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

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. And today we have some international visitors, we have Dr. Linda Kaser, who's the co leader of Networks of Inquiry and Indigenous Education and also a faculty member at the University of British Columbia. Also Dr. Judy Halbert, who is co leader of the Networks group and also the faculty member of the University of British Columbia. Thank you very much for joining us.

Judy Halbert: Well, thank you for having us.

Dale Atkinson: Tell us a little bit about British Columbia. Tell us about what you've learned there and how this might apply in other places.

Judy Halbert: So we were both teachers in public schools, secondary English teachers, and then principals and district leaders, and have worked for the government, and now at the university and run a network. So we've kind of done just about every job in the system. And British Columbia, we have 60 school districts. We have about 5 million people. We have a growing Indigenous population and we have about 88 percent of our students attend public school and then 12 percent are in independent band or religious schools.

We love our province, we love the direction and when we look around the world at smart places to learn from, we look to South Australia because we think we have a lot in common here with your focus on innovative curriculum, on leadership, and on Indigenous reconciliation. So it feels like a great fit between South Australia and British Columbia.

Linda Kaser: Yeah, I think one of the things that we've had the chance to do is to look at how other countries of our size, I'm saying in Canada, our system is federal, which means each province acts as a country in terms of our educational system.

So we've looked at We've looked at New Zealand, and we've looked at Finland, and we've looked at Singapore, and now we're going to look closely at your system as well. And one of the things that we've noticed is that the countries that seem to do the best job overall, the curiosity has been developed in their faculty.

In Finland, it's developed by every teacher having a master's degree, where they do an independent research. In Singapore, it's done in a different way. And so, we got very interested in inquiry and working with New Zealand educators at the University of Auckland on how curiosity, adult curiosity, done collaboratively to make a powerful system change.

Dale Atkinson: So one of the things I know that you've been focused on a lot within your system is the noticings and the work around inclusion and transition, specifically for Indigenous students in the Canadian setting. Can you tell us about what you noticed in that space and how that might apply in Australia to our own situation?

Judy Halbert: Well, it was interesting when we were first encouraged to take a look at improving transitions for Indigenous learners. It was a very narrow definition of transition. It was looking at supporting Indigenous, uh, young people from secondary school to post secondary. And when we really got into it, we realized that transitions was much more than that.

It was really any point where there's a change in a child's life or a learner's life. So we started to look from kindergarten to elementary school, from middle school to secondary school, but also from home to foster care. From band school to, state school, so really at any point where there's a change in a child's life, how do we support them?

So that's, we've got a much broader definition of transition now. One of the things that, that we ask the schools that are involved in that work, we're currently with working with our third cohort of schools, and there's a couple of reports on our website, but it's the importance of being, belonging, and becoming.

Regardless of what age or stage the young people are at. So ‘being’, do they have a strong sense of identity as an individual and identity with their community and identity with their nation? And is that identity reflected and respected within the school? So that’s the first one.

‘Belonging’, we have a key question that we ask all of our schools to ask, and that is, can every young person in the school name at least two adults in the school who believe they will be a success in life?

And success in life needs to be interpreted really broadly and contextually and culturally appropriate. But once we have the discussion around what success in life means, we think it's absolutely essential that every young person knows that there's at least two adults who have their back within the school. And then we have a strategy, if they can't name it, then what we're going to do about that. So that's kind of fundamental.

The third is ‘becoming’, and that is, can every young person see in the school, the connection with life outside school? So that notion of being, belonging and becoming is absolutely foundational to our work with transitions.

The other big learning that we've found is that if the school principal and the district team supporting that school isn't committed to that work, it's not going to happen. It's too hard for a single teacher or a single Indigenous support worker to create that setting. It has to be a whole team. So that's why we've been working really hard on kind of a network strategy surrounding kids with, with support at every level.

Linda Kaser: I think something else that might be useful. Is learning from indigenous perspectives about the importance of things like land and place and community and taking that really seriously and also the value it. I don't think in the Western literature about leadership, the word generosity comes up very much, but it's a powerful part of the indigenous cultures in, in our province and in our country. And the saying is “you show your leadership by what you give away” which is a very different way of looking at success in life. Indigenous people live in that way and whole schools now are trying to take those ideas very seriously, and I think listening carefully, because listening is an Indigenous value too. Our cultures have been on these territories for a long time, and not our cultures, their cultures. I think we've reached a time in the history of both of our countries where us listening more, to learn, and then, trying to live in a good way is a powerful change and overdue reform.

Dale Atkinson: The idea of giving your leadership away in the context of education, which is so highly hierarchical in many respects, it's how we structure the setup, and also, I guess, the concept of networking in that space can be challenging. In some settings. So how do you enact the networking strategy, what does that look like structurally? How do you bring that into being for a group of schools or within the school?

Linda Kaser: I think a piece of advice that we would have is trying to get groups of nine to work together. If it's nine schools, but within that three groups of three, because there seems to be a power and a teamwork of three people that's manageable and I know that we explain in the book we wrote during COVID.

One of the things that we ask our leaders to do is to be able to tell a very powerful story about why it's worthwhile to be in their school community. But it's, we also believe that if the three of us are principals together, that we can tell a story as a good a story about your school as we can tell about our own.

So that we visited your school, we understand it, we care about it, and we can say if a family comes, you know what, they've got a fantastic arts program. At your place, I think that's going to be a great fit and do it sincerely so that we work against that hierarchy and that competition, that negative competition that's in us. Like, we love hockey, you love rugby, whatever.

There's a role for that kind of competition, but it needs to be sportsmanlike, and we need to be able to use story to connect. So, those smaller structures within bigger networks are powerful.

Judy Halbert: One of the things that we did with our network has been in place for 25 years, and it started with, you know, a small group, 34 schools initially, and now we've got lots of schools involved.

But one of the norms is that you leave your role at the door. So when you enter a network meeting, you know, metaphorically, you hang up your role and you come in and you say, you know, I'm Dale, I'm Linda, I'm Judy, I'm Bella, not I'm Bella, the assistant superintendent of, you know, whatever, and that has been immensely freeing, particularly for school principals who can then just be alongside their teachers or their support workers or whatever, just as themselves.

So that's been huge and we didn't actually realize how important that was until we've had the feedback around it. In the leadership program that we run at UBC, again, it's open it's not just specifically for principals or district leaders. It's for anybody who wants to learn more. And again, people are not identified by their role, they just come in as a learner. The other thing is that we developed in collaboration with Helen Timperley from the University of Auckland. In observation about what great teams of teachers and principals do in the Spiral of Inquiry. And having that common framework for schools, regardless of what the focus of their inquiry is, has been really important, especially because it starts with listening to learners.

So from our perspective, that's where we start. And the key question is what's going on for our learners and how do we know? We as adults can have all kinds of assumptions about what the experiences of the young people in our schools are. And quite often we miss the boat. Because we think we know what's going on, but until we really listen, uh, we can't be sure. So I think those, those two things, leaving your role at the door and starting with listening has really helped.

