Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] 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 talking about students as agents of change and we are joined by Brenton Wilson who's the head of school wellbeing and learner agency at Kilkenny Primary School with Elliot who's a student there also at Kilkenny and also Narelle Christiansen who's the head of wellbeing at Avenues College who's joined by Joe who's a year 10 student there.

Brenton Wilson: Hello.

Narelle Christiansen: Hello.

Dale Atkinson: So firstly to you Brenton, can you tell us a little bit about this student agency project you've been doing within the portfolio and the impact that it's had for your students?

Brenton Wilson: I think a component of this program has been us being able to get together in a forum. So, you know, 90 kids together twice a year, just to sit down and have some discussions and working with each other and bouncing ideas off of each other.

So like a student forum situation has been really beneficial for Elliot, for our kids to get ideas off of other kids and listen to what's happening in [00:01:00] other schools and the chance for, myself, the classroom teacher, and our kids to sit around the table and have some really meaningful discussions that we probably wouldn't have otherwise has been a really beneficial factor of this.

It's not work that we're doing in isolation and school. We're doing this together as a partnership with 10 to 15 schools working together with a really good facilitator, running processes that we can then bring back to school and use it with our teachers and in our classroom. So that's been a really good part of this as well.

Dale Atkinson: And so Narelle, has that been a similar experience to what you've seen at your school?

Narelle Christiansen: Yeah, just what Brenton was saying as well, like the actual experience of participating in the workshops and having that quarantine time to sit with your students and actually brainstorm and discuss and reflect on ideas, going through the processes, the activities, the really useful activities that then yes, you can take them back and do them with your students or with staff as well.

And also, you know, the value of actually hearing other schools and what they're doing and sharing [00:02:00] ideas. I know our students really enjoy being able to work with other students from other schools, and it's improved their confidence or built their confidence to be able to share ideas with their peers, to listen to ideas from other students and actually, I think just know that their ideas are valued has been really important for our students.

Dale Atkinson: Sounds like an incredibly rich and interesting and exciting thing to kind of lean in on. Can you talk about a few of the common themes that were coming up in those workshops from across all the schools?

Brenton Wilson: Because the strategy is so big, a lot of the schools just went into exploring, at this stage, around student agency and student voice and what that looks like back in the school. I think probably that was the big theme around, okay, we've got permission now to talk about this and to get stuck into this. So it was probably still in the early phases of, Okay, we've had two workshops, we've sort of got a bit of an idea now, our theme is now to go back and discuss that. A lot of our schools are still at a global level, [00:03:00] you know, what can we do as a whole school? We've sort of narrowed it down to a classroom level a bit more in our school, because we've sort of been doing this work for a while. The big theme was around how do we involve students more in the whole process?

Narelle Christiansen: I definitely agree. I think it was mostly around, yeah, student voice and learner agency. I think a few schools were also, looking into wellbeing and different areas of wellbeing as well.

Brenton Wilson: And around what that looks like for them, so it was really a global thing, but the individual context coming through, and everyone sort of left the workshops with ‘This is an area I want to explore, let's go back and explore it together as a school’.

Dale Atkinson: Will you be meeting again?

Brenton Wilson: I think the beauty of this work is that it's going to be slow moving work.

I mean, we can't just go in and do it and say it's finished and it's over. So, with time constraints, I think a term 2 and term 3 each year would be really good. So, I think our partnership's really keen to stay involved and just to continually chip [00:04:00] away at this over the next couple of years. We do have an online forum coming up in term 4 where we're going to explore a bit of wellbeing data to see how we can use that to work through the process we're using and how we can start to evaluate and find evidence around if these are the changes we're making is it having an impact.

So I guess we started sowing the seeds, and now we've got to work out how then we can gather evidence to say that these seeds are growing and we're paying attention to them.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's great. Can you talk to us a little bit about the work that you're doing to empower your young learners in their learning?

Narelle Christiansen: We have only really recently become involved with the Students as Agents of Change, as part of the partnership project. We became involved because we've been doing a lot of work with our student leaders on looking at how we can actually restructure our student leadership team and our system. Because we're really looking at how we could improve student voice or gain more student [00:05:00] voice.

It's an area that we've been working on for a couple of years now, we've done a lot of work around student wellbeing and trying to improve student belonging, around safety and connectedness. But we were really looking to build on that and look at gaining more student feedback and student voice around teaching and learning.

When we heard about the Students as Agents of Change, the partnership workshops, that was a really good opportunity for us to invite our students to participate and start doing some more work around student voice and learner agency with our students.

Dale Atkinson: So Brenton, what is the program focusing on? What are you trying to activate when you engage with the students in this way?

Brenton Wilson: So I guess for us, as a school, we really want our kids to be working shoulder to shoulder with our teachers and our leaders, and just looking at how they can be activated in this process to focus on learning improvement. Our trials, as a result of this, have been students understanding the learning process and being involved in the learning process, and how they can contribute to that learning process [00:06:00] for better outcomes.

We're really looking this year at metacognition and self-regulation and how the kids can be involved in that through emotional regulation, but also through being self-regulated learners, around setting goals, around giving peer to peer feedback and in our junior primary area around having more voice through song and bee keeping. So primarily, as a whole school, we're working together with our kids and involving them in that learning process.

Dale Atkinson: So, Narelle and Brenton, Narelle, you first perhaps. What are you seeing that's different in terms of student behaviour and student engagement as a result of this process?

Narelle Christiansen: The big impact for me, in the past, a lot of the work we've done with our student leaders and around student voice, We've always got a lot of feedback around more building a positive school culture and, you know, running our house challenges and our special events.

We've been working in that area for quite some time. I think just from being involved with the partnership workshops recently, it's kind of like there's been a light switch moment for some of our students because [00:07:00] we've been asking for feedback, not about extracurricular activities, but it's more been around feedback on their learning, and the teaching and learning in the classrooms.

And giving them permission to have a voice about their own learning and how they can influence what's happening in the classrooms. It's about that working in partnerships with their teachers to empower them and give them a little bit more control over their learning.

Dale Atkinson: Is that a similar sort of experience that you've had Brenton?

Brenton Wilson: Yeah, definitely. I think for us, this is our third year as researchers in the project with the inner west partnerships. I think really the last couple of years have been around exploring our PAT data and having a look at that and question analysis. So this is our first year that we've been looking at the new strategy and doing some work around that.

I think the previous years around focus on the data and the testing has given kids a really good understanding of why we're testing and around a data analysis. They're a lot more interested in the data. So last year's PAT testing data, and if they've made improvements on this year's data, but they're analysing questions a lot better when they're doing their testing and understanding what the questions are asking.

We've seen a real growth in data just around that, around kids understanding what the testing's about and they're putting more effort into their testing because of that focus and the sort of, the skilling we've done with the kids with that.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it sounds amazing. So Elliot, I might ask you, what's your experience been like?

Elliot: Well, I feel like I can kind of choose what's going on in the school.

Dale Atkinson: What's changed? Like, is there anything that's kind of changed in terms of the classes for you?

Elliot: Well, we're doing peer to peer feedback so that we write a story and then we get a partner to give us feedback on that story.

Dale Atkinson: How is that different from the feedback you'd get from a teacher?

Elliot: Well, in this, the student gives you two good things that they like about it and one thing that you can work on.

Dale Atkinson: And is that something that, uh, you and your peers enjoy doing?

Elliot: Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, [00:09:00] nice. That sounds like something that's a little bit different, Brenton, in terms of how you might approach assessment and developing some of the programs of activities. Is it taking more work for you and the other educators to design that kind of interaction?

Brenton Wilson: Not really. So we've sort of been working in professional learning teams for probably three or four years now. And we've been trialling and doing our sprint work pretty well as teams, but. What we're trying to do now is infuse students into that process as well, bring them into that learning base around this is what we're trying to do as teachers, this is the trials we're doing, how can we involve you so that you're part of our success criteria as well.

So if at the end of this sprint we want teachers to have a chance to practice, Having the kids be involved in that, and what do we want to see our kids be doing more of and taking control of in their learnings? Before it was all the teachers giving the kids feedback, so now it's kids getting feedback from each other.

So they're understanding that feedback process, they're understanding the editing process, and then they're giving [00:10:00] each other feedback to promote the learning for the teachers getting involved. Probably what we want to see is our teachers doing less work and the kids doing more work in the space.

Dale Atkinson: Narelle, back to you. You spoke a little bit about how the engagement was, you didn't use this language, but less superficial and more ingrained in the actual day to day learning. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like in terms of classroom activities?

Narelle Christiansen: We've only recently just started with this whole Students as Agents of Change process.

So where we're at more is we're participating in the first workshop, which was really useful for us to explore the new public education strategy with students and look at the areas of impact around wellbeing and learner agency. And because we already had the goals around trying to improve or widen the scope of our student voice at our school, it was a really useful workshop.

But we noticed that at the workshop. There was some misunderstanding about the concept of learner agency and what that meant for students, so we kind of took a step back and then we had another workshop at [00:11:00] school and really just unpacked the meaning of learner agency and what that looked like at our school, what the current situation is at our school and how we would like to improve on that and how students could be more involved and what that would look like in classrooms for us if students are working more in partnerships with our teachers.

So we unpacked that a little bit more and then we attended the second workshop. And from that, we were able to explore Learner Agency a little bit more with our students and set some goals and some next steps as to where, you know, how we can improve learner agency and have students working more in partnership with their teachers around their learning.

And I think we're at that stage where we, from the feedback that students have given from the workshops, is around that they're actually wanting to share their understanding of learner agency with their peers and also with their teachers and then it'll be a little bit more specific about what our next actions are from there and what that will look like in the classroom. So that's [00:12:00] about where we're at with our change process.

Dale Atkinson: So Joe, how has that changed your perspective on how you can influence the things that you're learning and what agency means for you.

Joe: Oh, it is obviously very early steps, but with those workshops we had those days, we got to all sit down, go through what it meant, get a much better understanding of what the student agency and all of those other areas and then we've just started getting all of our ideas together, doing lots of brainstorming, and then thinking about what we can implement. We haven't implemented a lot yet, we're still working on the action side of things, but it's definitely made me understand a lot more about how the whole process of student agency and communication between students and teachers and all sorts of things.

Dale Atkinson: What are the ideas that have been floated up by you and your peers? What are you seeing that you might be able to influence now?

Joe: Well, everyone has different ideas. There's something that I thought was personally interesting was that everyone had different things. There was [00:13:00] lots of students that were saying we need to work on some wellbeing side of things. There are lots of students saying we need to work on communication between teachers and students. Lots of ideas around having comfortable environments for people and having everyone feel like they have a say, everyone can have an influence. So that really was one of the main things we got out of that.

Dale Atkinson: And does it make you view teachers in the school differently going through this process?

Joe: A little bit, for me, not very much. That might be more so for some of the other students because this is new to a lot of them. I've been involved with some of these things for quite a while with the student leadership team, so I'm more just interested in how this student leadership program is going to evolve over time and how I'm seeing all of this stuff brought into it. But yeah, it's definitely added on to my understanding.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that sounds really strong, really powerful. Thank you, Joe. So, Brenton, back to you. In terms of how that's changed the environment and the teaching practice within your school, what's the change [00:14:00] process been like for you and your colleagues?

Brenton Wilson: Yeah, it's gradual. So, it's taken time. So, this is sort of, I've been here five years, so we've sort of been chipping away at this for about five years now, just around how we can continue to involve kids in that learning process. I think the catalyst for us was a card saw that we did at our first researcher's day around, we used the strategy cards around metacognition and self-regulation, because that's sort of an area that we've been focusing on.

So we got the kids involved in that, and the number one thing the kids talked about was wanting to have more productive learning tools in the classroom. So we brought that feedback back to the teachers and we got them to do that card sort as well. And through the card sort, each teacher identified a different area.

So we've had peer to peer feedback. We've had goal setting. So there's a number of our teachers in the year level team, working on more productive goal setting strategies, feedback strategies, and then year six is looking at editing strategies. [00:15:00] Strategies that sort of gives them the power to be agents in their learning, for each other and with each other, but also promoting more learning dialogue in between. So the peer to peer feedback that Elliot was talking about is about getting kids to have productive learning talks with each other before the teacher gets involved in that. It's a bit of a change process that we're all working on like Avenues, still very early and we're just trying to do point of time, point of need work that's not too overwhelming for our teachers and our kids, but just keep chipping away at some new processes, new strategies and try and get them embedded into our practice.

Dale Atkinson: Sounds like an enjoyable journey.

Joe, if you had some friends from other schools who asked you about this, um, as a program and would you recommend it to them? And what would you tell them?

Joe: I think I would recommend it to them because it's always good for students to have that voice, that chance to make a difference, have an impact on their learning and people around them.

And I would probably tell them that it's just really [00:16:00] interesting to know more about the kind of logic behind how we're taught, those kind of background things behind what the teachers have actually given to us, and how we can, even though we see and we just go through it, it's actually we can make a difference on it, and we can shape it to something that's more suitable for us and I think that's a really positive thing. So I would definitely recommend it.

Dale Atkinson: Sounds like an excellent thing. Helping to influence your learning. All those sorts of activities that make a big difference in a student's sense of agency and their belonging in any environment, in any school, and their connection and relationship with their teachers.

Brenton, Narelle, Elliot, Joe, thank you very much for your time and good luck as you build and progress this into the future.

Brenton Wilson: No worries, thank you.

Narelle Christiansen: Thank you!

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] 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. Today, we're talking about reading instruction and intervention within a multi-tiered system of supports with Dr. Kate De Bruin from the School of Curriculum, Teaching and Inclusive Education at Monash University.

Dr. Kate, thanks for joining us.

Kate De Bruin: Pleasure to be here, Dale.

Dale Atkinson: So first question, multi-tiered system of support (MTSS), can you tell us what that's all about?

Kate De Bruin: Really, MTSS is a framework for service delivery that takes as its foundation that all students are entitled to a high-quality education that's equitable and needs based where everybody has access to the benefits of high quality teaching in classrooms. Any child who needs access to any kind of support or resource available in schools and systems, can access that quite quickly without restriction.

Dale Atkinson: Where did this come from? What's the idea behind it?

Kate De Bruin: MTSS really grew up with dissatisfaction to the kinds of models of service delivery [00:01:00] that have been in place before.

So under these more traditional models of support services, a lot of times students access to any support that they might need was determined based on whether they could access funding. And there was a quite a sort of medical approach to that. Which said, look, you know, children who need this support service can only access it if they're funded and they can only access funding if they've got the right diagnosis or if they've got a level of impairment that meets a sort of minimum threshold.

What that meant was a lot of kids missed out. Kids might miss out for a period of time while they go through a diagnosis process. Or they might miss out altogether because they might have a type of disability that wasn't funded, or they might not quite have met that minimum threshold for impairment.

So there were a lot of gaps in service delivery and over time, there were actually disproportionate growth in particular areas. So, in relation to learning disabilities, as they were called in the United States, particularly in reading and also [00:02:00] in relation to behaviour. There was some concern that there was skyrocketing numbers of students getting funded under these categories.

And there was some suspicion that perhaps either there was some issues in how students were being assessed for these. There were also some concerns the outcomes weren't good. So there was a look at how students access these support services and they found the outcomes weren't great.

Dale Atkinson: How does the framework apply across a classroom of students?

Kate De Bruin: It's helpful to think about the original seeds of the idea. These multi-tiered frameworks come from healthcare and the classrooms is a group of kids from the population. At a whole population level, we think about health services as primarily trying to prevent illness. So we do a lot of things to try to keep people as healthy as possible.

We might give quality education about healthy eating and levels of exercise. And we have mass population practices like vaccination and screening. And [00:03:00] then what we might do is provide some additional supports in place for people at high risk. We might provide free vaccines, for example, for populations who are at risk, like older people are entitled to free vaccines for certain conditions, we start cancer screening at the age of 50.

So the first population mass level is tier one. Those are the things we do to prevent illness in the general population. At tier two, we prevent illness in people at higher risk. And at tier three, what we're then doing is treating illness when that hasn't been prevented and we might provide medication or allied health treatment or hospitalization and so on.

So if we've understood that logic, we can think about in the classroom and say, what can we do to support the best possible learning outcomes and wellbeing outcomes and behaviour outcomes for all students in the classroom. And then we use those practices in teaching and creating a positive learning environment for every kid.

And then we say ‘who's not thriving here and what else can we do [00:04:00] quickly to ensure they are thriving or respond if they clearly aren't?’ At a class level it looks like high quality teaching, you know, creation of environments that are calm where all students feel they can belong and have their needs considered.

