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

Rod, thank you very much for your time.

Rod Bunten: Thank you for inviting me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rod Bunten: It was fun. We enjoyed it.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Buckingham: My pleasure. All the best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dale Atkinson: Just for life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natasha Chisholm: Thank you.

Jacob: Thank you.

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

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

Andrew Fuller, thank you very much for your time.

Andrew Fuller: Feel free to keep going.

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

Andrew Fuller: I get around.

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

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

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

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

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

So again, we co regulate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Fuller: Thank you.

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

Kathryn Mahadeva: Thank you. Thanks Dale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dale Atkinson: It's baked into the ethos.

Kathryn Mahadeva: Yeah.

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

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

Kathryn Mahadeva: Thanks Dale.

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

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

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

Joss Rankin: Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joss Rankin: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dale Atkinson: Where can teachers go for more information?

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

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

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

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

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

Joss Rankin: Thanks for having me.

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

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

Georgina Davis: Hello.

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

Elliot: Hello.

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

Ellie: Hi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgina Davis: Yes, it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are you planning to take this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgina Davis: Oh, absolutely. Go ahead.

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

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

Georgina Davis: Sounds great. Ellie?

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

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

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

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

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

So whether you're either baking a cake or

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

Georgina Davis: No worries.

Ellie: Thank you for having us.

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

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

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

Karl Robst: Hi, how are you?

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

Kirsty Amos: Good morning.

Beth Pontifex: Good morning.

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

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

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

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

Kirsty Amos: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirsty Amos: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirsty Amos: That's amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirsty Amos: I'll buy one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karl Robst: Yeah. That's great.

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

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

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

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

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

Dale Atkinson: Very good, Karl?

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

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

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

Kirsty Amos: Thank you.

Karl Robst: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valerie Hannon: You listened my keynote.

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

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

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

Dale Atkinson: That's a very narrow descriptive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valerie Hannon: Thank you.

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

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

Thank you very much for your time, Professor Masters.

Geoff Masters: It's a pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geoff Masters: You're very welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Harte: Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir Kevan Collins: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir Kevan Collins: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir Kevan Collins: Thank you very much indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Gabrielle, thanks for joining us.

Dr Florence Gabriel: Thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Florence Gabriel: Thank you.

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

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

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

Lisa Gascoigne: Thank you. Thanks, Bella.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lydia de l'Amour: Thanks, Bella.

Lisa Gascoigne: Thank you

Intro: Teach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily: Hello there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wendy Jolley: Thank you for having us.

Emily: Thank you so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The teacher leaders are those who hold those specialist positions in their school, such as an Inclusive Educator or a Wellbeing Coordinator. What we know about them is that they're going to come in with different levels readiness for this role. And so when you talk about, you know, what training's going to be provided, the training will be set at different levels because some of our teachers, such as our Special Options Teachers or our Special Class Teachers, or our Inclusive Leaders, Inclusive Education Leaders, they'll have deep knowledge in autism already. And so they'll be training for them set at a more advanced level to build teachers understanding of autism and to know its impact on learning. Most of our autism inclusion teachers will participate in a two-day face-to-face course provided by Positive Partnerships, and they will complete one of their modules.

Plus they'll receive training in how to use some of their autism specific tools that will be incredibly helpful for our teachers in the classroom and across the school and these tools will help support their decision making for their autistic students. Then what will happen is they'll be provided with a whole suite of training options.

We'll be pointing them to other training opportunities that are accessible on plink online. Or coming to South Australia, for example, Barry Carpenter is coming to South Australia in March, and the AITs are going to be invited to come along to that training.

Bella Pittaway: Awesome. And so once they've had all this training and they're taking up the role in their school, what will they actually be doing?

Anna Noble: They'll be analysing the data schools have on their students with autism. And this is to identify the strengths of the school already. So where are they already providing evidence-based strategies and supports and evidence-based interventions, and also looking at the needs. So with the AITs, they'll be receiving our training.

This will always be around what are effective practices in schools. And our AITs will then be able to say, okay, so we are doing this practice, but that doesn't seem as evidence-based as something else. Maybe we should introduce this. They'll be supporting their fellow educators to know a range of strategies and support.

So in-class supports, assessment modifications, ways to engage students in different classroom activities, such as working within groups, speaking in front of a class. They'll be sharing resources across the school, such as our newly released autism practice guides, and they'll be sharing their learning from the training.

So leaders, Will work with their Autism Inclusion Teachers to support them to identify what's gonna be most beneficial for that school community. So the main focus on site will be to provide guidance to the fellow educators on how to best support and educate students with autism and embed inclusive practices that support learning and development.

Bella Pittaway: And Erin, how does this role, the AIT role connect with other student support services?

Erin Anear: That's a really good question. It's so important that we recognise that there's excellent work happening across the system already to support autistic children and young people. And the AIT role is not designed to replace any of the supports that already exist.

So your special educators, your behaviour coaches, psychologists, speech therapists, they're going to continue to be available and they can help schools. They might work with the AIT at the site as part of that help with the school. But the AIT role isn't designed to be a main point of contact for the services, and we still expect schools to manage referrals just as they have been through their student referral teams. Or through just general consultations with their student support services providers.

Bella Pittaway: And we know you mentioned earlier, I mean, there are at least more than 4,000 students with autism. And for teachers out there that might have, uh, a student with autism in their class, they might be thinking, well, how can an AIT support me?

Erin Anear: And I guess building on what Anna said earlier, we really see that AIT role being able to support teachers in lots of different ways. And that really depends on the site context. But the AIT can share the learning that they're doing in the professional development. They can guide teachers to different approaches or strategies to trial, and they might be able to share resources like articles on specific areas around autism.

It might be that the cohort of students at that school has a specific need. You might have a number of girls diagnosed with autism, and therefore you might need some resources specific to that. That's something that our autism inclusion teacher could help teachers to access, or it could even be different kinds of scaffolds. So you know, ways of teaching students with autism, it might be strategies you can use around specific areas of learning. So that might be comprehension reading fluency, it might be, how do I best work with an autistic learner around multiplication? So there's lots of different ways, but I guess the most important thing is just sharing those contemporary evidence-based practices.