Linda Kaser: And I think just connected with that, we used to have four key questions. The belonging question is critical because we know every young person needs to have a strong sense of having a couple of people who have their back and if they don't, we need to move on that immediately. But also it's just amazing to walk into schools and say, what are you learning and why is it important? And you know, some kids say, I'm doing page 10, which is a very disappointing answer. And lots and lots of young people don't know what it is they're learning, and they don't know why it's important either and that needs to be addressed. So I think networks are a good place to have honest conversations about that, and the places in Australia that have taken that seriously, a year, two, three, four years later, they are very different and much better places.

Dale Atkinson: So one of the key tools that you have around innovation and system change is the concept of the Spiral of Inquiry. What does that look like for a school and how does it work in a setting?

Judy Halbert: The derivation of the spiral was from our work in British Columbia, really taking a look at observations of what great teams did. And then also in collaboration with Helen Timperley at the University of Auckland, her work around the differences that could be made in literacy and numeracy when schools used an inquiry cycle.

So, we got together and over a couple of years of hashing out our ideas and trying to get it into as clear language as possible, came up with a six stage process. So very briefly. It starts with scanning, which is what's going on for our learners and how do we know. So it's collecting all of the evidence that we have, but it's also listening deeply to what the young people have to say.

The second thing is from that information, identifying one clear focus area. Often schools are trying to do a zillion things and it's just too much. And we say, if you're working on more than two areas, you're not working on anything. So start with one. So, what's one thing that if we worked on as a group is going to make the biggest impact for our young people?

The third is to pause a little bit. And this is the hunch stage and it's where we say, how are we contributing to this situation for our learners? So whether it's an issue of wellbeing, of anxiety, of poor problem solving in mathematics, of low literacy scores, whatever it is, how is it that as the educators, we're contributing to that situation?

Then we move to, we've got to learn something new. So we're going to dive in and immerse ourselves in some new learning. Then we're going to take some action, and then we're going to check to see whether we're making a difference. And that becomes a continuous spiral. It's not a, there's no beginning and end. We see it as a professional way of life rather than a thing to do. And we're seeing some remarkable results when, when schools are able to embrace that and take it seriously.

Dale Atkinson: There's a degree of vulnerability that comes in all of that from a leadership perspective. What's your recommendation about how you maybe pack the ego away and approach these things in a really open way?

Linda Kaser: I think it really helps open mindedness, you're quite right, is an important feature and being prepared to live with vulnerability is, again, the University of Auckland has done some fantastic research on, on teachers and risk taking and has found that teachers are not afraid of risks. What they don't like is bad professional learning sessions, and failed initiatives, and too many things that are being asked of them.

And so I think we found a lot of success in using a systematic process of curiosity, because that's what the spiral is, adult curiosity. Which the Harvard person who's the biggest expert on that says, If we want young people to be critical thinkers, then we need to be critical thinkers as adults. So it, it calls it symmetry, that there's a parallel between the two processes.

And I think we have found that with time and patience and strong leadership, every teacher is prepared to take small moves. However, we are big fans now of micro moves. Because we've found that our strongest leaders are able to say, “well Dale, how about I come in and just try this learning intention thing?

I need a group to try it. Would you mind if I tried it with you?” Spend two minutes with you trying something, and then have a conversation later, as opposed to a long full day workshop. And once people get started, they are willing to move on it's getting that little micro moment at the and motion at the beginning that's powerful with vulnerability. So you're not too vulnerable all I'm asking you to do is, you know, watch me for a minute in your classroom. That's not too hard.

Judy Halbert: Just to add to that, we know that a trust between principals and teachers and parents is paramount to improving the outcomes for learners in the schools. And there's some wonderful work from Tony Brick, a longitudinal study in Chicago. And one of the aspects was around vulnerability and the point here is that the person with the most power, real or perceived, needs to make themselves vulnerable first. So, in the case of the spiral of inquiry, if it's a teacher leading the process or the principal leading the process, when we get to the hunch stage, it's how does that person put their own vulnerability out.

So, a very quick example, a school was working on improving inferential reading, and this was their focus, and they'd been doing, you know, quite a bit of work at it, but it was at the point where one of the experienced teachers in the school, a respected teacher, said, you know what? I really don't know how to do inferencing in reading. I don't know how to do it myself, let alone teach it. And there was this sigh of relief amongst the group and then they were able to step back and say, okay, what is it that we really need to know? And what is it that we're doing here? So there's a point in the spiral at which somebody takes that step to be honest and vulnerable that can shift things on a dime and we have loads of examples of that.

Dale Atkinson: It's really about that permission for curiosity, isn't it? Like, as soon as you admit that vulnerability, you can then really start to look at things differently.

Linda Kaser: That's right, and it doesn't have to be a big deal. In that micro example, it might be just my honestly saying, I've never tried this before. I've heard about it. I want to give it a go. I want you to watch your kids as I do it and just give me some quick feedback as I'm going out the door. And most teachers will say, sure. And that begins a dialogue and so we've seen strong, thoughtful leaders help people move forward on that, on that trust continuum.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's a really powerful thing. We're focusing a lot in South Australia on the idea of student voice and agency and you've spoken a little bit about how that's absolutely critical to this entire journey. How do you make sure it's authentically captured and followed through with?

Judy Halbert: I'll give two examples. One is connected to the vulnerability and then, then the second one around student agency. And this is a school in England, it was a primary school. And the year five and six teachers were going, “Oh my God, the class from hell is coming”. And I think that, you know, teachers understand what that means. Right from kindergarten, this group has been difficult, and now they're going to get them.

“Oh my God, what are we going to do?” 28 kids in the class. I think there were 24 boys, and they said, we need to, we need to change things here. So they asked the children at the beginning of the year, how would you describe yourselves as a learner? And they got things like, we're no good, we're rotten, we're shit.

And they just listed all of the things that the kids said about themselves, how they described themselves. And then they took all of their wording, and they put it up on the staff room wall. And when the rest of the staff came in, they said, “Oh my God, that's how we've been talking about them.” And there was that moment of realization that things had to change.

So then they went through a number of things, but they asked the kids again, How would you like to be seen? And they wanted to be seen as leaders, and then they were able to decide on two areas that they were going to work on. It was a magical change in that school, and it was from listening. And so that was real student voice, right?

It was taking what the kids said, and then turning it around and turning it into action. The, the second example would be from a secondary school in one of our suburban areas. And the teachers in the school had been working on the spiral of inquiry. And the language was quite familiar to the kids, at least in an abstract way.

And then there was an incident of racism where the students thought that the disciplinary actions of the school principal had been racially motivated. And they raised that and they decided to, you know, instead of becoming defensive or pushing back against the kids, they said, let's explore this.

So they started with the young people, a spiral of inquiry around what's going on for our kids in this school around racism, and they learned a lot. Out of that, they developed a strategy and an approach, and they work through, the young people work through both a decision making process and the spiral.

We thought it was so powerful that we encouraged them to write it up. So we now have a handbook on decision making for young people that's being used broadly. So it's way more than just, what do you think about lunch? Or, you know, do you like the colours of the lockers? It's around. Using students embedded in the spiral to make better decisions about what's, what's going on.