Dale Atkinson: So when we think about MTSS and the tiered system, what are the key components that sit within that?

Kate De Bruin: I'm often presented with people's triangles and they say, look, we've got an MTSS because look, here's our triangle. MTSS isn't actually synonymous with that triangle that's often used to discuss a certain component of it. MTSS is this proactive and preventative framework for quality instruction for everyone on the basis of need, but it's characterized by a number of important components and we have to have all of them in place to have that MTSS.

So, one of those components is that teaching and support should be coordinated across a sliding scale of intensity across tiers. Another is that evidence based practice should be used at each tier, yet a further one is around data based decision [00:05:00] making. Data should be used at a tier one. Where we screen all of our students responsiveness to Tier 1 teaching and learning environments and whether they're thriving.

We use data to make precise decisions to understand the instructional need of any student, whether that be small differentiation at Tier 1 or Tier 2 or 3 layered on top of Tier 1. And we also need to use data to monitor the progress of students receiving tiered interventions to make sure they're having the desired impact.

And that students are in fact going to meet intervention goals and graduate out of intervention back to tier one. At the heart of this is an assumption that all students can succeed at school with quality teaching and the right amount of support provided just in time, but we need all of those elements in place for this to work well.

Dale Atkinson: What do you say to educators? That sounds incredibly comprehensive and logical, is it more for an educator to apply this framework?

Kate De Bruin: It's a different way of thinking. People, once they learn a [00:06:00] little bit about it, they realize they are already doing a lot of the things that are actually essential to doing this well, they find that quite reassuring.

And they also often agree that the outcomes from the current system aren't optimal. There are kids that they think need support that aren't getting it. You know what I mean? So they, there's often actually agreement about the kinds of things that are really needed. And huge reassurance that what's in place isn't something radically different, but it may be some tweaks in how we pick up the kids that aren't succeeding and it may be some tweaks in how we think about what support looks like for those kids.

Dale Atkinson: So a high degree of nuance and judgment, can you talk about the difference between areas that need a point of differentiation and those that need an intervention when it comes to reading support?

Kate De Bruin: Differentiation is often quite misapplied or poorly understood. So in relation to reading, differentiation is what we're talking about when we're thinking about how we use that ongoing formative data that we collect in classrooms. So for teachers, for [00:07:00] example, in the early years of primary school, you'll be doing weekly checks to see whether students are learning those sound spelling correspondences that you're teaching. And if you can see that a couple of kids haven't quite mastered that concept that you introduced last week, you'll put, you'll put in place a little bit of practice. So that's what we call database differentiation. You might do small group targeted practice for those kids who need more. Differentiation is that data informed adjustment to instruction at tier one.

At tier two and at tier three, which are those higher levels of support. That's when you're putting in place something a bit more intensive. So tier two is additional instruction on top of tier one 30 minutes, four times a week in a small group. It's time limited and it's driven by data. So if kids are really struggling with a number of concepts and it might be that they haven't really acquired those new concepts yet, or they are not able to, you know, use them fluently and apply them well in [00:08:00] practice. Then you're going to do perhaps, you know, 12 weeks of really intensive practice and catch up for those kids. Or at tier three, you might even do an hour a day, five days a week, where they're going to get a much higher, what we call a much higher dose of intervention. That will always exist on top of quality tier one and ongoing differentiation.

Dale Atkinson: Have you got views on how you arrange the logistics of tiering these things out in the classroom and what teachers and leaders should be thinking about in terms of resourcing it?

Kate De Bruin: Schools have most of the resources they need, but they may not be allocating them in ways consistent with the data driven approach of MTSS.

Historically, we've had the categorical based funding model. It's taken time to change, and I'd want to shout out to the great work that South Australia's done in pioneering some revisions in those funding models. They are one of the leaders in Australia and change takes time and I'm sure any teacher listening to this is, you know, wanting to say to me, look, it's not perfect yet.

It's not, but it is, you know, vastly improved on where it was. We now have [00:09:00] needs based logic embedded in our system. And now we're trying to tweak to get that right. So the resources that schools may have to provide intervention should be provided to any student. Regardless of whether they get funding, regardless of whether they have any kind of diagnosis that points to them needing it, it should be based on any data that indicates that they need it.

So the other thing I was going to say is about grouping and that can really, and scheduling, and that can really vary depending on what kind of level of schooling we're talking about. So if we've got one of those, you know, kids in the first year of school, You may well be able to access intervention within the classroom because that will be very much reteaching what's already part of the curriculum.

So if we're talking about, you know, very basic code, simple alphabetic code that's being taught, that's able to be taught in the classroom alongside what's already going on in the classroom. It'll be different for older students. So if we're talking about a child in the upper years of primary or in high school where those foundational skills are no longer part of the [00:10:00] curriculum.

It would be much more difficult and undesirable to do that in the classroom. That generally means withdrawing children from the classroom. Now, there are really good reasons to avoid doing that where possible, because the moment you pull a kid out of class, they're missing out on something. Schools have a variety of ways they can think about that.

One of them is to actually reorganize the schedule. And I've seen schools that have done this incredibly well. where they have a block in the day and they term it various things. Some of them call it MTSS time, others call it what I need time or win time, where you have a block in the day where everybody gets something that they need based on data.

So no kids missing out on anything, they're getting the thing they need. If you're in a school where that's not in place, then you need to start making some really difficult decisions about what you pull children out of. And that's why it's always best to get kids succeeding from the outset and minimizing the number of kids getting pulled out for intervention.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's a really interesting point. What about students who are highly proficient readers? How do they get [00:11:00] accommodated within the tiered system?

Kate De Bruin: They get accommodated the same way, they get data based differentiation from the outset. So if we're talking about children, let's say, in those first few years of primary school, and we know that children often start at very different starting points.

So if you've got children who've already mastered some code, they'll be present in the classroom while it's being taught. That doesn't do them any harm. And then you'll have that database differentiation where they may be pushed to apply that concept that's being taught in a more complex way. And practice that at, you know, a high level if you like. So differentiation works well for those students.

Dale Atkinson: What sort of duration of time does it take for a site to kind of implement this approach?

Kate De Bruin: There's a large body of work and research around what that looks like. And in general, we need to think of change as a series of steps and they need to be implemented fairly methodically and you need good buy in.

So if you've already got a high degree of buy in for change at the site, that may take less time than in another site where people feel very [00:12:00] hesitant or have some concerns about change and about letting go of things that they've done or starting to do something that feels very new. You really need to get good, solid amount of buy in and you need to implement things slowly and methodically rather than everything all at once.

If you were in a school that wanted to embrace MTSS. You would be very wise to introduce that perhaps by thinking first about the data that you're collecting. Are you collecting the right data? That's going to get you there to make good decisions and introduce that and then start at tier one. So you need to sort of build it slowly so that you are not asking everybody to change everything all at once. That can set things up to fail.

Dale Atkinson: So one of the things I know about educators is generally, if you're trying to convince them to do something new, They want to see the evidence base. What's the evidence base behind this?

Kate De Bruin: There's pretty good evidence behind MTSS and a lot of that has come from the United States. Different frameworks introduced over 20 years ago and in fact build on the research that came before that. So I might [00:13:00] delineate my response a little further. The components of MTSS are exceedingly well researched and there's good, you know, studies to show their impact. As an entire framework, we've got that kind of population level, system level data.

And there were two huge studies, now quite dated and it would be great to have them updated. But there were two very large studies that looked at the essential components of MTSS implemented at a system level. And they had really sound benefits for both the system itself. As in the, the funds were used better and got better outcomes and they got better outcomes for students.

And those outcomes were better for students academically. There were better behaviour outcomes. There were fewer referrals for intensive specialised placements, far fewer students ended up in that most expensive placement of all, which is a special ed placement, a vast drop in those numbers. So it was good for systems, kids and schools. It would be great for that data to be updated and to have some Australian [00:14:00] research, because people like to see that.

Dale Atkinson: Where have you seen this applied well?

Kate De Bruin: I've seen components of this applied well. There are some excellent schools, particularly primary schools, where starting at tier one has really been embraced.

And quite often that's done in a very inclusive way because it's gone along with understanding that there are kids with disabilities missing out. So, it's gone along with that, how can we start with high quality teaching for all of our students? Make sure classrooms and learning is accessible to everybody without exception.

How can we make sure any kid who needs support gets it in a timely way? We're starting to see some fantastic results in high schools as well. AERO have a lot of case studies on their website where you can look at high schools that have started to try to implement tiered interventions well and close those learning gaps for students who are really struggling and far behind.

Dale Atkinson: We'll include some of those, uh, notes in the show notes around the Australian Education Research Organization's research papers. [00:15:00] I'm joined by Dr. Kate De Bruin, who's the Senior Lecturer in Inclusive Education at Monash University. She is one of the many international experts presenting research evidence, informed advice and effective practices for literacy improvement at the 2024 Department for Education Literacy Summit.

Dr. Kate, thank you very much for your time.

Kate De Bruin: Absolute pleasure, Dale. Thanks again.

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Teach podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education and today we're heading down to Naracoorte High School, which is one of 40 schools from across Australia and New Zealand participating in an ongoing research practice partnership with the University of Melbourne.

It's known as the New Metrics Project, where educators are working with researchers to explore new ways of assessing and recognising student learning, which goes beyond traditional academic achievement. Today we're joined by Lynette Corletto the Principal, Felicity Slotegraaf, the Senior Leader of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Year 8 Cultural Studies Teacher, and Eliza who's a Year 12 Student and House Leader.

Hello to you all.

Lynette Corletto: Hello.

Felicity Slotegraaf: Hi.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Lynette, first to you, what is the New Metrics project?

Lynette Corletto: So New Metrics is a research practice partnership. Essentially, it's a collaborative venture between the forward-thinking schools that have been selected and the University of Melbourne. We are undertaking research projects that lead [00:01:00] innovation and development in the assessment and credentialing of complex competencies.

Dale Atkinson: So what does that look like in Naracoorte High School?

Lynette Corletto: So for Naracoorte we have been working intimately with developing frameworks for agency and learning. Our teaching staff over the three years have trialled and tested the frameworks added to them and utilised them within their planning for student learning and then assessed the complex competency to test its validity.

We feed that back in to the university at points across the year and then we get some feedback from Melbourne Uni and we keep developing practice. So for us, it's about the teachers engaging in the thinking, moving beyond the traditional academics, and the measures for academic achievement to capture the full range of student competencies in the learning activities that they design.

Dale Atkinson: So I think it's quite a good week to have this conversation [00:02:00] because you've just received your NAPLAN results as all schools have across the country, which obviously focus on a narrow pan of academic outcomes. How does it shift the mentality, Lynette, by looking at things in a broader sense for your school?

Lynette Corletto: We’re really looking at supporting our educators to confidently teach, assess and report on the things that matter. So we assess the things that matter and unfortunately (maybe, that's my take on it) in Australia we have been locked into this narrow thinking around literacy and numeracy and what we know about our young people is there is a range of skills and capabilities that they need to develop to be able to thrive.

So we're challenging our teachers to look beyond an A to E grade. It's not about getting rid of an A to E grade, but to actually create opportunity for that capabilities development. We want our teachers to use the curriculum [00:03:00] as a tool and really dig deep into learning design rather than teaching to the test or teaching to the achievement standard, which is how we were taught for a very long time through teacher training, curriculum area, PD, pull the achievement standard apart, look at the existing structures. We're not interested in continuing in that way because it actually doesn't represent the whole learner. It doesn't show what our young people are capable of and it doesn't have any utility beyond year 12.

Felicity Slotegraaf: I did want to pick up on what Lynette was talking about there because I know we've talked a lot about teachers and learning design and those sorts of things. But one of the key drivers for us is actually, we believe that our purpose here is about developing the whole person. So when students leave us, it's not just about developing their literacy and numeracy. It is about that, but it's not just that. It is about developing what traditionally were the soft skills because we know that we've got students here who, [00:04:00] when they leave us, what they leave us with doesn't fully represent who they are as a person. Those skills that they have that perhaps aren't academic base are not being recognized in the traditional sense of the way school's set up at the moment. So that's part of our driver here and why it's important for us, because we really feel like all the young people who are here, should be able to leave us with a representative of who they are as a whole person, not just their grades or the numbers that they get at the end.

Dale Atkinson: So to support them in that work and support you in that work, you've, you've come up with a set of complex competencies that support the assessment. What does it look like for Naracoorte High School in terms of what's unique to you, do you think, and what would be universally applicable across all schools?

Lynette Corletto: What would be unique is that we are an agricultural school. You know, we're based in the Southeast of South Australia and our young people come from a broad range of backgrounds. We have a very large community of new arrivals to Australia. We're working with meeting young people where they're at we had another one just this week arrive with [00:05:00] no English, in a new community, halfway through high school. There's so much that that young person is developing on a daily basis that we need to nurture and capture and represent. That young person and all of our young people, our kids, our town kids are all going to go on and thrive and our community wants us to be able to develop proud, resilient citizens and to empower them to be valuable members of our community, whether they stay in Naracoorte or they move further afield, to still be positive contributing members.

The unique nature of being regionally located and sitting in Naracoorte, but the transferability of everything we're doing is, all our kids, and the kids are actually telling us this, and the young people who've come out of high school are telling governments and telling policy makers very clearly ‘we are more than a grade, recognize that and actually support us to be able to represent the whole of who we are’ because nobody cares [00:06:00] what grades you got, when you're in the workforce, they care about whether or not you're effective at communicating, whether or not you can collaborate with the people in your teams, whether or not you are ethical in your decision making. These are the skills, these are the competencies that we want to develop and we want to be able to represent.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's a powerful message, I think. Felicity, you've been, as the Senior Leader of Curriculum and Pedagogy, sort of instrumental in piloting this with students in years 7 to 10. What's this response been like from the students?

Felicity Slotegraaf: When you kind of turn things on its head a little bit, which is kind of what's going on here, there's a lot of things to look at. There's learning design, there's logistics about what you can actually do in the existing structures of your school, do you need to change that? There's teacher knowledge, there's student knowledge, there's student thinking. It's been quite interesting and students have actually been challenged on what they actually think school is about and what you actually do in a classroom.

Traditionally, it's been a look of, okay. You tell me what to give you and I will do it and I'll produce it and I will give it back. This is kind of [00:07:00] changing that viewpoint so students, especially our senior year students as well, have really taken on the fact that it's about a process and it's not just about your product at the end and it's about who am I reflecting on yourself. Some students have really taken to that actually, rather than leaving it as just being ‘I produce something for you’. It's really thinking about the process. Who am I as a learner? What do I need to know? That's something that's really come out of the various pilots that we've done across year 7 to 10 and some that we've done in 11 and 12 in a different capacity. It's students really reflecting on themselves, who they are, what do I bring to the table, and then how can that help me? So it's really looking at learning as a process, not just as a production.

Dale Atkinson: It's probably a good moment to bring Eliza, your year 12 student in on this. Eliza, what's the feeling like, what's your experience of this been like?

Eliza: Being able to have a choice in my learning. I'm doing an ag course at school and we get an assignment and it's quite a [00:08:00] broad, like there's a broad range of topics we can choose from. So for example, we've just gotten an agri business assignment where we actually have to choose what enterprise we want to run and then like figure out: what do we know from that, what do we need to know, what do I need to learn to be successful in that business? And I think having that choice in what to do makes it more interesting.

Dale Atkinson: Does it feel a bit more connected to what you want to do when you leave school?

Eliza: Yeah, I think definitely it feels more connected to what I want to do when I leave school.

Dale Atkinson: In terms of having some sort of influence over what you're learning, what difference has that made in terms of how you feel about coming into the school day to day?

Eliza: I feel like it's maybe more excited to come into school knowing that I'm learning about things that actually excite me and I'm interested in.

Dale Atkinson: Back to you, Felicity. Is that something that you've kind of noticed across like the whole student cohort, that kind of enthusiasm being inserted?

Felicity Slotegraaf: I think initially students are a little bit, they withhold themselves a bit because it's different. It's not something that we usually do, the structures are different, [00:09:00] but once they get comfortable with it, for example, in our year 8 cohorts, we actually introduced volunteering in the community. That was part of what they were doing in our futures program where they had to go out, find somewhere they'd like to volunteer. Do all of the background communication behind that to get that up and running. Do the volunteering, reflect on it when they came back. They were really excited by that because they felt like they were part of the learning, it wasn't something that was just done to them. I sit in my chair and I produce this thing for you and then I get to go home. Once students get in there and have actually had an opportunity to show their competencies, to be able to be active in their learning and be a part of it, they're actually getting really excited about it.