Bella Pittaway: That means you've got someone in that school that you can go to, if you've got a question, you can go to that person and go, look, this is what I've got happening in my class. Is there anything you can suggest or something that I can follow up on?

Erin Anear: That's right. And then, you know, the autism inclusion teacher has access to those networks of those professionals, um, to then be able to have those questions in supported by the professionals who have an experience as well.

Bella Pittaway: Well, we've sort of touched on it already, but Erin, what do you think AITs will be able to teach, you know, other staff at their school?

Erin Anear: The fact that we've got an AIT in all of our primary schools is such a unique position. So while we're talking about this being something that's site specific to the context and how they'll work, we're also making sure that there's a consistency of the information that's being shared with schools.

So this is an opportunity for those contemporary evidence-based practices to actually be shared more widely across the state as well. And we know that the research in and around autism is developing rapidly and there's new information being shared every day. So the AIT will be in a position to be able to share that with staff.

And they might not necessarily formally teach the staff, but they might be sharing information perhaps as part of a staff meeting. They might have a regular sort of sharing spot, but it's more about them guiding others, demonstrating that best practice and modelling that within their own classrooms um, or with the autistic students at their site as well.

And at the same time, the AIT is going to be regularly connecting with the networks as well, and the networks themselves will be able to help with some of that, I guess on the ground information. So, you know, I tried this and, and that didn't quite work. And oh, hey, maybe try it this way. So you've got this AIM team of professionals giving you the, the evidence base, and then you've got your contemporary peers actually helping you with, how do I actually get this happening on the ground at my school? I, I think that's a really unique part of the.

Bella Pittaway: So we've talked about what the autism inclusion teacher role, what they will be doing. What are some misconceptions you'd like to address or some things that they won't be doing?

Anna Noble: I think it's important for people to know that the autism inclusion teachers won't be teaching all of the children with autism on their site, that's not the role. That's not their particular role. They won't be providing the referral services Erin spoke to, and they're not going to be the centre point for families. Classroom teachers will still be the first point of contact for families, but if teachers are saying, I need some support to engage our families in working with this child who happens to be in my class, then the autism inclusion teacher, who will be undertaking some professional development around engaging families, will be able to bring some of those strategies to that teacher.

Bella Pittaway: And just also something unique. What has it been like, because this is an Australian first, so I can imagine it's not like you've had a model where you can look at and go, okay, well this is how they've done it in their school system. This is happening for the first time. What has that been like?

Anna Noble: It's, I don't know that we've had an opportunity in the past before to really step back and have a look at the science of learning, really considering how do adults learn, how do teachers come together? What makes a network? Because a lot of this work is going to be supported by the networks and teachers coming together, sharing practice.

So we've had to think really deeply about what does an effective network look like? How do these teachers stay connected? How do we ensure that we provide them with the ongoing support, ongoing modelling that we are guiding the work they're doing and giving them an opportunity to say, actually this is what's happening in my site, and is anyone else finding something similar? And the support of the Autism and Inclusion multidisciplinary team, we just call them the AIM team, is really to bring in their sort of credible scientific knowledge to go, these are the strategies that you could use in your classroom, hearing about what's not working, and then exploring with our AIM team around, you know, why don't you think this particular intervention might be working at this point in time?

So they're gonna have access to these opportunities. I think that's what's the difference and the time we've really taken to look at what does an effective network look like. That has been the most significant part of this.

Bella Pittaway: You're sort of forging this path, and I'm sure you know, other states will be looking on and seeing how it all goes and probably have their own questions about it too. Before we finish up here, what impact are you expecting the Autism Inclusion Teacher role will have in our schools,

Anna Noble: Given that there'll be one person who is released one day per week or one day a fortnight, to focus on improving the school experiences of students with autism, I'm expecting that they'll support schools to feel more confident in the approaches they're using for their autistic students, that they will increase their repertoire of strategies and interventions available in their schools. They'll have more evidence-based resources to draw from when thinking through tricky situations. And I heard Ceri talking about sometimes it's tricky and I'm going, yeah, that's kind of what we are doing here to be more inclusive.

And I guess the ultimate impact I'm expecting is that they'll have this sort of ripple through effect across the state, across our primary schools of building knowledge I'm hoping that families will report that their child's previously unmet needs are now being addressed better. I don't know that we can solve all problems in this, but we can start to improve and that children with autism will say they feel better connected to school. They feel they belong and they wanna be there.

Bella Pittaway: It's a big, big task and obviously something that is much in need. Um, and yeah, wish you all the, the best with it. It's, yeah, really, really important work. Thank you for joining us today to take some time out to sort of explain a little bit about the role and, and the impact, um, you're hoping it'll have.

Anna Noble: Thank you.

Erin Anear: Thank you.

Bella Pittaway: Joining us on the phone from Keith Area School in South Australia's Southeast is Ceri Price, a year four, five special education teacher. Welcome, Ceri.

Ceri Price: Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Bella Pittaway: Can you tell us a little bit about your school?

Ceri Price: Yes. So Keith Area School is a rural school. We've got approximately 310 students from foundation to year 12, and almost every class has autistic students.

My year four five class, for example has two autistic students, one of which is quite high needs.

Bella Pittaway: What difference does additional training and support for students with autism make in your classroom?

Ceri Price: So for me, the training and and support is all about leading the improvement of the experiences that my students have, not just in the classroom, but also in the yard. I want them to be positive and to cover all their needs, including functional needs and skills as well as the curriculum. So having that additional training's going to enable me to be able to deliver that.

Bella Pittaway: And how have you sort of had to change things or the way that you do things in the classroom to make sure that your teaching is inclusive?

Ceri Price: One of the things that we do is clear timetables, and I know many teachers out there will say, but we do that anyway. But for many of our autistic students, having it on the board isn't enough. They need their own personal timetable, differentiating the work so that it's inclusive. So we are using their interests, their interests to engage them in the activities, making it all relevant and personalised to them.

Bella Pittaway: What sort of changes have you noticed when it comes to inclusive teaching? Where we are now, say from 10 years ago?

Ceri Price: Nowadays, it is a very big focus on inclusive teaching, on making sure that all students are having their needs met, that we are differentiating the curriculum, that we are not just delivering one size fits all.

Because as we know, students aren't all the same. They don't learn at the same rate. They don't learn in the same way. So we have to be able to be adaptable and to make sure that we take into account their backgrounds, their abilities, um, their disabilities.

