very good, but I was a little bit protected from it because I had only been in the school for about a term, so I could read it in a particular way.

Probably what was most shocking to me was the comments at the end, but a lot of the comments were about communication. And so I was able to, after you, you put your emotions aside, really analyse what the, um, comments and the data was saying, and then decide with staff what we were going to do about.

Dale Atkinson: It's really important to take a bit of the personal out of it.

Kirsty Amos: Mm-hmm.

Dale Atkinson: Immediately. So what were the things that you went after?

Kirsty Amos: Communication, asking for information, analysing information, sharing the actual information, and then the analysis with people, but trying to do some of the analysis together. It's not possible to do all of the analysis together because, um, getting 150 people together often is difficult, but you can get smaller groups together to discuss things that are relevant to them.

You can share information. So I put out a weekly report, and I do that every Sunday, and I make it clear to people that they don't have to read it on a Sunday, but I would like them to read it before staff meeting on a Monday afternoon. And people have let me know that they like that because some people like to do it on a Sunday. Some people like to do it first thing when they get to school on a Monday. Some people like to do it just before they need to, and all of that is fine. But using that mechanism, um, I can usually send one communication a week. Every now and again, something really important and urgent comes up that I need to not do that, but people then know that that is the methodology that I use.

And if it's in there, it's important and they need to need to know it. But that also gives me an opportunity to put in an in attachments of photographs of data that's being collected and usually collected from everybody so people can see themselves reflected in the data, they can see themselves being listened to, and then they can see that whatever decision is made, either as a collective or with relevant groups, that there's a reason for it.

If I can't do what it is that the majority wants, and it's also important that that's communicated why and what we can do next. If we can't do X, what is it that we can do that is going to have the best outcome for the biggest number of people?

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, so it's communication linked to a strategic purpose.

Kirsty Amos: Yes. The original question was what we wanted to go after first, a lot of people were telling me that behaviour was an issue, and we knew that, and it definitely was the volume of behaviour that needed to be managed. Was a bit overwhelming, so we needed to change how we were doing that. So that was one of the things that we consulted about, and we came up with a very, very different model of how we were going to do that.

Then we had to look at the leadership and how we were going to make sure that the behaviour was managed in a reasonable timely way. And then that we communicated with people what had happened and why and what we were going to do next. And so that wasn't a short process that actually took two terms, but in order to be able to reassure people that we hadn't just forgotten, we had to keep making sure that people knew where we were at in the process and what was happening as a result.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, really powerful tool for creating a consistency of expectations top to bottom from you know, the students through to the, uh, teaching, leadership and all the way through, and the parents and, and families.

Beth, your experience as a, as a teacher and now B1 leader, what did you see that changed from that 2020 time to now?

Beth Pontifex: Lots of different things, but for lots of different reasons. So not only did our leadership structure change, but the way that teachers were included in different communication also drastically changed. So whether it was communication around behaviour, the way that we are now included in a structured way that if there is a critical incidence, for example, we know what communication we'll receive from leadership and within how long. The day-to-day communication around staffing, we have a daily bulletin that comes out, and this year we've recently added some more information to that. So it's just communication has improved but in lots of different ways and for lots of different people. Kirsty's weekly report that comes out every week, as she just mentioned, and that has different uses for some teachers.

They just like to know and overarching everything that's happening. Some people are really interested in the data that comes out. There's also positives that Kirsty shares in her weekly report about good things that are happening, and teachers love seeing that part of it as well. So I think I've been at Parafield in a really sort of important time of change, but for lots of different reasons, not only just communication.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Karl I don't want to pit you against Kirsty here who had 17% improvement in her communication score, but you got 45%.

Kirsty Amos: That's amazing.

Dale Atkinson: It is amazing. Tell us a bit about how you have achieved that, uh, over the last couple of years.

Karl Robst: In all honesty, it's been great to listen to Kirsty and Beth talk about their site and the improvement they've gone through with that, because we're seeing very similar levers of improvement in our site as well.

Just understanding that the Perspective survey provides that voice for staff, for all staff, and it really does give a good indication of that school climate. It's all about that clarity and consistency. It allows our leadership team to actually understand the climate for the education that's occurring and the initiatives that are taking place.

You know, positive climate leads to more successful initiatives. One of the levers I believe you touched on there, I think is something that we really focus on is building that collective investment in the school's environment and culture. So sharing the data, sharing the information, and really having that ownership about where are the improvements coming from based on that, that survey, so, uh, staff understood that. Now it is valued, their thoughts and their opinions are valued, so therefore, together we'll decide on where it needs to improve. Communication, our leadership team has a real, I guess laser focus on true communication stems from that trust. Building, that trust through all facets of the school and staff, parents, students, and our leadership team really value that communication and have developed the skills to do so with real clarity.

So our deputy and wellbeing leader are great practitioners, are developing those strong working relationships through that trust and really believe that there should be some really clear process for communication. I know Kirsty spoke about different methods and so did Beth, about communication between leadership and staff.

We have a digital platform, which we have similar actions as well with, uh, bulletins and daily communications. And having that ease of communication. Now, I really believe that it really should come from that, and Beth touched on it as well, that value adding direction as well, and really avoiding that deficit model, you know, that, uh, communication really needs to come from that, uh, value adding, so, you know, continues that trust.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, Kirsty he was nodding along there about the, uh, the value add model. Can you add a little bit to that Kirsty?

Kirsty Amos: Yeah. Schools are complex places regardless of where you are and how big or small or how diverse. But we, we need to manage the things that happen on a day-to-day basis, but we always need to come back to our core business and what it is that we are trying to achieve, which is, make school an amazing place for the young people that we teach and support them to develop the skills and abilities that they need to be successful in whatever it is that they choose to be successful in.

And the way that we do that is to have a site improvement plan. And we have strategies about whether it's about teaching, reading or um, numeracy or digital technology or so we have to be able to communicate about the things that we are making decisions about, but we always have to come back to that core, students at the centre, and we can do that by affirming all of the wonderful things that happen. I don't know of a better place to work than in, in a school because we have so many opportunities to do that. And bringing it back all the time is a good strategy too.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. It's such a great way to kind of reinforce the good work that's going on and encourage and help improve. One of the things that is a limit of Perspective is it's a point in time. It's, you know, once every couple of years and you get some results back. How do you track that the changes that you're making in response to it are being successful and gaining traction in the interim.

Kirsty Amos: I think we just use it as a point in time, but we continue to ask for information and share information and follow on. It's really important that if you ask for information, that you use it and that you share with people how it's being used. You also need to make sure that just because you got a piece of information and you choose to do X, Y, or Z, and you then do that, that may or may not end up the way that you think. So after you've done that, you've got to collect more information to make sure that it was the right decision in the first place. And if it is excellent, do more of that. But if it isn't, you need to modify it somehow. And you need to include the same people in making the decision if you're going to refine something.

So that's also really important. We, after every student free day, we have a quick Google form response sheet and we, we try and make it really quick and easy for people to see whether it met their needs and again, in the next student free day, if it did meet people's needs, we'll do more of that. If it didn't, we don't do that again.

But we also ask people what it is that would have met their needs. So we do that about really everything. So one of our strategies at the moment is before, during, and after reading strategies. And we have, uh, people really loved sharing their work. It doesn't have to be perfect work, but what the important thing is, is that people feel, um, supported to share, they feel supported that they don't have to be perfect, but that we are all in this together.

And we will get better if we share our work collectively. Lots of different data collection points, lots of sharing and using the information that we have together to get better. Continuous improvement all the time. Because you're already good.

Dale Atkinson: That's not bad. We might chop that out and use that as a, I don't know, a slogan for a t-shirt or something.

Kirsty Amos: I'll buy one.

Dale Atkinson: Karl um, uh, for you, how do, how do you maintain the momentum of or the focus that you are able to identify from Perspective and carry that through?

Karl Robst: I think one of the major challenges, and I know that Kirsty and Beth feel it in larger sites as well, is time. So if you want staff to communicate deeply about student needs, or within ancillary staff or to parents with special initiative groups, they must have the time.

This becomes a time tabling and a finance, and even a human resourcing issue, it can be. But if it's important, you structure the time in, and I love Kirsty's point about noticing all the quality and acknowledging the larger and the smaller achievements and really noticing what's occurring on site. I mean, how we go about checking in and maintaining, I guess, the momentum of the initiatives in place, after the survey, it really does come down to that, uh, open door policy. Really having leadership being open to feedback, have built those levels of trust with staff to be able to give feedback to leaderships and also the trust that, uh, as Kirsty said, it'll be acted upon. And if we can't act upon it, then have a real transparent conversation about why that is and what can we do instead.

Some of the work that, uh, previous leadership team put in place was around that aspect of time and communication, and really strategically giving staff opportunities during our PLCs to meet and discuss students' outcomes. And as Kirsty said, keeping students focused in that centre. It is all about the students and their needs.

Now, our current leadership team is really focused on the idea of a clear improvement narrative, giving all the staff a voice, providing the ancillary staff with high quality PD so they have the same communication, the same language as teachers, and can be considered partners in that student outcomes.

And our leadership team implement digital platform communication as, uh, many schools do. One initiative that we have, um, put in place that, um, not the Perspective survey, but our follow up check-ins have indicated have been well taken by staff is our PDP format. So Beth, our deputy and myself, are present in those meetings and we offer a coaching model and we coach the staff through the session.

So we ask them to come with less, less preconceived ideas of what we might want to hear. And instead through that open communication actually leave with meaningful and relevant goals. And, um, while that was something that we didn't put much weight to as far as we didn't think it would be a true, um, true lever, we just thought this was good practice and an opportunity that we could present. It's comeback from staff as a really meaningful opportunity.

And again, in some way it's really respected that aspect of time instead of the guesswork about what they think, uh, the leaders might want to hear. They come in, we have a real clear conversation, a real coaching method to actually unpack that deeply.

Yeah, I think that's a really powerful thing to have those sorts of conversations in an open forum with that coaching mindset in place.

 We are really talking about it in the smaller site though. Um, as the site gets larger, there would be many complexities around, um, time tabling where you would have two leaders in a session at the same time. So it may be unique to a, a site like such as ourselves. But, um, we do find it's a, it's a valuable method.

Kirsty Amos: Well, actually, Karl, it's interesting that you say that because we use a growth coaching model, but I don't do it all. So all of my leadership team have been trained in growth coaching, and it's a very similar process. We don't want people to come with preconceived ideas. So it is an authentic conversation where people are listened to and supported to come up with meaningful goals. Yeah. So that's great.

Karl Robst: Yeah. That's great.

Dale Atkinson: Now, if I can go back to the teacher perspective, Beth, what is the active role that the teaching workforce can play in this process? Not just of Perspective, but in terms of showing leadership from the troops?

Beth Pontifex: Yeah. I think it's all about, because schools, especially ours, is on that improvement trajectory around communication. Teachers actually feel more confident and willing to then go and ask those questions as well. Because the communications coming from leadership. Teachers feel confident to go and knock on a leader's door and ask a question or send an email, whereas that wasn't what people felt willing and comfortable to do previously.

But our focus is the young people in front of us and our focus is helping them. Whether that's positively, whether that's helping them redirect themselves and self-regulate. They're our focus. So just trying really hard to keep that in mind I think is something that is really important. We can all get bogged down in so much of the other stuff that happens in every school, every day, but just remembering why we're there.

Dale Atkinson: I think that's a powerful sentiment. So we might, uh, we're almost out of time, but we might just wrap up. Perhaps if I could go to each of you and just get your number one priority, communications wise over this term and how you are planning to kind of execute that. So, Kirsty, what do you think?

Kirsty Amos: Mm-hmm. Open, transparent, regular. Did I say honest already? It's really important that when, uh, people ask you a question that you answer it as honestly as you can with the information that you have, and do the best that you can to address whatever it is that the need is.

Dale Atkinson: Very good, Karl?

Karl Robst: I agree totally. I think having practices in place and avenues for communication in place at the moment, I think, um, we will really focus on being able to follow through with agreed actions from that communication.

So all staff who've have had a voice are seeing some results and together building that, that shared efficacy of that student outcomes, keeping those kids centred in the conversation.

Dale Atkinson: Consistency, commitment, honesty. Lots of good themes there. Karl, Kirsty. Beth, thank you very much for your time.

Kirsty Amos: Thank you.

Karl Robst: Thank you.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I'm joined by very special guest, someone who's CV almost defies summary in some respects, a woman who has advised education systems around the globe and the OECD. Valerie Hannon. Thank you very much for joining us.

Valerie Hannon: You are very welcome. Thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Dale Atkinson: Well, we've had you here today because we've gathered together all the principals and preschool directors within South Australia’s public education system for a discussion about the purpose of public education as much as anything, and to get a sense of where we need to go as a system and within individual schools.

What is in a brief summary, the challenge that public education is facing at the moment?

Valerie Hannon: It's facing the challenge that it was designed for a different time and for different purposes, and we have just rolled them on and rolled them forward with tweaking at the edges as though it will do for the 21st century. And the truth is they won't. Mass education, government funded, is a relatively new phenomenon. And the concept of the school, how it was, how it used resources, how it used time, people, space, we're all pretty much laid down in the last century, or even in some cases, the one before that. And those conventions have been very strong.

And I think if you look at systems, whatever they might be, economic or health systems or housing systems, there have been so many fundamental changes and yet education, has remained resilient and in a sense, you know, that's a kind of strength because people have a lot of confidence in the idea of school.

They went there, they know it's a kind of centre for a community, in many cases. You look at poll data about trusted professionals, teachers rate pretty high compared to say, politicians or journalists. So it's been a resilient system, but it's out of time. And the issue is not just, oh, well, let's refresh this, bit more technology, so forth for the 21st century, but rather the human species is in such a predicament and faces such extraordinary challenges, I would argue never seen before by our species. That we have now, I believe a responsibility to try to be what I call good ancestors. No, not what I call that. It's obviously indigenous people. Always had a sense of seeking to be good ancestors and we're not, because our education systems and the institutions within them are not enabling young people to shape the future that they need and that they want.

Dale Atkinson: Little bit about the old promise of education, being around social mobility and spoke a little bit about your personal journey.

Valerie Hannon: You listened my keynote.

Dale Atkinson: I certainly did. Now, you mentioned that you believe that's a false promise with an overvalue on the academic capacity as opposed to other skills and attributes that young people need. What should the new promise of education be?

Valerie Hannon: I think the new promise needs to be grounded in the new purpose that your colleagues are exploring today and what they look into their hearts and determine fundamentally is a good life in the 21st century and hopefully onwards.

So the old concept of the good life, which was, I mean, the Greeks explored it explicitly. We tended not to. There's a, there's a kind of hidden tacit, image, if you like, of wealth. I mean, actually, if you look up success, certainly in some dictionaries it says fame, money, and power. Is that, is that it? Is that the deal?

Dale Atkinson: That's a very narrow descriptive.

Valerie Hannon: Indeed. Indeed. But the underpinning kind of skeleton or frame for education is founded I think on a highly individualistic notion of getting on, of succeeding, of doing better. Yes, social mobility, making as much money as you can. And my argument, I think, in that of many other commentators internationally now is that we need to move from the I to the we. We need to think much more collectively about where we stand as humans on the precipice of some enormously dangerous crises, which are existential threats. And then unless we start to think A. more collectively about the common good, less about our own singular possibilities and be longer term rather than short term, then I would say we're toast.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. You've talked about the rebalancing of the value of the head, the heart, and the hand, which I think is linked a little bit to the argument that you were making just there, which is education systems have been grounded in this idea that funnelling children into academic achievement into university and into certain roles within society based on the capacities that we're able to assess through examination effectively.

How do we as teachers, as leaders of schools approach that idea of balancing the head, heart, and hand. What are we going after in the classroom with these kids?