It's just that initial stage because anything new, or slightly different, we all get a bit nervy about that. I think once they've had that opportunity, it's been really good to see students get enthused. It's been really great to see that, especially in our middle years, 7, 8, 9.

Dale Atkinson: Eliza, has it taken a bit more effort up front to undertake learning in this way, or does it feel like it's been pretty [00:10:00] smooth and easy to do?

Eliza: I feel like from a student's point of view, it's been pretty smooth. Like, there might have been a few changes where you get more variety in an assignment, but other than that, it hasn't, yeah, it's been pretty easy to transition to.

Dale Atkinson: In terms of organising the school day and organizing education components, Lynette, how's that felt as a leader embracing this approach?

Lynette Corletto: When we started three years ago, it was something that was unknown to the broader teaching group. We started off with some small scale pilots at Naracoorte High School, and we did that intentionally because you can't just roll a new pedagogical approach in a school without upskilling and providing opportunity for people to engage in the thinking. So we were quite strategic in creating collaborative spaces for teachers to engage with the research, to engage in the thinking, to explore learning design and to talk about curriculum in a [00:11:00] different way. There's been resistance. It's quite funny cause we've just come off the back of another professional learning day with the entire partnership and our teachers have come out of that and they've gone, ‘Oh yeah, we're so far ahead of the game. We just listened to Martin talk and this is what we've been doing for the last two and a half years’ but they were resistant and we had to change structures, we had to change the way we interacted as professionals.

There's been a lot of collaboration and a lot of reflective practice and we've been quite intentional in creating the space for that and the time for that. We've opened up classrooms so people are more comfortable to get feedback from their colleagues. We've opened up the way we plan so that we're collaboratively planning and we've tried to break down the silos between curriculum areas and moving into next year, our Science and HASS faculty teams, curriculum teams, held a collaborative planning meeting last week to actually look at environmental science and [00:12:00] the connections to geography and the science curriculum at year 7 and 8. And so they're now the champions of doing things differently.

Dale Atkinson: So there is a degree of having to be really methodical and thoughtful about this, isn't there?

Lynette Corletto: You can't do to people. Whether that's teachers or young people, we can't do to students and unfortunately schooling has been done to young people for a long time, but teaching to some extent has also been done to teachers with this top-down kind of approach in, ‘this is how we do things.’ And we've done a big piece of work around agency in learning that had to come with agency in teaching.

And we had to give the power back to the teachers and people are uncomfortable about it. ‘Just tell me what to do Lynette. Just tell me what to do’ Well, I'm not actually going to tell you because I'm not in that class with those kids and I don't have the relationships and I can tell you, based on the data, where they're at, but at the end of the day, you're going to have to take them from where they're at to where you need them to be next, or where [00:13:00] actually they are telling you they want to go. So this is your work.

Dale Atkinson: So there's a degree of trust in all of that as an approach. I'm interested, Felicity, in your view on how that environment is created where Lynette's been able to give people confidence to lean into this thing and how you've been able to work with your colleagues on that.

What does that look like and feel like?

Felicity Slotegraaf: One of the major kind of challenges was having the different headset around learning design and providing opportunities for not just reaching the achievement standard and the content descriptors. That was probably one of the major things we were looking for the alignment between our ambition, which is what everyone, and the South Australian public education direction at the moment is about, you know, developing these well rounded citizens, contributors to society. And then how does that match in with what we're doing in the classroom, our classroom practice? So to me, that was a big challenge and it's really been allowing teachers the freedom to trial things, [00:14:00] without having the, the fear of it going wrong, because it's actually okay to trial things out. And then you go, ‘Oh dear, that perhaps didn't work exactly the way I wanted it to, but I learned a lot from that and our kids actually still learned a lot from that experience’ And we have actually created this year along with the home group care pastoral care program. There's two sessions a week in year 7, 8 and 9. And we call it futures because we're talking about who are we going to be now? And who are we in the future? Where teachers have been given that freedom to be able to go, Okay, so if we're looking at trying to help our students have agency or to collaborate with each other or to communicate effectively, what sort of learning, design experiences can we have?

That we can actually allow students to practice these skills and then demonstrate them. And I think that's actually been quite positive because it's taken away the traditional Australian curriculum side of it that's sitting there, that pressure's not there. So it's allowed teachers to have a go with their learning design and now [00:15:00] what we'll be able to do going forward, which is what we're doing in this semester is looking at, okay, so then how do we assess that now that we're looking at our learning design? How do we assess these competencies? And then from there, we'll be able to roll into actual learning areas, the curriculum areas, and go okay, so it's possible here these are some of the activities that work. These are some of the tasks and learning design opportunities that we found have worked. So what might that look like when we're in our English class? What might that look like when we're in science? It's given a bit of a venue for teachers to have freedom to be able to use their ideas. I think that's been really important.

Dale Atkinson: What sort of conversations do you need to have with the parent community in this space? Has that been a challenge at all or has that been relatively smooth?

Lynette Corletto: We have a very supportive governing council and they are a fierce advocate for our school. I've been quite transparent with them about what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it. We report back in to them [00:16:00] about, you know, this is the pilot, this is what we learnt. This is where we're going next. They ask questions. What we're finding, however, is that people who choose to not send their children to our school need to justify their decision to go elsewhere. And so unfortunately that creates a narrative in the community that the things that we're doing are not beneficial for young people, even though the parents of the young people who are experiencing it can quite confidently articulate that their kids are thriving.

Dale Atkinson: It sounds like one of the many challenges of working and leading in a small country town, which are unique to small towns, but not always unique to leadership in school settings.

So all three of you, how would you summarize? Just quickly, in sort of three to five words, the experience of undertaking the new metrics project. I'm trying to see who looks most comfortable in this space. I'm going to go with…

Felicity Slotegraaf: Nobody, right?

Dale Atkinson: Nobody at all. Everyone's kind of leaning back. I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with [00:17:00] Eliza first. So how would you describe the experience?

Eliza: I would describe it as more of a choice in my learning and the way I get to undertake an assignment or the approach I have towards my learning, like, is it relevant to what I want to do? How can I make it relevant to what I want to do in the future?

Dale Atkinson: So building on that Felicity, what would you say?

Felicity Slotegraaf: I'd say, so being in the New Metrics Project, I feel like has made us focus on students as individuals and as whole people. And to me, that's nearly the most important thing that's come out of it, that students are individuals, and we can develop them as whole people. I think that's really important that's what's come out of it for me.

Dale Atkinson: Lynette, anything to add to that?

Lynette Corletto: I love seeing the shift in teachers and I love seeing them embrace the young people in their classrooms or in their charge and really digging deep and finding what lights that student up and what connects that young person to their learning and then watching the [00:18:00] deep thinking from both the educator and the young person that comes out of that.

Felicity Slotegraaf: It's about people, isn't it? That's really what we've all talked about.

Dale Atkinson: It's about people, not content, which I think is a pretty good summary of the entire approach. Lynette, Felicity, Eliza, thank you very much for your time.

All: Thank you!

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] 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 joining us down the line from Gladstone Primary School is Principal Jodie Zwar. Welcome Jody.

Jodie Zwar: Thank you Dale. Lovely to be here.

Dale Atkinson: It's lovely to have you. So let's talk about what a successful transition for children from preschool to school looks like. What is it that your school does that tries to make that a success for young people and families?

Jodie Zwar: We're really lucky here at Gladstone. [00:01:00] We have a site-based preschool, so we have our kindy children on site 2 days a week and then on a Thursday 3 days a term and for us it is embedded and a part of the way we work. We're really lucky in that we have a building that has our kindy and our reception-one class in there. So they work together all the time and especially in terms 2 and 4 where there is a door connecting, so they can open the door on a Wednesday afternoon and we have children working within both spaces.

So it's beneficial for both our kindy children for stepping into that reception space the following term and also great for our reception children who really like to work in the kindy space and then go back in there and be within that environment.

Dale Atkinson: And what are you looking to achieve through that sort of transition process?

Jodie Zwar: We're really looking for it to be just the next step in learning, going from one to the next. We look at them as classes, so they move from one into the other – that’s seamless – they're used to having met the teacher, working with them. So it's really, really smooth. They also come into the school yard on a regular basis. So, fantastic at recess time in terms 2 and 4. Those students at a starting school, they are putting on their little high-vis vests and coming with the kindy teacher and just getting used to being in a bigger yard and having experience with older children.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah it sounds like great exposure for them. [00:02:00] You mentioned before we came on air that there are 4 kindies within your catchment area. Are there things that you observe that are different between those primary and kindy kids who've had that exposure to those that haven't had it?

Jodie Zwar: We find that it is quite normal. They don't know any difference. So they settle in really quickly and having also their kindy teacher who is actually their reception teacher one day a week also really helps make that seamless. So it's just normal, it's a part of the whole big picture of their education.

Dale Atkinson: And what are the educators picking up through this process of collaborative work?

Jodie Zwar: They work together really, really well. They've worked together for a couple of years. So they have regular meetings. We have learning teams, so we have an early years learning team that includes from preschool up into year 2 and they work together just to get that smooth transition right across and programs that work across all of them. That works very, very well between those and they also work together with looking at data and students and how they're going so what learning plan they're using within the kindy, what they're doing, where their goals are at. That is transferred to the reception teacher so then they can make that continuous and smooth.

Dale Atkinson: So there's a lot to be gained in [00:03:00] terms of the individualised learning for those students and young people as they come across.

Jodie Zwar: Absolutely, so that is that real focus within a preschool, the curriculum and if you're working on their goals, their language, their social skills and then how can we build upon that when you move into the reception space.

Dale Atkinson: And what's the extension of that in terms of engaging with the families?

Jodie Zwar: For us having a site-based preschool also enables us to have occasional care as an option and also play group. So we are having families that come in at a very early stage with their child. So in play group they're playing and getting to know other people and socialising then through into occasional care and then into our kindies. So we're building relationships from very early on in with the child to get them ready. So parents also feel really comfortable in that space.

Dale Atkinson: And that parent connection is just so important, isn't it?

Jodie Zwar: Absolutely, that is huge. So with the new Mid-year intake into kindy last year, I had a parent come and speak to me. She was quite concerned about having had already had a child start school at the beginning of the year. And kindy, what was that actually going to look like for her second child who would be starting mid-year? So she had many questions about that. So I sat down and had quite a long conversation with her.

Dale Atkinson: Interesting! How much additional work does it take to approach it in this sort of way, as opposed to perhaps being a bit more passive?

Jodie Zwar: It does take a bit more work, but I think the benefits completely outweigh anything else. We really want that child to be settled and comfortable in our environment, whether that is in the preschool space or in the reception classroom, and for the parents too. [00:04:00] So it does take a bit of work but it is so worthwhile in the end when you see that child so comfortable within the spaces.

Dale Atkinson: And what does it mean to have 2 intakes across the course of a year in terms of how you schedule the work and allocate some of these tasks to your team?

Jodie Zwar: It has been a shift in headset. I was a reception teacher when we were doing those sorts of things and having the four intakes a year and then not having that for a while but it's just been a change of headset for us. So looking at our continuity of learning plan that we did within our portfolio for each site and looking at how we're going to map it out, what are we going to do when. So then we make it manageable for ourselves to be able to provide the best outcomes.

Dale Atkinson: What are you learning together as a portfolio? What are the opportunities for you to share the information and the knowledge that you've gained through this experience?

Jodie Zwar: Our partnership and portfolio are fantastic. So we often get together and we've had someone focus on that continuity of learning within our portfolio last year. So for all sites having that continuity of learning plan for every preschool going into reception. So for both the kindergarten and for the school to be on board together to make sure it's all planned out to make that the smoothest transition possible and that possible.

And having a site-based preschool does make that slightly easier in that we're one site where we can all just come together. [00:05:00] But we do have three site-based preschools, so we could all get together and have those conversations and support each other in putting those plans in place. So that was very, very helpful in setting us up for the mid-year intakes.

Dale Atkinson: So a good collaborative learning experience by the sound of things.

Jodie Zwar: Absolutely.

Dale Atkinson: So what, if anything, would you do differently for next year's mid-year intake?

Jodie Zwar: I don't know if I'd do anything differently but our next step is putting an information package for families into one document. [00:06:00] So we still have 2 documents, so starting kindy and then starting school. So for us we're really getting the message that we're one site. It is kindy to year 6 and putting all of that together so when families come to enrol in they get all the school information as well, we're one site this is how it all works. So just sort of streamlining that process is our next step.

Dale Atkinson: And does that also feed back into the activities of your teaching staff as well?

Jodie Zwar: Absolutely, so we're finding when we have our reception teacher working and then she actually comes out and does a curriculum role. We have our kindy teacher step in to that Reception-1 classroom. So we're finding that she has brought the intentional play through and changing those concepts. And the way we go about teaching within the early years, but our Reception-1 teacher is very experienced and also has that headset as well. So they work together to bring across both of those together, so the traditional as well as bringing through the intentional play and that child focus.

Dale Atkinson: [00:07:00] It seems like a lovely kind of flexible approach to meeting those little people where they are.

Jodie Zwar: Yes, yes and it's lovely to see them grow and we had transition full day last week and looking at our older children in the 5-6 class racing over to welcome our new children into the preschool and having our preschool children come into the Reception class and watching all those conversations and those older children being involved and encouraging them and being a part of it. It was a lovely moment to see.

Dale Atkinson: So, Jodie, [00:08:00] what does it take in terms of organising the school day? How is that different for you now?

Jodie Zwar: I suppose the other one big change for us has been that we are releasing our kindy teacher for lunch and doing that. It's been done by myself as the leader and our reception teacher. So on a Tuesday I go in there and release our kindy teacher and then I'm in there having lunch with the children and building relationships. And then on the Wednesday our reception teacher is in there and she is actually working with them and having lunch and building those relationships in preparation for coming to school. [00:09:00] So that's been a really big change for us and worked really well.

Dale Atkinson: And so that must be a positive right through for you, your kindy teacher, your reception teacher and for yourself as well in terms of the reward.

Jodie Zwar: Absolutely and it's great to have those conversations and get to know them so that when they pop down into the office they're quite happy to pop their head into my office and see how I'm going and what I'm doing.

Dale Atkinson: That does sound absolutely perfect. Jodie, Principal of Gladstone Primary School, thank you very much for your time.

Jodie Zwar: Thank you very much, Dale.

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] 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 the South Australian Curriculum for Public Education and specifically the languages component within it. And I'm joined by Miriam Parsons, who's the Manager of Languages and Bilingual Schools within the department, and Amy Goodrich, who's the Indonesian Specialist Teacher at Kilkenny Primary School. Welcome to you both.

Amy Goodrich: Thank you.

Miriam Parsons: Thanks for having us.

Dale Atkinson: First of all, Miriam, to you, what is the purpose of language learning in primary schools?

Miriam Parsons: We really want students to understand what learning a language is about. Not so much focus on the content and communicative competence as perhaps being in the past, to being able to compare the languages, bring the languages that they know already from home, English and their mother tongue languages, or [00:01:00] languages that they've learned previously in primary school, and make sense of the target language through making connections and comparisons through those languages so that it's more about their place in the classroom, who they are, their identities as expressed through language.

And to take those understandings to their secondary learning, whatever that language may be.

Dale Atkinson: So what are the dispositions that we're looking to unlock in the students when we teach them a language?

Miriam Parsons: There are many. And we've been working towards developing, focusing in on particular dispositions that we think are really emphasized and highlighted through learning a language. Things like community mindedness, empathy, being inquisitive, curious about language learning, making those connections between languages and wanting to know more.

But really, the human element of being a good human being and understanding the world and people around them and wanting to interact and communicate with others in [00:02:00] the class, in their families, in their communities and beyond.

Dale Atkinson: So within the organisation of the Australian Curriculum version 9 and what we're doing in South Australia with the SA curriculum for public education. Why have we looked at languages as one of the first that we’re leading out on?

Miriam Parsons: We'll have curriculums for all 8 of the learning areas. Languages happens to be one of the first 4 that we've developed and put up prototypes for, for teachers to start to explore and look at. And this is a three year process, so there's time for teachers to engage and look at all 8 learning areas along the way. but we're really excited that languages is one of the first 4 to be offered to teachers to get involved and get familiar with. And one of the real advantages of that is that we have time to promote that real purpose and understanding about what languages is about, and that higher purpose that languages is more than just a code, [00:03:00] more than just… we've got AI now so AI can do that direct translation.