Bella Pittaway: And how do you go about sort of balancing the needs of your students in your class?

Ceri Price: It's a tricky one, and each day can be very different because as students come in like one day they can come in and have had a bad morning. And so you teach to the emotions that day, but it, it's knowing your students, it's getting to know them and keeping up to date with evidence-based practices and knowing what strategies and methodologies are the ones that are recommended. And ones that are known to work are not ones that are just, 'Hey, one teacher's done this and it worked there', but there's no backing to it. There's no scientific evidence that says that it either works or doesn't work.

Bella Pittaway: Is there one in particular that you've sort of been using that you've found really helpful?

Ceri Price: I wouldn't say one, I'd say there's a lot of different methodologies that I incorporate cause you need to have a toolbox. I like the Positive Partnership and a lot of the advice and strategies that they promote on their website and in their trainings. But yeah, it's really about getting to know your students and, and having that toolbox and, and knowing what you can and can't do at a different, at certain times.

Bella Pittaway: And Ceri what are you looking forward to with the Autism Inclusion Teacher role?

Ceri Price: Well, a school can be a really isolating place, especially when you're trying to improve the experiences of students. So I'm actually really looking forward to being able to work with other teachers in the same role, to develop that sense of collegiality and support and to lead the upskilling of educators at our sites with evidence-based practices and methodologies, but also working with other professionals such as the psychologists, having that extra support to back us and to advise us is going to be so worthwhile and useful.

Bella Pittaway: What difference do you think it's gonna make to Keith Area School?

Ceri Price: I think it's gonna make a huge difference having so many students that are autistic, being able - school bell sounds -

Bella Pittaway: I love that we've got the school bell. It's perfect. . We're having a chat with you at school, so of course the school bell's gonna go off.

Ceri Price: That's it. It signals the end of the day, so it's the mad rush hour. But no, being able to help the students gain a better experience to help the teachers, the SSOs or the educators to be able to provide that and know that actually they're doing the right thing as well. It's that sense of peace of mind that comes with it.

Bella Pittaway: And Ceri before we, we let you go, because the school, school bell has, uh, just rung there, . What does, um, what does inclusive teaching mean to you?

Ceri Price: Well, inclusive teaching's about what we've just talked about, really it's about meeting the needs of the students. It's about having that toolbox of strategies and methodologies. It's differentiating and it's engaging the children in the class, no matter what their abilities or backgrounds, and having all of that together will then help develop their sense of being valued, their wellbeing and their overall success at school, which is essentially what we've become educators for.

Bella Pittaway: That's a lovely way to end there, Ceri. Thank you so much for your time.

Ceri Price: Thank you.

Intro

Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders, past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. And today something a little bit different, we're joined by the big boss, Professor Martin Westwell, Chief Executive of the Department. Professor Westwell, welcome.

Professor Martin Westwell: Oh, good on you, Dale. Looking forward to it.

Dale Atkinson: So, nine months into the job now, it's a reasonably solid gestation period. What would you say you've learned so far?

Professor Martin Westwell: Look, how long have you got? It's a steep learning curve when you go into a new job. And no different with this job. When you think about our system, lots of people complain about the bureaucracy, and so they should. That's what we do. But, you know, coming into department, one of the things that I have learned is just how impressive the work that we do, the people that we've got in the department, really are having a kind of central corporate function, all the things that go on here.

Professor Martin Westwell: Learnt so much about that and the support for schools. And just the way that people think about the support that they're providing for schools. I think especially during things like, you know, COVID and now the floods in the Riverland, how we're able to bring resources to support schools. It's just amazing. And also I think I try to get out and go to sites, preschools, primary schools, high schools to see the work, see the system from their point of view because you can't see the system from this office in Flinders Street.

Professor Martin Westwell: You've got to get out there and see that in all the different contexts that we're doing work. I kind of knew it in my head, but just seeing the breadth that we've got, you know, we've got some amazing educators supporting kids in amazing ways and a knew it, but just never seen the breadth of it. And that's been something that I've learned.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's pretty impressive, isn't it? And I know you've made a deliberate and conscious effort to go out to sites a lot this year. Are there any specific kind of things that stick with you from your experience over the last nine months?

Professor Martin Westwell: So, so many examples and it's hard to pick. I think one of the things is kind of got trapped in this thing where we talk about good schools being schools that get, you know, the highest grades. And what I've seen a good schools, great sites, amazing kindies, you know, just sitting down with the kids. There was one down in the South East, and I sat down and sat with a group of kids in the kindy, and they were playing hairdressers. And so, they had the brushes out and the hairdryer and they said, ‘Can we do your hair?’ And they thought that was hilarious because anybody who knows me, knows I've got no hair at all. So that was hilarious. And then they decided that was a bit boring because there was no hair. So, they started doing my makeup. So, but actually what I saw in that was the results of the efforts that the people on site put in to develop the kids and the kid’s interaction. And one kid kind of tried to get another kid to do something and that child wasn't having it and just gently said, ‘No, I don't want to do that.’ And the other child backed off. It's those moments that you really get to see. You know, you can see the impact that we're having on young people.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's interesting you say that. I was out at a meeting with a principal and the Governing Council chair, and the principal was talking about implementing project-based learning as a way of preparing young people with a breadth of skills academic, social, interactive that would really help those kids to thrive and prosper in, you know, the modern workplace, the modern world.

And the Governing Council chair brought it back and he said, ‘Look, that sounds fantastic, but what does that mean for teaching pure academic stuff to my kids?’ He says, ‘Everything we see kind of indicates, you know, NAPLAN scores, PISA scores. That's what we're looking at when we're looking at the quality of education’. We've done an amazing job, I think, conditioning parents to look to those things as an indicator of educational quality.

What does that tell us, that interaction, about how we should be talking to parents about the broader purpose of education and the role of schools?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, our structures kind of corral parents into this way of thinking. And one of the ways in which has been expressed is this idea about, you know, parents asking the question, how well is my child doing? As if there is kind of one line. And what we want to know is how far are my kids along that line, how far are my kids along that line in comparison to other kids?