Linda Kaser: Yeah and I'll give an even maybe simpler answer, a smaller thing, because we learned it from an Australian secondary school in Wollongong. And that is, young people didn't seem to be very interested in what was going on, and they invented a very simple strategy. Think recipe cards, every class on Friday afternoon, a kid got a recipe card, and they wrote two things.

Something they'd enjoy during the week, and something that if the learning had been more hands on, or standing up, or outdoors, or whatever, a suggestion that they had for improvement. The teachers all agreed that on Friday afternoon, before they went to the pub, they would read these cards and choose one to introduce on Monday as something they would do.

So, on Monday, they would say, Dale has suggested that, you know, if we had less time sitting and more time occasionally standing and moving about, that that would make his learning better. For the week, we're going to try that. That was the most improved secondary school in the region by the end of the year, because that small change and that commitment was simple enough that people could do.

It didn't require hours and hours of thinking and work and taking an individual voice and trying it out, because it doesn't matter what country it is. Most young people in secondary say, we sit too much, we don't get outdoors, there's not enough hands on, there's not enough humour. It's a simple set of ideas, and the more we do that, and the more we appear genuinely to be listening and trying things out, the better.

Judy Halbert: And I could make a final comment on that, clearly we could go on and on, but it's the use of surveys in our province, there's a satisfaction survey that's done, it's got 40 questions on it, it goes out every year, schools get their results back, and we've found, in our experience, that we should never ask a question of young people if we're not prepared to act on what they have to say.

So we say if there's more than five questions on a survey, it's not going to be very useful. So we say be really intentional about what questions you're going to ask, and then make sure you report back on what you're going to do. Otherwise, we can get, you know, survey fatigue, and kids just won't bother and Tony Brick actually told us at one point, we'd love to have this confirmed, but if you ask more than five questions, you're wasting your time.

Dale Atkinson: I think the powerful message there is simplicity and sincerity. As a combination of things.

Linda Kaser: That’s exactly right. I think also using whatever evidence you get. This is what is happening in the Northern Territories, I think there are up to 60 schools now, I call it the Student Commission. Young people are working, you know, if we did that survey, then we would be sitting down as an adult student group, looking at the survey results together. Because in the racism example, what young people said is, adults never hear these racist remarks. We're doing it in the cloak rooms, in the hallways, and we're passing it off as humour.

I say something racialized to you, Dale, and then I say, “ah, no sense of humour” and that kind of thing is eroding for people and the young people put a stop to it and it was fantastic.

Dale Atkinson: One of the things, Judy, that you said in the space where you were giving some examples around student voice and agencies is the question that was asked there about how do you want to be seen?

What an incredible question that is, I think, not just for the kids, but for the schools that would engage in this process to ask themselves, so I just want to say thank you. Maybe leave on that note to Dr. Linda Kaser and Dr. Judy Halbert. Thank you very much for your time.

Judy & Linda: Thank you.

Judy Halbert: It's been a pleasure.

Linda Kaser: Yeah, we're going to take lots back.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach a Podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education and today we're talking about literacy without barriers. We're breaking down those barriers to literacy and we've got a community driven success story at Kingston Community School and I'm joined by Kirsten Barich, who's the teacher librarian there and Katie Hines, who's a parent.

Welcome to you both.

Kirsten Barich: Thanks for having us.

Katie Hines: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: The Literacy Without Barriers Project at Kingston Community School. Kirsten, what is it?

Kirsten Barich: We established this project back in 2003 and it's been about the creation of book packs for families to borrow from our library. We are lucky to be a joint use library so we serve both our school community and our wider community and so these book packs are available to every family in our region.

So we've selected 35 different picture books and we've got six copies of each book. The main part is that each book comes with quite a detailed but very user friendly guide [00:01:00] of some hints of how to read the book, the learning intention behind the story, some ideas of how to talk about it, sing with it, ask questions about it to help the children build meaning from their stories.

Within each pack we also have key themes and key ideas of how to play with it and we've included lots of materials in the pack to run an activity based on the story. So, for example, one story encourages families to make and excavate frozen dinosaur eggs. Another one's about measuring water displacement. There's a pack about engaging with First Nations perspectives and so each activity that's in the pack is designed to be hands on, easy to do at home. All of the materials are included within the pack because we just want to really encourage families to be able to engage with reading and all the activities without spending any money or having to find resources.

Dale Atkinson: They sound like fantastic resources. Now, you've deliberately gone after children from zero to five, why that cohort of [00:02:00] kids in particular?

Kirsten Barich: We had a few intentions here. Number one being that we were noticing a downward trend in school readiness data. And I think that's common in many areas throughout the state, but in particular ours, and it's something that the Words Grow Minds campaign is seeking to eradicate. And we thought that as a library that was already quite a trusted hub within our community, as well as our school, we were perfectly placed to support families in changing that trend. You know, a conduit between preschool and school so again, perfectly placed.

We also know that 90 percent of a child's brain is developed between naught to five and so those early learning years are the optimum time to be reading and engaging with stories. Secondly, because we run preschool programs from the library and we work with our early learning centre once a fortnight, we noticed that there were actually a lot of adult barriers to early childhood literacy.

It might be their adult literacy skills, adult confidence, financial barriers, access barriers. And so we just wanted to [00:03:00] remove any that we could, any possible thing in a really supportive and non-judgmental way.

And thirdly, and probably most importantly, we just wanted to remind families that reading is fun and should be fun. Any reading that you do at home is good reading. You know we teach and we learn about the mechanics of reading in the classroom and in schools. But as a library, we can support the love of reading and the development of dispositions like curiosity and questioning through reading so, yeah, lots of intentions.

Dale Atkinson: How important has it been to engage with the parent community around this?

Kirsten Barich: It's huge. As we know, as teachers it takes a community to raise a child. And so we're noticing that when you have the parents on board, when the parents are confident, when they are engaged and they see that the school and the library is trying to engage with them, I think they're much more likely to have a positive attitude toward the school and just education in general.

Dale Atkinson: What have you seen in terms of impact that this program's had on the teaching in those early years for your colleagues.

Kirsten Barich: I think for colleagues it's just enabled them to connect with the library a little bit more. I think prior to this, we, we mainly saw reading in the early years of learning as how to read.

And so we really tried to bring back the idea in quite a big way. Um, that yes, obviously learning how to read, learning the mechanics of reading is super important and without those building blocks. It is impossible to read, but a love of reading is just as important.

So we need to balance our reading and our readers that we use in the classrooms with just any sort of texts that kids love and they want to read, because I think the more excitement, the more fun you can create about reading, the more likely you are going to be able to develop lifelong readers.

Dale Atkinson: It's really impressive listening to you talk about, you know, how this process has kind of worked through and assisted the broader school activities. How have the resources from the Literacy Packs been integrated into classroom activities?

Kirsten Barich: Well, I actually get to work with all of the primary classes. Um, I teach reception German and I also work with R-6 through the library. And so I incorporate lots of the themes and the activities of Literacy Without Barriers through all of that.

Whether it's developing questioning, whether it's using actual activities or whether it's just developing the dispositions. For example, we've done lots of colour experiments using the packs, we've made garden stews, we've gone on hippopotamus hunts, um. We've made magic hats to practice fine motor skills.