And it's timely in that the changes that we see through AI, making teachers question, “well, what is my role as a language teacher?”, and the broader community to questioning what the purpose of language learning is. And so we can take this opportunity to really say, well, languages is about that higher human purpose. It's about the co-creation co-construction of meaning. It's not about getting it exactly right, but it's about using language to connect as human beings and going beyond just the literal communicative, purpose of learning a language.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. That's really – It's a really interesting area. Now you can't talk about curriculum without talking about pedagogy at the same time. What are the pedagogical changes that might come about from the emerging approach?

Miriam Parsons: Yeah. Already our language teachers are drawing on the languages that students bring to the classroom and using them as resources. [00:04:00] But this is making that visible for teachers. So the pedagogies will allow students to participate in really meaningful, authentic learning experiences that draw on connecting the languages that they know and saying, yeah, that's okay. Bring your language, your home language, your understandings of English.

How does that compare to the language that we're studying now? Whether that be Spanish, Chinese. How do we connect and make sense of all these languages, so that students, making those connections for themselves and having opportunity to explore them in a safe environment and to demonstrate and be comfortable with their identities and expression of self in the classroom.

We really want languages to be an area that promotes wellbeing through social interactions. And we know that there's a real focus now in schools on social cohesion, on building that sense [00:05:00] of community. And that languages practice – the activities of the languages classroom – can really help students to engage in that and then take it out beyond the classroom.

Dale Atkinson: Now Amy, who's our Indonesian specialist teacher from Kilkenny Primary School. You were nodding along to a fair bit of that. How does it reflect in your own practice, in your in classroom activities?

Amy Goodrich: It's just really exciting to be honest, because that's the direction that I like to go. And now knowing that that's where the South Australian curriculum is heading, it's just really validating for a lot of those little extra things that you put into your day by day, to, you know, improve even the life skills of the students. So it's very exciting.

Dale Atkinson: Can you talk a little bit about what those little things, extra day to day look like?

Amy Goodrich: Things like, you know, when you're building empathy, you got to look at, you know, other people's, you know, body language, the expression in their voice [00:06:00]. Pulling apart more than what just the language is. When we're talking about, grammar points in Indonesian, for example, I could just talk about how we add this prefix or how we add an extra word to turn it into a command.

But instead we look at what does this say about Indonesian people that they want to soften every command. It tells us a lot about the people themselves and the culture. Just little things like that.

Dale Atkinson: So there's depth of learning and comprehension that goes into that, that must be really exciting to see children pick up.

Amy Goodrich: Yeah, absolutely.

Dale Atkinson: Can you talk a little bit about how the new language curriculum will positively impact students more generally?

Amy Goodrich: I think because we're focused on things like empathy, inquisitiveness, those are useful. [00:07:00]

Dale Atkinson: Can you talk a little bit about the interplay between this approach to learning and student wellbeing and how those things support one another?

Amy Goodrich: Yeah. I think one of the key parts of the curriculum is it has a ‘why’ for everything. You know, and each language teacher has so many reasons why they think their language or that culture is so important, or language in general is important. But this document actually states why these things matter.

And children who can connect with the reason for their learning are happier, more successful learners. So just knowing why they're there, why they're doing it – I think it's going to be really impactful.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it sounds exciting. Now, Miriam, we're talking about primary school languages at the moment. One of the things we know is that as students get a bit older, we tend to lose them from the language streams and they move into different focuses.

What are we looking to achieve by creating excitement and interest and engagement with languages in the primary area.

Miriam Parsons: As Amy said, if students know why they're there and what they're doing and where it might take them in terms [00:08:00] of their next steps in learning, and they can see the transferability of the skills through the capabilities and transfer those skills to a new language, they're more likely to be able to build and be interested and enthused to continue.

If they're only focusing on being a perfect native speaker of a language, which is not realistic in primary learning, well, for anyone, then we're not setting ourselves, setting our students and teachers up for success. By focusing on the transferable aspects of language learning, developing a love of language, and enjoying being in the moment in activities that are meaningful to the student.

Dale Atkinson: Focusing on students in the primary areas and their engagement, in doing that, what are we hoping to achieve as they transition into secondary?

Miriam Parsons: We want students to understand that what they bring from one language, they can transfer to another language. So even if they [00:09:00] take up a different language at a high school, then they've still learned things in primary school that they can apply and build on in the next language that they learn.

And also if they stop learning language and come back to it later in life, that they've had a positive experience of learning at primary school or early secondary and have something to build on in the future and a real appreciation for those, human attributes and qualities that they've developed through their language learning experiences early on.

Dale Atkinson: There’s an enormous expression of empathy through the learning of a language, but also, you know, resilience there because inevitably you're going to fail quite a bit as you as you move into that area. But what a capability builder in terms of teaching children how to learn. What an exciting area to be working in.

Miriam Parsons: And to be positive about interacting with different languages and cultures around them. So knowing that they may not speak the language of the person that they're sitting next to in the year 11 classroom, but that [00:10:00] they have some intercultural skills and communicative capability to be able to engage and form relationships with people and work out ways of making meaning and building relationships with others.

Dale Atkinson: So, Miriam, the public school system is going to be working together to refine this curriculum over time. How can educators get involved?

Miriam Parsons: Yeah, there's many ways that teachers can get involved, but particularly through direct feedback through our website that people can go to. There'll be ongoing testing, refining happening in schools and through that will continually be working with teachers, working together to say, oh, well, this perhaps needs a tweak or a shift or a change. So there'll be different ways that the curriculum evolves and is refined as we move forward.

Dale Atkinson: Amy, what's it been like to be part of the process so far?

Amy Goodrich: As a teacher, it's nice to be acknowledged that we [00:11:00] do have something to put forward. That our opinions count, that our practice, you know, can inform future practice. And that, you know, we are the specialists – it's not just a title – we are specialists in our area. And it's great to be noticed. It doesn't feel like a top down curriculum. It feels like I can really get involved in this because I was part of building it. And I guess it makes it a bit more user friendly for teachers as well, because they were a huge part of the process.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. And it's going to be an ongoing, collaborative, iterative process. And we'll have some notes in the show notes below on where to find the resources, but also to be involved in further development. Miriam, Amy, thank you very much for your time.

Amy Goodrich: Thank you.

Miriam Parsons: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] 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 a couple of academics from Flinders University, Professor Sally Robinson, Professor of Disability and Community Inclusion, and Professor Gerry Redmond, Professor of Public Policy. Thank you very much for joining us.

Sally Robinson: Thanks for having us.

Gerry Redmond: Great to be here.

Dale Atkinson: So tonight we're at the Student Wellbeing Leader conference, where you are both, keynote speakers, and we're talking about supporting the safety and wellbeing of autistic and neurodivergent students. Can you tell us a little bit, first of all, how do we define neurodiversity?

Gerry Redmond: Look, neurodiversity is relatively recent term, and it's not yet a clinical term. So it's used as a means of people to identify themselves in terms of having diverse, needs, supports and also talents to what's seen as general in the population. [00:01:00]

And in practice, neurodiversity tends to cover, people, for example, who are autistic or who have ADHD or perhaps dyslexia or a whole range of different conditions that are fairly common, particularly in school going populations.

Dale Atkinson: And what are the, what does the research tell us about the proportion or the number of neurodiverse students in our schools?

Gerry Redmond: We don't know exactly. This is really interesting. We know it's high. We know it's increasing, but it's very difficult to give an exact number. What we do know is that about 1 in 5 students in our school system does have some kind of support for learning that's associated with disability. [00:02:00]

For example a very high proportion of those, by far the majority would fit into one of these neurodiverse, categories such as ADHD or autism or dyslexia.

Dale Atkinson: Is the prevalence increasing, or is it just that we're becoming better at understanding some of the issues?

Gerry Redmond: Again, we don't know. It could be both. It's certainly the case that we're becoming better at understanding these issues. It's also the case that we're changing and developing our views as to how these issues should be defined.

So it's really that we're looking at a moving picture here. And I would expect that over the next several years we will see an increase simply because we know there are some groups where these conditions are not diagnosed the extent that you would expect. But we don't know where it's going to end up.

Dale Atkinson: So Sally, what does the research tell us about, how learning is different for this group of students? [00:03:00]

Sally Robinson: Well, the research that we did was seeking the perspectives of students and educators and parents about what helps students to feel safe and supported at school. So we weren't really looking at learning.

We were looking at social and emotional well-being and safety. We were particularly interested in a ‘what works’ approach, rather than looking at really dwelling in the negative experience that students have at school. There's not very much that's known about either of those things, the ‘what work’s or the ‘what doesn't work’ from the perspective of autistic students, though. So when we came into this research, we were surprised to find out how little was known from a research perspective, from students own point of view. And so it's been a very interesting research project for us to really focus on prioritizing students points of view about what helps to support their learning.

Dale Atkinson: And what did you hear about what can help support their learning?

Sally Robinson: Well, we really [00:04:00] came up with four key areas that we focused on The relationships that are really core for students in supporting trust and a sense of confidence. The practices and programs that help to scaffold those relationships, a continuity in the support for students, and the continuity that supports the practices and programs and the systems level things that can support change.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the things, particularly for the audience and our listeners, is largely a group of educators and teachers is what does the research tell us about, that relationship between autistic students and their experience in their relationship with teachers?

Sally Robinson: Well, like all students, relationships are primary. That's a very human thing for everybody, isn't it? But there were lots of barriers for students about forming trusting relationships. And I want to really emphasize that the barriers [00:05:00] weren't with the students themselves, so much as they were with, relationships between students and people who they could have reliable, trustworthy, consistent relationships with.

So, for example, students told us about things that they would have set up with, teachers that they knew well. So strategies that they would use when they got overwhelmed or they really needed some time out of a busy classroom for a few minutes to help decompress when they were getting a real sense of sensory overwhelm.

And then, they would have a relief teacher who wouldn't uphold the strategies that the students were using really successfully. Or they would have a go to person who really understood what was going on for a student when they were feeling really overwhelmed and they were starting to melt down. Somebody who could help talk that person down and to feel successfully able to continue on with their learning if their go to person was away, they didn't have other trusted relationships with somebody. [00:06:00]

So that the sort of, you know, consistency of relationships and having relationships with more than one person, was lacking. For some students, for lots of students, actually, there was some fragility in relationships with peers and so difficulty with friendships and navigating friendships and sometimes the culture of the school environment wasn't robust in really supporting students to feel that they were valued and that they really belonged and that they were people who were an important part of the school, and that made it difficult for them.

Every student has a hard time in school sometimes, but when you don't feel a really strong sense of belonging in your school and like you're an important part of the school, it's much harder for you to re-enter into the school community again.

Dale Atkinson: So what are the changes in practice and approach that schools should be considering in this space?

Sally Robinson: So in terms of relationships, students and families both really wanted to see stronger, proactive, visible responses to bullying and interpersonal harm as well. [00:07:00] So that it was really evident, that teachers, school leaders, and other support staff in schools responded when anybody experienced interpersonal harm. Because if you can see anybody who is experiencing harm receives a strong response, an effective response, an empathic response, then you feel confident that somebody is going to respond if that happens to you.

Feeling part of the community of learners so that there are diverse learning strategies, for everybody. And I realise that these are things that are resource intensive. They take time, they take skill. So it's easy for me to say it – It takes a lot to implement it. Building acceptance, building welcoming building a sense of value across the school community for diversity.

And that, you know, schools are places for lots of different people and the kind of practices that build trust, you know, the ways that that teachers, proactively demonstrate that they are trustworthy people. That they respect students, that they value students when there's a vacuum and students can't see, especially if they find it a bit hard to navigate social relationships. [00:08:00]

If teachers don't show and say and tell that they value and respect people, sometimes you can fill that void with thinking that people don't value and respect you. So it's really important to show and tell that you that you do.

Dale Atkinson: That sounds very relatable. Gerry, in terms of system responses, what should we be considering as an education system and as groups of schools and preschools?

Gerry Redmond: That is a really difficult question. Okay. To start with, I think you need to recognise that schools are part of communities, and what happens outside schools also impacts what happens inside schools. So if you're thinking about systemic responses, you need to be thinking about how we as a society, support and help develop young people with a whole range [00:09:00] of different, needs and disabilities.

So for schools it's about recognition. It's about providing the adequate resources. It's about, linking up with other services. One of the things that came out from our research was often a lack of coordination with other, for example, health service or disability services outside of the school. So, it's a really tricky thing. At the very basics it’s about developing positive relationships, teachers and students developing positive relationships, students developing positive relationships with each other, whatever the characteristics.

But that it is a lot more likely to take place in a situation where it's this broad systemic change and where schools are more welcoming, but also society is more accepting and welcoming and perhaps less unequal than what we often experience today in Australia. You know, that is a very significant challenge [00:10:00] for all of us.

Dale Atkinson: What are the experiences in your research? What have you seen? Is there anything that has jumped out that's really, kind of, impressed you in terms of the way that a school or teacher has approached this?

Sally Robinson: Some of the strategies that we saw from educators were really lovely, creative, thoughtful strategies that didn't require resourcing, but had really good impacts. And students and families and teachers all talked about them as effective. So an example of that was a teacher who had a practice of morning and afternoon check-ins with her class and they were just a really nice way of taking the temperature, the emotional temperature for her group. And they didn't single anybody out. Everybody was part of that.

It only took a few minutes – morning and afternoon – but it was a way for her to check in with anybody who needed a little bit more support about whether their emotional regulation was a little bit out, whether their sensory issues were a bit out of kilter, [00:11:00] whether she needed to have a little bit of extra communication with home that afternoon about the fact that the day hadn't gone so well for that student, and so at home, they needed to provide a little bit more support.

It was just a really nice, responsive strategy that didn't call out anybody for being autistic or not autistic or neurodivergent or not neurodivergent. So there was, there were quite a few strategies like that which were really thoughtful.

Dale Atkinson: Just a kind of, present mindful consciousness and being very thoughtful. I'm going to give you both a magic wand and give you the opportunity to wave it at one specific area. Is there one thing - Gerry, you first – that you would do if you had control of the education system that you would change?

Gerry Redmond: Oh, I'd like to have control of the entire country!

Dale Atkinson: I'll give you that.

Gerry Redmond: Look, I think it's really important that schools are adequately resourced to support students with a whole range of diverse needs. I think that is absolutely critical. [00:12:00] It's also critical, however, that families are supported as well in raising their children because as all the education documents tells us, children's education is, if you like, a co-production between families and schools.

Dale Atkinson: Very good. Now, if you could hand your magic wand over to Sally, what would you do?

Sally Robinson: I'm going to use my wish to make sure that children's priorities and their concerns are heard at all levels of the education system. When we talk to kids in our research, they said a whole lot of stuff in their groups that you'd expect about being full of bravado. And they would do this and they'd respond to that and they would challenge the bullies in this way, and they would, you know, do all of this sort of brave stuff.

And then when we found other ways of helping them express their views more privately, more quietly through worksheets and other ways of talking, they shared a whole lot of more private, quiet concerns and worries and fears, really sad things about feeling lonely [00:13:00] and feeling worried and feeling frightened, and those things really matter. They really, really matter about, you know, if kids are really terrified of going to high school because the bullying might get worse, but the bullying is already bad, we actually really need to know that, and we really need to be responding to that.

It's not okay that kids are feeling like that, but they're covering it up with a whole lot of bravado about “I'd make a sword and I'd whack them”. So to find the layers, through the way that kids talk, to find out what's really worrying them so that we can really respond to it and do something about it.

That's what I do with my magic wand.

Dale Atkinson: Both excellent, very challenging things in a very, informative and challenging conversation for our educators to address. So thank you very much for your time. Sally, Jerry, thank you.

Sally Robinson: Thank you.

Gerry Redmond: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] 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 at the Adelaide Convention Centre where we've just wrapped up the Numeracy Summit. And I'm joined by two of our keynote speakers: Doug Clements who's the university professor at the Kennedy Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning, and Executive Director of Marsico Institute for Early Learning, University of Denver. That is a mouthful, Doug. That's a lot. And I'm also joined by Julia Sarama, who is the Kennedy Endowed Chair in Innovative Learning Technologies and a professor at the University of Denver. Thank you very much for joining us too.

First of all, you've been here to talk to us about learning and teaching with learning trajectories. Can you tell us a little bit about what learning trajectories are?

Julie Sarama: Wow, that's a big question. My daughter who works in communication, our daughter who works in communication, told us it's a horrible name because it's not that difficult a concept, but it's a pretty complicated name. But pretty [00:01:00] much what it is, is a three part thing.