We want to know where our kids are developmentally. You know, even when your child's born, you know, you might follow the weight in the growth compared to the averages. But if you're not average, that's fine as well, because you're not supposed to be average. Yet, somehow in education, we've got to narrow this thing down to the average or some comparison on one single measure.

So, this question, ‘how well is my child doing?’ is almost the wrong question. The question really should be, ‘how is my child doing well?’. Trying to capture that kind of diversity of what so many ways of doing well and being ready for the world. More and more we see employers saying not interested in university, not interested in how much you know, I can help you to develop that knowing, What I'm really looking for.

Doesn’t matter which industry students or young people are working in, what I’m really looking for is resilience. What I'm really looking for is that ability to learn. What we're really looking for is that good communication and ability to work with others, you know, whatever those things might be. And yet we leave those to emerge from education. Parents go, ‘Well, that's all okay, just as you said, that's all okay, but come on, the main game games over here, isn’t it?’

Well, no, it's not anymore. It hasn't been for a long time, but what we really see now is the world really demanding that shift. I was talking to the Industry Skills Council, so people from industries all across South Australia and I talked about this and the shift. I think that we do need to make to get that balance right.

A bloke came up to me afterwards and said he was a potato grower down in the South East, and I thought, oh, what's he going to say? He's going to say ‘oh, I just want skills.’ And he didn't. He said, ‘that’s the best thing I've heard, that's exactly what we need for young people.’ Now, of course, getting a job isn't just the only purpose of education, but what we are seeing is the world asking us to think differently about education.

And I think that will come through with that conversation with parents as well. The question being, ‘How are you, the Education Department, best preparing my child to get into the world and be brilliant? Come on. How are you doing that?’ That's what I want parents to ask, not ‘how well is my child doing?’

Dale Atkinson: So, what does that mean for an educator in terms of how they know whether they're doing a great job? What are the indicators we're looking for from educators in that sort of space?

Professor Martin Westwell: That's really why we've started off this conversation about the purpose of public education in South Australia because we have to really have a settlement on what we agree that we're going to jointly be responsible for. And then things like the Australian Curriculum that I think are full of lots of knowledge, which is great, students need knowledge, subject specific skills, but perhaps not some of these other the things that we know are so important.

So, if you just think about something like self-regulation skills, some research just came out that you can teach self-regulation skills. And if you do, what happens is it has a big impact on students’ academic achievement. But what it also does is it has a big impact on students’ ability to control some behaviours, ability to stop and think and make better decisions.

That's making students brilliant, not just in academics, but also in other aspects of life and in the way that they interact with other people, the way that they make decisions, the way that they participate in a democracy. Not all the information, all the misinformation that's thrown at them to be able to just stop and think and say, well, actually my emotional response to that is this.

But my second thinking is actually, well, hang on a minute and do that thinking. That's what makes a brilliant mathematician, or contributes to making a brilliant mathematician, a fantastic historian. And it also helps to find your way in the world.

Dale Atkinson: Gives you that space. The clarity of thought, I guess, is where you need to be. You've spoken before about South Australia being historically a leader in public education, stretching back to the 1800s. It's probably not the public perception now, albeit we know that there's plenty of innovative practice in that field. What can we do collectively to reclaim that position as innovators and leaders in public education?

Professor Martin Westwell: Got to be able to tell a good story, right? I think going back to this kind of purpose, you know, what are we here for and tell that story. You know, there's a famous story that's probably not true of JFK going to NASA in the sixties and meeting a janitor and going over and saying, well, what do you do?

He said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I'm helping to send a man to the moon.’ And I love that, even though it's probably not true, I love it because what it is, you know, we've got this thing that we're going for and everybody knows what it is, and we can be really clear about what it is that we're going for.

And of course, it’s not enough just to start the story, kind of do the thing as well. Right. They actually did put a man on the moon. So, you have got to be brilliant. But if you look back at the story, South Australia, you know, some of those amazing people like the likes of people like Alby Jones, Garth Boomer, South Australia was known for meeting the needs of students.

Having a system that really focused on students, on students being effective learners compared to know us. To be an effective learner, you’ve got to know stuff, you can’t be knowledge free. You got to know stuff, you got to have skills in the subjects in the areas in which you're doing learning. But I think South Australia was known for being effective learners.

So you go to a janitor, in a school in South Australia and say, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I'm helping to develop effective learners.’ That would be pretty amazing if we had that story. We had the evidence to back it up and say, this is what we're doing, this is how we're changing the world, this is how we're changing South Australia.

So, I think that both, we can do that, and I think we can tell a better story about how we're doing that.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, a group of 30,000 people all targeting one direction. You've identified student agency as a key factor in gaining traction in learning. So, my dad would say ‘why would you ask a six-year-old what they want to learn?’ What does it mean? Student agency, in terms of curriculum, design and pedagogy?

Professor Martin Westwell: Two things, just first of all, one of them is the student agency in learning. That's a kind of means to an end. So, what we want to do this learning, you want to get this achievement, you want to do brilliantly in NAPLAN and SACE and other assessments. And so, there's a question about how the student agency support that.

And you can think about student agency as an end in itself. We want young people who have got agency, can take agency, can use their agency in their lives. We want young women, young men who can use the agency. We also want young people, gender diverse people say, this is who I am, and I am taking agency my life to achieve my goals in my life, to support other people, to help other people to change South Australia.

And the opposite, of course, of agency is just that passivity of sitting back and letting the world do what the world wants to do to you. And so now we think about student agency, the development of agency as an end as well as a means and something that's going to be important in the world. Back to kind of what it means for us in terms of our system.

It's not about saying, you know, you choose, we'll stand back and cheer from the sidelines. You know, it's not that, if we're purposely going to be developing a student agency and it's an intentional outcome and we're going to get in there and support students to do that. And it might be some choice about what they're learning.

It might be some choice about how they're learning, it might be some choice about how they're going to show us the evidence of their learning, through our assessments and other things. And it might be some big things. So, imagine if we had student voice in some of the policy decisions we're making about curriculum, about the way that we run our schools, the way that we run our system.

Because then if they've got that voice, they've got some of the ownership, the part of the story. And so now they become active partners in that work rather than again sitting back and letting it be done to them. I also think that the student agency we can see has a big impact on student’s self-concept in their learning, on the sense of belonging, the idea that, you know, yeah, this is something I'm taking this personally, this is something I can do, I can be part of.