There are lots of dispositions that we can develop through using these packs. And interestingly too, we've had an uptake of the packs with our SACE child studies students. So they've been engaging with the packs to design activities for younger students. They've workshopped the packs with some of our receptions and year ones.

And they've also used them to help develop their own knowledge around early childhood literacy. Which is great. It was really unexpected benefit that we hadn't foreseen.

Dale Atkinson: That's an incredible sort of self-sustaining collaboration there, that's incredible. You mentioned earlier the data around the kid’s preparedness and literacy in the early years was one of the things that kind of drew your attention to this as an area of focus. What has been the result in terms of those numbers? What have you seen as a result of this program?

Kirsten Barich: Well, I think that. We've seen a lot more parental engagement with the library from a much earlier age. So, we've always run preschool programs here at the library, but we've seen more families borrowing, particularly borrowing the packs.

And it's been especially noticeable among families who didn't use to engage with the library at all, or perhaps where people who hadn't had the best schooling experiences and so weren't what you would call, readers themselves. I think that's probably been one of the main things. We're also noticing that families are staying longer at the library, and they're bringing in a whole range of children, whether they're really young or even, you know, mid primary, which has been really good.

And we've also noticed that there's just much more of a happy, positive atmosphere around reading at the moment. There are big groups of children that'll come in really excited to tell us. What they've read at home or what they've been creating and, and asking, can we help them choose their next book and that as a librarian, that's just the most special thing that you can have when you're, you're getting children in your space that are really engaged, really wanting to read. Yeah. It's amazing!

Dale Atkinson: That sounds incredibly rewarding. Now, Katie Hines, parent of two children, I believe. Tell us a bit about your family, Katie.

Katie Hines: So I have two young children. I have an almost two-year-old young boy named James, and I have a five-year-old, Emma, who was in this new mid-year intake. Who’s just started school.

Dale Atkinson: An exciting and busy time for you. How are the reading packs and, and the literacy without barriers project? What's, what's been your interaction with it and how has that helped you in your journey with your kids?

Katie Hines: So, um, I've been really lucky that I've been able to come in and go to say baby bounce, for example, with both of my kids and coming into the library and having something other than just say the books and having the book packs has been great. My five-year-old absolutely loves them. She loves coming back in and sharing her creations with whoever's working in the library. They're really great for the sense that we start them when we're still in the library, you know, they borrow them, both of my children are very confident when it comes to the library and they go up to Cherie and one of the other librarians and they literally get the scanner and scan their own book in and out, but that's facilitated based on what the library creates and the atmosphere that they create here that you kind of feel like you're part of the furniture when you come in and part of the family and yeah, you can get your book pack and go off and do it when you're at home.

Dale Atkinson: Have you noticed the confidence in your kids growing as a result of interacting with the with the books and the packs?

Katie Hines: Absolutely. Um, particularly my five-year-old, she loves the book pack. She loves borrowing them. She'd borrow a book pack every day if I let her. And I have to, you know, kind of be like, Oh, we've still got this one, let's finish this one off before we get too many. But we often have two or three book packs on the go at one time. She loves getting the book out. She loves reading it. We can't go to bed at night without her reading a book. Or two or three or four. We have to negotiate. She's at that stage where we're in negotiation on how many books we can read at night, depending on time, but she is confident in the sense that she can get it out.

She understands on the card that's in there, whether what the activity might, she can't read it at the moment, but you know, she knows that one section's about reading, one section's about singing, one section's about making and playing, and there's just lots of different activities just within a singular book pack that she's confident enough to get it out and lots of kids like repetition. So, you know, she borrows the same one over and over again, which is great because she knows the story. She can tell you the story. So you kind of see that confidence develop just through that repetition, she might not be able to read the words, but she has learnt lots of books, which is great for her development. So, we're really happy as a family that the library provides opportunities for us to really enrich our kids’ lives.

Dale Atkinson: And does it help build connections with the school and the wider community for you?

Katie Hines: Absolutely. I think that as a mum living in the country, it can be really isolating once you've had a kid. When you've been working full time and then you go to not working and being at home with your kids, sometimes you can get a little bit lost. The library has provided multiple opportunities for people to engage with our library. But, you know, you can come in, the book packs are starting to like, they're so popular that as a mum, I'm talking to other mums at baby bounce about what packs have they used that are good and the kids are talking amongst themselves. I think it's just a great opportunity to kind of like, “Oh what are we going to do today?” Or like you know, you look at the four walls in your house and you're like, “I've got to get out of this house.” Like my two-year-old is becoming a tornado. The library provides that place where you can pop out of the house, go for a walk, go to the library, grab a book pack, go home. My toddler's now asleep. Now I can sit down with my five-year-old and give her all the attention that she's wanting. We can do the pack. And then when my two-year-old wakes up. We can, like, do other activities with him. So, I think that the packs really provide great opportunities for families to engage in literacy.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's great and Kirsten being a teacher librarian, not everywhere has a teacher librarian, not everywhere has a library. What's your recommendation in terms of schools that perhaps don't have that specialist resource in terms of how they might apply some of the thinking that you've, you've put into practice here for perhaps kids who are a bit older, somewhere, you know, that 5 to 10 range, what sort of things should they be doing?

Kirsten Barich: I think that the way that we've created these, there's a lot of scope for differentiation. You know, we focused a lot on the naught to five age bracket, but the basic premise behind it is that you are encouraging kids to read, talk, play, sing. Which is good for all children, regardless of how old they are.

And so any school, whether they've got a library or not, we have specialist teachers within them. Specialist teachers of literacy, specialist teachers of numeracy, specialist teachers of science. We've all got pedagogy behind us. We all know how important it is to create varied learning experiences for kids.

And so, any school could take the idea that we've got here and make it their own. A lot of our packs focus on things, for example, that we can do and find in our local region. So some of them, for example, encourage kids to explore the lighthouse. Some of them, um, encourage kids to go to the beach or have a look at the sundial. But, you know, if you're up in the Barossa, for example, you might have something around visiting some of the vineyards or something like that. And so I think whatever resources they have, they've got the expertise within their teachers to create something like this for the children that are in front of them.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I think that's, that's a really great message Kirsten. Thank you very much. Now, I know the weather down there is very good. Your middle school is having their swimming carnival today, so we won't keep you any longer but thank you, Kirsten. Thank you, Katie, for your time.

Kirsten Barich: Thanks so much for having us.

Katie Hines: No worries. Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome to Teach a Podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and in this episode, we meet Cathy Cook, the autism inclusion teacher at Marryatville Primary School. Hello, Cathy.

Cathy Cook: Hello.

Dale Atkinson: And also, we have Sue Shywolup, who is a year three teacher at Marryatville Primary School. Hi, Sue.

Sue Shywolup: Hi.

Dale Atkinson: It’s an absolute pleasure to have you. Now, we've brought Cathy along for a couple of reasons, because she's the autism inclusion teacher and also because she's the 2024 Public Education Award finalist, or one of them, and she's making a real difference in fostering inclusivity for neurodiverse students. Cathy, What does that look like? How do you foster inclusivity for neurodiverse students?