Valerie Hannon: That's a really great question, and I think you heard some of it in Geoff Master's contribution to this conference after I spoke. Let's be clear. I mean, the, the first thing is you have to really explore, interrogate these ideas and make them meaningful to yourself. If you're just adopting the kind of motto, head, heart, hand, you know, it, it can be like, icing on the cake or frills or, or as Martin put it kind of at the periphery, let's, let's hope it rocks up.

These, the concepts say of being able to form and sustain and develop great relationships, which is at the heart of great lives. The capacity to understand a different relationship with our planet, which we have systematically violated and continue to do. That's a question of the value frame that young people acquire through their learning career.

And no amount of tech fixes or development of bio flight fuel carbon catcher will solve our problem unless young people start to perceive their relationship with a natural world in a very different way. And understand humanity's relationship to other species, for example, and Mother Earth herself in a very different way.

So that's, that's a huge agenda. And it is about heart, and it is about values and dispositions as well as knowledge and skills. I mean, look, I, I believe in knowledge, don't get me wrong, so we're not tossing out the concept of bringing minds to become the most intelligent they can be. But I think we want to broaden our concept of intelligence and understand that we need to be and grow in many different ways.

I will insist on the value frame being absolutely front and centre in all of this. And don't talk to me about knowledge as being sort of preeminent. And I've also seen enough of short of sheer intelligence at work, kind of slicing and dicing concept. Look, in our lifetime, who was it who created, say, the financial meltdown in 2008?

It wasn't the illiterate people. It wasn't people with low education qualifications. It was extremely greedy people with MBAs and PhDs.

Dale Atkinson: With a narrow set of capabilities, perhaps a very limited moral compass.

Valerie Hannon: Precisely so. So all of this needs to be in scope, hugely in scope. And I think one more thing on this, if I may think that the, the COVID pandemic was an eye-opener in many ways, wasn't it?

But one of the things across the world people clocked was that, you know, who is it who keeps society running? Who makes sure that we get food on the table and gets it delivered and stocks the supermarket shelves, who is in there in the hospitals, nursing people who perhaps don't make it. Head, heart, hand. And we disvalue those people.

So I, I think I mentioned in my keynote, as book, which I really recommend to your listeners. Called The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandell and a Harvard professor, ironically, who absolutely knocks to pieces this idea of a meritocracy built on intelligence and where that's brought us to. So how do teachers recentre this?

Well, and Martin Westwell touched on this, it's about bringing into the centre that which is at the periphery, and you can only do that if you get real clear about your new purpose and a narrative that surrounds that because that will enable you to create the kind of balance within your, your school offering. I think that is what we might be looking for.

Dale Atkinson: It strikes me as you are talking that to some degree the children and young people that we're educating are ahead of us in some of these areas, particularly around consciousness of environmental sustainability in the future of the planet, a recognition of the importance of democracy and democratic institutions. Do we need to be a bit better at listening to and following their instincts rather than continuing down the same path that we have been?

Valerie Hannon: Well, naturally we do and not just listening but involving them in designing solutions, which I think you in South Australia are in the lead on, I really do. I haven't come across more sophisticated means of exploring the understandings of young people and their potential contribution that I'm seeing here. So absolutely no question about that.

I mean, I'm heartened by what you say about young people's sensitivity to the fragility of democracy. I hope that's true. But the data, if you look at a number of sources on this of young people out of school from sort of 17 onwards, is that there's a real kind of indifference about democracy. So something like, would you be prepared to fight for democracy?

And the graph of people who said that they would is on the slide, is going down. On account of democracies disappointed quite a lot of people I think, so I hope you're right that young people care about that. I want to believe that. But we need to help them to do it. And we won't do that by kind of dry civics lessons about our government institutions.

We need to get much more relevant, much more participative for young people to explore forms of democracy and indeed, practice it like a muscle. But you are right, of course, on many aspects, young people are more sensitised. They're angered by the short-termism and the irresponsibility, the egregious lack of care for their future that adults have demonstrated, and they want to do something about it if they get half a chance.

Dale Atkinson: What you're speaking about, I think, is really reinforcing the role and function of teachers within society and the importance and pivotal nature of the role that they have. It's an incredible privilege and responsibility, isn't it?

Valerie Hannon: I believe it is. And becoming ever more challenging. So naturally, I argue for a kind of societal response to what teachers do in terms of both of remuneration and frankly respect. We need to work at that. It's really important. But with the advent of in increasing technology in classrooms, I'm all for it, and I think we should deploy it and exploit it to the max, but the skills of teachers are becoming or need to become ever more sophisticated and ever more central.

So this morning at our convening, people were asked to talk about purpose and so forth and again and again this understanding, this insight that relationships are at the heart of deep learning was surfaced, and that's spot on for some young people. As we know, the, the school will be the place where they form the most important relations, that perhaps the most, the loving relationships, maybe the only place where they get respect.

So for all my criticisms of the current, you know, kind of model of schooling, I believe passionately in the importance of the institution of schools, I think they're critical to flourishing and thriving societies for a whole range of reasons, which probably haven't got time to, to enumerate here but I think part of that is to create this public space, which, which by the way, you know, becoming rarer and rarer as we zoom more, as we buy our stuff online, as we shop less, you know, where'd you go in the public space to meet people not in your family and not like you?

So the whole concept of the school is a really critical space for connection and making relationships, I think is more important than ever.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. You have looked at schools and education systems across the globe to identify what a future school would look like. What is innovative about the approach of those exemplar, future schools and what's the common thread across them?

Valerie Hannon: Well, to be clear, in the research I've done on this, I, I didn't sort of set out to look at schools who are innovating because who's to say that their innovations would be sustainable or be successful in the long term or would be part of the future?

It couldn't just be me saying, I think so, and I'm not in the crystal ball gazing business. So my method of going about this was to start with the future, what we know about the kind of trends affecting our future, and look at the work of a whole range of organisations, which were futurists, think tanks, research organisations, intergovernmental organisations. Whose business was to say, here's how the future is looking, and if that's the case, what does that imply about what education should be doing?

And I synthesised out of that some design principles for schools. And these design principles were not around curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, which is the way we usually chunk it. They were around values, they were around operational philosophy, which is by the way, where curriculum and all that comes in. But they were also around learner experience. So three sort of clusters of design principles. And then with our research team, we went out, we had look for schools who were exemplifying these design principles. All of them actually with a very clear view to preparing their young people for the future that they want.

So if you ask me, values were very upfront around purpose, again, come back to that, that word, very much framed on understanding how equity is essential for a thriving future, that schools need to be absolutely relevant to young people's lives as they're lived. That they need to be learning centred in that they employ all the best research about how learning becomes powerful. And it's powerful. That they deploy technology cleverly not, you know, obsessively, sometimes a paintbrush is the best piece of technology. And that they are ecosystemic, which perhaps is not a word, familiar with colleagues, but meaning that they, they reach out, they see the school as a kind of base camp from which learners reach out and to which they bring terrific learning resources. And then finally they really do focus on the learner experience. Cause if it doesn't change the learner's experience, doesn't really mean a damn. And how do the learners experience it? Well, it should be, they should have a sense of being included, that they should be known where collaboration is the norm. That's how people do things here. You know, we collaborate together so we become powerful learners. That it is personalised, Geoff Masters talked a lot about that today, and obviously that's very challenging in public schools, but we're finding better ways. And I'll finish with this, that learners should feel empowered. Not disabled, not humiliated, not disregarded, but actually the school is a place where they become empowered.

Dale Atkinson: Well, I think it's a lovely, powerful message to finish on. Thank you very much for your time, Valerie Hannon.

Valerie Hannon: Thank you.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we are joined by Professor Geoff Masters, who's the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Council for Educational Research. He's a man who has held numerous roles in education in Australia, nationally, states, territories, he's advised a lot of the governments, if not all the governments across the country.

Thank you very much for your time, Professor Masters.

Geoff Masters: It's a pleasure.

Dale Atkinson: So first of all, we are here together at Leaders Day, and one of the things that we are discussing is the purpose of public education. You've been writing about this for a number of years, particularly within the context of emerging challenges for public education.

What are the big challenges that we need to address at the moment?

Geoff Masters: Well, I think globally there's recognition that school systems everywhere face a couple of big challenges, and really the first challenge is to think about how we better prepare young people for their future. What kinds of skills, what kinds of knowledge, what kinds of attributes will young people need if they're going to not just survive but thrive and flourish in the future. So that's a question that, as I say, school systems everywhere are now asking, and I think there's a general recognition that curricula as they have existed, are not going to provide the kind of preparation that people believe is now required. And that's because the curricula tend to be heavily based on subject learning.

Subject learning will continue to be important of course, but it's a matter of getting the balance right. Not so much emphasis on memorisation, on reproduction in a, in a passive way of facts and procedures, but being able to think, being able to take what students know and apply it, transfer it to different contexts.

They'll need skills in thinking critically, solving problems, creating new solutions. Around the world there's this focus on the challenge of broadening our priorities for education and incorporating into that priorities like student wellbeing and social and emotional skills that young people will need to develop.

So that's one challenge. Then the a second challenge is the challenge of ensuring that every young person develops those kinds of outcomes, knowledge, skills, attributes. So this, if you like, is the equity agenda, and it's equally important to make sure we don't leave many young people behind as we move in this direction.

Dale Atkinson: Is a move away, I guess, from a post-industrial kind of work-based outcome for children and young people and funnelling them into contributing to the economy in certain clearly defined ways.

For education systems and adjustment in their priorities is difficult and it takes a a lot of change. How are we going to make this move to adapt to this new world?

Geoff Masters: Well, it is true. I think the kinds of changes that we are now talking about are not just minor changes. They're not just tweaking what we currently have.

It really means rethinking, redesigning, re-imagining, the way that we think about learning itself and the way that we structure learning in school. You know, once upon a time it was the case that even students who didn't do well in school could end up in employment. There was a need for people with low levels of skill and manual skills and so on.

But of course, what's been happening over recent decades is that knowledge is becoming more accessible, more routine jobs are being performed by machines. And so there's a real risk, I think, that people who do not achieve minimally adequate standards are going to be left behind and will often be left without job opportunities.

And that will have implications for all sorts of other outcomes, health outcomes, you know, career, earnings, and lifestyle. And so if we don't address this question of how we ensure that every young person is well prepared for their future, there's a real risk, I think, that we end up with social consequences of that. People who fall behind and, and end up being unemployed see education as part of the problem. Education, they will say, works in the interests of the already advantaged, the social elites. So I think there's the potential for significant social division if we don't keep our focus on not just ensuring that people are well prepared for their futures, but that every young person is well prepared.

Dale Atkinson: It's a significant change in mindset mentality for education systems and perhaps not educators, because I feel like some of the conversations that I have with teachers and principals and preschool directors, they are very focused on the whole child, but they do feel sometimes that they are operating within a system that has some clearly defined structures and restrictions and, and things that they have to go after.

In particular, the signal that we send around academic performance where we sit with the PISA scores, SACE outcomes in South Australia, NAPLAN scores. How do we send a different signal to our educators?

Teachers know what they would like to be able to do, and schools leaders know what they would like to be able to do, but often they work within a framework that not only guides what they do, but often constrains what they're able to do.

Geoff Masters: And what I'm talking about here is the curriculum. The content of the curriculum, the way the curriculum is organised and, and the way it organises learning, I'm talking about examinations and assessments and reporting requirements. These are all part of the framework or the context within which schools work.

And we all need to be thinking about the implications of that. It's not just something for education departments and national curriculum bodies and so on to be focused on. It's something for all of us who have an interest in improving the quality of education and the outcomes of education for young people.

We all need to be thinking about how we redesign the context within which schools work. And as I said, I think that needs to be a radical redesign if we're going to address the challenges that now face us.

Dale Atkinson: Speaking of radical redesigns, there's been a lot of discussion recently about the role of artificial intelligence and the impact that it might have on education.

A lot of the media coverage is centred on it as an issue of assessment, that it's going to present issues for educators and education systems in understanding how well children are doing and perhaps not focusing on what I think is perhaps more of a central problem, which is what does that actually mean for what these children need to be able to do when they enter the workforce and move beyond schooling?

How do we start to look at those issues? The what is education for that central kind of component within an environment where there are rapid technological developments.

Geoff Masters: Yeah. What is the role of humans in the future? What do we want humans in the future to be able to do? They need to be able to work with the available technology, and the technology needs to be supporting what it is that humans can uniquely contribute. So I see an ongoing role for teachers in this, but I see technology increasingly being able to support the work of teachers. For example, when you mentioned assessment, I can see technology being used to provide better information about the kinds of misunderstandings that students might have developed.

For example, automatically testing hypotheses about misconceptions that students might have. I can imagine that. And then feeding that through to the students and to teachers. So yeah, technologies do introduce challenges. People have been worried, as you said about the implications for assessment. My worry there would be that we don't use the appearance of things like Chat GPT to go backwards. One response would be to say, alright, from now on, our assessments are just going to be paper and pen tests where we can control what's going on. That would be a backward step in my view. On the other hand, there are challenges around the authentication of student work as their work if they're able to draw on systems like Chat GPT so it's a question of working out as we go along, how to make best use of these available technologies and, and how to have them complement the work of teachers.

Dale Atkinson: If we are to broaden out the purpose of public education, having signalled to parents that certain things are valued, what conversation do we need to be having with parents in the public more generally about broadening out the metrics that we are going after, and how do we demonstrate that there's value in those other things that are perhaps harder to quantify?

Geoff Masters: Yeah. Well, I think the first thing I would say is that in my view, the disciplines continue to be important. Subject learning continues to be important, and it always, they always will.

But it's a question of what that means in practice. And I think what we need to work with parents on, so it's a matter of having appropriate conversations around these topics. We need to work with them to say, look, the world is changing. Knowledge now is much more accessible than it used to be. You can look things up very quickly.

Some routines that we used to teach, you know, in mathematical, long division or whatever, students can now carry out those operations on their devices. And there are many things now that machines can do. So we need to be thinking about the implications of that for what we value, the kinds of learning that we value.

And I think if you approach it from that direction, Parents in the broader community will understand what we're saying. We're not saying that knowledge is not important and that mathematics, science are not important. Of course they are, but it's a question of what should we now be valuing because traditional kind of passive, reproductive learning that is characterised, so much of education will be less relevant because of the ready accessibility of facts and processes and routines.

Dale Atkinson: Perhaps the last thing to touch on before I let you go is we're facing a, a bit of a teacher shortage across Australia. In fact, internationally. What should we be doing to raise the profile, the profession, and attract more young people and indeed people who aren't so young into the teaching profession?

Geoff Masters: Oh, that's a really interesting question too. Look, I think part of the answer is to promote teaching as important to the future of individuals and the future of society to help the community understand that teaching is crucial to building the kind of future that we want.

And I think some countries, for example, Singapore have been quite effective in doing this. They've made it clear that school education and that teaching are crucial to the future of the nation. I mean, in that case, they don't have things they can dig out of the ground and sell. And so they know that's a capacity of, of their humans, their population that will be so crucial to their future.

So, I think it's partly about sharing with the community, just how important the work of teachers is and will be for creating the kind of future that we want. There are other things we can do as well, I think to make teaching more attractive and they include increasingly treating teaching as a profession and giving teachers not only a better preparation, but also more flexibility and more autonomy to decide what and when and how they teach. I think the more we constrain those things, the more tightly we try to specify what you have to teach, when you have to teach it, how you have to teach it, we de-professionalize and make teaching less attractive as a career.

Dale Atkinson: I think we'll have a lot of teachers nodding along to that last sentiment. Professor Geoff Masters, thank you very much for your time.