So, I see it as being crucially important in moving forward in education, no matter where we are in the world. And I do think we have to think about how we incorporate it into our practice and how do we support our educators to incorporate it into their practice.

Dale Atkinson: And that's a process that's already started. Last year we held a number of student forums across the state. Can you tell us a bit about that project and why that was so important?

Professor Martin Westwell: This is starting with students, purposefully, asking our students about their aspirations for the future, trying to reveal the thinking underneath that. Also thinking about how are they partners in this process. So, this idea about getting to our purpose, you know, the example that's often given around the world is Kodak. Kodak thought that they were in the business of film and chemicals, and they sold more film and chemicals. And even in their own labs, then they invented digital photography and they put it to one side. Why? Because they were in the film and chemical business, and it decimated the company. It made them irrelevant because the main game moved and went to digital photography. Now, if they thought they were in the business of photography, the business might have moved and changed and maintained its relevance.

So, the reason why I give that example is, when we talk about our purpose, we have got to make sure that we remain relevant. And who do we have to remain relevant to? Clearly, our students. So, what does relevance to our students mean? So, talking with our students is important to do that work and to make sure that our students feel like they're part of the story, that they're activated in that work.

But what we're also seeing there is students telling us, you know, they don't use this language, but telling us something about equity, telling us something about wanting to be challenged more. You know, we put some of the data in front of them about things like their cognitive engagement, talked about what cognitive engagement was. Then showed them their own data from the Wellbeing and Engagement survey and said, what do you notice about this data, first of all?

Then we asked them, why do you think things are like this? And then ask them, how might we improve if we do it differently? What could we start with? What should we stop doing? Amazing insights from our young people to help us move the system forward.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's incredibly powerful, isn't it, to talk to those kids. So, this is the opening salvo in that discussion around the purpose of public education. What are the next steps in that process?

Professor Martin Westwell: We've got all this input now from our students and just working through that feedback now and getting that together. And then for us to be able to share that with leaders, educators across the system, to help that to inform some of our thinking, of course, using some of the best research from around the world to inform our thinking as well, but also, of course, the expertise and experience that we have in our system.

So, engaging with our educators and with our leaders again to think about what is it that we're going to have the shared responsibility for. From that, when we think about that purpose and those components of what we're taking responsibility for, what we want our system to look like, we've had a lot of focus on excellence, quite rightly over the last few years.

But I think we need to think more about equity in our system. What do we mean by that and how do we get an equitable system? Because we know that if you drive a more equitable system, you get more excellence from it. Those two things work together really well. And thinking about, you know, the wellbeing of our students, developing that, developing some of these capabilities of students that are going to make them brilliant in the world and brilliant learners.

And of course, again, to improve that achievement. So, we want to kind of bring those principles together and then say, okay, so if this is what we do, we want to be responsible for how do we know if we're going to be successful? So, what are some of those measures? And we're going to need to put in place across the system to understand that we are being successful in those things?

Clearly, from a school's point of view, if there's a dozen different measures of ways of being successful, you're not going to do all 12 or however many there are. That's too much. But schools will know where they can really focus to get the biggest impact they can for their students and perhaps focusing on two or three of those measures going for those things to make the biggest difference outcomes for our students.

Dale Atkinson: It's interesting you say that schools will know. Speaking to a teaching colleague, they were saying that generally in their opinion, a 2 to 5 year lag between a change in systemic strategic direction and that adjustment gaining traction in the classroom. How do we address that? What do we do to meet that kind of need and make sure that the educators themselves aren't suffering from initiative fatigue or feel like they have too many competing priorities?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, so look, I agree with that. I mean, it's really clear that even with an intensive focus on one particular thing, sustained change happens over at least an 18-month period to get sustainable change. You could focus on that for at least an 18-month period. And I think your point about initiative fatigue is a really good one.

If we're doing lots of bits and pieces, there's no clear understanding of, you know, why we're doing this. We don't have our man on the moon discourse. It feels like you've just been asked to do a lot of stuff, you know, it's unconnected stuff. We've got this thing or initiative going on over here and that initiative going on over there.

It’s all piling in on schools. So, I think there's a couple of things. One is we're actively thinking about now is how to relieve some of that pressure on schools. What are we currently asking teachers to do and principals to do, leaders of preschool sites as well? What are we asking them to do that really, we shouldn't be asking them to do?

So, what can we take off whilst making sure that you've got student agency, but we'll want to make sure there's enough room for teacher agency as well, and for principal, site director agency in the system too. That's a balance to get right. Sometimes you can think that you're taking a load off teachers, but what you end up doing is taking choice off them as well.

So, we've got to get that balance right. So, if you have lots of different initiatives that don't seem to be connected and don't resonate with educators in terms of how is this making a difference for kids, how is this helping me to express my professional identity as an educator? Because this is what we're here for. I’m here to make a difference for the kids.

If you don't feel like it's all connected, then you’re just doing stuff for the sake of it. That's draining. But I think that with our purpose statement, with this shift of balance from just excellence to excellence and equity, we're thinking about what are the components of wellbeing that support our students to be successful in the world as well as in their learning, and perhaps some broadening to think about how are we developing some of these capabilities for our students.

I think when we've got that story settled in South Australia, anything that we do will then be guided by that. So, everyone should be able to see that this initiative, this piece of work, this offering, this opportunity is connected to putting a man on the moon. Our version of that. I think things will make much more sense and educators will see the connection to their professional identity and to their professional purpose in making the biggest difference to kids.

I think that will help, as well as the streamlining that's necessary along the way.

Dale Atkinson: We're speaking with Professor Martin Westwell, Chief Executive of South Australia's Department for Education. Now you're new to the role, ish, do we still claim newish? Nine months? How do we go?

Professor Martin Westwell: Still lots to learn, I reckon.

Dale Atkinson: Still lots to learn, and still lots for people to know about you, I think too. So, we've established a little fast round here of questions for you so you so people can get to know you a little bit better. Are you ready?

Professor Martin Westwell: I’m not sure, but let’s do it.

Dale Atkinson: All right. So first off, I know you're from the north of England originally. So, this first question, it's very important. AFL or Premier League?

Professor Martin Westwell: I'm going to say neither, Rugby League.