And one part is a sequence of goals, like a curriculum, like you have here. And then, so we have a goal, a learning goal about math that we want to keep in our mind. And then we have an understanding of children's development that will help kids meet that goal, that kids will go through to meet that goal. And then we have the third part, which is all the kinds of interactions, instruction, activities, environmental things that'll help move kids from one level to another. That's the easy way.

Doug can probably give a little more background as to what those levels are in terms of, it's not just saying kids can add two-digit numbers and then add three digit numbers. It's not that kind of thing. It's a little bit more complex than that.

Doug Clements: So, what the levels are, are qualitatively different ways of thinking about a problem [00:02:00] and about how you would address that problem.

So, yeah, it includes incremental growth, such as two-to-three-digit number addition and stuff. Or for younger kids, you know, count to 5 before you count to 6. But the main thing is the conception, procedures, strategies, and the like that constitute a level of thinking so kids will learn numbers 1 to 5 in a very different way than they learn numbers from 6 to 10.

Their understanding of it, they're often called the "intuitive numbers", you know, because fingers in one hand and experiences like that, they're often very intuitive. Kids can do more with those numbers far before they can do larger numbers. And it's not just that the numbers are larger, but a different way of thinking about it.

So we try to capture those kind of qualitative differences in something that [00:03:00] Australian researchers call "growth points", and those are broad levels. We often have levels in-between those growth points because we're searching for those that are most instructionally relevant to teachers.

Kids are at this level, where do I go next? That's the developmental progression understanding. And then, how do I get there? That's the teaching strategies that Julie explained.

Dale Atkinson: How do educators access this and what's the step change in their teaching of mathematics that we're looking for if they engage with this as a way of approaching the kids?

Julie Sarama: Well, I'd say the first thing is we really try to turn what is typical mathematics teaching on its head. The way I was taught to teach math was to think about what your goal is, turn it into an objective, and then come up with a good lesson that helped kids meet that objective. Not thinking very much about who the children were in front of me, but really thinking about what was the content, right?

So, [00:04:00] taking an example say from kindergarten. If I was trying to teach kids to add numbers like 10 + 3, 10 + 4, 10 + 5, what I'm doing is thinking: 'How am I going to go in and make this relevant to this group of kids?' I know nothing about those group of kids. I'm 100% focused on the content and how I'm going to break down this content, maybe model it, maybe do some fun activities or whatever to teach that content.

We're doing kind of the opposite. We're starting with where the children are. So we have a goal, okay yeah, I want kids to learn addition. But the next step is figuring out what the children know and use my understanding of children's development to know what do I do next. And so I'm really going to differentiate my instruction based on what my children do.

And that's just such a flip. And so when we hear teachers say, "Alright, I tried that, you know. I tried doing 10 + 4 and they just don't get it", or, "I have my stars who get it, [00:05:00] but I have some kids who don't get it. What do I do?" My very next question is always, what do they get? What do they understand? What are they doing?

Well, they're still counting on their fingers. Okay, what are they doing when they're counting on their fingers? What is their idea of addition? Because there's no child that knows nothing. There's always some strength that they're bringing to the table that we can use to build from.

And although I taught, I thought successfully, for a long time doing what I said in the beginning, I've been saying for a while now that it's like giving directions without finding out where the person is, right? It's like somebody calling you up and saying, "I'm a little lost. I'm trying to get to your university. Can you give me directions?"

And me saying, "okay, get to my house first and then follow me and I'll take you to the university". I mean, the very first question you say is: 'where are you', right? 'Where are you?' And then you try to figure out how to get them there. And that's our approach. And there's lots of ways for teachers to access information on it.

Doug Clements: That's so good. And to just randomly think [00:06:00] about the 10 + 3, 10 + 4, what do kids know about those numbers that are going to be the sum? So, many kids have no idea that 13 means 10 + 3. Our language, and most Romance languages, hide the fact with words like 15, and 11, and 12, and, and the like.

So you might first say when they count those, what do they know about those and everything? Let's see, let's talk to them about it. So, 11, what does that mean? You know, and this kind of stuff can build that understanding as opposed to saying, "let's do a worksheet. I'll put 10 + 3, 10 + 4, 10 + 5 on the worksheet and have them fill in those answers".

If you do that, actually, kids will get all the answers right because they'll copy the 1 and copy the 3 from the written problems with no understanding of what that means quantitatively and no way around the difficult [00:07:00] language that we have. That's 11 and 12, 13, et cetera.

Julie Sarama: That actually made me think also of if kids do the worksheet say that's, again, a standard way. 'I'm going to do a worksheet. Maybe it's not the best way to teach that'.

But you're like, 'Okay, now they're going to practice it. They're going to have a bunch of these to do'. For the children who get them all right, get the gold star, that's it. They're just like, 'Great. They know it. I'm happy'. And again, with the learning trajectories approach, when I say, "what do they know?", it's also going to be, "they know this plus more".

So we're going to meet them where they are and challenge them. So it's differentiation at both ends. We're not only focused on children who might be struggling with a concept, we're very much trying to include kids who can sometimes sit in math class for a year, honestly, all of kindergarten, maybe all of first grade, and really never be learning anything new, and feel pretty good because they're always getting that little gold star.

Doug Clements: It reminds me of the true story of an interview of a first-grade kid who went up to his teacher in England with a paper that had something like: 10 + 3, 10 + [00:08:00] 4, 10 + 7, repeated and repeated and he did 3 and he turned it in. She said, "What about the rest of them?" And he just looked at her and said, "How many do I have to do to show you that I understand this?"

But normally we'd have the kids finish that paper regardless of whether they understood it before they started the paper, and then go to the back room and play or something. No future challenge. And like Julie said, the research is very clear that kindergarten in the United States, and I would wager in Australia and many other countries, is a place where we teach kids what they already know. And, unfortunately, our view of teaching is, of mathematics especially, is often, "well, it's good practice for them".

Is it really, you know? Or is it just a lack of new challenges that'll keep kids both interested in mathematics this year and the next. And, you know, our responsibility to make sure those kids have something interesting to learn.

Dale Atkinson: I think there's a, [00:09:00] perhaps a degree of comfort and ease in handing the worksheet over for an educator. It's not a simple thing to do. But it is, it seems like the worksheet as an approach asks less of the educator in terms of their confidence to do the thing. Can you talk a little bit about how we encourage educators to take that step and move into the space that you're describing?

Julie Sarama: I try to encourage teachers to engage as professionals in trying to take a scientific approach truly, right? In trying to understand where their children are developmentally and appeal to their sense of professionalism. When we conduct professional development, we talk about being in a safe space. We understand that many people who are teaching young children may not have grown up with a really good math attitude themselves.

They might not feel very comfortable with math. And so we say, 'we're going to make mistakes, we're going to try things out, we're going to do it in front of each other, and it's just going to be good'.

And I kind of say, "look, if you're going to go and learn how to drive a car, and you went to a classroom [00:10:00] only, and you sat quietly, and then you got behind the car, it would be bad, right?" so, "you're going to drive the car on the road by yourself" is the same thing as, "you're going to be in the classroom with the kids".

This is your chance to work with an instructor and "try driving" where we "still have brakes on the side" and we can help you if you make a mistake. So we have to engage and we have to try.

And so a lot of our professional development is very much hands on. It's not teachers sitting and listening. It's them trying things out, and, in role playing and pretending. There are different levels of thinking. You know, we play charades. What if you can, you know, everyone knows a level of thinking and teachers can ask them questions and figure out what level of thinking they are to really learn it.

But I guess that the other part is rather than teachers coming to something and saying, "Look, I've done this math teaching this way for a long time and I don't want to give it up. This is what feels very comfortable for me. And almost a sense of loss over being told what I've done for a really long time, all of a sudden you're telling me, isn't good enough. [00:11:00] You know, I've always played the dot game that kids do for six months and they really aren't learning anything, but it's a fun game and they like it".

Rather than saying, 'You know, you have to give that up', we try to say, 'Keep focusing on the kids', right? So our questions are always with teachers. What are your children thinking? What level do you see your children at? Only you know. You're the teacher. You are the professional. You have the power to differentiate activities. No one can tell you. A calendar can't tell you how high to count. The number of children can't tell you what your, you know, for attendance can't decide all your arithmetic problems. You're the instructor. You can make those decisions and try to empower them.

So it's about really urging them to be scientists, to be professionals, to make those decisions. Because, in the end, we all want children to learn. I would say that not one teacher we've worked with doesn't care about children learning math. They really do want to learn. They just don't want to quite give up what they're comfortable with, like you said.

Dale Atkinson: So how can teachers access and start using these learning trajectories within their own work?

Doug Clements: We have a [00:12:00] website called 'learningtrajectories.org' the name of it is: 'Learning & Teaching with Learning Trajectories'. But that's the address.

It's based on about a quarter century of work in developing the learning trajectories, validating the learning trajectories, and then making what Julie just said about professional development work for teachers and giving them a resource. For instance, lays out learning trajectories for counting or the like, and teachers can hear about the goal which is often more than they think. Teachers of very young children will often say, "I teach them rote counting. That's the most important thing. They count to five and then they count to 10".

And we try to expand that saying, "first of all, even for verbal counting, we don't call it 'rote counting'", we're not arguing with the teachers, "use our phrase".

But we are trying to make them understand that, for instance, when kids learn to just count to [00:13:00] 6 or 10 or something, they're just verbally counting, sure, but they know that 9 is a big number compared to 2. For instance, they might be able to recite the whole alphabet, but they don't think that "G" is really big and "B" is very small.

So they understand something about sizes or quantity is increasing. That's a relative term, a relative understanding of counting that's mathematically coherent and interesting. When they start counting, and maybe you want to tell the story real quick of the child counting and getting stuck at "39" for a second.

Julie Sarama: Right, it was just that a child goes: "39..." and then says, "What comes after 3? Oh, I know, 4". And then says, "Um... Okay, 40".

And so that kind of was just a good illustration of a child who understands that "1, 2, 3, [00:14:00] 4" is directly mapped onto "10, 20, 30, 40" and so she was into 39, which means that she knew what came after 3, which was 4, she got 40, which told her what happened next. Which is really cool and show that it's not rote.

Doug Clements: Patterning, in the numerical sense, rather than just "red, red, blue, red, red, blue", kind of patterning, sequential patterning. And it's also structure. She understands mapping the structure of single numbers onto the structure of decades.

Julie Sarama: Right.

Doug Clements: It's amazing. And that's coming from kids who are, again, four or five years of age, compared with kids who are taught more like it is a rote process. I don't know research in Australia on this, but I do know in the United States, at least a little while ago when this research was conducted, it wasn't till fourth grade that the majority of kids knew that 50 had something to do with 5. Fourth grade.

Because if your mindset is: 'this is rote', the way you're teaching it [00:15:00] and the way you lack discussions, math talks with kids, can convince the kids that it's just memorization all over again. And they miss that, the beauty of the structure and pattern.

Julie Sarama: So the 'Learning Trajectories' website usually has a video that will talk something like Doug did about how important counting is. And then it'll have all the levels of kids counting from, hopefully, birth through third grade. And videos of what you can kind of look for and a good written description. And honestly, the good written description, sometimes when I try this out with groups of teachers, the written description can be more helpful for people because it really puts the different things, the different parts of the understanding there.

And then below that are instruction activities, kinds of things, your routines you can add to your day that will help children achieve that level. So that's all there on the website. We have several topics. We have lots of resources for parents, teachers, people who [00:16:00] are engaging with the website in a sort of a professional learning community because it can be overwhelming.

Sometimes I say it's like a recipe website where it's like everything is on there and you look at it and you could be like, 'I have no idea what to make for dinner'. But if you can go in there and say, 'Alright, I have chicken. Give me some chicken recipes’. And then you're like, 'I still don't know', you need a way in.

And sometimes professional learning communities can give you that way in. We can look at what we're planning to do. We're just like, 'okay, the next couple of weeks we're going to be working on, keep going with the same, we'll say geometry. And I think we're going to be learning about shapes. Let's look at about the levels that we think our kids are going to be. Do a little bit of reading and watching those videos and seeing if any of those activities make sense'.

Dale Atkinson: Well, if you're interested in what you've heard here today, speaking with Professor Clements and Professor Sarama, the information on the learning activities, how to engage, support and extend each learner on the 'Learning & Teaching' and Learning Trajectories tool, the website link is below in the show notes.

Also, you can access the [00:17:00] Numeracy Summit presentations on plink, where you can see Professor Clements and Professor Sarama giving their presentation. Doug, Julie, thank you very much for your time.

Julie Sarama: You're welcome.

Doug Clements: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] 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 join you from the Convention Centre in Adelaide where we've just finished the Numeracy Summit. And I'm joined by Francis Su, who is the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, and also a former president of the Mathematics Association of America.

He's been a keynote speaker with us. Thank you very much for joining us.

Francis Su: Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Dale Atkinson: So firstly, what drew you to mathematics and maths in the first place?

Francis Su: I was fortunate to have parents who instilled in me the value of a, of a good education. And I think I got interested in math when I first began to see, get a glimpse of the beauty of maths.

So I give an example, one of my parent's friends came over to the house once. And I remember I was a little kid, you know. I was learning how to add stuff at the time and he said, "Oh, can you add all the numbers from 1 to a 100?" And, of course, you know, I, [00:01:00] I didn't know how to do it, so I just started doing 1 + 2 + 3. It seemed very, really hard. And he said, "no, no, no, no, let me show you an easier way".

For the listening audience, I'm just going to do this with the numbers 1 through 10. And he showed me a beautiful way of adding the numbers 1 through 100, but we'll do 1 through 10. So he said, "imagine all the numbers lined up in a row, 1, 2, 3, 4, all the way up to 10. Yes? If you grab the first thing and the last thing in that list, 1 and 10, what do they add up to? Eleven, great. Now if I move in from both ends, so now I'm grabbing the second thing and the second to the last thing, that's 2 and 9, what do they add up to?

Dale Atkinson: Eleven.

Francis Su: Good, and then 3 and 8 add up to?

Dale Atkinson: Eleven.

Francis Su: And if you keep moving in from the ends in pairs, you basically get 5 pairs of things that add up to 11.

Dale Atkinson: Now you're going to test my mathematics here, right? You might, yeah?

Francis Su: What's 5 x 11? I mean, at that point you could probably figure that out any way you wish, but you'd see it's 55 and you're like, [00:02:00] 'Oh, I remember, I remember seeing this and thinking, "Whoa, that was a pretty cool trick"'.

Like suddenly this thing that seemed really hard became really easy if you looked at it the right way. And that's one of the ways that beauty pops up in mathematics. You use symmetry, or in this case, something that is anti-symmetric, but you, you, you take advantage of structure and you say, 'ah, suddenly a hard thing becomes easy'.

Dale Atkinson: And it is that beauty and clarity, I think, that people who enjoy mathematics, really enjoy about mathematics. But it's sometimes, I think, communicating that beauty to people who may be anxious about mathematics or maybe find it more challenging.

How do we do that thing with people who maybe don't feel like they're able to access the skills?

Francis Su: Yeah, well, mathematics is, it's an odd subject because it's a subject that is very important, very useful, as we know. And it's, you know, the backbone of science and engineering and a lot of the, the data revolution that's happening even as we speak. But a lot of that is computational [00:03:00] and the beautiful side of, of math isn't really seen until you explore it, until you start playing with the ideas.

And so I think we need to give kids more opportunities to just play with the ideas. The one thing I often talk about is if you think about what people normally think of math, they think of arithmetic, right? And you know arithmetic is, it's true, it's part of what you need. You need a solid foundation to do maths, you need to have arithmetic. But if that's all it is, it's kind of boring, right? Like it's kind of like, 'gosh, we could get a calculator to do that, right?'

And so, why do I need to learn this stuff? That's the question kids often ask. And so, how do you get kids excited about math? Well, it's the same way you get them excited about other things that motivate, that stimulate them. You, you go in through the human desires they have, right? The desire to know, to understand.

So, for instance, you might give them a puzzle that has a, an interesting aspect to it that makes you want to go, 'Oh, I wonder how you, how [00:04:00] did you do that?' If you can motivate a kid's curiosity in that way, then they'll be more motivated to learn, to learn maths.

Dale Atkinson: So that seems like one of the things that educators can do or try to access.

What are some things that, perhaps, we need to stop doing in the classroom and elsewhere?