Geoff Masters: You're very welcome.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a Podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I am joined by a man who has an extensive technological background technology in schools, technology around schools, ways schools can use technology.

He's the Government and Academic Engagement Lead at Google for Education. Mr. Chris Hart, thanks for joining us.

Chris Harte: Thanks, Dale. Lovely to be here.

Dale Atkinson: So first of all, what is the positive potential of technology in education?

Chris Harte: So I think one of the areas where technology can genuinely support is in personalising learning.

And I think that we've talked about like the promise of personalising learning for 20 years. How do we give each child an equitable shot at learning, at learning growth? How do we really ensure that they have what they need at the point in time? And technology has always like hinted at that possibility and never really delivered.

And I think that we're moving into a space and technology where the actual capacity of the technology to support the personalisation of learning is becoming a reality. If you tackle the big challenges around access to devices, access to connectivity and platforms and skill building and pedagogy, which have now made sound really small, but they're pretty big challenges once you kind of tackle those and you're in a space where young people and children have access to technology, as a standard piece of their learning. It's not like we're going to go to the lab to do an hour. They've got some access to technology over a long period, an extended period of time. Then I think we're in a space where technology is supporting personalisation and you know, that's through AI. I think it's through the ability to collaborate and to connect globally.

I think there are so many parts of that where we're kind of plugging into a learning ecosystem beyond just the classroom.

Dale Atkinson: So you must engage with a lot of schools out there in all sorts of capacities. What are you seeing nationally and internationally that is really exciting, you and animating sort of your work?

Chris Harte: I'm really so lucky. I mean, I spent 17 years working in schools as a, as a languages teacher in the school leader in the UK and also here in Australia. I should never pick a favourite school, so I'm not going to say a favourite school, but one of the schools I think that really inspired me and continues to inspire me is XP School in Doncaster in the UK.

XP School is one of those schools I worked very closely with a lot of the founding staff in that space, and it came from the tragedy of a secondary school burning down. And so, what do we do? It's actually a blank canvas for us to be able to do something brand new and XP School takes a very, very different approach to learning.

And even though, you know, I have a passion I guess for technology, the reality is that the technology at XP is probably quite invisible. It's just there. And it really is much more about the pedagogical approaches and the culture of personalisation. And it is a bit of a tagline, but it's really meaningful as they talk about the children and young people in the XP schools because there are now a number of them in the XP schools are crew, not passengers.

And so it's really about how do you empower the agency that the young people already have so that they are driving their learning with support, with scaffolds, with accessibility, with all of the things that the kind of grownups in the space have to put in to ensure that that happens. The reality is that that crew, not passengers, mantra, really feeds into everything.

So students drive their learning. They do take a project based, they're actually called expedition based. So that's where XP comes from, expedition-based approach to learning, where they will investigate through transdisciplinary approaches, some big challenging questions, but they connect to the local community as well.

And the walls both kind of physical and metaphorical, I guess, are really porous. So they're constantly connecting out to community, having community connecting in. And part of the technology piece is being able to connect to that global learning community and global learning experiences. So when I'm looking at something which is a very non-traditional model of a learner focused ecosystem, I think XP has got a really interesting story there, which is within the context that the school exists, it's within the physical context, the location, the community, and every school's different.

But I think there are some things that you can pull from that, which are really interesting to explore anywhere in the world.

Dale Atkinson: I'm going to make a big assumption here. Any parent of a child and teaches are, are similar in this dynamic, understands the plasticity of their little brains and their capacity to pick up technology is far more intuitive than perhaps it is for those of us as we get a bit older.

What are the challenges for educators in this space, and how do we encourage upskilling and building capacity in these areas for, for people who perhaps aren't the digital natives?

Chris Harte: Yeah, it's a, it's a really great question because I think there is absolutely a lot of truth in the idea that young people who have been surrounded by technology intuitively know how to access and use the technology, but they don't intuitively necessarily know how to access and use it for good. And in the sense of they don't like they can use the things, but there are still a bunch of skills around digital citizenship, around what it means to use the power of technology to advance learning, to do good in the world. I think that's a really important piece that needs to be deliberately designed by educators, um, and, and families actually, and parents to talk about, you know, what are the pros and cons of, of technology because there are. And the technology in itself is, is never at fault in the sense that it's just a thing, it's just a tool. But the reality is like how we use it, how we apply it. So while I totally agree that young people tend to know how to use the technology, whether they know how to use it well and safely, for the most positive impact, I think is maybe another question.

And to pick up on the, the kind of upskilling piece, there are lots of programs out there at Google we have a program called Be Internet Awesome. Which is a kind of game based, um, curriculum around for young people, which is freely available just in go and Google it. And that is really focusing in on how do I stay safe online, how do I look after my identity?

What does it mean to have a digital footprint, those kinds of things. So we do it through a game-based approach, which is great, and we localised it across the Asia Pacific region into many different languages now. So that idea of, yes, there is technology, yes, you know how to turn it on, you know how to do stuff with it.

But there is definitely learning and upskilling around that, the capabilities and the digital kind of citizenship skills needed to really make the most of it.

Dale Atkinson: So one of the big challenges for the schooling system over the last two or three years has been COVID-19, the impact on learning. What has it taught us about the positives and the negatives of technological opportunity?

Chris Harte: At the height of COVID, there were kind of 1.5 billion kids who were, you know, forcibly removed from their schools across the world. So there were suddenly kind of evicted and having to learn from somewhere else. And in many countries, you know, in Australia we were, we are very lucky, we're generally resource rich and able to do kind of remote learning and those kinds of things. For where that was impacted in many other countries, that was not the case. And I think what it has taught us, there are a couple of things. I think that technology in and of itself is never the solution that it has to be about how technology is used. So if you go personal anecdotes, I have a who's now a 17-year-old, but he was going through year 10, 11, and 12, some parts of 12 through COVID.

And day one, when he was sent home, there was a timetable set. He was online and he had lessons, you know, an hour long between 9 and 10 and whatever. And day one, he was sitting at the dining room table, you know, bright eyed and bushy tailed. I think after four days he was lying on the sofa with his laptop, and then probably after a week he's in bed with his hoodie on, camera off.

And there was something about that whole piece. I mean, it was a challenging time anyway, but there was something about that whole piece of we can't shift technology into the same structures. It'll only take us so far. So if we try and just take school as is and shift it online, then actually we're losing connection. We're losing that wellbeing aspect. You end up with a two-dimensional representation of your class where you might have some cameras on and some cameras off, and this isn't the best of circumstances where people have actually got technology and connectivity. I think there's something about that learning design is not the same, so you have to think about learning design hand in hand with technology. And why I think the, the kind of pandemic and the, the sessions of remote learning have, have really taught us is that to do learning really well with technology, we have to unleash learner agency. They have to have some level of autonomy, some level of choice and voice and responsibility and identity around their learning experience through technology.

Because if we just think, oh, I'm going to do my teacher piece, and then the kids are going to fill in some quizzes and, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but you're losing a huge amount of students’ engagement because it becomes such a passive piece. And you know, as a teacher, you're walking out of the room, you've got eye contact, you've got the ability to keep the dynamic in a room or in a learning space going, and you kind of lose that a bit with technology.

So the learning design has to be different. The learning design has to be focused on learners at the heart of a learning ecosystem, like how do I tap into this self-serve learning content? How do I tap into this lecture from an expert in, in the states on something else? And I think it's a much more dynamic and, and in many ways more interesting and personalising opportunity to take technology as an enabler of a different paradigm versus let's just pick up school, which we tried to do because that was, it was an emergency, right? You try to pick up school and put it into technology. So I think that that is a shift. My biggest worry is that we snap back to an older paradigm because we're all tired, like we're all sick of change. And you know, there's the real exhaustion out there. So I think that school's thinking about that and saying, what did we learn?

And in fact, asking the very question, Dale, that you just asked is, what did we learn about it? What can we take the good bit and how can we move that forward in our school, I think is a real opportunity.

Dale Atkinson: I mean, there are some fundamental things about the way, uh, education infrastructure is designed which are not future ready to the physical spaces, the furnishings, even the structure of the school day, uh, in many cases, which can sometimes be, you know, locked away in enterprise agreements and various bits of legislation.

These are very big challenges for us. What are some of the kinds of practical changes that schools, educators, leaders, can make now to kind of adopt some of these technologies in a really meaningful way for kids?

Chris Harte: I think that one of the really interesting pieces in this is that if we focus on an incremental shift on what we already do, then technology will be helpful. It'll be something that's useful for kids. It'll shift maybe instead of having a handwritten essay as a proxy for learning, we've got a, you know, a really dynamic video presentation as a proxy for learning, but it's still, at the end of the day, just a proxy for learning for, for something from a curriculum.

I think that the small steps are about how does this enable us to do something different and better than we would otherwise do. Like I'm a fanatic for post it notes and butchers’ paper, like I love it. I'm all about it. I want to be in that space. I want to be moving stuff around. And sometimes, you know, you can go online and, and you can go and do a Padlet, or you can do a Jamboard or something like that.

And it's a kind of that when we talk about sort of SAMR models and pieces like that, it's a bit of a substitute level. What I'm really interested in is yes, do that because that helps teachers to feel comfortable. It helps them to see that the technology helps a little bit. Look for things which are maybe more augmentative, things that are going to move learning in a different direction, but also really try and at the same time, and this is also the challenge, at the same time, in parallel, try and reflect on what would it fundamentally look like if we shifted something like the timetable.

So what does it look like when, which we did during the pandemic, often in many schools, what does it look like when students have extended periods of time where they are driving their online? And I think when we talk about agency and it, it sometimes feels like it's a student voice wellbeing place and it's like, oh yeah, it's about students being able to talk about what they want, which it is having some voice and having some choice.

But I think the reality with agency is that technology allows the students to access learning at times, which are more appropriate to them, and that will be different for every child. And technology allows us at this idea, again, of, of the promise of personalisation. Technology allows us to lean into personalisation.

So if you were to say to kids, okay, we, we are doing this for unit of work, and there's some content and there's some process and there's some product, one really simple thing with technology is to say, okay, the content is x, the process we're going to use over the next six weeks is this. The product can be whatever you want.

Use technology. If you want to go and do a video, do a video. If you want to do a beautiful poster, then do a poster. Like as long as whatever you’re creating demonstrates the learning outcomes. Great. And I think unleashing technology that way is a really small step that people feel comfortable with, but also then that helps learners and young people to really demonstrate what they know and what they can do and what they can apply in lots of different modes.

And I think that's a real joy of technology and I think it's that kind of, short, easy step to take.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it does take some bravery though.

Chris Harte: It all takes a little bit of bravery. I think that's the thing.

Dale Atkinson: Well, I think you've inspired all of us to be maybe a little bit braver in our thinking, um, as we move forward.

Thank you very much Chris Hart, for joining us to talk about technology and education.

Chris Harte: Thanks for having me.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today something with a bit of an international flavour. I'm joined by a man called Sir Kevan Collins. He is the founding Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Fund.

He's also a member of the department's Education Innovation Council. Uh, which is chaired by our CE. So he's a, an important advisor to the strategic direction of our department. Sir Kevan, thank you very much for joining us.

Sir Kevan Collins: It's great to be here.

Dale Atkinson: Can I ask you first about, uh, the parochial question as a South Australian, what are the advantages and disadvantages we've got as a jurisdiction

Sir Kevan Collins: In the, in the work I do supporting South Australia, it's, it's interesting reading the data because I think the big advantage is obviously the brilliant people that work here, and all the data shows the successes and the progress you've made, but also the size. Because one of the things we've learned about education is the more personal you can get, the more down you can get to know the individuals, the more progress you'll make.

And the size allows you to really get into the detail and that's where the answers are. Not in grand, big plans, but in meeting the needs of individual children and working with individual schools, the 700 or so schools that serve here.

Dale Atkinson: So it's really the interface which, where all the, all the work gets done, isn't it?

Sir Kevan Collins: Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: So let's talk a little bit about equity. You spent some time, a lot of time in Tower Hamlets as Chief Executive there an environment where there is a vast span in terms of the haves and the have nots. Can you tell us a little bit about your view of equity and why our schools and parents should care about it?

Sir Kevan Collins: Equity matters not just for the child who is underserved, but actually equity matters for everybody. If you look for example, at Australia, let's do this, the country rather than the state here. If you look at Australia's results in PISA And the desire to move up if that's what you want to do. You cannot do that without raising the tail.

The dragon lag of having some children left behind makes everyone suffer. The other thing we found in the UK and the work I do with UNESCO and and other parts of the world is when you serve the most disadvantaged children, well everybody benefits. You become a better teacher, a better school, and more effective organisation.

That's true of special educational needs as well. The biggest challenge of our generation educators is how do we make sure we don't leave some children behind because there are growing gaps. And the bad news to bring to Australia is when you look at the gaps, they're widening. And this big challenge of how do we narrow gaps and bring everybody with us to the promise of education, if you like, is the challenge.

Dale Atkinson: Can I talk to you a little about how we address this in a, in a post COVID environment? A lot of the researchers sort of indicated that there has been impacts, not just on learning outcomes for students, but on wellbeing indicators as well. What should we be looking at post COVID in terms of helping our kids?

Sir Kevan Collins: What we learned through COVID and I was the National Education Recovery Commissioner for the UK appointed by the Prime Minister to work on COVID, and what we learned through COVID was that education affects the whole of the child's life. It's not just that maths scores go back. Or English scores go back. We learnt that mental health, socialisation, a whole range of things have been impacted by not going to school.

What that reminds us then is schools aren't just about academics, they're about the whole child. The impact of COVID, unfortunately, on all the data everywhere has been greater on the most disadvantaged children. So how do we deal with the legacy if we're not careful of COVID, that we've got widening gaps?

You know, children have had access to computers. Children who had parents who were highly educated supporting what, that's one story. But there were some other children who didn't have connectivity, didn't have resources, and this is the biggest disruption since the Second World War on, on education in, in most of the developed world.

And it goes without saying that it's going to take a long time and it has to be a broad front across the whole of a child's life. Not just more maths and English, but more sport, more choir, more drama. In England, 19%, uh, drop in the number of kids taking part in sport. These habits have been broken of being involved in these activities and we need to rebuild them.

Dale Atkinson: And so what have you seen in your experience of site systems, individual schools are doing this well and what are they focusing on?

Sir Kevan Collins: I think there are three domains that people are beginning to focus on. The first. You do face down this thing of learning loss. Those of us who working, for example, early education, will know the phrase from someone like Jim Heckman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, 'skills, beget skills'.

And if you haven't got some skills that you would've acquired in early learning that has a deficit, it begins to catch to you later on. So we have to cover the loss off. The second we've seen is that these broad social skills, these habits of learning and social skills have to come before you do the hard academic skills.

You have to get children back into the habits of learning. Teachers will talk to you now quite often about behaviour, low level disruption, kids not attending. So you got to get the habits of learning first. And then you've got to work on the skills. And then the third bit I think, is this, um, opportunity to really understand how technology, now there's been a kind of breakthrough in technology that's a positive legacy.

If there are already from COVID, we should grab hold of and rethink education as this blended experience between the use of technology. Never, ever without the teacher that's going to not be, instead of that as well as, and how do we think about those two things, but critically, the broad experience, which I think COVID taught us children really need in schools now.

Dale Atkinson: You started your career as a classroom teacher. What do you wish you knew then in terms of teaching children that you know now from your experience?

Sir Kevan Collins: It's almost like you wanna go back and apologise to those children because, Uh, and I was lucky, I taught, there was one group of children, we had a, what's called vertical grouping in London, east London. It was 40 years ago. A third of the kids were, were of one age, and I had the youngest kids all for all three years, every day. And of course now I know that I wish I'd been better skilled. I wish I'd known more. I look at teacher training and I think it's great, but we need to kind of develop it.