Dale Atkinson: Rugby league.

Professor Martin Westwell: So born in Wigan in Lancashire, which is just, Rugby League country.

Dale Atkinson: So, do you still follow the rugby league?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah. So, we adopted our Australian team when we first got here. The kids were five and nine and there were a few Poms playing for the Rabbitohs. So, we follow the Rabbitohs and get to see some games and of course the State of Origin gets played in Adelaide from time to time. So that's always a good day out.

Dale Atkinson: So corporate office or classroom and I'll be shocked if you answered corporate office.

Professor Martin Westwell: There's some things you can do from a corporate office, right? So, there's levers. You know, you get to influence the system, but you know, it's the reason for being is the classroom and what goes on in the classroom to make that difference to kids.

Dale Atkinson: Favourite band?

Professor Martin Westwell: Tricky one. I reckon, anything Northern Soul. Wigan was the centre of the Northern Soul area in the UK. I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties, probably Stone Roses. And you know and you go to WOMAD and see some of those bands that you're never going to see again. And so, some got into things like there's a band called Elephant Sessions, but really love and would never have, you know, really obscure.But that's the great thing about going to WOMAD.

Dale Atkinson: So Northern Soul, does that mean you've got a pair of bowling shoes at home, and you can do the, the kind of shuffle dance?

Professor Martin Westwell: Yeah, that’s right. Years and years ago, you know, people used to come out with talcum powder at the trouser legs and sprinkle it on the floor, just to get the moves going.

Dale Atkinson: And I would encourage anyone who is not aware of Northern Soul, to just type that into YouTube and have a look at kids going crazy.

One book every educator should read?

Professor Martin Westwell: If I had to pick one, it would be Ken and Kate Robinson's ‘Imagine If’ that came out recently. I think that's a really great short read. Captures Ken Robinson's philosophy. But things like even G.H. Hardy’s ‘Mathematician's Apology’. I think anybody who works in science, maths, physical sciences, that's an incredible read and I don't think I can go past Garth Boomer’s ‘Negotiating the Curriculum’ either, and the contribution from South Australian educators to that volume.

Dale Atkinson: We'll look to see a little bump on the Amazon list there.

If you could achieve one thing in 2023, it would be?

Professor Martin Westwell: Look, there's so many things, lots of medium sized things and big things, you know. So, landing this purpose conversation, obviously that's something I'm really focused on. Some of the national stuff. Minister working hard to improve school funding and the way that school funding occurs for public schools in South Australia. So, negotiations with the Commonwealth Government. But 2023 has to be a year of hope.

It's raising the levels of hope in the profession. It's been such a tough couple of years. Things have been really difficult, but now I think we're coming out of it and so just thinking about what we want to achieve as professionals can flourish, can grow in 2023 in a way that's just not been able to over the last couple of years.

Dale Atkinson: So, in that light, if you could say one thing to South Australia's educators and support staff in week zero, what would it be?

Professor Martin Westwell: I’m not sure this can be one thing. So do you think, you know, think about the possibilities that we've got in front of us, be part of the purpose and feed into that process. Look after yourself. But also, you've got to look after yourself, you've got to feed your soul in this work. And Ken Robinson, going back to Ken, said, ‘What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world.

What you do for others lives forever.’ I think that teachers, more than most, are able to change the lives of others children, young people to change the life of South Australia. So, what I'd really say is go on, live forever.

Dale Atkinson: I think it's a lovely way to wrap it up. Professor Martin Westwell, thank you for your time.

Professor Martin Westwell: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome to teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. And this year I'm joined by a new co-host by the name of Georga Tyson, who we have pulled out of Largs Bay School, Georga welcome.

Georga Tyson: Thanks Dale, it's good to be here.

Dale Atkinson: So tell us a bit about your background. Why have we gone out and drawn you out of your school? What are we getting from you today?

Georga Tyson: Well, I've been teaching for the past 20 years in a few schools across South Australia, including some valuable experiences in my hometown of Whyalla, I've taught in a number of schools across metropolitan Adelaide. And at the moment I'm at Largs Bay, as you said, and I 'm in a unique role there as a specialist NIT teacher, taking kids for functional grammar and, and writing, which has been amazing. So I'm working with kids from R to 6

Dale Atkinson: Well, it's great to have you thank you very much for agreeing to join us this year.

And I think we'll have some, some fun adventures together. And the first of our adventures is today and we're at a Norwood International High School. Now for a lot of students returning to the classroom this year has been a fairly substantial challenge. I think it's safe to say we've had a staggered start. We've had COVID there's been a lot of unsettling activities nationally and internationally with flooding the situation in the Ukraine. It's a lot for any child to digest. And on top of it, Is the process of being a child and being a teenager. So given all of that, we thought the first podcast for 2022 should focus on student wellbeing and in particular, how our teachers can support students to be mentally well and to be prepared to learn when they come to the classroom.

Georga Tyson: And how lucky are we Dale to be here at Norwood International High School and this new facility, which is really impressive. I have to say. We acknowledge that we're on in the Eastern suburbs of Adelaide on Kaurna land. We pay respects to elders past, present and emerging. We're speaking to Shaun Walsh, director of wellbeing for learning and Lucinda Yates, a student wellbeing leader at the school. Welcome to you both.

Shaun Walsh: Thank you.

Lucinda Yates: Thank you.

Georga Tyson: What has the start of 2022 been like for both of you and the school community?

Shaun Walsh: Where do we start? Where do we start? It's certainly, I think it's going down in history as one of the most unique years that education's ever faced. Our school has nearly 1700 students in it. We've gone on to a one campus model. Prior to that, we had a middle school campus down the road and the campus we're on now was, currently that was the senior school. So we've had the complexities of 1700 students aged from around 11 years to 18 years of age, finding their niche areas and their little market spots within the school and accessing online learning right from the get go. So that's been a challenge.

Lucinda Yates: Bringing in year seven and eight new cohort has been particularly challenging. So at the start of the year, we had a lot of parents waiting out the front and there's been a lot of changes in regards to kids coming to school, leaving school, with the addition of masks, some kids have never seen our entire faces. So it's, it's quite difficult to make those connections sometimes as well.