Cathy Cook: Well, in many ways and evolving and always progressive. So at the school, what I've been able to implement throughout the last two years as the autism inclusion teacher. I've been able to upskill staff, so I ensure that they've got the pinnacle training to immerse their students in what best suits their individual needs. Also working alongside students, I might be looking at a whole range of things, whether it's incorporating peer to peer connections, building and developing some social connections, working in the classrooms for some students, or taking them out working together. But also just really being an advocate for ensuring that neurodiversity and autism's on the forefront for parents, in newsletters and also across the whole school of just being inclusive, I suppose, making sure that everyone's voice is heard.

Dale Atkinson: So how does the experience differ for a student in your class?

Cathy Cook: Well, it's not only a student in my class, it's across the whole school. So I think we need to be really making sure that that's where it evolves and that's where it's about making sure every voice and every child is heard in what they need.

So in our whole school, it's ensuring that we've got individual support that can be adjusted in supporting where those students need to access the curriculum or access breaks, maybe more so, or having different sensory tools or also looking at what's going to best engage those students in their own learning so that's, yeah, across the whole site.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's an incredible thing to implement. Can you tell us a little bit about the sensory boxes in the regulation space that you've put in place in your site?

Cathy Cook: Sure, so the sensory boxes was probably one of the first initiatives that I was able to implement at the school and that was making sure that each classroom had a toolbox of focus tools, I call them, also little regulation cards, just a whole range of different materials that children could access because we're all different in what we want to use.

So some might like stretchy tools, some might like the hard Rubik's cubes, others might like something which is like a squish ball, but also the regulation cards so they can look at their emotions, where they're feeling and then upskilling the children during this time to look at what they could use. in their own toolbox.

So each class has one of those and every three or four weeks it actually gets moved on to a different classroom because each box has different tools in it. So then it's sort of invigorating and new for, you know, every few weeks we're moving it forward. So that's the first point of call of [00:03:00] what, yeah, we started doing.

Dale Atkinson: Starting is a good point. Like, how do you start this journey with the kids, with your families, with your educators?

Cathy Cook: I think, you know, a lot of it is around my passion and drive, and I have a lot of foresight in looking at what can be best for the students and how we can move that. So starting the journey really starts with me, but also starts with my Autism Action Team, who I'll talk a little bit more about later on.

And Then just implementing it. So upskilling the staff so then they can take it back to their students to learn how to use the tools, how to implement them in the classroom and just navigating the space. So, and then also sharing that with families by providing photos in the newsletter and things like that.

So, It's just, yeah, giving it, giving it a voice, putting it out there, making it be seen and making it be heard that, you know, we've got all these tools, this is what we're going to use them for. This is, you know, the, the purpose behind it and then let's just see how it goes.

Also then reviewing it. Is it working? What's working? What's the tools and focus tools that are best for you. So adapting along the way is also really crucial.

Dale Atkinson: Obviously the professional development time is precious in any school. It's incredibly well protected. How is it that this is being prioritised within Marryatville Primary School?

Cathy Cook: Probably because I've been really fortunate in my leadership that I have last year and this year have both really embraced the opportunity for me to ensure that staff have professional development in a whole range of things around autism. And so I am very fortunate that at pupil free days, I've had sessions where I've been able to upskill staff in what is autism, how can we best support children with autism, but also once a term, I also have an opportunity at staff meetings to present, share data, share survey responses and also upskill again with different professional development.

Once I've actually collected data from surveys from staff, I then know where to pinpoint target it and move forward from there. So, leadership at my side have been incredibly supportive and also quite free of letting me drive my own initiatives to where I want to go and what I think is best for the staff. So that's been really positive. I'm very fortunate to have that.

Dale Atkinson: Sounds like it's been an incredibly deliberate learning process with that group of people. Can you talk about the makeup of the Autism Action Team and how it's developed over the years?

Cathy Cook: Sure. So last year I put out a call. I asked for people to nominate if they'd like to be part of the Autism Action Team and that went out to SSO’s as well as staff. So we started with about five people last year who nominated, at the beginning of this year I also said, look we'd love staff to be involved who'd like to be part of the autism action team and we had another four teaching staff that chose to be part of it. And we had about nine SSO’s that also jumped on board this year, which has really been great to strengthen their understanding because a lot of time they're working with autistic students so it's great to have their voice.

That initiative sort of came about by looking at wanting to have a focus group that I could bounce ideas off, share ideas, also hear from their voice as well at different points. So we've got junior primary teachers and middle primary and as I said, SSO’s involved so that we can sort of have a stronger understanding of what all our students are needing.

But like minded people, people who are passionate and driven around autism will have a really good understanding or are still wanting to be part of the journey and learn along the way. That's where it sort of started, and so I meet with the Autism Action Team probably twice a term at minimum, depending on what the high focus is, it could be more, but I also email them things throughout the term so they're aware of what's happening or they can share ideas and contribute along the way.

Autism Action Teams have also helped support at presenting at pupil free days or helped support during staff meetings as well and share. So, it's been really powerful for me to have that group, core people who are really interested in autism to then build a stronger foundation for where we're going.

Dale Atkinson: What's the difference that you've noticed in student behaviour, but also educator behaviour across the last year or two?

Cathy Cook: I think, I'm not going to focus so much on the word behaviour, I'm going to focus more so on the positivity around it and how students have embraced a stronger awareness and also with staff.

So, you know, having the professional development, having the understanding that all brains are different and that's okay, has definitely been a really positive way in which the students have embraced having neurodiversity brought to the forefront of our daily learning and also ongoing. So, equally with staff, there's been lots of positive comments from staff where they've been able to say, look, you know, really loved the way that was being able to be embraced or, you know, could we do more on this?

So it's been able to, it's been an open platform for everyone to contribute, which has been really positive.

Dale Atkinson: So, Sue, how's the experience been for you?

Sue Shywolup: It's been great. Our school has had, for many years, a very strong wellbeing focus, and this is closely linked to that, and really has further developed that side of it.

I've always had a really big interest in helping those children who have anxiety and other neurodiverse conditions, autism being one of those. It's really been good to see how the children have taken that on board and really have more of an understanding of different learning styles. That's been a really big positive in the classroom to see that.

They’re more aware, they're more accepting, for most part. I mean, I've got year threes, eight and nine year olds, so things change from day to day, but they're, yeah, they're very positive and really understanding all of the different learning styles has been a really positive thing.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, before we, um, came on air, you revealed that you're an educator of 40 years standing. You've been 18 years at Marryatville Primary School, which is an incredible innings. How has the teaching practice changed in that time to accommodate some of these, the understanding neurodiversity now?

Sue Shywolup: I think it's just that we've had to be a bit more fluid in how we present things. Certainly, when I think back to when I first started, it was a lot more structured, and not so much structured, but there was a set way of doing it. Whereas now, you, on some occasions, you have to change how you're presenting a lesson. Sometimes partway through the lesson, it's not always a set, it's going to follow this path, but it can divert the path quite quickly on occasions when you need to do that.

Dale Atkinson: And how has it been engaging in this type of professional learning, where you are looking at your own practice quite closely?

Sue Shywolup: Yeah, it's been really good. It's really consolidated and strengthened how I already felt and Cathy's different experiences that she's offered staff have really helped to build on that.