So this being intellectually curious about what I do and about how children learn, I think is kind of driven by my ongoing guilt about the way I serve that first group. So I wish I'd known a hell of a lot more.

Dale Atkinson: So taking you back to that Tower Hamlets experience, and I know Tower Hamlets had a reputation for being quite innovative as a local government area, and local government in the UK has a remit that's more akin to State Government in Australia.

So responsibility for things like education, child protection, aged care. So a fairly broad remit, I think one of the things that Tower Hamlets was looking at and, and had enacted was really going out to the community and talking to them very actively about how they wanted the money to be spent and resources allocated.

Sir Kevan Collins: Sure.

Dale Atkinson: What are the kind of things that we can learn as an education system from that approach?

Sir Kevan Collins: So when you look at the challenges of serving, I think any kind of community, what we've realized increasingly is that you can get a disconnect between those of us that want to do the best and sit in big offices running the system and those on the ground who are the communities. As they get more and more diverse and the needs kind of develop and they get more and more complex. It's hard to keep ensuring that the classic old services deliver. So you've got to be more creative about how you engage with people. So in Tower Hamlets, for example, which is if you take free school meals as a proxy for poverty, we had the most kids in England and by 10% more than anyone else. And when I first got there, it wasn't me who did this. Our results when I was teaching at the beginning were pretty much the worst in the country. Interestingly, now they're in the top quartile and for every year group in England, and they outperformed somewhere like West Sussex, which is interesting because, uh, these kids, 70% come with English as second language and there's poverty now.

I think the big step, and it was unusual for someone to be a, a primary school teacher and then to become the chief executive of the council took a long time. But the interesting thing we learn was one, you have to work with the crane of your communities, so you have to go to where things are quite interesting.

You have to work with the moss, you have to work with all sorts of community groups where there are lots of conversations that need to be thought about. What are your values, what are their values? What's non-negotiable in those spaces? You also have to be ready to do things that were innovative. We, in that example, to the budgets, we spoke to young people and so the community across all ages and said, what do you think we should do with the money?

And we actually put money on the table and said, you decide. Young people overwhelmingly suggested we spend it more on older people in their lives. Older people overwhelmingly said we should spend it on young people, but giving people the chance to really take ownership meant a different relationship with the activities.

And I'm a great believer that the people who use services are the best source of data and information on how you improve services. And by the way, the other thing about improvement is its habit, not an event. So this took 20 years of sticking with the knitting, which people like to kind of keep innovating, but sometimes you've gotta stick with it and the grind it out.

Dale Atkinson: So that takes us very neatly to a conversation that's going on here in South Australia around the purpose of public education and a thing that our chief executive has kicked off in terms of a discussion at every level about what are we for in public education? What's your focus on that? What is your take on the purpose of public education moving into 2023, 24, and the next century?

Sir Kevan Collins: I mean, I'd like to start the conversation just a slightly different place, and that is what kind of place does South Australia want to be? Is educations one of the biggest drivers to create the place you'll be in the future? What kind of lives do you want children to have in the round? And then how does education play a part in that?

Because the one thing I'm absolutely certain is that education plays a part, it's essential, but not sufficient to describe and create the lives you want for children if you want them to flourish and thrive. So you've got to ask, how healthy do you want children to be? What achievement do you want children to have?

How do you want to participate and make a contribution to the lives of South Australia? What about the economic wellbeing of our children and what about their resilience and wellbeing? Education has a role to play, but we just can't load it all education. Well, we have to think about that in the future, and education is right at the centre of that ecosystem.

Dale Atkinson: Sir Kevan, those are some excellent questions for us to think on and to leave on. Thank you very much for your time. You are needed by our chief executive to, um, provide him with some advice and a discussion point. So I'll let you get going, but uh, thank you very much for your time.

Sir Kevan Collins: Thank you very much indeed.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we are talking about numeracy and mathematics with the Emeritus Professor of Education at Monash University. Peter Sullivan, welcome.

Peter Sullivan: Oh, thank you. I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Dale Atkinson: First things first. You're here at our Numeracy summit and have just presented to a group of 900 leaders and educators in in preschools and schools across the state. What's the one thing all educators could do straight away to improve a student's experience of learning numeracy?

Peter Sullivan: The main thing is to get students doing the thinking. Someone described it as the students holding the pen and finding ways to ask problems and exercises and tasks and experiences where the student is doing the thinking rather than following instructions from the teacher. And the more the students can take on that challenge of thinking for themselves, being curious, exploring possibilities, looking for patterns, the more likely they are to learn mathematics and to experience mathematics and to enjoy it.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the ways you describe that in your presentation is a 'you do, we do, you do' approach. Can you unpack that a little bit more?

Peter Sullivan: One of the ways I describe it sometimes is experience before instruction. There's almost nothing that being told how to do it is helpful. Almost always. If you have an experience and then are told how to do it, then it makes sense. And I think that, that, if you're like metaphor is that if we always have the students do something before they have an opportunity to formalise it, then it's more likely to be resilient or to be persistent, to be retained by the student, to be able to use it again in the.

Dale Atkinson: You represented this in a very entertaining way actually, in that you gave all the educators who were there a simple problem that I think you would've given to, I think you said year three or four age students in, in that context, you engaged them in that problem, came back to them and spoke them through the techniques and the opportunities that existed to solve that particular problem, and then extended it to the next step.

And I think one of the things that you observed from the stage, but was really obvious participating in it on the floor, was just how much more engaged those teachers and educators were once they had to revisit that subject.

Peter Sullivan: And it's called consolidation. And the idea with the first task was, that it was what we described as low floor, high ceiling. Now, what that means is without it varying the task at all, it's possible for some students to engage and get one or two correct answers, whereas other students might engage not only getting multiple answers, but actually seeing the pattern, seeing the possibilities, proving that they'd found all the possibilities.

Uh, the idea is that the students work on a task. They have an opportunity to discuss the task with each other. But then work on another task, which is a little bit the same and a little bit different. And it's the experience of the first task prepares them for the second task, and it's the second task we want them to know how to do.

Often I suggest to teachers that the goal is we ask students things they don't know how to do, but arrange the lessons in such a way as they finish the lesson knowing how to do. Because that's what learning is moving from not knowing to knowing. Sometimes we can do it in the reverse order, but if we set tasks up like that, followed up by productive discussion that between the students and the students and the teacher, and then follow up with another task that the students have now learned the skills to be able to solve because they've had an experience before the instruction. It's the second task that consolidates the learning and that's what's engaging for students.

Dale Atkinson: You've identified that there are four types of maths lessons that should be delivered to students. Can you describe what they are and what links them and how they can be effectively used?

Peter Sullivan: Okay. Well, it's like a balanced metaphor diet. Now, sometimes when I talk about this, I have a graphic from the hospitals and it actually says that one of the food groups is biscuits. It looks like it says that. So the idea of a balanced diet is important. Now I say there are four types of maths lessons. One type is called practical investigations. That's more or less anything that involves measurement. Anything that involves the students getting out of their seats. Anything the students involves gathering data, you know, measuring the size of containers, measuring the areas of basketball courts, designing car parks, whatever they're doing. That's an example of a practical experience and that should be happening regularly. Not necessarily frequently, but certainly regularly and maybe let's say once in every planned sequence that that we have, there should be an opportunity to do something practical that's connected the mathematics with the world.

Another one is games and activities. Now there are literally hundreds of games and activities on the web, and there was one session today that was on that topic from James Russo and utilising games so that it's not just game playing, but actually a learning experience that's engaging for students is an opportunity to create lessons.

And I would say in the same thing, there should be a game slash activity in every lesson sequence that we might play in the every unit of work. A third one is active. I call it active teaching only because explicit teaching sounds a little bit like giving the students rules in which that they follow, but often the interactive teaching where the teacher is, is drawing from the students their knowledge but progressively leading the learning, you know, through the course of the whole of the lesson. That's another effective way of teaching. And the model that I was using was structured inquiry where the students predominantly work on a task that's then discussed and then a further task as opposed to do that.

But having said that, I think there are some principles that guide each of those lessons. We still want the students thinking to be at the centre. We still want the learning to be inclusive of all students and the students to feel like they're part of the classroom community. And we also want the lesson, however it's structured, to build connections between ideas, between parts of mathematics, between other KLA's between meaning.

We want those things to be parts of all of the lessons, even though they may have different goals and different pedagogies. The learning goals, the experience of the students is still.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the really interesting things that you referenced, and there actually has been a through line in a lot of the presentations to the Numeracy Summit, which the presentations were all available on plink and there'll be some show notes which link off to those plink sessions.

But one of the things that you kind of touched on was that you can approach. , any of these subjects matters or these problems for all children altogether, and it's not necessary to stream them into different capability areas, but rather it's about the time that you give them to engage with and process some of these problems.

Peter Sullivan: Yeah. Some students if given a problem can just start work straight away. Other students just need 10 minutes to get their pen out. It's the amount of time that they take to get ready and sometimes the time getting their pen out is actually productive time. They're still considering the task. But what can happen is if the task is such that the, the students who have worked quickly and work efficiently get the task finished, we can then be stuck by saying, well, we've got to move forward. Some students sitting there and doing nothing. That's why I always say that teachers should always consider that there may be some students for whom the challenge is, is too great, and how do we support them? Well, maybe we need an enabling prompt that's specially designed to give them a, a leg up, a scaffold that they can get on back onto the main task.

But the more important thing in this context is we need to be able to extend the thinking of the students who are finished and give them something that's meaningful and relevant and extends their thinking. But is actually a, a meaningful challenge that they'll take on the challenge. Oh, that's an interesting challenge. I'll do that. And if we can do that, it actually allows us to have more time for those students, if you like, in the middle, who just need more time to engage with the task, to see the patterns, to build the connections.

Dale Atkinson: And of course sitting behind all of that is an awful lot of planning and preparation for teachers and, and for the leadership. Can you talk us through how that should be approached to the school level in terms of really enacting high quality numeracy education practice in the school?

Peter Sullivan: One of the things I believe in strongly is that we should have formal structures for our planning meetings. A lot of countries, teachers don't have time to plan, so having time to plan is a real privilege, and so we should really structure that time so it works effectively.

Now, I think the first item on the agenda should be what, why, how. That is, what do we want the students to learn? Why do we want them to learn it, and how can we bring that learning about, what experiences can we choose? The next stage is how would we know if they've learned it? You know, if you like it, formulating and formalising the assessment.

The next thing is how do we anticipate the students will respond? And how are we going to support the students who might need additional support? How are we going to extend the student's thinking? Then what resources do we need in order to be able to teach the lesson? What other things do we need to think about?

So if we structure the planning experiences, you know, formally and deliberately, and maybe even have an agenda with minutes, it's actually going to facilitate that planning. In effect, the planning, it looks complicated, but because the teachers are just planning one set of experiences for the students, and a lot of the learning is generated by the students themselves, the planning is actually less onerous once the teachers become familiar with the process.

Dale Atkinson: One of the things you spoke about was the absolute central nature of evidence as a key to understanding impact, but not to suffer too deeply from, I think what you described as a data museum, which is an overload of information that's perhaps not useful to, to the teacher.

Peter Sullivan: Well, schools gather and are sent a lot of information about student progress, about cohort progress, about implementation of goals, and sometimes I suspect schools may well be overwhelmed by it, but I think that we should use evidence to help guide emphasis and priorities in our planning. Now, for example, what seems to be a current issue at the moment is that there's attention to the, what I call high potential, but underperforming students. Now that's actually evidence in the data it's in, in the growth data, the year three to year five, year seven to year nine data that are accessible for every school.

And for example, if the students are in the top two bands are falling backwards from year seven to year nine students in top two bands from falling back to the year, to three to five, then I think it, it means that it warrants our attention to look at what might be the causes of that decline. But we need to think about, well, there should be improvement from seven to nine in, in everything.

And if teachers are teaching in a particular way and they, they're convinced that this is the right way, well, is that improvement what they're hoping to achieve? You know, are there enough students, for example, proceeding all the way to the elective areas of, of mathematics study and they need to use the data of their own school, because all policy implementation is context specific.

There's no one size fits all for educational programs. And so trying to find what's the data that we have access to, what are the resources we have, including the teacher resources, you know, including their enthusiasm and their knowledge, and how can we utilize those resources in the best interest of improving the experience of the students when learning.

Dale Atkinson: Could I touch a little bit on artificial intelligence, which has received a lot of media coverage recently. It strikes me that mathematical disciplines within all the academic areas are probably the area that has been most influenced and adaptable to technology, presumably since the invention of the Abacus coming forwards. So what can you see as the impact going forward on teaching practice, but also the learning experience for kids?

Peter Sullivan: Look, it's a difficult question to answer. I'll come back to answering the question, but what my interest at the moment is to try and create mathematics questions that are suitable for, let's say, year three students that the artificial intelligence can't answer.

So ones where, if you like, the sort of brain type of flexibility that's necessary to answer the question just isn't available to artificial intelligence. So my interest is trying to, uh, formulate questions of that sort. And I think that if we can come to understand what artificial intelligence does do and what it doesn't do and, and in fact how it does, what it does do, that would be useful.

I was actually out of school and they used artificial intelligence to create my introduction and it was quite accurate. Now, I assume it probably searched my bio at Monash, but it was interesting that something, a task like that, that would be able to create it for an individual in a place would be able to be done.

I actually applaud the South Australian Department for Education for its openness to exploring the possibilities of artificial intelligence, and I think it's an interesting challenge for, well, for everyone. Particularly for educators, uh, such as myself to say, yeah, well, what are the implications for teacher education, for classroom practice, for task design, for the design of experiences, now that we have access to artificial intelligence and that can influence not only the design of the task, but the design of the experience as well.

Dale Atkinson: And how do we unlock those unique human capabilities that hopefully remain unique. I guess we'll find out soon enough. So thank you very much for your time today. If you had one final message to provide to educators, for those who are at the front of the classrooms, what would it be?

Peter Sullivan: Well, look, if I can answer that with two messages. The first message, and probably the most important one, I'm often asked that question in, uh, when I'm doing professional learning sessions. If you had just two words of advice for us, what would those two words be?

And my thinking is, shut up. That you probably, if you are a teacher, you probably talk too much and you could probably afford to talk less, to encourage the students to talk more, to create more space for the students to talk. But the other thing is just connects to something that happened in my house. I hid some Easter eggs one time. And the grandchildren came into the room with the Easter eggs, and then something happened. It was a bit unfortunate. There were two people there and I, I won't name them, let's just call them the mother, and the grandmother, wanted to show the children where the eggs were, but it was an Easter egg hunt. The whole point is to hunt for the eggs.

It's sort of a metaphor for teaching. Sometimes we can be like the mother and the grandmother and we lose confidence that the students will be able to find the eggs. And so we say, oh, here's an egg. Now you've got an egg. But in fact, the more that we can encourage the students to hunt, the more we can be patient, the more we can trust them, the more likely they are to find and create their own knowledge. And so it sort of becomes like a metaphor for teaching. Let the students find their own eggs.

Dale Atkinson: I think that is the perfect summary and conclusion. Peter Sullivan, Emeritus Professor of Education at Monash University. Thank you very much for your time.

Peter Sullivan: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I'm joined by Dr. Florence Gabriel, who is the enterprise fellow in Education Futures, and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at the University of South Australia.

Dr. Gabrielle, thanks for joining us.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Thank you for having me.

Dale Atkinson: So today we are talking about maths anxiety. We're going to take it out of the equation. I guess the first thing to kind of establish is what is maths anxiety?

Dr Florence Gabriel: Studies over the years have shown that many people have extremely negative attitudes towards mathematics, and that they can develop negative emotions when confronted with mathematics and these negative emotions, they can turn into a phobia of what we call mathematics anxiety.