Francis Su: So one of the things that I've been changing the way I teach is thinking about my assessments. So I like to distinguish between skills and virtues. So skills are things that people traditionally think of as math. Like learning your number facts, knowing how to factor a polynomial or use a quadratic formula.

Virtues are aspects of character that shape our attitudes, our habits. And with a virtue, a virtue might be something like creativity; persistence in problem solving; courage to tackle problems you've never seen before. A skill, unfortunately, is something that, it's all the stuff that people think of as traditionally math, and they say, "why do I need to know this stuff?" Right, like, most of us never need to know how to factor a quadratic in our lives, why are we learning it? [00:05:00]

Well, actually the reason we learn maths is not just for the skills. Some people will use them if they go on to a career in science and math, but most people won't. The reason we learn maths is for the virtues, like the habits of mind that it builds, the dispositions that it builds.

And so one thing I realised even after many years of teaching was if I say I value persistence but I only give traditional assessments, like exams where you're graded on whether the answer is right or wrong, then I'm not really sending the same message in my assessments that I'm sending in the classroom.

Dale Atkinson: That is a huge step-change for a lot of education and for education systems. To kind of move away from this idea that there's a bit of data that comes out at the end of any learning process which tells you how well you've done that learning.

What do we need to be thinking about in that assessment space, in that evaluation space, to make that the reality for us, our [00:06:00] kids?

Francis Su: Yeah, we need to value the process in, in find ways to value the process. So I'll give an example of something that I do now is I often ask my, my students to reflect on a problem. Let's say this past semester when, you know, at the end of the semester I might say, "think of a problem that you wrestled with that you struggled to solve and didn't solve and reflect on, explain to me why the struggle itself was valuable".

That's, I think, an example of a, of a reflection that it's, you know, in some sense it's formative assessment. You know, I don't worry too much about, you know, I give close to full credit for almost any thoughtful answer. My students do a lot of really healthy introspection through that. And often they write these wonderful responses that show me that they've grasped this idea that math is actually about building persistence and problem-solving.

That the struggle itself is valuable. That even if you don't solve a problem this time, that act [00:07:00] of exercising your persistence muscle will pay-off down the line with some other problem.

Dale Atkinson: Can I talk a bit about standardised testing? Because every student in year 3, 5, 7 and 9 is going to sit down and be tested in various different domains, one of them being mathematics, mathematics capabilities.

That sends a certain signal. The results have been interpreted in a certain way and used in a certain way to rank schools, rank schools performance based on that dataset. And I understand this is an issue that is not universal to Australia. It's something that happens in the United States as well.

How do we shift the narrative with our parents, our families, to indicate that that outcome is not indicative of the quality of education or how well their kids are doing overall?

Francis Su: Yeah, it's a very, it's a very hard question because basically you can say whatever you want in the class, but what kids remember is the stressful test, right? Whatever that is.

Are you saying that you could change, that there's a possibility of changing the [00:08:00] assessments? Cause that's the first thing I would try to do.

Dale Atkinson: Okay.

Francis Su: Is to change the assessments so that it, it values process more than just outcomes.

Reflection is one way that I try to do that. There needs to be a lot of serious thought about, about how to change assessments. Now, one of the things that's hard is that the, the kind of assessments that need to be done for this to be done right often involve a lot of human labour to grade. So, the people are, you know, used to grading math exams as automated, right?

Like just something I could feed through a, through a computer. But ultimately, I think that's self-defeating in the sense that it's hard to measure things. If we're trying to measure the virtues, some of the human virtues, those things are actually often hard to measure in an automated exam.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, absolutely.

I saw a clip of John Cleese, the comedian, talking the other day when he was giving a lecture from a number of years ago where he was talking about the link between creativity and the childlike ability to approach things with a [00:09:00] sense of play. Is that important in mathematics?

Francis Su: Yes.

Dale Atkinson: And how do we activate it at kids?

Francis Su: Yes. Well, I mean if, if you have the luxury of changing 'K through 6' education, then I think play needs to start early in, in people's experience with mathematics, mathematical play needs to happen. And you know, what does that look like? People often think of play as just gamifying something, turning everything into a game, right?

That's, I think a, maybe not a, a rich view of what it means to play. So to play with an idea is to allow kids to tinker, right? To give them an interesting question and then allow them to wrestle with different ways of solving the, that puzzle or problem and might even be collaborative in some ways. But play looks like trying things out. It's maybe not that different. It has, it shares some features with the way people play a game, right?

Every time you play a game it's a little different and a lot of play involves trying out different strategies on the, on the field whatever they are. And looking [00:10:00] at something from many different perspectives, right? Your, your perspective and your opponent's. That, that's what we do when we play a game, don't we?

And these things are very valuable in mathematics as well. Like looking at a problem from multiple perspectives is actually the key to experiencing joy.

Dale Atkinson: So I think the areas of impact we're going after in our Public Education Strategy are really looking at wellbeing, learner agency, equity and excellence, effective learners.

What are the connections that you see between mathematical flourishing in those areas of impact?

Francis Su: Well, I mean, I think of, of flourishing, certainly flourishing is a, a notion of wellbeing, right? And it's not the same as, as just being happy. Because you could be flourishing even in a very difficult circumstance. I like to think of it as, often involves realising one's potential. And so, even in a hard circumstance, you might rise to the occasion to address some challenge that you're facing.

And so, wellbeing is a huge part of what it means to flourish. The, the [00:11:00] idea of equity or the inequities that we're trying to address, you know often I think can be more effectively addressed when you begin to value each person, dignify each person as a competent mathematical learner, right?

We've written-off too many kids as not "cut out" for math. And that's often we have a gender bias in that and a racial bias sometimes enters into that. And so often people ask, well, people are saying, "we need make our systems equitable, and we do. But I think fundamentally, if you want to change the system, you have to, and you want kids to have, have excitement and agency over their learning, you have to appeal to their humanity.

And certainly there are structures externally to them that maybe prevent them from learning, but for each person to have a productive, exciting relationship with mathematics, we have to give them opportunities to experience that joy and stop thinking about maths as just creating better human calculators, right?

We don't need better human calculators. Our [00:12:00] world doesn't need that, right. We have calculators, right? And that's not to say kids shouldn't learn how to do their basic maths and become fluent and have, you know, automatically be able to do certain skills. But it is saying that like, hey, you know, what does the world need now, especially in the age of AI? What they need are people with human virtues, be people able to think, who are able to look at the output of some computer program or some AI ChatBot and say, "Hey, something's not quite right here", right.

Someone who's, we need people who are creative. We need people who are able to, to reason, to, to, to quantify, to define, to abstract. Right, those are all virtues. Those are aspects of character that we need. We want to shape in our students through a great maths education. It can't just be about skills.

Because skills, as I like to point out, skills are going away. The coming AI revolution, all the jobs if they depend on skills, those jobs are going away. [00:13:00]

Dale Atkinson: Professor Su, thank you very much for your time.

Francis Su: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dale Atkinson: And if you'd like to hear more from Professor Su or any of the speakers at the Numeracy Summit, those presentations are available on plink and you'll be able to find those in the show notes with this podcast.

And if you'd like to look for some extra resources, check out the Number Sense courses on plink, which have got a lot of professional learning that's available for you.

Thank you very much for your time. See you next time.

Dale Atkinson: [00:00:00] 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 it must be the start of the school year because I'm sitting across from Professor Martin Westwell, our Chief Executive. Thank you very much for joining us.

Martin Westwell: Oh no, it's an absolute pleasure, Dale.

Dale Atkinson: Now, we were sitting here last year. We spoke a lot about what your plans were for 2023. 2023 was a pretty big scene-setting year with the launch of the Purpose Statement, the Department Strategy. So they're out in the wild, where to now?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, it was such a great year and we started off with all that input from our students and then saying, 'well what does this mean?' and the Strategy and then coming out with the Strategy. And as I've said lots of times, it was a "strategy" and it wasn't a "strategic plan". And we did that absolutely on purpose because strategic plans so easily just become plans like stuff to do.

So you end up with a lot of initiatives and then what you do is you congratulate yourself for going through the initiatives and getting to the end of them. And that can be impactful, but really what we want to do is focus on purpose and what we're [00:01:00] here for. Why are educators signed up to be educators in the first place, whether that be preschool, primary, high school teachers?

So we've, we've kind of really sat in that, 'let's get to grips with the Strategy and what was meant by the areas of impact and the guiding principles, how we're going to use some of the levers'. So we talked about that a lot.

And at the beginning of last year, you know, Leader's Day, we used a lot of international experts to help inform the conversation. And I think this year we're really now turning to say, 'well, what does that mean? How are we putting that into practice?'

For lots of our sites, they were already looking at the areas of impact and really now building up momentum, saying, 'well, I'm kind of getting this out.' It wasn't being as recognised before, as much before as it is now. And so we're really kind of saying, 'so we were already putting into action and we're going to double-down on what we were doing because we could see that it was working for our kids'.

For others, it's going to be a year, I think, where they're going to say: 'well, I'm going to try out this area of impact. I want to put focus in on this. This is in our school. This is going to be our focus'. And then grappling with [00:02:00] the, "how are we going to do it?"

And, you know what? Sometimes we're going to be really successful and sometimes we're not, and it's not going to be successful. So we're not going to see improvement as this kind of lockstep series of things to go through.

That improvement cycle we've had in the past is a really good improvement cycle, but you've got to be able to have the human beings in it and know that it's a bit messy and sometimes it's going to work, sometimes it's not. Try some things out a particular way, and then if that's not working, well why is it not working? Do we need to do something differently? So it's a year of putting things into, into practice, but again, not being too judgmental of each other, not being too high-stakes about this. Really think about it as a year of learning how we together and in our individual sites are going to approach the Strategy and put it into practice.

Dale Atkinson: So it sounds like the message is one of being brave and trusting your professional judgment.

Martin Westwell: Absolutely. So the professional judgment is a really important part of our Strategy and the Strategic Plan. The, the planning for how we're going to put the Strategy into [00:03:00] place.

Because, again, I've talked about this quite a lot before, I don't think there's any such thing as "best practice" in education. That suggests that everybody's the same, education's simple, it's really well-established what to do and everybody should just do that. There may be one or two parts of education where we should do that. But really, what we know is that teaching and learning is just not that simple. And so to deal with the complexity, we need to rely on the professional judgment of our educators.

They're going to make decisions and choices that are in response to the students that they've got, the context, what's going on, the other staff at the school, the supports that they've got, a whole host of things to make those choices. And I want to empower our leaders, our teachers to be able to make some of those choices in their classroom, in their school, to make the biggest difference they can to our students. And that they can make some, you know, they can have some failures as well, that they can have those praiseworthy failures that we talk about: 'give something to go and if it doesn't work, well, that's okay. We can learn from it, take a step back and move [00:04:00] forward and be even more successful'.

Dale Atkinson: Now on a weekly basis you go out and visit schools and preschools, and so you're hearing them talk about this, and you're seeing how they're engaging with the Strategy and the Purpose. Have you seen anything that exemplifies the direction in which you want our system to head?

Martin Westwell: Oh look, so many things. You know, one of the things about the Strategy was, it was actually quite a reflection of what was already going on in, in many of our schools. So many of our schools with a focus on wellbeing and making sure that our students are able to regulate, are able to work with each other, are able to work well in classrooms. That all the things that need to be true for that classroom experience to be a good one put in place.

But you know, some of the places that I've been to when I think about other areas of impact, like being an effective learner, for example. Just watching students do things like self-differentiate. It's amazing!

So just pick out one example, I was at Mount Barker South Primary School and there they've got two classes, two teachers. And they got the two classes together [00:05:00] and it was a particular piece of maths work and they said, "so if you're", they had this particular language about, "if you're looking at this in the", I think it was "surface" that they were using.

"If you're just, if you're just getting into this and you're just starting and you're not so confident, you're just getting going, you can do this task in there with this teacher. If you, if you're going for deep and you've got an understanding of this and you're going a bit deeper and you really, you know, you think you can do these kinds of questions, stay here with this teacher. And if you're doing transfer, so if you're taking this idea and you think you can go with it, pair up and do this particular piece of work. No teacher, just get on with yourself".

And then I watched these kids sort themselves out. And I saw the teachers like intentionally looking across and like seeing some of the kids who had gone for the surface and going, "uh, not sure you're in the right spot. Go next door and see if you could, if you can give that a go".

And I talked to some of the kids who were doing the transfer piece, so they I could see them, they'd negotiated whether they were going to do the transfer bit or not. They talked [00:06:00] about it, they decided they were, sat down, they got on with their work. And I went over and said to them, "Why have you chosen to do this? Because, you know, if you went into that other class, the deep one, you'd be able to be really successful. Why don't you go in there and show everybody what you can do?" They looked at me as if I'd grown two heads. They said, "But we can already do that. You know, why, why would we, why would we go next door and do that because we can already do that. We're here trying to do this thing that we can't already do and we're grappling with it".

And so just fantastic to see. And that doesn't happen overnight, right? The learning culture the, again, the aspects of wellbeing that have to be in place. And then the kids are able to kind of do this differentiation, feel like they're in the right place and then just lean in and engage with their learning. It's an absolutely beautiful thing to see.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, and I think what goes for the kids there at their primary school goes for the schools and preschools within our system. That success looks very different for different settings and in different settings, doesn't it?

Martin Westwell: I think that's a really important point, right.

So, you know, so I [00:07:00] say this thing, but what I, what I don't want anybody to do is to kind of rush out and go and do that, you know, because it might not work in your site. That might not be the way that we get the biggest difference for the kids in every site. So there is something about, yeah, again, that teacher judgment. Having a good sense of what's going to make the biggest difference for these students with the staff that you've got, the students that you got and so on.

And so, you know, that's that difference between "best practice": everybody do this; to, you know, through to good practice and even emergent practice: these are the things we're trying so that we can make a difference for our students. And I think we see that again, we see that all over our system. And of course, some parts of that that are really important, you know, we've invested heavily in phonics.

And so clearly phonics and the phonics check that we've got really helping people to make decisions around what, when kids have got it and we can carry on and when we might need to put a bit more effort into that. But the way that people are doing it are different in different places. Just, again, making sure that it's, [00:08:00] we're having the maximum impacts that we can through good practice based on teacher judgment.

Dale Atkinson: Can I turn to the corporate office. What are your expectations around how the department's corporate services are going to orient themselves in light of the Strategy?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, you know, so for all of us, we've got, you know, we've got this purpose in education. And when you think about it, we're all having an impact on students.

And so we talk about them learning and thriving. We talk about them achieving and prospering. And how do you achieve that? That almost only happens through the interaction between a student and the people in a classroom, teacher or the students. Most of the time that's where that change occurs. So really everything we do, it's got to be focused on that moment.

And yet, because we need our systems in place and a whole host of things to really kind of focus down on that moment, those moments, that space in between. The student, child, an, an educator, whether that be in preschool or schools, focusing on that moment because that's where it makes the difference.

So there [00:09:00] is something about making sure that we are always operating in service of principal or a preschool director, their staff, in order to make the biggest difference to students.

Sometimes it feels like we ask people to do things to serve the system. And wherever we can, you know, there are some things where we have to do that. There's some national requirements for data collection, you know, even things like our finances. There's some requirements that we should have. But really asking all of us to say, 'is what we're doing really serving as best it can the people in schools and preschools to make the biggest difference they can to children and students'.

Dale Atkinson: Now at a meeting of principals recently you flagged a book by Helen Timperley, 'Leading Professional Conversations' I think it was called, as a, it's a bit of a touchstone on what leadership should look like and feel like under the Strategy. Can you talk us through the key learnings from that book?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, I think the reason why I was talking about Helen's book, and it goes back, I mean, this has been Helen's work for a long time, right? And she wrote a piece for the, for AITSL back in [00:10:00] 2015, 16, which was along the same sort of lines.

And really it's about the kinds of conversations that we have as leaders. And when I say "leaders", I kind of mean all of us, right? So in almost regardless of our role within public education, we're all leaders. You might have a formal leadership role or when we're providing a service and, of course, educators interacting with kids being leaders of learning and development. So we're all leaders. And what do those conversations look like? And Helen's book is particularly about kind of school leaders and people in that kind of leadership role.

But what she's saying is that the sorts of conversations that we need to be having. And much more of those kind of coaching conversations. And of course, when you're having coaching conversations, you're not telling someone what to do. That's, that's not what we're doing in coaching. You're kind of asking questions, you're prodding, you're getting people to think. And I definitely think that in a learning organisation, the way that we should be leading is through learning. We should see leading as a learning activity.