It's been great to have Kathy there as a sounding board when you're looking at individual children and, and their needs. So we talk to each other and other staff as well. And yeah, just to know that it's not an isolated one person managing one child. It's yeah, that's been good.

Dale Atkinson: Is there a strength in a community of practice that includes, you know, a handful of educators plus the SSOs all working together? Is that a strength for you?

Sue Shywolup: Definitely. Yeah. That's really in, in anything in education. If you've got a community around you to help support that, that's a really positive way of doing it, making those connections with parents, with all different staff, SSOs and leadership and teaching staff as well.

Dale Atkinson: And you mentioned parents there, I think they're always a critical partner in any activity, and particularly an activity where you're approaching something in a different way or thinking about something differently. Cathy. How has that experience been with the parents at Marryatville Primary School?

Cathy Cook: Well, the Marryatville Primary School parents have been engaged in a whole range of ways, and it really depends on the families and also what supports they need. So I've had some parents come and meet with me to discuss their specific child learning. I've also had other parents, you know, have come in a group setting and said, how about, you know, we look at options of what we could do, starting up a parental support group, for example.

I've also run professional development for parents. So we organized for Mark Le Messurier to come and do a parent afternoon or evening, which was an hour and a half session to sort of make them feel connected. And also they're not alone and also give them an opportunity to hear different strategies that can be provided for them.

So having a really strong family link and connection, something that I really think is pinnacle. In making a really successful relationship between teachers and peers and students. So it's a whole approach, isn't it, to make sure everyone's embraced.

Dale Atkinson: And it does take extra effort. And I think that's obviously recognized in you being put up for a finalist as the public education awards. What's been the effort to reward here for you?

Cathy Cook: Just love it. I love what I do, you know, and that's as simple as that. And I feel really fortunate that I've been able to do the autism inclusion teacher role and, you know, to see students thrive and flourish and also to see that parents feel heard and valued in what, what they're trying to do, but also seeing the growth in the staff.

The whole thing's been amazing. I just, I love the role. I'm very passionate and dedicated about building an understanding around neurodiversity and autism. And whilst I feel that I have a really good understanding, I'm driven to continuing and going further with it. with this and finding out more. So I'm continually learning myself about how I can best support through the whole process as well.

So autism inclusion teacher role has definitely been a positive impact at our site and the way in which our staff have embraced it, taken things on board. I just really risk takers in trying new things or asking questions. Hats off to them. They've done a great job and I'm really fortunate that, um, it's been a whole community approach, so that's been great.

Dale Atkinson: And what's next?

Cathy Cook: What's next? Well, watch this space. So, look, you know, lots of things I'd like to try and do next year. And, I've already started to plan, you know, I've got Nell Harris coming to our site. So Nell Harris is an autistic and ADHD author and has written, you know, my brain is a race car and a whole series of things.

So she's coming to do a session with the whole school, so that'll be great. Also looking at strengthening more around the self regulation services that are coming out to work and link up with our school as well. Going to do not only the autism action team, but we're going to look at change champions as well, which will be another approach to that.

I'd also like to look at [00:13:00] possibilities of strengthening autistic students in getting together, whether we have an afternoon, once a term, with families connected to that. I'd like to look at that as an opportunity. Currently, I've got Lego club happening. I'd like to broaden that as well and let students have more passion and interest groups happen so we can sort of listen to different points of views.

You know, we're lucky at the moment. We've got knitting club and beads club and French club and, um, STEM club, but, you know, where else could we go? And so giving a bit of student voice and advocacy from all of our students, not only our autistic students, I'd like to sort of draw that in further, but, you know, the world's your oyster.

Let's see where this can go.

Dale Atkinson: An incredibly positive message, and given all those clubs, it sounds like a fun place to hang out. Thank you both for coming in and talking about the autism inclusion work that you're doing out at Marryatville Primary School. It's very exciting, it's excellent work, and it's wonderful to hear how you're bringing the students and the teachers and SSOs and the families together and bringing them along the journey.

It's incredibly exciting. So, well done and thank you to you both.

Sue Shywolup: Thank you.

Cathy Cook: Thanks for having us.

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 doing what we do at the start of every year, which is invite Professor Martin Westwell our Chief Executive, to come and join us. Martin, thanks for joining us.

Martin Westwell: Happy New Year, Dale.

Dale Atkinson: Happy New Year to you as well. Always good at the start of the year to reflect on the previous and look ahead. Touch on perhaps a few of the key achievements from 2024, lessons learned perhaps, and how that's going to shape the department's direction in 2025.

Martin Westwell: When you think about the achievements, when you actually stop and think about the achievements. It is pretty amazing what we've achieved over the last year or two. And the first thing I think to say is that just like the everyday work that goes on in our classrooms, in our preschool sites, that's the achievement, right. That's the work, and whatever other things go on, that's the main game. So another great year doing the main game. Let's not lose sight of that. Just doing a great job in our schools and preschools. When you think about some of the challenges that we've got, you know, perhaps we'll talk about these a bit more. Clearly things like, you know, vacancies that we've got, but what I've seen is in South Australia, we've not got nearly the kind of teacher vacancies that we've got in other states and territories yet.

We're starting the year and there are a few schools that have got some vacancies, but I think actually getting to a position and, you know, with some special authorities to teach and some of those things where we're starting really well, I think is a great achievement as well. Some policy things, Technical colleges going gangbusters, we've got mid year reception, the introduction, that shift from FLO to Tailored Learning Provision, that shift, I think is really important. Enormous amount of work there, not just work from, you know, kind of within Flinders Street but with sites, with leaders, with teachers. Some of the other policy stuff that kind of every school a great school work that we've done really focusing on well, where are we gonna make investments? What's the capital investment look like? How do we support schools perhaps that don't have the best reputation? How do we support to make sure that those schools can be as brilliant as other schools and so people are not driving past them to go to another school down the road but actually they're attracting students to them.

Talk about the country strategy, OSHC, you know, those kinds of things. One of the things that I'm really proud of, and it's just the beginning, is the agreement that we signed with the Anangu people in the APY lands around a partnership with them about what education is going to look like. One of the Anangu talked to me about it and said, we used to be like this and they made a gesture where there's kind of two fists hitting each other. We used to be like this with the department and now we’re like this and showed the two hands next to each other, pushing in the same direction. I really felt proud of all the work that's gone into that and getting us to that place and as I say, that's just the beginning now we've got to honour that.

That's us making a promise with the Anangu about how we're going to do this thing, how we're going to work together. There are some non-negotiables in that, with a lot of ways in which we can work in partnership and now actually getting on and doing some of that work. That's a great achievement from last year that of course will shape some of the work going forwards.

I think some of the other things as well have been, you know, with the strategy. It's the strategy and the structures around it and how people have responded to that. I think some of it is the culture shift, you know, the vibe. I think that's changing. I'm asking leaders and education directors to provide more of that kind of coaching, working alongside, providing support for improvement, that shift has even been in Flinders Street..

The senior executive group working more effectively across divisions. Each division has got a massive amount of work and of course the danger is that we fall into our silos. So us getting out of that, you know, all of that is working towards giving school leaders more autonomy and that notion of the tight and flexible. Tight on what we're going for, but flexible on how it's achieved and just make sure the whole system's getting behind that.