Maths anxiety is a negative emotional response to mathematics, and it's often defined as feelings of tension, nervousness, or even fear that some people experience when doing mathematics at school, at work or in their everyday lives. And unfortunately, maths anxiety is a common problem in classrooms. If we look at piece of data, for example, select survey that's run by the OECD.

25% of Australian students report feeling helpless when solving a maths problem. And also, interestingly, neuroimaging studies have shown that students with high levels of maths anxiety they show more activation in brain regions associated with the detection and experience of pain, but it's pretty serious.

Dale Atkinson: That seems like a, like a pretty extreme reaction to something that we are exposed to pretty broadly in the education setting.

So for a lot of kids, what, what are they experiencing in terms of symptoms? Like what? What's visible to teachers when a child is, is experiencing mass anxiety?

Dr Florence Gabriel: There are different types of symptoms associated with maths anxiety, and it can cause physiological symptoms, and that includes increased heart rates and breathing rates, sweaty palms, stomach ache, or headaches.

It's also linked to emotional symptoms, so if you're a student who's starting to panic or if you are getting angry during a maths lesson, , it might be due to maths anxiety. There's one more type of symptom that's actually really important to learning, and these are cognitive symptoms. These cognitive symptoms, they can take the shape of invasive negative thoughts or ruminations or, or worries where you would think things like, Ugh, I'm never going to understand math, and these worries, they will overload your working memory.

Which is the type of memory that allows you to hold information in your head when you complete tasks, like mental calculations, for example, and obviously when your working memory is disrupted, well, your performance in mathematics will often suffer. Something that I don't think I have mentioned yet, but if you are math anxious, it doesn't mean that you are bad at math.

It just means that maybe some students would be deterred and wouldn't become the mathematicians, engineers, scientists, programmers, or, or economists that they could become because they feel too scared or anxious about mathematics. We want to avoid this situation and support our students and help them perform to the best of their abilities.

Dale Atkinson: So where does this all come from for students?

Dr Florence Gabriel: Unfortunately, it starts really early and mathematics anxiety appears to increase with age during childhood. So it can start as early as in year one or two, and it becomes quite strongly apparent from year four or five. And this may be due to general anxiety, increasing as children get older, but also because of exposure to other people's negative attitudes towards mathematics. It's also linked to experiences of failure or, or even just the threat of it, and also it's linked to changes in the content of mathematics itself. With maths becoming more complex and more abstract. Math anxiety is caused by pre-existing difficulties in mathematical cognition, but we shouldn't neglect social factors because they also play an important role. For example, if you were exposed to teachers who themselves suffered from maths anxiety, you’re more likely to develop math anxiety yourself, and studies have shown that this tends to be more often the case for girls than for boys.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I think the public perception of mathematics and, and how it's all framed is an interesting phenomenon in that people will very readily describe themselves as incapable or, or not particularly adept when it comes to mathematical concepts in a way that they wouldn't do in terms of literacy.

Yeah, that's great. Often here or I'm not good at math, so I'm hopeless, but you'd never hear somebody say I'm hopeless with reading. These stereotypes are well and truly alive and, and it's something that we hear all too often.

Dale Atkinson: So how do we combat that in the classroom?

Dr Florence Gabriel: What's really important in the class is to build student confidence in their mathematical abilities.

And things that we can do to help combat these stereotypes is just making teachers aware of them. Studies from the US showing that if in-service teachers are made aware of stereotypes and stereotype threat around mathematics, it will actually change their attitudes and obviously teachers attitudes and their beliefs in their mathematical abilities will also influence their students attitudes and and their mathematical achievement.

There's actually a really interesting theory that comes from educational psychology that was put forward by Reinhard Pekrun, and it can help us understand how and why maths anxiety is happening in the classroom. And this theory is called the Controlled Value Theory of Achievement Emotions.So according to this control value theory, the experience of emotional achievement settings is determined by two types of appraisals, those relating to control, for example, that can be expectations for success or confidence or self-concept beliefs, and then appraisals relating to value.

And that could be the level of importance that a student gives to a task or a subject. This theory says that anxiety is rooted in poor control appraisals combined with higher levels of value, which means that if you care about mathematics but you don't feel in control of your learning in mathematics, you are likely going to experience anxiety.

So what we can do to help that is developing students' self-regulated learning skills because this will allow them to take control and take ownership of their learning. That's something that we're working on currently with my research team at at UniSA. Developing interventions built to develop students self-regulated learning in maths classroom.

Dale Atkinson: I was talking about the opportunity to interview you with one of my colleagues. They immediately jump to the work of Dr. Carol Dweck around, you know, the growth mindset and the fixed mindset and how the perception of the opportunity to learn and the idea that success is possible is such an important thing for a child when they're particularly in any learning space, but, but with mathematics.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Yeah, absolutely. And I think building strong self-belief and that confidence in mathematical abilities is very important. Because, you know, sometimes we just feel negative emotions and it happens, but what really matters is what we do with these negative emotions and how we're going to regulate them so that. They don't negatively impact our learning.

Dale Atkinson: So what are some of the things that educators can do to create that sense of safety for a child to embrace the challenges of perceived difficulty?

Dr Florence Gabriel: What's really important is that children are allowed to fail and they feel comfortable and that they understand that failing is part of the learning process. Encouraging taking risks in the classroom, and that can be done by using open-ended problems, for example, where there's multiple solutions to our problems. Students can explore different ways of solving problems. Collaborative learning can help too. In this case, these are techniques that are proven to help students and reduce their anxiety as they're working on mathematics problems.

Dale Atkinson: Something for parents perhaps. What's the role of high expectations from parents to students in this area?

Dr Florence Gabriel: Parents' expectations for, for their children and, and how much they value mathematics themselves. They are also obviously associated with student attitudes and their outcomes in, in mathematics and research actually shows that parents' expectations can act as a, as a filter through which children understand their abilities and it will affect their expectations for success. There's really interesting research coming from the US on the impact of parents, mathematics, anxiety, and particularly when dealing with the children's homework. But it's not necessarily linked to pressure, but it's related to the maths anxiety that the parents experienced themselves.

If children ask their maths anxious parents for help with their math homework, it, it can actually backfire. And this is because parents can communicate their fears and their frustrations to their children who can then internalize all of that. In the worst case, avoid mathematics entirely. So the way we talk about mathematics and the language we use, is really important here.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I think, it's probably the classic kind of challenge for any parent is not imprinting the negative perceptions of things on their own kids . So it's a, it's an extension out to mathematics in all parts of life. So you mentioned a bit earlier that a significant proportion of the adult population and a number of teachers experience maths anxiety themselves. What are some techniques that educators can avail themselves of to help to overcome?

Dr Florence Gabriel: Yeah, so unfortunately there is indeed a large value of evidence in the, in the research literature that shows that pre-service teachers have higher levels of maths anxiety compared to other university students who are studying things like business or health sciences, for example.

And unfortunately, these pre-service teachers are typically going to become teachers in early years or primary school. And, and the big issue here is that they will bring their maths anxiety with them into the classroom. And usually they tend to think that they are less capable of successfully teaching mathematics, and obviously that will have a negative impact on those students.

One of the, the biggest issues here is that maths anxiety can affect how teachers assess their own mathematical abilities. So the more mathematics teachers know, the more confident they will be in their mathematical ability. And one of the positive consequences of increasing teacher's self-efficacy beliefs in, in mathematics is that they tend to rate the importance of teaching mathematics to young children more highly.

It's really important to support pre-service and in-service teachers in this space. This support can take the form of professional development or enrolling in postgraduate courses, in in mathematics education, for example.

Dale Atkinson: It's something that really needs quite a bit of focus and, and I guess part of it is wraparound from colleagues who are confident and capable working with those who are perhaps a, a little bit more anxious and feel that anxiety. So really it's about, you know, getting together with your colleagues and, and one owning up to whatever anxieties you have, but having those conversations with people who are perceived within your teams as, as really strong in that area.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Absolutely. And I think having that safe space to talk about it freely and recognizing that maybe you are a bit anxious when you are teaching maths, but there's something you can do about it and, and working with your colleagues to, to help alleviate the symptoms you may feel when you are teaching maths yourself, that's definitely very helpful.

Dale Atkinson: We're very fortunate that you have agreed to provide, some of your expertise for a plink course that's going to be available to listeners and that'll be linked off to in the show notes, uh, when it comes available, what are the top three things that you want to get across to, to educators in that process?

Dr Florence Gabriel: The first thing I would say that, well, maths anxiety is very common and it's probably something you've seen in your students before. But the second point that I want to make is that we can actually do something about it. And self-regulated learning seems to be a good avenue to alleviate maths anxiety symptoms.

So helping children with their self-regulated learning and their emotional regulation, uh, will help them become more confident and less anxious when learning mathematics.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the interesting things about mathematics as opposed to, you know, we touched on literacy, uh, a bit earlier and, and lots of other areas of learning, is that it can be perceived to be right or wrong, you know, it's a pass fail binary kind of outcome in terms of the problem that's in front of you, which is not something that's apparent if you're discussing the humanities or if you're learning how to write or even, you know, you're reading it's okay to fail a little bit and then get some growth.

What role does that play in terms of maths anxiety, and how can that be alleviated by educators when confronting kids and letting them know it's okay not to get it right the first time.

Dr Florence Gabriel: It's important for teachers to allow children to understand that it's, it's okay to fail and, and to take risk in, in math classrooms.

And, and sometimes there's not a, a single right answer as well. It's, it might be true with simpler arithmetic, but if you work on more complex mathematics, there might be more than one way to arrive at a solution. So, focusing on, on that flexibility in terms of teaching and learning is really important as well.

And, and that's actually linked to all of that self-regulated learning and the, the executive functions that underline self-regulation. So, allowing children to come up with, flexible answers and different answers to a problem will help them in this case and hopefully alleviate some of the, the maths anxiety symptoms they would otherwise feel.

Dale Atkinson: I mean, so much of it, like all things in education, comes down to educator demeanour and perception of how the kids are experiencing that relationship with their educators. It's such an important factor, isn't it?

Dr Florence Gabriel: It is. It really is. Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: What's your final message to everyone out there in terms of giving maths a go?

Dr Florence Gabriel: I think it's really important for children to feel less anxious when it comes to mathematics. Mathematics is beautiful and it's also the gateway to many different careers. One of the long-term consequences of mathematics is the avoidance of anything that has to do with math. So any course or university degree or career that has mathematics in it.

So what we want to do is really support students here and make sure that they develop their full potential.

Dale Atkinson: Some great messages for, for educators, for parents, for students about, you know, being bold and giving things a go. Dr. Florence Gabrielle, thank you very much for your time.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Thank you.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Bella Pittaway: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Bella Pittway and I'm from South Australia's Department for Education. Today we're taking a student wellbeing focus and talking about bullying prevention. Later in the episode, you'll hear from a student wellbeing leader in school captain at Woodville Primary School about their bullying prevention approach, which includes a student-led initiative that last year won a Children's Week Minister for Education award.

But first, did you know there's a suite of bullying prevention tools, resources, and guides that are available to you. To find out more about them and approaches you can take to bullying prevention, I'm joined by Engagement and Wellbeing Policy Officers, Lisa Gascoigne, and Lydia de l'Amour. Welcome to you both.

Lisa Gascoigne: Thank you. Thanks, Bella.

Bella Pittaway: First of all, how do we understand bullying now? What kind of behaviours fall under this definition?

Lydia de l'Amour: Well, here in South Australia, we use the national definition of bullying, which is found on the Bullying No Way, website. And based on the national definition, there are three key things to look out for when we are looking at bullying.

So these behaviours are one, ongoing and or repeated. Second, they are seen as a deliberate misuse of power. So we see a power imbalance occur amongst students. And finally, we might see repeated verbal, physical, or social behaviours that are intended to harm. So bullying can be seen in person or online, or a mixture of both.

It can also be obvious to others, but there are times when bullying can also be a bit sneaky and hidden. And might be harder for young people to be able to explain or articulate what's actually going on when we have conversations around bullying, referring to young people as victims, perpetrators or bullies is really unhelpful because it's not always clear where the issue has started.

So when we are talking about young people, we talk about young people involved in bullying. So they might be on the receiving end of bullying, or they might be the one who is engaging in bullying activity. Because demonising language is really unhelpful to have those restorative conversations and a more strengths based and supportive approach.

We need to consider how there's an overlap in roles when it comes to bullying, because it's not always clear cut. It is a complex social issue, and we acknowledge that. So when we are talking about bullying, it's important that we get the language right. But I'm going to take an opportunity to clarify what bullying isn't, because there are many times that we refer to behaviours and things that are happening in our school.

It's actually not bullying. They do require a response, but they're not actually bullying. And these things might be one-off acts of violence or intimidation or social exclusion. There might be someone saying something hurtful or abusive to another person. Or it might be just simply not liking someone.

They definitely require a response by the school. These are not bullying behaviours.

Bella Pittaway: What are those called? Those behaviours you've just mentioned there?

Lisa Gascoigne: Yeah, so there'd be things like violence, harassment, discrimination, all things that are really important for us to address within schools and across the community in general.

But it does really pay for us to kind of consider what is bullying and what are these other behaviours, because there are certain approaches we might take to bullying that you know are, are specific to those behaviours.

Bella Pittaway: And how might bullying look differently from the early years to say senior secondary?

Lisa Gascoigne: At different age groups, we might kind of see that occur differently. And it's really important for us to consider what's developmentally appropriate at different age groups. So obviously behaviours that might occur in the early years might not be considered bullying because they're just, um, the normal things we would expect of 3, 4, 5 year olds as they're kind of learning what those social skills look like. So the department does have a behaviour support toolkit that can help schools in kind of unpacking which of those behaviours are developmentally appropriate and what might be concerning or serious and need more of a response.

Bella Pittaway: And is that toolkit that's up on EDi?

Lisa Gascoigne: Yes. So you can access it on EDi. There's also hard copies that schools have been sent and they can request from the department as well. Obviously at different age groups as well. We see bullying kind of appear in different ways. So Lydia was kind of talking about covert bullying. Bullying that's a little bit more hidden in nature.

Might kind of, um, occur at different age groups. We know that bullying tends to peak around grade four and five, and also again as young people transition to high school. We're obviously going to take a different focus at different age groups. In the early years, we might focus on, um, building a strong foundation for young people around what positive friendships look like. In primary school, like we might hear from Woodville, focus on how they, uh, negotiate personal relationships or personal conflict. And in high school we might be kind of talking to young people about bullying and the law and what that looks like.

Bella Pittaway: And speaking of high school, I think most students, by the time they're in year seven, they probably have access to a phone and social media. How has the use of that digital technology impacted bullying in schools?

Lisa Gascoigne: Yeah, absolutely. So we know that cyber bullying or online bullying, so that might occur kind of using mobile phones or using digital technology is really the same behaviour. It's just carried out through a different medium. There are a few added complexities in that online or cyber bullying, more likely to be anonymous, so they might not always know, um, who's kind of using those behaviours. Online content can be easily shared, so there might be a much larger audience that that kind of is happening in front of, and children and young people can be exposed to online bullying kind of any time of day, any place that there's technology available.

So that does make it that little bit more complicated in that there aren't really boundaries around that. We also know as well that generally speaking, young people that are experiencing online or cyber bullying are also experiencing bullying in person. So it tends to be an extension of bullying that they might already be facing kind of in the schoolyard.

It is really important kind of when we are addressing cyber and online bullying, that we also address the general drivers of bullying.

Bella Pittaway: So how should schools respond to cyber bullying and other online safety incidents?