And so those conversations are kind of a prodding conversations they're [00:11:00] bringing out people's thinking. They might be putting two ideas together that just don't go together. So that natural tension that then kind of comes out of that, again, to stimulate thinking. The conversations have to be those kinds of conversations.

Anytime in leadership where we're using our positional power, things have probably gone wrong to a certain extent. Where we're using the kind of hierarchy of the organisation, things might have gone wrong. And you know, don't get me wrong, we have to have some structure to just get things done and there are some things, you know, some requirements.

So we've got NAPLAN, so we need to be communicating through our system when the NAPLAN test window is and this and that. That shouldn't be our starting point, that should almost be the kind of footnote of information that needs providing. The sorts of conversations that we should be having should be the conversations about the, it's the human conversations.

And Michael Fullan talks about systems having, you know, being in danger of having a kind of "bloodless paradigm". It's all about data, it's not about people. It's all about a transaction. It's all about training teachers to do this thing and do it in this way. [00:12:00] And he calls it the "bloodless paradigm". And he's calling for a shift to a human paradigm.

Where we're recognising the, kind of, the motivations that people have, what they bring to this social enterprise of learning. Because it is a social enterprise. Because it's a, it happens because of social interaction. You can, you can transfer information online, you can, that's quite easy to do. But when we know that, you know, we want to encourage somebody who's struggling with something, we want people to grapple. You want people to kind of look into each other's eyes and go, kind of, 'yeah, I trust you. I'm with you on this. We can do this thing together'.

There's a social interaction that's, that's going on there. So those coaching conversations that Timperley talks about, I think really helped with that. Recognising that this is a human paradigm, these are human beings interacting with each other, working together, grappling with the same sorts of things. And it's those conversations that we need to be having rather than more kind of compliance conversations.

Dale Atkinson: You touched in there about becoming a learning organisation and the importance of learning as an individual. What [00:13:00] have you personally learned from the process of developing the Purpose Statement and the Strategy?

Martin Westwell: So much. So much. Where to start?

You know, there's been some things. So some things about kind of, you know, just us as a system and the human system. Let me try and pick out a few. Some of the things I already knew, but have just been reinforced, just about the kind of, the commitment. You know, we talk about the moral purpose of educators and just how much that kind of shines through. And when it does shine through, the joy that comes from that, about, you know, letting educators be educators, letting teachers teach.

And, you know, when you do that the joy that comes with it. That's been really great learning. That was something that we'd intended through the Strategy. You know, we'd really come at it from that point of view to create a bit of space. And there's loads more work to do to create space for educators and leaders. But to create a bit of space to allow that joy to come through. And I think we're starting to see that happen now.

So it's, one of the learnings is it's doable. You know, there's this latent joy, you know, alright joy that's already [00:14:00] being expressed, but there's more of it that can be released in our system. I think there's something there.

One of the things I've seen as well is, you know, like we talked about before with the Strategy, we're setting out the choices that we're making as a system. This is the direction that we're going in. This is what's important to us. And you can criticise that and say, 'well, if you're not going to tell educators what to do, it's either a thousand flowers blooming, or it's just confusion for people'. Well, what I've learned is that that's not the case.

Some people need some support. Some of those coaching conversations we're about, you know, to draw out some of that thinking. Some people, you know, want to try this thing out but perhaps just need a bit confidence, a little bit of nudging along. But what I have seen is so many of the responses at a site level when people have taken that time to stop and think about where we're heading, how this connects with where they are as a school and as an individual professional and as a team of professionals, when people have done that and stopped and thought about it, there has been so many different responses. Almost all of them have just been fantastic, you know. [00:15:00] Really different action, but really bringing out the kind of heart and soul that we'd intended from the Strategy.

Again, I think there's still a distance for us to go. There always will be. There'll always be changes. There'll always be something that happens in the world, the students will, they'll change, the demands from society on educator and educators will change and we'll need to respond to those. But I do think we're in a, you know, a really positive place in South Australia. And, in fact, getting more and more national and international attention because of the work that we're doing.

Dale Atkinson: Flash forward a year from now, what do you want us to be talking about?

Martin Westwell: I think the conversation that we would need to be having would be about the impact that we see. You know, the road to impact. So, you know, so if last year was kind of looking at the big picture, getting the international thinking into our thinking, bringing all that together, this year being about us taking control of that story.

This is our story. It's South Australia's story. The introduction of some of the Australian curriculum, the adapted Australian [00:16:00] curriculum subjects this coming year. I think, you know, we really need to be saying, 'this is the impact we're starting to see. This is the change that we're seeing'.

And so if you take that kind of good and emergent practice notion, in a year's time what I think where we'll be as a system is we'll be able to see the things that we really want to amplify across the system. Might have been occurring at site level in some of the pilots and things that we've been trying out and saying, 'well, how are we going to amplify those things?'

We'll be clear about some of the things that are not working for us and we'll have to dampen those things down. So I do think we'll start to see almost kind of the output of the evaluation. Yeah, we've had some successes, we've had some things that have not been so successful and then building on those and, and make sure that the system can take those on and we can grow and learn further together.

Dale Atkinson: Grow and learn further together. Professor Martin Westwell, thanks for your time.

Martin Westwell: Thanks Dale.

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 professional learning programs and specifically about the professional learning programs provided by Orbis, which can boost your career development and opportunities as an educator and a leader. And we're talking to two people who have been boosting their opportunities as educators and leaders in Kurt Ferguson from South Downs Primary School, and Sarah Edwards from Loxton High School.

Welcome to you both.

Kurt Ferguson: Thank you.

Sarah Edwards: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Dale Atkinson: So first of all, Kurt, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your current role?

Kurt Ferguson: Sure, so I've been out for a little while now teaching. My current role is a senior leader for curriculum pedagogy that really involves system-wide processes for our school around kind of our data collection and how we use our data. And then kind of building evidence-led practices at our site and supporting with effective teaching learning behind that as well.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I'm sitting across from you and you look like a reasonably young human being. [00:01:00] What's that career journey involved in terms of going from teacher to leader in relatively rapid succession, I assume?

Kurt Ferguson: Yep. It's probably taken a fair bit of adjustment. I think probably early on I had to really grapple with kind of my own knowledge and building my confidence around that and really backing myself in and realising that, obviously, people have put me in the position because they also see something in me, believe in me for that. So, that's probably taken a little bit of adjusting, but I'm kind of finding my feet with it now and obviously nothing worth having is without its challenges.

Dale Atkinson: Absolutely true. In terms of Orbis' role in your professional learning, how have you engaged with the programs there?

Kurt Ferguson: Yeah, so I think my first one was Instructional Leadership. So we actually had at the time at my previous site, my whole leadership team went in and that was really nice way to find, dabble my feet in with the Orbis work. You're actually doing a lot with your current site and I found that a lot of the Orbis PDs had us doing a lot of things that we could actually take back and action at our site.

So that was probably a really nice way to dabble into it. And then probably more recently I've [00:02:00] been engaging in Middle Leaders PD, and that's probably been a little bit more on my own personal development and myself as a leader; and talked a little bit about building my own confidence and resilience as a leader. And that's probably had a bit more of a role in that there.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it is a nice mix, isn't it, of learning some of those leadership capabilities that you're looking for, but also some of those practical tools around pedagogy and classroom experience.

Kurt Ferguson: Absolutely.

Dale Atkinson: Now Sarah, you're a teacher who's worked at various country locations across South Australia. Can you walk us through your experiences?

Sarah Edwards: Well, my experiences have been a bit of a whirlwind, to be honest. I've also been out of uni for a little while now and I was teaching for a couple of years and then, before I knew it, I was in a leadership role and I was like, oh what is going on? And what I can really accredit it to is living in country areas.

Like, being in country schools provides such unique opportunities that you don't necessarily get in those metro schools. And there's ample opportunities, there's some really broad opportunities, to [00:03:00] demonstrate your capacity as a leader and that's anything from organizing camps, excursions, you can coach sporting teams, and then of course you go right through into those official leadership positions within the school.

And I think I was quite lucky being in a country secondary school. Sometimes those cohorts were a little bit smaller and the teaching teams are very close-knit. So I was working quite closely with a leader, and then he retired and it just seemed like that natural progression to step into his role. It wasn't as easy as what I'm making it sound like.

I initially applied for the job and didn't win it, but sought lots of feedback, particularly around how I could work with other people and how I could develop my skills. And I worked really hard as being a leader in like running PLCs and chairing committees. I really tried to set myself up and then I applied for the job again, and I won it. Flash forward and yeah, here we are.

Dale Atkinson: That's really good, isn't it? 'Cause it's that combination of kind of structured professional development and learning that you want to engage with as, as an educator and as you go through your career. But then there's also the self-propelled stuff that you do on your own.

That's right. Isn't it [00:04:00] Sarah?

Sarah Edwards: Yeah, absolutely. I was only having a chat to my principal this morning; I was chatting to her and I'm like: "remember when there used to be written reports? And it'd always be like, Such and Such talks a lot, or Such and Such is this. Mine was always: Sarah always has leadership opportunities or she's always a leader of a group".

So I guess it was kind of there and I've always wanted to be a leader in some capacity. It just probably happened a little bit quicker than the plan, but I love it. I think it's fantastic. I, I think teaching is a great job and I think that these B-band or middle-band leadership roles have that really great balance between the leadership and that teaching as well.

Dale Atkinson: And so what is the, what's the role of Orbis been in drawing out some of those sort of natural leadership tendencies in you?

Sarah Edwards: Orbis has an extensive opportunity for me to, or not just me anybody really, to network and work with people who are like-minded and just as passionate about what you do. I really like the Instructional Leadership that Kurt mentioned earlier where you actually do get to work in a small group of people and you, you get to really build on your strengths within that team that then is [00:05:00] reflected nicely and directly into schools.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Kurt, is there anything that you've been surprised about yourself or something unexpected that you've learnt through the Orbis programs?

Kurt Ferguson: Definitely. I think probably in the last one, the Middle Leaders, really getting engaged for like who I am as a leader and actually starting to, you know, you've got professionals that are actually there who are well-skilled in leadership everywhere and all the different facets that it has and actually kind of understanding that there's so many different layers to what leadership can look like, what kind of leader you can be.

And I think probably in that Middle Leaders you really get the chance to grapple with your own identity as a leader and, kind of, what your values are and what they mean for, you know, if you've got certain traits or characteristics that you lean into when you're feeling pressured or when you're feeling that you're under a certain level of stress and, kind of, ways to manage that and mitigate, kind of, your responses as a leader to make sure you're still the most effective leader.

I think that's something that certainly surprised me and has been, you know, really powerful for me as a leader to, kind of, move my own learning forward.

Dale Atkinson: That does sound really powerful.

[00:06:00] Sarah, you mentioned this a bit earlier in terms of professional learning communities and those sorts of things. How have you been sharing what you've learned at Orbis with your colleagues?

Sarah Edwards: The thing I really love about the Orbis professional learning, and I will continue to rave about this, it is that it's so relevant to what's actually happening in South Australian classrooms at the time. Like, I'm sure we've all been involved in some professional learning that isn't provided by Orbis.

And you kind of go, 'oh, does this really fit my context? Why am I here?' What I really love about Orbis is I walk in going, 'this is gonna be great, and I know I'm gonna walk out, I'm gonna be walking out with resources and strategies that I can directly implement into my classroom. And if it's not in the classroom, in that leadership space, depending on what the professional learning was about.

I rave about this so much that when I did the Orbis 6 to 9 Numeracy last year I was like, 'right, this is great. I had direct impact on my own pedagogy in the classroom that when I started at a new school at the beginning of this year, I was like, 'I need my maths team, my maths [00:07:00] teachers, to be participating in this because I know how valuable it is. And if it's impacted me and my efficacy in teaching mathematics then it is certainly gonna have an impact on them.'

So we've had three teachers do the same program, and I could confidently say that they've all had the same experience. That they can take exactly what they've learned and bring it straight back into the classroom.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Kurt, you were nodding along to a bit of that. Is that a similar experience that you've had?

Kurt Ferguson: Yeah, very similar experience.

I've really enjoyed, kind of, everything that I've engaged with and, as I said earlier, like the Instructional Leadership, kind of, my first little chance to engage with Orbis was very much, you know, taking what you're doing into practice and taking it straight back to your site. Spread out over a year, you know, it was really intentional in that, you know, you're working with your entire team on quite literally your site. It wasn't just something that you do on a day and you bring back. And the reason I was nodding is, I've had a couple of our staff sent off to the Orbis Maths this year and it's always a glowing review when they come back. There's evidence-based practice that they can bring straight back in that's gonna provide the, the best bang for buck in classroom practice. So yeah.

Dale Atkinson: That's really [00:08:00] good feedback. How has that impact filtering down to students? What have you seen in that area?

Kurt Ferguson: Yeah, I think all of the Orbis PDs and trainings that both our teachers and our leaders have been able to go along to, we started to see that trickle-down effect. So it might not be that we're directly, it's not the students that are going along to these PDs, but their educators are making sure that you're putting best practice in front of those students and then, in terms of leadership, we're making sure that all the different things that we're implementing as a site and our school-wide practices and processes are so streamlined and tight. It, it falls hand in hand that by the time it gets down to the students, we're, we're very confident in that, you know, there's the most evidence-backed, research-based practices happening in there and there's engaging pedagogy and, as a result, you're gonna see your students move from that.

Dale Atkinson: And you're seeing something similar at it to Loxton, Sarah.

Sarah Edwards: Yeah, for sure. I'm lucky, I'm sitting on the end of the phone 'cause I'm also nodding away. I think, Kurt, really, now that they're talking about that evidence-based approach to lots of the, the teaching and the [00:09:00] learning strategies that Orbis presents and that, that we can take directly into classrooms.

I found as a teacher and somebody who engaged with the 6 to 9 Numeracy program, that it really consolidated my understanding of the maths curriculum. I found it rather affirming and that when I came back to class, I noticed an increased engagement level with my students because I wasn't spending all my planning time unpacking the curriculum because I learnt so much of that at the Orbis that when I was planning for these lessons, I could focus on making it more engaging for my students and that I could differentiate for them more confidently because I just had, I guess, almost one less thing to worry about because Orbis had gone through it so thoroughly.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's a huge step change for, for any teacher in terms of workload and other things.

Kurt, you mentored early career teachers. Can you tell us a bit about the benefits of mentoring for yourself and, and the mentees?

Kurt Ferguson: Sure.

Yeah, I've been lucky enough to have a few early career teachers that have gone through the Orbis early career stuff with me as well.

I think something [00:10:00] that has been really powerful for me is, I mean, schools are a very busy place, as you both would probably understand. It's not often you get the opportunity to kind of set aside some time to really unpack both: one, how your early career teacher's going; and two, actually getting the opportunity to work through those things with them.

I think a lot of the time you feel like you have a really strong grasp on how things are going, but it's not until you get to a day like the Orbis Early Careers, the first intensive you do where a lot of the work is around, kind of, their perceptions of how everything's going. And I think in the times that I have done that, it's been really like, 'oh, I really needed to probably take a bit more of a step in the direction of actually getting the information I needed from you to see how I can best support.'

I've done it twice now and both times I've walked away feeling more confident that I can support my early career teacher better and vice versa. That, you know, they have a stronger affirmation that I can be the leader that they need.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. That does sound like a really powerful kind of exchange of, of interest really.

Sarah, you mentioned earlier today that you're out on a beautiful spring day in Loxton. Best [00:11:00] time of the year, according to you, up in the Riverlands. So you started your teaching career out at Roxby.

Sarah Edwards: Mm-Hmm.

Dale Atkinson: You've been all over the country. What advice would you give to new teachers considering starting out in country areas?

Sarah Edwards: Oh, this is so easy for me. I love when I get these questions because I'm so passionate about education, particularly in country areas. And I get that I can respond to this question really easy 'cause I grew up in regional areas and so for me it was a no-brainer that I was gonna teach in a regional area myself.

I really didn't have any interest in going to Adelaide schools because I just think the country is the best. Like we have the most beautiful state, and I might be a little bit bias-y, but I think we actually have one of the most beautiful states and some of the pristine holiday locations. So, heck, why not wake up every day in these beautiful locations and get to work and live in that community?

But for me, I guess I just really wanted to use this to address some of probably the worries that some teachers may have about moving out [00:12:00] into the country. It, it can be really daunting for some people, but rest assured, the department has plenty of supports in place. You have access to government employee housing with subsidised rent which is always a, a win there.