I also think the protecting democracy work that looks like civics and civics professional learning and developing people in terms of their ability and the innovation around teaching civics in secondary. I think, you know, the bigger picture is how are we getting kids to stop and think, not get pushed around by social media? How are we helping students and young people to disagree agreeably? To not fall into, ‘well, if you don't agree with me, you're against me and I hate you.’ And we're seeing so much of that around the world and how it erodes democracy, how it erodes society.

When you look at education, think about the purpose of education and you see one of those challenges, and it's a challenge to childhood, but it's also a challenge to society. If we're not addressing that what's the point? What are we doing? So, I think that work again will be really important for the coming year.

Dale Atkinson: The big process of kind of development and growth. This is a third of the conversations that you and I have had at the start of a calendar year over the last couple of years has been, the development of the strategy, the purpose statement and allowing sites, site leaders and central office to kind of really live with the strategy and try to reflect on it, what does it mean? And put it into practice. What have you seen over the last year has indicated how this has been put into practice and are there some standard examples of success?

Martin Westwell: Some of the things that I've seen, when I do site visits and I talk with leaders and, you know, often the story is, you know, we started with the areas of impact, we started getting into them and we thought, what's the template, what are we supposed to do, what does accountability look like in this? and we'll meet that requirement and then you didn't put one out where we thought you were a bit crazy doing that. So we started to have a conversation, we started to dig in and think about what we were already doing and lots of schools, of course, already doing lots around those areas of impact anyway, and thinking about where they would build on and some were saying, well, we just got going on this thing, you know, maybe something around wellbeing or student agency or the site saying, well we were really great, I remember Andamooka primary school, Bronte the principal saying ‘we'd put so much into wellbeing, we really want to keep that going but when we look at the strategy, instead of just carrying on doing wellbeing and saying, well we're doing this pretty well, building on that and shifting that wellbeing to support student agency’ because you know how important that is for students.

So there's a bit of, yeah, we're already doing some of this but look what we can do now. I think the other great things that I heard quite a lot was, we thought we were going to do wellbeing or student agency and then we got into it and we realised that we couldn't do that until we'd worked on this, whatever it might be, and so people change their minds.

I think when people start thinking about something and they set off in a direction with their planning and then they change their minds because they've got good evidence for it, that's incredible, right? And you don't get that from a top-down pushing at compliance saying everybody's got to do this thing. So when you see people changing the minds saying, we think this is going to have a bigger impact on our kids so we've shifted and we're doing that. I think that's amazing!

I think the other thing that we've seen that I see is when people have literally said ‘so we did this thing and we put our school, we've got a journey map, you know, where we started we used to think this, and now we're thinking that, look at where we've been, look at where we're going to’. Schools that expressed their improvement plan as kind of a one pager graphic so they can talk to parents, students, internal conversations, other stakeholders around their school. We can talk to this plan, there's lots more behind it, but they've got this kind of graphical representation.

One of the things that people have said is because we've had these conversations in the school, people have got much more ownership of it and so it's activating people rather than kind of, you know, the danger of the top down stuff is people do it, but it's not necessarily activating them in the system, in their site, in the way that you would hope.

So I think, you know, when you see that kind of aspiration, people do talk a little bit more about kind of joy in the work about creativity. I think that's been really positive. I think the danger is we can fall into an either/or, you know, it's such a focus on literacy and numeracy and we're not doing that anymore we're doing wellbeing and agency. And of course it's not that at all. We're trying to get these things to work together in service of each other.

Dale Atkinson: One of the things you've spoken about a little bit in the past is like the difference between accountability to ourselves, the account to which we hold ourselves and the ways in which we're held accountable externally. Can you talk about how that concept is going to play out through how we measure success of the strategy's implementation in 2025?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, I think this is going to be a big one for us this year. You know, you look at systems around the world and what they do is they have kind of a system measure. We want to increase literacy and numeracy. And what happens is that measure then gets pushed down onto schools and it becomes this kind of compliance.

And that definition of accountability is almost kind of being held to account. You know, it's a high stakes, it's a punishment if you don't improve, if you don't get the thing rather than accountability being saying, well, we agreed we were going to take responsibility for this together, this is what we were going for in our site. Even kind of knowing that might look different with different cohorts of kids, you know, some sites have got kids who might have transient population, so kids who come and go, and other kids who are quite stable and have been there for a period of time and you would expect different things, perhaps for those two different groups. At a site level you've got to be able to think about your accountability in terms of what you're taking responsibility for, how you're making a difference to these two different cohorts of kids. So I've been kind of constantly grappling with this notion of, as soon as you get a system measure, how do we stop it from being a high stakes measure that then drives behaviour in a way that you just don't want it to?

So yeah, you know, as a system, what are we going to report on, we have to report on NAPLAN so that’s done. What else would we see if this strategy, you know, if this thing was working, what else would we see? And I do think we'd see increases in attendance, we'd see increases in retention in schools, some of the kind of big picture things. I think in the longer term as well, we'd start to see some of those equity measures, you know, and the first way in which you'd measure equity would have some of those standard things like NAPLAN results and attendance and retention. For some of those, you know, what people call low equity groups, low SES kids, some of our aboriginal communities, some kids with disability, making sure that the kids are engaging with school and are achieving and are getting what they need out of school.

So you'd have some of those measures as well. But again, even if you look at something like attendance, the danger is that attendance strategies start to create behaviours that you don't want, you know, it's driving kids to come to school and they might be attending in person but they're not attending in heart and mind. And so that's not actually what we want. We want them to attend and we want them to be present as well. Attendance strategies, you know, the strategy. Should be driving attendance rather than looking for ways in which we kind of push on attendance, that balance is a really tricky one. So making schools accountable in that responsibility way and then saying, okay, so how do we all work together to achieve this.

Dale Atkinson: Now we focus a little bit as a system now under the new kind of way that we're approaching things and certainly under the what we're going after is, the purpose of public education on the human paradigm of, how we're interacting with these kids and the environment in which we're preparing them, AI and other influences, and what we're going to need them in terms of capabilities to have when they reach maturity in the workforce. So in terms of that focus on the human paradigm, how's that shifting the way we want to lead and learn within our system?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, that human paradigm stuff comes from that Michael Fullan work, doesn't it? About what actually are system drivers, and he's kind of, he's shifted his thinking a little bit and he contrasts the human paradigm to what he calls the bloodless paradigm. You know, there's just no heart or humanity in it. And so bringing the heart and humanity back to it, I think is clearly what Fullan's getting at. And that’s the core of the strategy, that notion of the choice that we made was to be purpose driven around learning and thriving and not being data driven. It drives you crazy when people talk about data driven. I'm such a data nerd and data is really important. It gives us great insight into how we might achieve our purpose, how we're going, where we might put our efforts, resources as a system or as a school level. So the data is crucially important, but we're not driven by it, we're driven by our purpose and the data can give us insights.