Lydia de l'Amour: So Simply put there isn't a one stop answer for this. However, a great place to start is the department's Responding to online safety incidents in South Australian schools procedure and guidelines. This is found on EDi as well. And this resource does help schools to respond consistently and proportionately to the incident at hand. And it helps schools to consider the many factors in making a decision on how best to respond because there may be a need to just do a local response.

However, there may be need to be able to do a more escalated response, and there is that support and procedural steps that schools can follow to do. There's also a lot of information on the department's website about cyber bullying and online safety that's accessible to everyone. Here, it points us to the eSafety Commissioner.

Now, the role of the eSafety Commissioner is to support families, educators, and students in responding to online safety incidents, and they may be called in to remove content. So there are always places that people can go for support.

Bella Pittaway: We're about to talk about this suite of bullying prevention tools that was released last year, but just before then, what is the best approach to bullying prevention?

Lydia de l'Amour: So Dr. Phillip Slee, who is an expert around bullying prevention from Flinders University has said, relationships, relationships, relationships. When we can strengthen our relationships. It means we can have a really strong approach to bullying prevention, but in that it's a three-pronged approach. So we need to include students, families, and communities, and the school. On the department suite of resources and support, we have a lot of tools and resources that can help schools to actually do that. But before we even discuss preventing bullying, it's important that everyone has the same understanding of what bullying is, and that's what these resources and the Bullying No Way definition can do. If we're talking about schools being a place where students can come and feel safe and feel included, we can actually have a strong bullying prevention approach right there. What that looks like is a place that celebrates diversity, calls out discrimination when it occurs, and teaches the skills around assertiveness and conflict resolution skills. Teaching students to have those difficult conversations and to be able to have a restorative approach when we're looking at relationships with each other.

One thing I want to point out is that having a zero tolerance approach or scare tactics around bullying actually has the opposite effect. It's probably what we encountered when we were children and it's probably what feels most familiar, but it actually, it doesn't work. Having a strengths base and a supportive approach can have the greatest impact.

Bella Pittaway: Let's get to these resources, cause I'm sure teachers are keen to, if they haven't already accessed them, find out all about them. What did you release last year? What can teachers access?

Lisa Gascoigne: Yeah, brilliant. Lydia was talking about how important it is for everyone to be on the same page. So all of these tools and resources are really focused on building that shared understanding using consistent language and messaging and increasing knowledge and skills for educators and school-based staff.

So they do include a suite of six professional development modules for educators. They're available across all three schooling sectors to make sure we have that consistency statewide. And they do kind of support schools to look at a range of topics, including understanding bullying, strengthening relationships for safe and supportive communities, providing effective interventions and responses, preventing and reducing bullying for children and young people at highest risk, and working with parents.

In addition to the modules, we also have released practice guidance to help schools kind of work through extra advice and tips on, on the best way to approach things. An induction checklist for leaders. So when new staff kind of come on board, they can help them step through that learning journey as well about what works best for bullying prevention and response, and a PowerPoint resource for schools to use when they might be running education sessions for parents as well so that we can make sure the whole school community's on the same page.

Bella Pittaway: And it's all, we'll share the links in our show notes so teachers can access them, but everything is on EDi for them to access.

Lisa Gascoigne: Yep. So the majority of resources are available via the external facing website to make sure they're accessible to all three schooling sectors, so we can have that consistency.

So young people that are accessing any school site are going to have the same messaging. But we do also have the professional development modules and some lessons that we have available. A package that focuses on bullying and the law that are available via plink, so schools can log in there and find all of the the resources.

Bella Pittaway: Awesome. And we're going to hear shortly from Woodville Primary School about the work they're doing in bullying prevention. Why are student-led initiatives important?

Lisa Gascoigne: Yeah, so prevention and response to bullying is much more effective when we involve students. We know students have the right to be involved in decisions that affect them, um, and that includes their schooling and their experience and, and how we might prevent and respond to bullying.

And we know that when we do involve them, that we are going to have better decisions services and and supports for them and for their school community. Really when we say kind of student-led approaches, um, we're talking about meaningful student participation and it can look different for different groups because we know that different age groups, different capabilities of students involved, but it really is about supporting them to express their views and influence the things that affect them that might student-led, where young people are kind of coming up with an idea, advocating it for it, and putting it in place. Through to more consultative where they're being asked for their decision, but it's being taken really seriously as, as a really valid source of information for the school as well. So earlier this year, in June, we, um, funded 75 sites to implement bullying prevention activities that, um, involved meaningful student participation. And Woodville Primary was one of those sites that received funding to put in place their idea.

Bella Pittaway: Just lastly, the other important community here are parents and carers. How can schools and teachers engage with parents and carers to prevent and reduce bullying?

Lydia de l'Amour: Yes, Bella, this is a good question because parents do come with their own experiences and understanding around bullying, and this may then influence the advice they give to children and how they think a school should respond.

So we need to take parents along with us as teachers in the journey around bullying prevention. So as Lisa mentioned before, we've developed a suite of resources that help teachers to be able to effectively engage with parents in bullying prevention. This starts with having that common understanding around what bullying is, and then second, supporting teachers be able to have those difficult conversations.

But there are things such as the teacher practice guidance to the plink module around how to best engage with parents. So there is support for teachers to be able to engage with families in bullying, prevention.

Bella Pittaway: It's really great to know that there are so many, um, resources out there that will be able to help teachers with approaches to bullying prevention.

Lisa, Lydia, thank you very much for your time today.

Lydia de l'Amour: Thanks, Bella.

Lisa Gascoigne: Thank you

Intro: Teach.

Bella Pittaway: Let's head off now to Woodville Primary School, where we're joined by Student Wellbeing Leader Wendy Jolley, and School Captain Emily. Welcome, Wendy. First of all, can you tell us a little bit about your school?

Wendy Jolley: Woodville Primary School, we're on Port Road. We've got about 240 student reception to year six. We've got a massive property. Great Lot of playing. and we're looking forward to having this podcast with you guys.

Bella Pittaway: Well, thanks for, for being with us. We are talking about bullying prevention approaches today. Can you tell us what the bullying prevention approach is at Woodville Primary School?

Wendy Jolley: One of our, um, prevention approaches is to use the restorative practice questions. There are five restorative practice questions that we use when children are having a conflict, a dispute, or a misunderstanding. We have a business card that we give to the children and when they come in and they want to have a discussion, we usually go through those five questions. The first question is, what happened?

So everybody has a turn and goes around the table and explains in their words what they consider to have happened. The second question is, what were you thinking at the time? And that's where we find out what everybody, their intentions were or what they were thinking while the incident was occurring.

The third question, then says what have you thought about since? So everybody has a turn to tell us what they have thought about since the incident. And often you see that they've corrected their thinking or they're letting other people know what their thoughts have been since then. And the fourth question is, who's been affected and in what way?

And people are able to say how they're feeling about what's gone on. The fifth question is, what can we do to make things right? So people give their opinions about how to fix something. So we do that and traditionally we've done it in a session inside around a round table. But the initiative that we've had for a restorative bench means that we don't have to use those business cards inside.

So one of our things that we think is important is that open discussion often helps with bullying prevention.

Bella Pittaway: Just touching on that, how have you found the questions have gone? Like, why was that an approach that your school has chosen?

Wendy Jolley: I think we love the first question, what happened, because sometimes adults ask kids why they did something, and that's really philosophical, and the children have to search for an answer that they think the adult wants to hear, so they can usually relax.

As soon as you say with the first question, what happened? You usually get the story. And then after that, you can't challenge somebody else's thinking. So if the second question, what you are thinking at the time, then they're quite relaxed with that approach as well. So it opens up the discussion. We actually tell our families and our parents that they should have the business card on their fridge. And if anybody wants to have an argument at home, you should stand near the fridge. And you should go down the list of questions because we think you'll get a better response from everybody if you do that.

Bella Pittaway: I love that. That's the voice of Wendy Jolly, student Wellbeing Leader at Woodville Primary School.

Also joining us from Woodville Primary School is their school captain Emily. Hi, Emily.

Emily: Hello there.

Bella Pittaway: Can you tell us a little bit about your student-led restorative bench project?

Emily: So the other school captain and I were told toward the start of the year that we could get a grant of $4,450 to help stop bullying in our school.

We then both came up with the idea of installing a bench in our school with the restorative questions on it where people could discuss the question together. We were then nominated for the Minister of Education Awards. We attended the ceremony and were very happy to win one of the awards. We are now hoping the idea can be taken up around Adelaide and South Australia in both public areas and schools to tackle bullying issues.

Bella Pittaway: And for teachers out there who might be listening to this, can you tell us a little bit about what the bench looks like? And I understand there's also a QR code on it.

Emily: Yeah, there is a QR code, so it's like just a standard picnic table and it has the restorative questions on five blocks down the middle of the table so people can read them, and we are still yet to put the QR code on one of the blocks, so the QR code will link to our video and to prepare for the video, we wrote a script, held auditions.

This video features a conflict between our student actors who demonstrated how to use the bench, and it went for about three minutes. So a student drops the coin on the ground and another picks it up. There is an argument then, and basically the video explains how to use the bench and how to solve a problem.

Bella Pittaway: Yeah. That's awesome to have that, that visual guide as well with the questions. Emily, what's sort of been the response from, from students at your school to the bench?

Emily: I've seen a lot of people around just sort of using it and we've already had people coming over with, you know, conflict. So it's been really great to see people using it and we're hoping that it can be used a lot more in the future.

Bella Pittaway: And you did mention before about the Children's Week Minister for Education Award. How did you feel when you won?

Emily: I felt amazing. It was amazing. It's a cool glass trophy. It just looks amazing. Really excited.

Bella Pittaway: Wonderful. I'll just go back to Wendy before we leave you there. Wendy, what do you hope having this bench will mean for your school?

Wendy Jolley: I think the main thing we hope is that the students will have a skill for life. We want them to be really familiar with the idea that you can sit down and discuss things and come to some resolution. So we hope that they're going to use the bench to sort at their own issues. We've seen a few kids, as Emily said, sitting around the bench and talking, and they have come to us and said that they have used the bench.

Sometimes we think teachers might need to sit with them because it's not possible to solve it completely by yourself, but we're excited because it's outside in the fresh air and we don't have to stay inside around the wellbeing room table anymore. We also asked the Mayor of Charles Sturt to come to the opening because we believe that these benches would be really good right around South Australia in lots of parks.

So we asked whether she would want to come and see what the bench looked like, and because of the QR code, we think that people would be able to just click on that and use those questions even while they're sitting at a park bench and having a picnic.

Bella Pittaway: Yeah, it's a really, really great concept and and good to sort of get out, like you said, in the outdoors as well, and, and have those conversations.

Wendy, Emily, thank you very much for joining us.

Wendy Jolley: Thank you for having us.

Emily: Thank you so much.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Bella Pittaway: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Bella Pittaway and I'm from South Australia's Department for Education. Today we're talking about the Autism Inclusion Teacher role. We'll be seeing across our primary schools this year for the first time. Soon, we'll head to Keith Area School to hear from a special education teacher about the difference this new role will make, but before then, let's get some more information about the Autism Inclusion Teacher role. Joining us, uh, Anna Noble, Assistant Director of Inclusive Practice, and Erin Anear Manager of Disability Advice and Research. Welcome to you both. Now, the big news last year was that an Autism Inclusion Teacher will be appointed in every public primary school this year. What exactly is the Autism Inclusion Teacher role?

Erin Anear: Yeah, it certainly was big news. Since then, we've been working really hard to make that announcement kind of become a reality. But before we talk about the role, I just wanted to explain really quickly that you might notice us use the terms autistic person or person with autism today.

And this is because many autistic people prefer identity first language, and we might use both interchangeably. So you might hear autistic person or child with autism. But we use both because each person is unique and their preferences around identity are different. The Autism Inclusion Teacher role is really exciting.

It's a new role. It's been developed with a focus on improving school support for autistic children in young people in ways that work for their school. And that's really important because while we're rolling this out statewide, we have been really conscious of ensuring that each school can develop the AIT role to work within their own site context. But we don't wanna lose focus around that role. And the consistency as well. The AIT role's really focused around two key areas, so that's helping teachers to build their own practice in teaching autistic children and their knowledge around autism, but also influencing the practice of others at their school as well.

So that's really our two key things that we're looking at. There'll be opportunities for formal and informal professional learning, and the AITs will all be connected to a network as well. And I know Anna will talk a little bit more in detail about that, um, later on too. And it's unique because the role isn't just release time and it's not just training, it's a whole package of supports around the teachers.

We've been calling it the team around the AIT. . So this definitely includes that release time and that targeted training, but it's more than that. And this is something that hasn't really been done before. So it's a really new concept. Um, and it is a really exciting initiative as well. And I guess the role itself has been developed with input from educators, from schools, from teachers, from industry groups, university researchers, specialists in autism, and most importantly, with input form autistic people themselves. And so from teachers in our system who are autistic, and also from young people as well in our system.

Bella Pittaway: And Anna, why is this such an important role?

Anna Noble: Well, the prevalence of autism diagnoses among children and young people has increased substantially over recent decades, and this has in part, been driven by a greater awareness of the condition of autism.

And what we are finding is that school outcomes for many of our students who are autistic, they're poorer relative to their non-autistic peers. Uh, so things like not feeling connected at school, not feeling like they belong, difficult relationships sometimes with peers and with their teachers. It really is something that is noticed throughout the education and throughout their research.

The other thing is participation rates, and it's not just children not attending school. What we're finding is participation rates within a classroom. So for a lot of our autistic students, teachers will be providing opportunities for learning, but not think about, well, how do I make sure that a young person with autism is fully included in this? Have I provided supports around working in groups? Have I prepared this person so they know what's coming? For many of our children with autism, school can present a real challenge. So given this, there's a need for building teachers knowledge of autism so that they can apply effective approaches in their classrooms and so that they can make good decisions about which supports, which services, which interventions will likely be in the best interest of their students.

And this is really about the best interests of our children with autism. So that's one of the key reasons it's building the capacity of our Autism Inclusion Teachers to know and recommend good practice. Another reason is we know um, autistic students benefit mostly from teachers who can recognise or maybe anticipate where the challenges are at school for their children. Is the classroom noisy? Is there too much going on? Is there not enough going on in the classroom for these children to keep them engaged in their learning and motivated in their learning? Is the classroom too unpredictable? And as well as those, those aspects, there's things around, um, opportunities. Where are the opportunities such as freedom to follow a deep interest? We know that for a lot of our autistic students, they have very deep interests and passions, and teachers can use these strategies and these interests of the children to really engage and motivate their kids. So there's lots of things that can make or break a good schooling experience for our autistic students.

Bella Pittaway: And do we know approximately how many students have autism? Bearing in mind that there would be students who are undiagnosed.

Erin Anear: This can be a tricky question to answer. There may be children and young people in our schools who are undiagnosed, and there also might be students who are diagnosed, but they don't necessarily receive any extra support or resourcing or anything around them.

But what we do know is that sort of at the end of 2021, when our last data came through, there were around 4,900 students who you know, had an autism diagnoses, were in a mainstream school and they received additional resourcing as well. And I guess if you look Australia wide, the number of people with the diagnosis of autism is actually growing.

When we have a look at the data in 2015, there were 164,000 people across Australia who were diagnosed. And by 2019, that had grown to 205,000. And that's a trend that's sort of across the world as well. So we are looking at about one in 70 people would have a diagnosis of autism.

Bella Pittaway: Anna, who will be in these roles at school this year, what training are they going to receive?

Anna Noble: There are gonna be lots of teachers. We're expecting there to be about 440 teachers, and they're all different kinds of roles. The people who be AITs are coming from different positions within schools, so lots of them are teachers. Quite a few are leaders, and some are teacher leaders.