Dale Atkinson: What you're describing there is something that a lot of other schools are experiencing, but you perhaps on a larger scale, which is students having to settle in, in a number of different ways facing a number of different challenges, like you say the seven to high school thing is creating some issues. You've got issues around the patriation of kids from two campuses into one, you've got the backdrop of of COVID and all those sorts of things. So what are the strategies that you guys are putting in place to kind of address some of those big issues for kids?

Lucinda Yates: So we started some of these last year. So for five of our year levels, they hadn't been to this campus at all. So our year twelves are the only cohort who have been on this campus. So we started by doing a transition day. At that point we didn't have all of the facilities open so they just did a walk through. It was about, you know, transitioning them, making sure that they were aware of where everything is having, just having a look generally. And then we also had the, have the addition of the new house systems. So we're trying to bring in a lot more community and relationships with staff and students and build up a connection to school. So we have a new house system. We have four houses. We recently, we previously had three and then we embedded things into our connect curriculum, things like a Kahoot quiz, every Thursday, a fitness Friday. so going out into the yard and just really getting them to think about wellbeing and things that make them healthy and connect to school.

Georga Tyson: Is this space that we're sitting in now, this wellbeing hub is this new to the school or was this at your previous site as well?

Lucinda Yates: Yeah, so the entire kind of wellbeing web is new to the school. So previously we did have a director for wellbeing, but it was, he, he was based on the middle campus. It was just one wellbeing leader on the middle campus, one on the senior campus. So there was no kind of group approach to wellbeing. We were separate. We met regularly, we did case management together and we worked very much as a team, but in terms of the support, it was just very separate. And so having now we have the director for wellbeing here. We have three wellbeing leaders. So we deal with two year levels each and then we have kind of a whole community approach up here. So we did previously work very heavily with the year level management and now we're able to separate that and go you level management deals with academics, attendance, behaviour. We are very much about wellbeing and the whole person approach.

Dale Atkinson: What sort of difference has that made in terms of how you're able to support the kids?

Lucinda Yates: It makes all the difference because yeah, we're able to support each other as well as supporting the students and if one person's workload is too much we're able to kind of separate that and say, hey, this has come up, is anyone available to deal with it? And so we have one person that's based here for every double lesson so then if students do come up and they're experiencing a heightened state of awareness, we're able to deal with that on the fly.

Georga Tyson: As I was coming in today, I saw a student coming in, actually, and, and I thought what a welcoming space. They'd just brought themselves in to catch up with one of your colleagues, I think.

Shaun Walsh: And it's great I think having three or four of us up here, because if a student can't find a connection with that person that's allocated to their year level, it means that they can go and work with another person sort of thing and I think that that's really important. I mean, the whole value of, it's not therapeutic, what we do, but the whole value of that relational safety and that connection to, to someone in your site is really important. So the fact that they, every kid in the school would have someone that they could come and connect with on some level is, is, is really great.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. That's amazing. Isn't it? I mean, I think like what I'm hearing from you and what I can see around here is that there's a, there's kind of a multi-layered approach here, where, you know, the overarching strategy is to create a sense of belonging for the kids and to create a real sense of kind of wellness in the space. But then there is, you know, resourcing there's, there's a really kind of intense focus on being able to support kids in, in like the acute circumstances that they might be facing. Is that, is that fair to say?

Shaun Walsh: Yeah, definitely you know, and I mean, I think it, and it's, it's brilliant in the sense that we have a principal that sees the, you know, the measurable value of having a wellbeing focus within her school and our focus is not just on our, our students. It's also on our staff and particularly at the moment with everything that's happening around, you know, staff coming out on COVID leave and all sorts of things, you know, we've tried to make as much focus as possible on making sure that our department's most valuable assets it's teaching an SSO and support staff you know are a huge priority alongside of our students too.

Georga Tyson: Which is really that whole school approach. Isn't it. And that's what the experts tell us is the best way to support mental health and wellbeing is with a whole school approach. And we understand as well that the wellbeing engagement collection, the survey data has been a big part of forming that whole school strategy. Can you tell us a little bit more?

Shaun Walsh: Oh, look obviously like every school, the WEC data, all form attendance, you know wellbeing, referral data, all adds to our vision and where we, where we see that we need to drive our supports. I think the 2021 data highlighted things like connectedness, school belonging, motivation to achieve, and students actually knowing who they can go and talk to and what they could talk to that person about, whether it be academic challenges, whether it be wellbeing challenges. Obviously things like bullying and keeping themselves safe and keeping their friends safe as well. So, I mean, obviously that data formed the focus for 2022 in relation to the way the program was structured, in the way the resourcing was structured, the staffing levels and what the teachers would actually be delivering in that, around, you know, the, the child safe curriculum, anti harassment, bullying programs, but also it drove where teacher training needed to be invested as well to make sure that the teachers were armed with the resources and the skills needed to actually deliver the programs and support the kids in their classes.

Georga Tyson: Connect program, does that take place where maybe in the past it would have been your home group?

Lucinda Yates: Yeah, we also had a look at the structure of the role of the connect teacher as well. So we worked with our staff around being mentors and not so much just the teacher that stands in front of the class, so when we say, where do you go to for support? We not only say the wellbeing team and year level teams, but we say very much that that connect teacher is someone that you can go to if you need to talk to someone, and if you need support in any area.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the interesting, that you kind of touched on Shaun is like in a school of 1700 kids that will have vastly different backgrounds, how do you make sure that you provide kind of a differentiated, kind of personal support to the kids that meets them where they are?

Shaun Walsh: There was a massive amount of work that went into the transition for the year six's coming into seven and the sevens into eight. And I mean, I've only been in the school eight weeks, put my hand up and say that, but I was blown away in that sort of initial week, zero time when we came back together just at the learning community leaders, how they just knew who their kids were, and they'd worked extensively with the primary schools in the lead up through the transition programs. So that sharing of information and not just with students from six to seven and seven to eight, but also within the school itself. So the eights moving into nine. And I think the structure of the learning community leaders has actually meant that the handover of information is quite spectacular for a school this size, but also the fact that everybody knows something about one of the students in there in their cohort of kids, in their class sort of thing, there's always information and the learning management system as well, we use Day map, we put a lot of information and maybe not highly sensitive, but a lot of sort of, you know learning information, but also wellbeing information about students on that. So it's a ready tool for teachers to access if they've got a student that they're a bit concerned about.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, right. Is there like, is there a way that you guys kind of foster nice interactions between the teaching and the staff to kind of share that information? Is that a formal thing or do you kind of just do it on a kind of one-to-one basis.

