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Episode 4: Connection, innovation and the Spiral of Inquiry

19 March 2025

In this episode, hear from Dr Linda Kaser and Dr Judy Halbert, co-leaders of the Networks of Inquiry and Indigenous Education in Canada. Judy and Linda share insights from British Columbia’s education system and their work globally, drawing upon the power of curiosity, networks and the Spiral of Inquiry model in driving transformation and change in our schools.  The conversation covers leadership, transitions for Indigenous learners, decision making and student voice, offering practical tips and real-world stories which support our implementation of the Strategy for Public Education.   

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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.


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