The teacher leaders are those who hold those specialist positions in their school, such as an Inclusive Educator or a Wellbeing Coordinator. What we know about them is that they're going to come in with different levels readiness for this role. And so when you talk about, you know, what training's going to be provided, the training will be set at different levels because some of our teachers, such as our Special Options Teachers or our Special Class Teachers, or our Inclusive Leaders, Inclusive Education Leaders, they'll have deep knowledge in autism already. And so they'll be training for them set at a more advanced level to build teachers understanding of autism and to know its impact on learning. Most of our autism inclusion teachers will participate in a two-day face-to-face course provided by Positive Partnerships, and they will complete one of their modules.

Plus they'll receive training in how to use some of their autism specific tools that will be incredibly helpful for our teachers in the classroom and across the school and these tools will help support their decision making for their autistic students. Then what will happen is they'll be provided with a whole suite of training options.

We'll be pointing them to other training opportunities that are accessible on plink online. Or coming to South Australia, for example, Barry Carpenter is coming to South Australia in March, and the AITs are going to be invited to come along to that training.

Bella Pittaway: Awesome. And so once they've had all this training and they're taking up the role in their school, what will they actually be doing?

Anna Noble: They'll be analysing the data schools have on their students with autism. And this is to identify the strengths of the school already. So where are they already providing evidence-based strategies and supports and evidence-based interventions, and also looking at the needs. So with the AITs, they'll be receiving our training.

This will always be around what are effective practices in schools. And our AITs will then be able to say, okay, so we are doing this practice, but that doesn't seem as evidence-based as something else. Maybe we should introduce this. They'll be supporting their fellow educators to know a range of strategies and support.

So in-class supports, assessment modifications, ways to engage students in different classroom activities, such as working within groups, speaking in front of a class. They'll be sharing resources across the school, such as our newly released autism practice guides, and they'll be sharing their learning from the training.

So leaders, Will work with their Autism Inclusion Teachers to support them to identify what's gonna be most beneficial for that school community. So the main focus on site will be to provide guidance to the fellow educators on how to best support and educate students with autism and embed inclusive practices that support learning and development.

Bella Pittaway: And Erin, how does this role, the AIT role connect with other student support services?

Erin Anear: That's a really good question. It's so important that we recognise that there's excellent work happening across the system already to support autistic children and young people. And the AIT role is not designed to replace any of the supports that already exist.

So your special educators, your behaviour coaches, psychologists, speech therapists, they're going to continue to be available and they can help schools. They might work with the AIT at the site as part of that help with the school. But the AIT role isn't designed to be a main point of contact for the services, and we still expect schools to manage referrals just as they have been through their student referral teams. Or through just general consultations with their student support services providers.

Bella Pittaway: And we know you mentioned earlier, I mean, there are at least more than 4,000 students with autism. And for teachers out there that might have, uh, a student with autism in their class, they might be thinking, well, how can an AIT support me?

Erin Anear: And I guess building on what Anna said earlier, we really see that AIT role being able to support teachers in lots of different ways. And that really depends on the site context. But the AIT can share the learning that they're doing in the professional development. They can guide teachers to different approaches or strategies to trial, and they might be able to share resources like articles on specific areas around autism.

It might be that the cohort of students at that school has a specific need. You might have a number of girls diagnosed with autism, and therefore you might need some resources specific to that. That's something that our autism inclusion teacher could help teachers to access, or it could even be different kinds of scaffolds. So you know, ways of teaching students with autism, it might be strategies you can use around specific areas of learning. So that might be comprehension reading fluency, it might be, how do I best work with an autistic learner around multiplication? So there's lots of different ways, but I guess the most important thing is just sharing those contemporary evidence-based practices.

Bella Pittaway: That means you've got someone in that school that you can go to, if you've got a question, you can go to that person and go, look, this is what I've got happening in my class. Is there anything you can suggest or something that I can follow up on?

Erin Anear: That's right. And then, you know, the autism inclusion teacher has access to those networks of those professionals, um, to then be able to have those questions in supported by the professionals who have an experience as well.

Bella Pittaway: Well, we've sort of touched on it already, but Erin, what do you think AITs will be able to teach, you know, other staff at their school?

Erin Anear: The fact that we've got an AIT in all of our primary schools is such a unique position. So while we're talking about this being something that's site specific to the context and how they'll work, we're also making sure that there's a consistency of the information that's being shared with schools.

So this is an opportunity for those contemporary evidence-based practices to actually be shared more widely across the state as well. And we know that the research in and around autism is developing rapidly and there's new information being shared every day. So the AIT will be in a position to be able to share that with staff.

And they might not necessarily formally teach the staff, but they might be sharing information perhaps as part of a staff meeting. They might have a regular sort of sharing spot, but it's more about them guiding others, demonstrating that best practice and modelling that within their own classrooms um, or with the autistic students at their site as well.

And at the same time, the AIT is going to be regularly connecting with the networks as well, and the networks themselves will be able to help with some of that, I guess on the ground information. So, you know, I tried this and, and that didn't quite work. And oh, hey, maybe try it this way. So you've got this AIM team of professionals giving you the, the evidence base, and then you've got your contemporary peers actually helping you with, how do I actually get this happening on the ground at my school? I, I think that's a really unique part of the.

Bella Pittaway: So we've talked about what the autism inclusion teacher role, what they will be doing. What are some misconceptions you'd like to address or some things that they won't be doing?

Anna Noble: I think it's important for people to know that the autism inclusion teachers won't be teaching all of the children with autism on their site, that's not the role. That's not their particular role. They won't be providing the referral services Erin spoke to, and they're not going to be the centre point for families. Classroom teachers will still be the first point of contact for families, but if teachers are saying, I need some support to engage our families in working with this child who happens to be in my class, then the autism inclusion teacher, who will be undertaking some professional development around engaging families, will be able to bring some of those strategies to that teacher.

Bella Pittaway: And just also something unique. What has it been like, because this is an Australian first, so I can imagine it's not like you've had a model where you can look at and go, okay, well this is how they've done it in their school system. This is happening for the first time. What has that been like?

Anna Noble: It's, I don't know that we've had an opportunity in the past before to really step back and have a look at the science of learning, really considering how do adults learn, how do teachers come together? What makes a network? Because a lot of this work is going to be supported by the networks and teachers coming together, sharing practice.

So we've had to think really deeply about what does an effective network look like? How do these teachers stay connected? How do we ensure that we provide them with the ongoing support, ongoing modelling that we are guiding the work they're doing and giving them an opportunity to say, actually this is what's happening in my site, and is anyone else finding something similar? And the support of the Autism and Inclusion multidisciplinary team, we just call them the AIM team, is really to bring in their sort of credible scientific knowledge to go, these are the strategies that you could use in your classroom, hearing about what's not working, and then exploring with our AIM team around, you know, why don't you think this particular intervention might be working at this point in time?

So they're gonna have access to these opportunities. I think that's what's the difference and the time we've really taken to look at what does an effective network look like. That has been the most significant part of this.

Bella Pittaway: You're sort of forging this path, and I'm sure you know, other states will be looking on and seeing how it all goes and probably have their own questions about it too. Before we finish up here, what impact are you expecting the Autism Inclusion Teacher role will have in our schools,

Anna Noble: Given that there'll be one person who is released one day per week or one day a fortnight, to focus on improving the school experiences of students with autism, I'm expecting that they'll support schools to feel more confident in the approaches they're using for their autistic students, that they will increase their repertoire of strategies and interventions available in their schools. They'll have more evidence-based resources to draw from when thinking through tricky situations. And I heard Ceri talking about sometimes it's tricky and I'm going, yeah, that's kind of what we are doing here to be more inclusive.

And I guess the ultimate impact I'm expecting is that they'll have this sort of ripple through effect across the state, across our primary schools of building knowledge I'm hoping that families will report that their child's previously unmet needs are now being addressed better. I don't know that we can solve all problems in this, but we can start to improve and that children with autism will say they feel better connected to school. They feel they belong and they wanna be there.

Bella Pittaway: It's a big, big task and obviously something that is much in need. Um, and yeah, wish you all the, the best with it. It's, yeah, really, really important work. Thank you for joining us today to take some time out to sort of explain a little bit about the role and, and the impact, um, you're hoping it'll have.

Anna Noble: Thank you.

Erin Anear: Thank you.

Bella Pittaway: Joining us on the phone from Keith Area School in South Australia's Southeast is Ceri Price, a year four, five special education teacher. Welcome, Ceri.

Ceri Price: Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Bella Pittaway: Can you tell us a little bit about your school?

Ceri Price: Yes. So Keith Area School is a rural school. We've got approximately 310 students from foundation to year 12, and almost every class has autistic students.

My year four five class, for example has two autistic students, one of which is quite high needs.

Bella Pittaway: What difference does additional training and support for students with autism make in your classroom?

Ceri Price: So for me, the training and and support is all about leading the improvement of the experiences that my students have, not just in the classroom, but also in the yard. I want them to be positive and to cover all their needs, including functional needs and skills as well as the curriculum. So having that additional training's going to enable me to be able to deliver that.

Bella Pittaway: And how have you sort of had to change things or the way that you do things in the classroom to make sure that your teaching is inclusive?

Ceri Price: One of the things that we do is clear timetables, and I know many teachers out there will say, but we do that anyway. But for many of our autistic students, having it on the board isn't enough. They need their own personal timetable, differentiating the work so that it's inclusive. So we are using their interests, their interests to engage them in the activities, making it all relevant and personalised to them.

Bella Pittaway: What sort of changes have you noticed when it comes to inclusive teaching? Where we are now, say from 10 years ago?

Ceri Price: Nowadays, it is a very big focus on inclusive teaching, on making sure that all students are having their needs met, that we are differentiating the curriculum, that we are not just delivering one size fits all.

Because as we know, students aren't all the same. They don't learn at the same rate. They don't learn in the same way. So we have to be able to be adaptable and to make sure that we take into account their backgrounds, their abilities, um, their disabilities.

Bella Pittaway: And how do you go about sort of balancing the needs of your students in your class?

Ceri Price: It's a tricky one, and each day can be very different because as students come in like one day they can come in and have had a bad morning. And so you teach to the emotions that day, but it, it's knowing your students, it's getting to know them and keeping up to date with evidence-based practices and knowing what strategies and methodologies are the ones that are recommended. And ones that are known to work are not ones that are just, 'Hey, one teacher's done this and it worked there', but there's no backing to it. There's no scientific evidence that says that it either works or doesn't work.

Bella Pittaway: Is there one in particular that you've sort of been using that you've found really helpful?

Ceri Price: I wouldn't say one, I'd say there's a lot of different methodologies that I incorporate cause you need to have a toolbox. I like the Positive Partnership and a lot of the advice and strategies that they promote on their website and in their trainings. But yeah, it's really about getting to know your students and, and having that toolbox and, and knowing what you can and can't do at a different, at certain times.

Bella Pittaway: And Ceri what are you looking forward to with the Autism Inclusion Teacher role?

Ceri Price: Well, a school can be a really isolating place, especially when you're trying to improve the experiences of students. So I'm actually really looking forward to being able to work with other teachers in the same role, to develop that sense of collegiality and support and to lead the upskilling of educators at our sites with evidence-based practices and methodologies, but also working with other professionals such as the psychologists, having that extra support to back us and to advise us is going to be so worthwhile and useful.

Bella Pittaway: What difference do you think it's gonna make to Keith Area School?

Ceri Price: I think it's gonna make a huge difference having so many students that are autistic, being able - school bell sounds -

Bella Pittaway: I love that we've got the school bell. It's perfect. . We're having a chat with you at school, so of course the school bell's gonna go off.

Ceri Price: That's it. It signals the end of the day, so it's the mad rush hour. But no, being able to help the students gain a better experience to help the teachers, the SSOs or the educators to be able to provide that and know that actually they're doing the right thing as well. It's that sense of peace of mind that comes with it.

Bella Pittaway: And Ceri before we, we let you go, because the school, school bell has, uh, just rung there, . What does, um, what does inclusive teaching mean to you?

Ceri Price: Well, inclusive teaching's about what we've just talked about, really it's about meeting the needs of the students. It's about having that toolbox of strategies and methodologies. It's differentiating and it's engaging the children in the class, no matter what their abilities or backgrounds, and having all of that together will then help develop their sense of being valued, their wellbeing and their overall success at school, which is essentially what we've become educators for.

Bella Pittaway: That's a lovely way to end there, Ceri. Thank you so much for your time.

Ceri Price: Thank you.

Intro

Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders, past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. And today something a little bit different, we're joined by the big boss, Professor Martin Westwell, Chief Executive of the Department. Professor Westwell, welcome.

Professor Martin Westwell: Oh, good on you, Dale. Looking forward to it.

Dale Atkinson: So, nine months into the job now, it's a reasonably solid gestation period. What would you say you've learned so far?

Professor Martin Westwell: Look, how long have you got? It's a steep learning curve when you go into a new job. And no different with this job. When you think about our system, lots of people complain about the bureaucracy, and so they should. That's what we do. But, you know, coming into department, one of the things that I have learned is just how impressive the work that we do, the people that we've got in the department, really are having a kind of central corporate function, all the things that go on here.

Professor Martin Westwell: Learnt so much about that and the support for schools. And just the way that people think about the support that they're providing for schools. I think especially during things like, you know, COVID and now the floods in the Riverland, how we're able to bring resources to support schools. It's just amazing. And also I think I try to get out and go to sites, preschools, primary schools, high schools to see the work, see the system from their point of view because you can't see the system from this office in Flinders Street.

Professor Martin Westwell: You've got to get out there and see that in all the different contexts that we're doing work. I kind of knew it in my head, but just seeing the breadth that we've got, you know, we've got some amazing educators supporting kids in amazing ways and a knew it, but just never seen the breadth of it. And that's been something that I've learned.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's pretty impressive, isn't it? And I know you've made a deliberate and conscious effort to go out to sites a lot this year. Are there any specific kind of things that stick with you from your experience over the last nine months?

Professor Martin Westwell: So, so many examples and it's hard to pick. I think one of the things is kind of got trapped in this thing where we talk about good schools being schools that get, you know, the highest grades. And what I've seen a good schools, great sites, amazing kindies, you know, just sitting down with the kids. There was one down in the South East, and I sat down and sat with a group of kids in the kindy, and they were playing hairdressers. And so, they had the brushes out and the hairdryer and they said, ‘Can we do your hair?’ And they thought that was hilarious because anybody who knows me, knows I've got no hair at all. So that was hilarious. And then they decided that was a bit boring because there was no hair. So, they started doing my makeup. So, but actually what I saw in that was the results of the efforts that the people on site put in to develop the kids and the kid’s interaction. And one kid kind of tried to get another kid to do something and that child wasn't having it and just gently said, ‘No, I don't want to do that.’ And the other child backed off. It's those moments that you really get to see. You know, you can see the impact that we're having on young people.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's interesting you say that. I was out at a meeting with a principal and the Governing Council chair, and the principal was talking about implementing project-based learning as a way of preparing young people with a breadth of skills academic, social, interactive that would really help those kids to thrive and prosper in, you know, the modern workplace, the modern world.

And the Governing Council chair brought it back and he said, ‘Look, that sounds fantastic, but what does that mean for teaching pure academic stuff to my kids?’ He says, ‘Everything we see kind of indicates, you know, NAPLAN scores, PISA scores. That's what we're looking at when we're looking at the quality of education’. We've done an amazing job, I think, conditioning parents to look to those things as an indicator of educational quality.

What does that tell us, that interaction, about how we should be talking to parents about the broader purpose of education and the role of schools?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, our structures kind of corral parents into this way of thinking. And one of the ways in which has been expressed is this idea about, you know, parents asking the question, how well is my child doing? As if there is kind of one line. And what we want to know is how far are my kids along that line, how far are my kids along that line in comparison to other kids?