I think there's a recognition that we're a people business and this people business runs on relationships. And you can see that from students, you know, that notion of particularly when students get to high school, how important that relationship is with an adult in a school in order for students to attend and to be present. So we know it's about relationships. It's very much about kind of teachers learning from each other. You know, so a lot of that is about us as people working together. Now then that means, I think as a system, truly being a learning system, you know, what does it mean to be, a learning system, to be able to try out things together, to be able to learn from each other, for the system to provide opportunities for us to do that?

One of the great strengths that we have as a public education system is that we're a system and we've got amazing people all over this system and we should be connecting them to each other. Sometimes those will be connections that persist, and sometimes it might be connections getting people together because you want to address a particular thing, or you either solve a problem, or move forward and innovate and find new ways of doing things, getting people together to do that.

And I think the AI work is a good example of that. Right? So we set out, you know, most people know this story. We didn't ban chat GPT when it came out and that was an interesting thing when everybody else was banning it. Because we said we're going to learn and then we put it into the hands of teachers and students and said, well, we're, we just want to learn from this. We're going to provide the guardrails, provide some protection, but we just want to learn from our teachers. Let's really listen to our teachers. Let's really listen to our students, kind of explicitly, what are they actually telling us? But also using some of the data around how people are using AI to have a positive impact and how do we amplify that within our systems.

Then rolling out our own AI EDchat to all of our staff, all of our site staff, to give them the opportunity to have a play with it, just learn to have conversations together and to think about then, well, what are the resources, what's professional learning, how do we support that? I think that's a really good example of the kind of thing that we want to be doing as a learning system, really making the most of the expertise that we've got in the system and the relationships between people.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. Relationships between people is such a critical piece of work. You spoke a bit earlier about the civics and citizenship, kind of program that's pulled together. We're also doing quite a lot of work in terms of student agency and involvement and a critical part of the civics and citizenship is we're actually going to ask kids, what do they think about it? What role is that kind of approach going to start playing within the system for us?

Martin Westwell: One of the things, again, kind of a big pitch thing that you're going to grapple with is the relevance of education. We've got our purpose, but that could be expressed in lots of different ways in terms of the kind of curriculum and what kids are learning and how you go about that.

And one of the things that we learned from putting the strategy together in the first instance was just what you learn from students. And you're only learning if you're surprised by something. So there was a lot in that original work with the students that we weren't surprised by, but there was a lot that we were.

And of course that's the stuff that changes your thinking, that's the stuff that helps you do a better job. And so I think it's the same when we're thinking about What students want to learn, how they want to learn it, how we make the biggest difference to them, you know, students really being partners in that learning with us, that's going to be more and more of what we do at a school level and a system level as well.

It's been really interesting hearing about schools that have invited students into some of the pupil free days and students are turning up on a day off from school and actually reporting how much they get out of it and are enjoying it. And again, the thing that really stands out is when the teachers are surprised because the students are saying things and there's conversations going on that are not necessarily going on in the classrooms. And, you know, there's not necessarily space being created to have these conversations. And when we do that and we have those surprises, it's always an opportunity for us to do a better job. And, you know, again, it's this notion of ‘better job’. Who defines what a ‘better job’ is? And of course, serving the students, that helps us, I think that's the better job, making the biggest difference for the students. And you've got to temper that a little bit, right? Because first thing when you say to students, how could school be better? They'll say, longer recess, more sport, you know, you get those kinds of things from students. But it's kind of getting underneath that and actually really grappling together with students on about how this thing could be better.

Dale Atkinson: You've emphasized over the last two years about the importance of a learning system. You've created your own personal learning system in the off season. Talk to me about welding.

Martin Westwell: Welding for me is kind of one of those skills that I think, you know everybody should have. It seems like such a great thing to be able to do. So I kind of set off with that, with a few mates and again, it was that importance of people. If you want to do a transactional thing I learned a lot from, I think lots of us do, you know, YouTube. You know, how do I fix that particular thing in the car, look at a couple of videos, find that thing out and that particular kind of almost like, it's not a micro connection, but it's kind of micro skill that you then develop a tiny little thing, that's great.

But when you're doing a kind of bigger, broader skill or bigger kind of learning and development. I think it's hard to do it as an individual. You kind of, you got to do it with people. It makes more meaning, you connect it more, from a neuroscience background, you make more connections in your brain because it's not just kind of this self contained little bit of knowledge.

It's connected to the experiences that you have together. The questions that other people have that I wouldn't think of, you think, ‘Oh, Amazing’. And so what it does is it kind of reminds you of how hard learning is, but it reminds you about how uncomfortable it can be sometimes. It also reminds you about how important it is to get a bit of fun in it as well, you know, I don't think I've had many real lasting learning experiences that haven't involved some laughter in some way or another.

Laughter often is a part of it because of those relationships and so it gives that kind of emotion that, that you did learn in that emotional sense as well. So it's a bit meta, you know, kind of learning this skill, but also just applying that, I'm thinking, ‘yeah, this is what learning looks like’.

Dale Atkinson: And what have you welded, what have you made?

Martin Westwell: Not much yet, I've got to say. By my shed, there's lots of bits of, bits of old metal.

Dale Atkinson: Incredibly well connected.

Martin Westwell: Yeah, that's good.

Dale Atkinson: Finally, what message would you like to share with educators and leaders and staff at the start of 2025?

Martin Westwell: Yeah. Look, I think obviously there's a keep going message. What we've got in South Australia. With the strategy and with the work is a great ambition. And I think that ambition has been recognized nationally and, and increasingly internationally.

You know, the AI work was really ambitious. I think the work that we're doing around the strategy and what that means for school improvement or for curriculum, what it means for the ramp up and the work on inclusion are Aboriginal learners is really ambitious. And I'm really keen for everybody to kind of be in on that ambition, especially in a period of time when I look around some of the parts of South Australia, particularly Australia, look around Australia and I don't feel like education has got ambition.

I feel like it's got the danger of this mediocrity, that it's focusing kind of too much on itself, and not on the kids that it, you know, standardized test results, all of that stuff. And, you know, it's okay. We've got good education systems, but I'm not sure that education is really doing it for our kids.

And I think in South Australia, we've got that ambition. So I think something about being proud to be. South Australian, you know, I get that opportunity to go out and talk, say, like, nationally and internationally. And the feedback I get about what we're doing is incredibly positive. And, and I do hope that people feel that as well, you know.

I know it's hard work too but I think the ambition, the focus on, you know, that educators always have on making the biggest difference we can for our kids and using the opportunity of the strategy with that notion of the kind of tight and flexible, with that notion of us being a learning system.

And so I want everyone, including our educators, to be great learners within that system, recognizing some of the pragmatic challenges that teachers have, you know, day on day. That's how I want us to shift. So our students and our teachers are feeling more joy in the everyday experience of school.

Teachers have got that agency, that wellbeing. Teachers are effective learners and then all that that means for the flow through to our students. We had some visitors last year from, well, Ron Berger from the States and Gwyn App Harry from the XP schools in the UK. And one of the things that they talked about was how student culture never exceeds the staff culture.

So for us to work on us, for us to focus on us for a bit and think about how we are developing with agency and with our wellbeing, with being effective learners, I think that's something really important for this coming year.

Dale Atkinson: There you go - Be proud, be ambitious. Professor Martin Westwell, thanks for your time.

Martin Westwell: Thanks Dale.