And then, of course, the department also supports you in moving by organising a removalist and you don't have to pay for those kinds of things as well. So it's a wonderful opportunity. And I guess I'll also take this opportunity to give a bit of a plug for all of us here that quite often if you are in a country school, they will pay for your accommodation or your travel costs to head down to Adelaide.

So I think that's a win-win win all round.

Dale Atkinson: We'll take all those wins.

So lastly, for those who are aspiring to step into leadership roles and are maybe considering Orbis professional learning, what is your advice in, let's say, fewer than five words to them?

Kurt Ferguson: I can give you a few over.

Dale Atkinson: Go. Start with a few over.

Kurt Ferguson: Don't be afraid of what you don't know. Just remember that you're gonna grow.

Dale Atkinson: That's pretty good. That's not bad. Sarah?

Sarah Edwards: Aw man, that one even rhymed!

Dale Atkinson: You've gotta try and top that.

Sarah Edwards: How am I gonna beat that? [00:13:00]

Dale Atkinson: Do your best.

Sarah Edwards: Take every opportunity and grab it with both hands 'cause you just never know where it's gonna take you.

Dale Atkinson: I, I'll take both of those. They were excellent. Thank you very much to Sarah and to Kurt.

Kurt Ferguson: No problem.

Sarah Edwards: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: And Orbis professional learning programs, they can support you and your career from graduate teacher to leader and everything in between. You can enrol in a professional learning program that's right for you on the Orbis website, which is www.education.sa.gov.au/orbis.

Or you can just look in the show notes underneath where you access the podcast.

Thank you very much for joining us. See you next time.

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 very special guest. An international man of great ability and expertise, Professor Guy Claxton.

He is a cognitive scientist. He's written more than 30 books on psychology and education. He's a man with a double first in natural sciences from Cambridge University and a doctorate in experimental psychology from Oxford. That's a lot of stuff there.

Professor Claxton, thanks for joining us.

Guy Claxton: Not at all. It's my pleasure.

Dale Atkinson: Now what I'd like to speak to you today about, and you've just joined us from a conference with a large group of our students, and I'd like to talk to you about student agency.

Tell us a little bit about what that session today with those, four, five, six hundred students looked like.

Guy Claxton: First of all, can I say it was a first for me. First time I've done a live workshop with that number of kids scattered across a large geographical area. It was the first also in the sense that I've never been involved in a similar event anywhere else on the planet.

I would like to start by just tipping my hat to Martin Westwell and his team for engaging in such a thorough and honest investigation of what it is that communities, and professionals, and families and students themselves, what they want from their education. I don't know of any other jurisdiction that has gone to these lengths to do customer research- customer facing research.

Doing that kind of research has been a kind of commonplace in the business world for, I don't know, 30 or 40 years, but education doesn't seem in most places, certainly not in my country, and then back in England, it doesn't seem to have caught up with the importance of finding out what the customers actually want and getting some feedback. I suspect there are a lot of reasons, but one of them might be there is a kind of continuing insularity or arrogance on the part of educational professionals, that they're the only people who know whose business it is to know what young people need to know, and that anybody who questions- who isn't trained in the profession, you know, doesn't know what they're talking about. So students who don't turn up or vote with their feet, there's something wrong with them, or there's something wrong with their families.

And the idea that cumulatively, certainly in my country, the vast number of kids that haven't come back to school after COVID is just brushed away as if it were, you know, we need more draconian measures to punish parents if their kids don't come to school. Rather than entertaining the possibility that it may just be that their time out of school hasn't sharpened their sense of the relevance and the empowerment of what goes on in school. And they've, you know, hundreds of thousands of such kids are continual truants in my country, and I suspect the stats are not very different in Australia.

This consultation and the seriousness with which the department are taking it, I think, is really laudable. And the focus of it is obviously meet and drink to me.

My work is two-pronged in a way. I am, as you said, Dale, a cognitive scientist or a learning scientist is my specialism. So part of me is an egghead and my work has revolved around learning to learn, the learnability of learning itself and also really quite rapidly changing fundamental conceptions of what it is to be intelligent and moving away from that. The idea that we're condemned by our genetics to have some kind of fixed sized pot of general-purpose nous that sets a ceiling on what we can achieve and that follows us around for the rest of our lives.

And the other side of my work is very practical with schools. Actually going into classrooms, talking lots of workshopping with teachers and gradually developing an extensive micro-toolkit of little things that teachers can do in schools as they are. We're not going to get wholesale improvement unless we can show existing teachers the steppingstones that are not too threatening to get them from here to there.

So a large part of my job here and my work with the students this afternoon is to try and introduce them in a kind of entry-level sort of way into some of the science, but also a little bit into some of the practical ramifications. And I think we were at least partly successful. They seem to be quite interested in the practical relevance of some of the things that I was talking about.

Dale Atkinson: And what changes when we start to engage students on this level, the level that you were engaging with them today?

Guy Claxton: The fundamental change is around the notion of learning and around the learnability of learning. And around the interestingness of, if you unpack that, if you start to see learning as a craft, then beginning to understand what the skills and capabilities or life skills, or there's a whole big vocabulary that is used to refer to something a bit deeper and a bit broader than merely a skill which sounds like a rather technical thing.

So habits of mind, character strengths, positive learning dispositions. So getting clearer about what are the underpinnings of someone who is confident, autonomous, and capable when faced, this is my definition broadly, when faced with situations that are novel, challenging, complex, or uncertain. That's my definition of learning.

It's like being good with uncertainty. Or as Jean Piaget once defined intelligence as: knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. We've built an education system around giving kids things that they do know what to do.

I always have this image by the time they leave they have a large backpack of well-rehearsed performances of understanding that is supposed to equip them for life in the big wide world and I honestly doubt that that's the best send-off we can give them.

Whereas, if we dig deeper into the process of learning and if we talk about learning as if it were itself something that was learnable, there are skills and strategies, obviously, but there are these more deeper, more character like things. And I think for me, that's the difference of nuance between in the new framework that's emerging from the Department for Education.

I think for me, learner effectiveness or the effective learner points in the direction of the skilful or the strategic. And the idea of learner agency points at something deeper; a confidence or an attitude or a stance. All other things being equal and openness to that which is strange or challenging. Not being automatically frightened or bigoted or dismissive of people, things or ideas that are not immediately yours or not immediately familiar.

And goodness knows, society needs that kind of mindset, doesn't it? Tolerance for diversity.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I think that's certainly echoed, I think, in the way that educators have been engaging with their students.

Guy Claxton: Yeah, so if I could just add one-one more thought.

A lot of my work is how to make that not just hot air and aspirational. You know, the road to educational hell has been well-paved time and again by fine words and wish lists. Whereas my work has been: 'so how can we tweak what's going on in a maths classroom so that it is building, not just the ability, but the desire, the appetite to figure it out for yourself?'

So you don't have students kind of sitting there looking pathetic with their hands half up, saying with their most mournful face on, saying verbally and unverbally, "I don't get it, Miss, please come and rescue me”.

And I think we've been too quick often in the past to, it's like kind of responding to a stroke patient who says, "Nurse- I, my legs won't work anymore. Please wheel me around in my wheelchair". Whereas, a good physiotherapist will say, "Come on, George, up you get. You did 12 steps yesterday, do 15 today". And that kind of tough love, you might say, is absolutely in George's best interest. And likewise, for children to discover the capacity and the appetite. I think both those things are important.

So I often say that you know you're making progress in a classroom when you set the students a puzzle, it might be in an English lesson. A common activity, certainly in my country, is to take a poem- a well-known poem, cut it up into individual couplets or stanzas, give them back muddled up to students and take away the title of the poem and give it back to students to would say work in twos or threes to see if you can reorder these elements into what seems to make the most sense to you. And out of which, you can make a reasonable guess as to what the title of the poem is.

And you know you're doing well when you say, "I'll give you ten minutes to do that", and after seven minutes, you say, "Would you like to know the answer?" And they all say, "No, Sir. No, don't!" Like: 'Don't rob us of the possibility that we might be able to figure it out for ourselves'. Because there's pride and pleasure. It's not fun, but there's a pleasure, isn't there? In that efficacy.

So it's like, little things like that. How do we change our very understandable impulse to rescue children and comfort them when they're finding something difficult and tweak that so that now they are gradually discovering and strengthening their capacity to do it for themselves; so that the mood in the room now becomes one of the teacher is the last resort to rescue them like if all else fails rather than the first resort?

Dale Atkinson: I mean this is quite a glib summary perhaps, but that transition from teaching the student the thing to teaching the student how to learn about the thing is quite a profound shift, isn't it?

Guy Claxton: 'Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him how to fish'. It has some similarities to that. Fish goes off much faster than learning does. But yeah, absolutely.

The idea that children's performance in schools, like how and why they do well or they do badly in their learning, is not easily predicted by some naive combination of fixed ability and effort.

That's the traditional, what we call in my discipline, folk psychology. And it's inaccurate and it's unhelpful. It would be like talking to, you know, the third squad of a football club and saying to them, effectively, you know, 'you're in the third squad and that's where you belong, mate. Because you lack ability'.

You wouldn't be a very good coach if you spoke to your athletes in that way. You'll motivate, you'll say, 'if you try really hard, if you practice, ta da da, maybe next season you'll make it into the second squad'. And maybe they do and maybe they don't, but they'll have learned more through the aspiration, rather than feeling pigeonholed.

And we've unfortunately and without really meaning to that notion of ability, fixed ability plus effort, has and in some places still does permeate. It's like a bit of mental malware. That if you're a bright student or a successful student the way you tell that is by the fact that that student gets everything right first time, preferably without breaking sweat, and always. Now that's a very stupid idea to feed into students' minds because it means if they're slow or they make mistakes, that immediately gets interpreted as stupid. Nobody likes to feel stupid, so you're kind of getting them to veer off, you know, the legitimate experiences of being a learner now become aversive to you.

Once you point that out, it's common sense. But in some classrooms, still, it's a rather uncommon common sense. People might sort of poo-poo it as just a bit of sort of Namby-pamby psychology, but to my mind, it's absolutely practical.

And I think it went- those ideas went down rather well with the students. For a lot of them, it made them stop and think about, for example, the nature of mistakes. Some mistakes are sloppy; some of them are unacceptably costly if you really mess up some expensive material; and some mistakes are smart. Like, they were a good idea, they didn't work perfectly, but you've learned from them and the next time you're going to do better.

So even that, for a group of five-year-olds, detoxifies the notion of mistake and opens up the concept of drafting, learning through critique and through reflection. Good old-fashioned trial and error.

Dale Atkinson: One of the things you spoke to the students about was the learning pit. Can you sort of explain that concept to the listeners?

Guy Claxton: The learning pit is a very nice, simple, graphic visualization which basically just points out two things:

Any learning worth its salt is uncomfortable by definition, unless it's kind of really trivial learning. What it means is you're at and beyond your current limit of comprehension or competence. You're somewhere out there. You don't know, you can't reliably predict the effect of your actions. You can't always get the result that you wanted.

Getting kids clearer, getting-getting them to understand more clearly the realities of learning, I think. And to know that frustration and confusion are not things to be scared of. They're inevitable emotional accompaniments.

The science shows very clearly, deep down in us in the way we're designed biologically, our bodies, and our brains and our minds learning is an emotional business, you know. We were designed as learning animals to discover things that matter to us. And our brain is designed to switch on and to make itself rubbery and plastic when we're confronted with something that matters to us, that seems threatening or an unexpected resource. And yet, schools have often kind of operated as if curiosity, or that sense of significance or mattering, was a sort of expendable issue. Like, we don't need to pay attention to it or even that it was a distraction.

So the learning pit, first of all, encourages children to understand that it's not that bad to be in the pit. And everybody did. David Bowie did, Paul McCartney did- he spent a lot of his time in the learning pit. So did Beethoven, so did Einstein, etc, etc, etc.

And the second side of the pit, it just graphically shows, but if you develop on your strategies, and if you develop your learning strengths and your learning attitudes, you have ways of getting yourself out of the learning pit. They're like crampons in the side of the pit. And that you can go on discovering those more and more.

I was in a school this morning, Prospect North Primary School, where the children there- year five and six children were showing me their customized version of the learning pit which was very meaningful. I, like, I checked with them, 'Is this just another bit of teacher business that we have to do?'

They- 'No', they said, 'it's really useful to have those words, to have that insight'.

The time in the pit is not necessarily just painful and useless. And that if you try and build a rope bridge across the top of the pit and avoid the discomfort, then you end up just as incompetent as you were on the original side of the bridge. I mean, I think a lot in metaphors. And I think in education, it's useful to communicate a lot in metaphors.

So I think the learning pit is a very useful image, a way of imaging that gets kids, particularly younger kids, directly into an understanding of the reality of learning rather than this alternative idea that anybody who's really bright doesn't have to bother with mistakes or effort. You can just do it.

Dale Atkinson: There's a huge degree of resilience and self-confidence that's required for a student to tackle learning in that particular way. How is it that educators can activate those capabilities within learners?

Guy Claxton: Well, that's a big part of my work and I think it's a big part of what underlies the responses to the consultation.

I was just looking at some of them. Children and parents alike saying they often use the word 'skills', where I would use the word 'dispositions'. But again and again, they use words like: 'be more resilient', 'more confident', 'more curious', 'more creative', 'more entrepreneurial', 'more imaginative', 'more collaborative'. They often couch their wish list for education in those terms.

So the job of the teacher now becomes moving them at an acceptable rate. You become like a mind coach, where you're not- you don't see your job just as filling minds of a fixed sized ability, but of actually expanding that ability. And you do it gradually in the way you blow up a balloon. So it's like you see intelligence not as a fixed sized bucket, but as a balloon that is capable of being inflated or becoming larger and more flexible as you go along.

So little things like resilience. There's lots of little strategies that are very common, they're not particular to me. But what I do is try and collect these things and show the synergy behind them.

Little things like, try '3 Before Me'. Which is when a child is struggling, you'll go to say, "I will help you, but just tell me the three things you've tried to help yourself first. And if you haven't come up with three things, then would you just, Anna, would you just see if you could hang in for another couple of minutes? Then if you're really, really, really stuck, I'll come and give you a hint. Would you do that for me?"

It's a tiny tweak in the classroom, but it's a tweak that is inviting, that is telling Anna she might be able to rescue herself. That doing so it is a desirable thing and that if she has another couple of minutes, she might just be able to do it rather than falling into that helplessness and there's lots of lots of variations on that. So it's just finding those little stepping stones that help teachers get from here there.

How you build concentration, for example, we know that the ability to concentrate despite distractions is a strengthenable muscle. It's what mindfulness training is all about. There are all kinds of little ways in which you can raise children's awareness of their own potential capacity to control their attention. To not get ripped away from what they were doing by a fire engine that goes by. And to learn to recognize that. And it's a bit like CBT, a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

It's like having the awareness in the moment to say, 'Ah, this is a potential distraction. I don't need to go there'. And sometimes it's so juicy you can't resist it still. But sometimes that opens up a moment of choice where you can say, 'Aha, I'm now going to go back to what I was doing'. So these little things that are highly accessible, but I think often psychologically quite sophisticated, are things that I want to kind of make available broadly to teachers.

We're not going to get into the world of dispositions by a quantum jump. We're going to get there by evolution by lots of teachers hearing about these things and going quietly to themselves: 'Oh, I could do that. I could do that with my kids. I'm going to try it tomorrow'. And gradually, the great liner of education begins to turn around or at least that's my belief.

Dale Atkinson: Well, I think that's very encouraging and, uh, in the show notes we'll have more information on where teachers can go to access some of the advice and expertise that, uh, Professor Claxton has made available.

If you had one piece of advice to the teachers that are listening today, what would that advice be?

Guy Claxton: Give it a go. That was one of the things- one of the lists of five most important things that parents said they wanted for the children. The willingness to give it a go. And I would just wish all teachers not to be stuck, not to be defensive, not to be immediately critical.

Not to say: 'Oh, but it'll jeopardize the results', particularly secondary and senior secondary teachers. But to say: 'It's only a little thing, it's a little tweak. It might make a difference; I don't know yet. But I'm going to give it a go and I'm going to make it work for three weeks and then I'm going to see if it's made a difference to the mood in the classroom'.

Chances are it will, and if it does, then you might be ready to make the next little tweak and on you go. So do something a little bit different tomorrow.

Dale Atkinson: I think the piece of advice that we're providing to teachers there is exactly the skills and capabilities we're trying to instil in the students that we're educating.

Guy Claxton: Exactly right.

Dale Atkinson: Professor Guy Claxton, thank you very much for your time.

Guy Claxton: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

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