We want to know where our kids are developmentally. You know, even when your child's born, you know, you might follow the weight in the growth compared to the averages. But if you're not average, that's fine as well, because you're not supposed to be average. Yet, somehow in education, we've got to narrow this thing down to the average or some comparison on one single measure.

So, this question, ‘how well is my child doing?’ is almost the wrong question. The question really should be, ‘how is my child doing well?’. Trying to capture that kind of diversity of what so many ways of doing well and being ready for the world. More and more we see employers saying not interested in university, not interested in how much you know, I can help you to develop that knowing, What I'm really looking for.

Doesn’t matter which industry students or young people are working in, what I’m really looking for is resilience. What I'm really looking for is that ability to learn. What we're really looking for is that good communication and ability to work with others, you know, whatever those things might be. And yet we leave those to emerge from education. Parents go, ‘Well, that's all okay, just as you said, that's all okay, but come on, the main game games over here, isn’t it?’

Well, no, it's not anymore. It hasn't been for a long time, but what we really see now is the world really demanding that shift. I was talking to the Industry Skills Council, so people from industries all across South Australia and I talked about this and the shift. I think that we do need to make to get that balance right.

A bloke came up to me afterwards and said he was a potato grower down in the South East, and I thought, oh, what's he going to say? He's going to say ‘oh, I just want skills.’ And he didn't. He said, ‘that’s the best thing I've heard, that's exactly what we need for young people.’ Now, of course, getting a job isn't just the only purpose of education, but what we are seeing is the world asking us to think differently about education.

And I think that will come through with that conversation with parents as well. The question being, ‘How are you, the Education Department, best preparing my child to get into the world and be brilliant? Come on. How are you doing that?’ That's what I want parents to ask, not ‘how well is my child doing?’

Dale Atkinson: So, what does that mean for an educator in terms of how they know whether they're doing a great job? What are the indicators we're looking for from educators in that sort of space?

Professor Martin Westwell: That's really why we've started off this conversation about the purpose of public education in South Australia because we have to really have a settlement on what we agree that we're going to jointly be responsible for. And then things like the Australian Curriculum that I think are full of lots of knowledge, which is great, students need knowledge, subject specific skills, but perhaps not some of these other the things that we know are so important.

So, if you just think about something like self-regulation skills, some research just came out that you can teach self-regulation skills. And if you do, what happens is it has a big impact on students’ academic achievement. But what it also does is it has a big impact on students’ ability to control some behaviours, ability to stop and think and make better decisions.

That's making students brilliant, not just in academics, but also in other aspects of life and in the way that they interact with other people, the way that they make decisions, the way that they participate in a democracy. Not all the information, all the misinformation that's thrown at them to be able to just stop and think and say, well, actually my emotional response to that is this.

But my second thinking is actually, well, hang on a minute and do that thinking. That's what makes a brilliant mathematician, or contributes to making a brilliant mathematician, a fantastic historian. And it also helps to find your way in the world.

Dale Atkinson: Gives you that space. The clarity of thought, I guess, is where you need to be. You've spoken before about South Australia being historically a leader in public education, stretching back to the 1800s. It's probably not the public perception now, albeit we know that there's plenty of innovative practice in that field. What can we do collectively to reclaim that position as innovators and leaders in public education?

Professor Martin Westwell: Got to be able to tell a good story, right? I think going back to this kind of purpose, you know, what are we here for and tell that story. You know, there's a famous story that's probably not true of JFK going to NASA in the sixties and meeting a janitor and going over and saying, well, what do you do?

He said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I'm helping to send a man to the moon.’ And I love that, even though it's probably not true, I love it because what it is, you know, we've got this thing that we're going for and everybody knows what it is, and we can be really clear about what it is that we're going for.

And of course, it’s not enough just to start the story, kind of do the thing as well. Right. They actually did put a man on the moon. So, you have got to be brilliant. But if you look back at the story, South Australia, you know, some of those amazing people like the likes of people like Alby Jones, Garth Boomer, South Australia was known for meeting the needs of students.

Having a system that really focused on students, on students being effective learners compared to know us. To be an effective learner, you’ve got to know stuff, you can’t be knowledge free. You got to know stuff, you got to have skills in the subjects in the areas in which you're doing learning. But I think South Australia was known for being effective learners.

So you go to a janitor, in a school in South Australia and say, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I'm helping to develop effective learners.’ That would be pretty amazing if we had that story. We had the evidence to back it up and say, this is what we're doing, this is how we're changing the world, this is how we're changing South Australia.

So, I think that both, we can do that, and I think we can tell a better story about how we're doing that.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, a group of 30,000 people all targeting one direction. You've identified student agency as a key factor in gaining traction in learning. So, my dad would say ‘why would you ask a six-year-old what they want to learn?’ What does it mean? Student agency, in terms of curriculum, design and pedagogy?

Professor Martin Westwell: Two things, just first of all, one of them is the student agency in learning. That's a kind of means to an end. So, what we want to do this learning, you want to get this achievement, you want to do brilliantly in NAPLAN and SACE and other assessments. And so, there's a question about how the student agency support that.

And you can think about student agency as an end in itself. We want young people who have got agency, can take agency, can use their agency in their lives. We want young women, young men who can use the agency. We also want young people, gender diverse people say, this is who I am, and I am taking agency my life to achieve my goals in my life, to support other people, to help other people to change South Australia.

And the opposite, of course, of agency is just that passivity of sitting back and letting the world do what the world wants to do to you. And so now we think about student agency, the development of agency as an end as well as a means and something that's going to be important in the world. Back to kind of what it means for us in terms of our system.

It's not about saying, you know, you choose, we'll stand back and cheer from the sidelines. You know, it's not that, if we're purposely going to be developing a student agency and it's an intentional outcome and we're going to get in there and support students to do that. And it might be some choice about what they're learning.

It might be some choice about how they're learning, it might be some choice about how they're going to show us the evidence of their learning, through our assessments and other things. And it might be some big things. So, imagine if we had student voice in some of the policy decisions we're making about curriculum, about the way that we run our schools, the way that we run our system.

Because then if they've got that voice, they've got some of the ownership, the part of the story. And so now they become active partners in that work rather than again sitting back and letting it be done to them. I also think that the student agency we can see has a big impact on student’s self-concept in their learning, on the sense of belonging, the idea that, you know, yeah, this is something I'm taking this personally, this is something I can do, I can be part of.

So, I see it as being crucially important in moving forward in education, no matter where we are in the world. And I do think we have to think about how we incorporate it into our practice and how do we support our educators to incorporate it into their practice.

Dale Atkinson: And that's a process that's already started. Last year we held a number of student forums across the state. Can you tell us a bit about that project and why that was so important?

Professor Martin Westwell: This is starting with students, purposefully, asking our students about their aspirations for the future, trying to reveal the thinking underneath that. Also thinking about how are they partners in this process. So, this idea about getting to our purpose, you know, the example that's often given around the world is Kodak. Kodak thought that they were in the business of film and chemicals, and they sold more film and chemicals. And even in their own labs, then they invented digital photography and they put it to one side. Why? Because they were in the film and chemical business, and it decimated the company. It made them irrelevant because the main game moved and went to digital photography. Now, if they thought they were in the business of photography, the business might have moved and changed and maintained its relevance.

So, the reason why I give that example is, when we talk about our purpose, we have got to make sure that we remain relevant. And who do we have to remain relevant to? Clearly, our students. So, what does relevance to our students mean? So, talking with our students is important to do that work and to make sure that our students feel like they're part of the story, that they're activated in that work.

But what we're also seeing there is students telling us, you know, they don't use this language, but telling us something about equity, telling us something about wanting to be challenged more. You know, we put some of the data in front of them about things like their cognitive engagement, talked about what cognitive engagement was. Then showed them their own data from the Wellbeing and Engagement survey and said, what do you notice about this data, first of all?

Then we asked them, why do you think things are like this? And then ask them, how might we improve if we do it differently? What could we start with? What should we stop doing? Amazing insights from our young people to help us move the system forward.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's incredibly powerful, isn't it, to talk to those kids. So, this is the opening salvo in that discussion around the purpose of public education. What are the next steps in that process?

Professor Martin Westwell: We've got all this input now from our students and just working through that feedback now and getting that together. And then for us to be able to share that with leaders, educators across the system, to help that to inform some of our thinking, of course, using some of the best research from around the world to inform our thinking as well, but also, of course, the expertise and experience that we have in our system.

So, engaging with our educators and with our leaders again to think about what is it that we're going to have the shared responsibility for. From that, when we think about that purpose and those components of what we're taking responsibility for, what we want our system to look like, we've had a lot of focus on excellence, quite rightly over the last few years.

But I think we need to think more about equity in our system. What do we mean by that and how do we get an equitable system? Because we know that if you drive a more equitable system, you get more excellence from it. Those two things work together really well. And thinking about, you know, the wellbeing of our students, developing that, developing some of these capabilities of students that are going to make them brilliant in the world and brilliant learners.

And of course, again, to improve that achievement. So, we want to kind of bring those principles together and then say, okay, so if this is what we do, we want to be responsible for how do we know if we're going to be successful? So, what are some of those measures? And we're going to need to put in place across the system to understand that we are being successful in those things?

Clearly, from a school's point of view, if there's a dozen different measures of ways of being successful, you're not going to do all 12 or however many there are. That's too much. But schools will know where they can really focus to get the biggest impact they can for their students and perhaps focusing on two or three of those measures going for those things to make the biggest difference outcomes for our students.

Dale Atkinson: It's interesting you say that schools will know. Speaking to a teaching colleague, they were saying that generally in their opinion, a 2 to 5 year lag between a change in systemic strategic direction and that adjustment gaining traction in the classroom. How do we address that? What do we do to meet that kind of need and make sure that the educators themselves aren't suffering from initiative fatigue or feel like they have too many competing priorities?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, so look, I agree with that. I mean, it's really clear that even with an intensive focus on one particular thing, sustained change happens over at least an 18-month period to get sustainable change. You could focus on that for at least an 18-month period. And I think your point about initiative fatigue is a really good one.

If we're doing lots of bits and pieces, there's no clear understanding of, you know, why we're doing this. We don't have our man on the moon discourse. It feels like you've just been asked to do a lot of stuff, you know, it's unconnected stuff. We've got this thing or initiative going on over here and that initiative going on over there.

It’s all piling in on schools. So, I think there's a couple of things. One is we're actively thinking about now is how to relieve some of that pressure on schools. What are we currently asking teachers to do and principals to do, leaders of preschool sites as well? What are we asking them to do that really, we shouldn't be asking them to do?

So, what can we take off whilst making sure that you've got student agency, but we'll want to make sure there's enough room for teacher agency as well, and for principal, site director agency in the system too. That's a balance to get right. Sometimes you can think that you're taking a load off teachers, but what you end up doing is taking choice off them as well.

So, we've got to get that balance right. So, if you have lots of different initiatives that don't seem to be connected and don't resonate with educators in terms of how is this making a difference for kids, how is this helping me to express my professional identity as an educator? Because this is what we're here for. I’m here to make a difference for the kids.

If you don't feel like it's all connected, then you’re just doing stuff for the sake of it. That's draining. But I think that with our purpose statement, with this shift of balance from just excellence to excellence and equity, we're thinking about what are the components of wellbeing that support our students to be successful in the world as well as in their learning, and perhaps some broadening to think about how are we developing some of these capabilities for our students.

I think when we've got that story settled in South Australia, anything that we do will then be guided by that. So, everyone should be able to see that this initiative, this piece of work, this offering, this opportunity is connected to putting a man on the moon. Our version of that. I think things will make much more sense and educators will see the connection to their professional identity and to their professional purpose in making the biggest difference to kids.

I think that will help, as well as the streamlining that's necessary along the way.

Dale Atkinson: We're speaking with Professor Martin Westwell, Chief Executive of South Australia's Department for Education. Now you're new to the role, ish, do we still claim newish? Nine months? How do we go?

Professor Martin Westwell: Still lots to learn, I reckon.

Dale Atkinson: Still lots to learn, and still lots for people to know about you, I think too. So, we've established a little fast round here of questions for you so you so people can get to know you a little bit better. Are you ready?

Professor Martin Westwell: I’m not sure, but let’s do it.

Dale Atkinson: All right. So first off, I know you're from the north of England originally. So, this first question, it's very important. AFL or Premier League?

Professor Martin Westwell: I'm going to say neither, Rugby League.

Dale Atkinson: Rugby league.

Professor Martin Westwell: So born in Wigan in Lancashire, which is just, Rugby League country.

Dale Atkinson: So, do you still follow the rugby league?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah. So, we adopted our Australian team when we first got here. The kids were five and nine and there were a few Poms playing for the Rabbitohs. So, we follow the Rabbitohs and get to see some games and of course the State of Origin gets played in Adelaide from time to time. So that's always a good day out.

Dale Atkinson: So corporate office or classroom and I'll be shocked if you answered corporate office.

Professor Martin Westwell: There's some things you can do from a corporate office, right? So, there's levers. You know, you get to influence the system, but you know, it's the reason for being is the classroom and what goes on in the classroom to make that difference to kids.

Dale Atkinson: Favourite band?

Professor Martin Westwell: Tricky one. I reckon, anything Northern Soul. Wigan was the centre of the Northern Soul area in the UK. I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties, probably Stone Roses. And you know and you go to WOMAD and see some of those bands that you're never going to see again. And so, some got into things like there's a band called Elephant Sessions, but really love and would never have, you know, really obscure.But that's the great thing about going to WOMAD.

Dale Atkinson: So Northern Soul, does that mean you've got a pair of bowling shoes at home, and you can do the, the kind of shuffle dance?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, that’s right. Years and years ago, you know, people used to come out with talcum powder at the trouser legs and sprinkle it on the floor, just to get the moves going.

Dale Atkinson: And I would encourage anyone who is not aware of Northern Soul, to just type that into YouTube and have a look at kids going crazy.

One book every educator should read?

Professor Martin Westwell: If I had to pick one, it would be Ken and Kate Robinson's ‘Imagine If’ that came out recently. I think that's a really great short read. Captures Ken Robinson's philosophy. But things like even G.H. Hardy’s ‘Mathematician's Apology’. I think anybody who works in science, maths, physical sciences, that's an incredible read and I don't think I can go past Garth Boomer’s ‘Negotiating the Curriculum’ either, and the contribution from South Australian educators to that volume.

Dale Atkinson: We'll look to see a little bump on the Amazon list there.

If you could achieve one thing in 2023, it would be?

Professor Martin Westwell: Look, there's so many things, lots of medium sized things and big things, you know. So, landing this purpose conversation, obviously that's something I'm really focused on. Some of the national stuff. Minister working hard to improve school funding and the way that school funding occurs for public schools in South Australia. So, negotiations with the Commonwealth Government. But 2023 has to be a year of hope.

It's raising the levels of hope in the profession. It's been such a tough couple of years. Things have been really difficult, but now I think we're coming out of it and so just thinking about what we want to achieve as professionals can flourish, can grow in 2023 in a way that's just not been able to over the last couple of years.

Dale Atkinson: So, in that light, if you could say one thing to South Australia's educators and support staff in week zero, what would it be?

Professor Martin Westwell: I’m not sure this can be one thing. So do you think, you know, think about the possibilities that we've got in front of us, be part of the purpose and feed into that process. Look after yourself. But also, you've got to look after yourself, you've got to feed your soul in this work. And Ken Robinson, going back to Ken, said, ‘What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world.

What you do for others lives forever.’ I think that teachers, more than most, are able to change the lives of others children, young people to change the life of South Australia. So, what I'd really say is go on, live forever.

Dale Atkinson: I think it's a lovely way to wrap it up. Professor Martin Westwell, thank you for your time.

Professor Martin Westwell: Thank you.