Shaun Walsh: It's a mixture. I think it's a mixture. Yeah. I think we get you know, you'll have, you'll have really switched on staff who will come and say, look, I'm really concerned about this student in my class. I've noticed that their attendance or their looking a bit sad or a little bit under the weather today. Obviously the learning community leaders track attendance data and that's in a school I think one of the biggest indicators that something's not quite right for a student is looking at that data. So obviously we flag students in relation to those that are the ones who, even if they're approved absence, you still start looking at the mount up and think maybe something's not quite right. So obviously, you know, the wellbeing leaders in, in consultation with the learning community leaders will connect with families, will connect with students and almost create that, I guess, a team around the child approach in, in relation to sort of making sure that that child is supported.

Lucinda Yates: It kind of comes naturally as well with our leadership team. So we've got the different levels of leadership teams. There's exec, then there's wellbeing team. Then there's the different management teams of the senior and then the middle. And then there's the curriculum leaders. And then, of course there's the year level teams. So the learning community leader will work very closely with their year level team. And we would work very closely with the teachers that have those high level well-beings students in there. But I think just the, the leadership structure, the way that they all work so well together kind of bleeds out into the general staff as well.

Dale Atkinson: Yes. So got to be a real big kind of culture piece for you guys.

Georga Tyson: Who do you turn to for support?

Shaun Walsh: Each other, each other, each other. I mean, even though I've only been here eight weeks, I feel like I've worked here for a very long time and I'm very blessed and fortunate to have an amazing team that I get to lead. But certainly, you know, we all bounce off each other and if one is in crisis, then we're all there alongside that person. Obviously accessing external supports, like incident management team, the SWISS team, our own private networks as well outside of school. I think they're all the things that we amongst ourselves promote, but also promote them amongst the staff too. And as I said earlier on we, we, you know, one of my passions is staff wellbeing and we've really started to work on that sort of thing around, you know, how do our staff look after themselves and what's their window of tolerance and you know, how much time do they spend outside of the window of tolerance and you know who is their trusted colleague or their trusted person that they can just purge when they need to sort of things. So they've got the opportunity. Sometimes that's us, you get the kids purging at you and sometimes the staff purging, but that's the nature of the job that we've chosen to do.

Georga Tyson: Along with the pandemic, more recently, we're seeing mages of record-breaking floods in Eastern Australia, and the war in Ukraine, how do you help students deal with these, with understanding these events that are happening in the, in the broader community?

Shaun Walsh: It's about establishing, not just about individual events, but a culture of safety and connection. I think that any, any natural disaster, anything globally that happens, and I mean, we have a massively diverse student cohort from many different backgrounds and cultures. So you don't necessarily know, at the time who's being impacted by what's happening around the world. So, you know, through, through our, our language that we use through our you know, our our sort of, you know, commitment to young people through our leadership, as Lucinda's already mentioned, it's around our core value is safety and diversity, and actually making sure that every student that comes through our doors as much as we possibly can with 1700 feels safe and that they've got someone they can connect to. Our teachers, I mean, I had the opportunity to walk around to the classes a lot and you watch the very topical discussions that happen in the morning connect and during extended connect time and things like that, and there's a real culture amongst the, amongst the teachers that have talking with kids about what's happening around the world and actually unpacking it and giving them probably that educated view rather than just what they read on social media or what the, you know, the media itself is barraging at them as well.

Dale Atkinson: Now Shaun just finally, before we wrap it up, you've been in a number of different settings, so you've, you've spent a fair bit of time in the Southern Behaviour Centre leading that up, you've been in Willunga High School. What are the differences and similarities between, you know, places like that, which would be perceived, I think, to be very different to, to Norwood International. What, you know, what's the experience across those sites?

Shaun Walsh: When I won the job here, people said, oh, eastern suburbs you'll have no behaviour issues. I scoff at that because we have our fair share of, of students with challenging behaviour and, and who will test the boundaries but that's adolescents. The similarities is, is kids are kids. They bring with them, the complexities they bring with them, the joy of coming to school. There are lots of kids here and there's lots of kids at Willunga and there were lots of kids at the learning centre who found a sense of comfort and joy in actually attending school because it's a safe haven for a lot of our kids, you know, sort of thing. And I say that sadly, and I don't mean that, but you know, they don't necessarily get that at home. I would say that probably, I notice here families are in the whole far more proactive in seeking external support for their children than I've experienced in previous schools. When you do talk to a family, they'll say, look, we've been to the GP, we've got a mental health care plan. We've got them connected with a psychologist. I would say this area particularly has highlighted to me that there are more services, I think as well, because I think maybe financially people are able to pay for things more than they necessarily might be able to do in some of the southern areas as well. Not to say that there weren't amazing families at Willunga or through the learning centre as well, but I just get the feeling too, because we're closer to the CBD, there's a lot more option for families to sort of shop around for supports and they might in the southern area.

Dale Atkinson: So there's issues of capacity, engagement.

Georga Tyson: In your role over that period of time, have you had to have more connection with outside agencies then than before, or.

Shaun Walsh: Definitely. And especially the last three years at the learning centre, our role was really to be, I guess, the intermediary between schools and support services. And I'm a huge advocate of support services, schools, building relationships, setting up effective student review teams. That's one of my goals here for us to work on developing those relationships, accessing services through the department, like the HEI, like complex case review group, the SWISS team, they're amazing, and the incident management team, even though we report and we have incidents, I've always found when I ring them, they've always been a wealth of information, and if they haven't been able to answer a question, they'll always get back. So it's about reaching out because you can't do this job without establishing those relationships and accessing what our department actually has on offer.

Dale Atkinson: That's great, Shaun, Lucinda. Thank you very much for your time. This has been a great chat just to learn how you're going about it here at Norwood International and the challenges and the, and the programs that you've got in place to overcome them and really actually pretty inspirational.

Georga Tyson: Catch you next time on Teach.

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 back to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. Today's episode is all about our people, our teachers, our leaders, and the people working in support roles, and also in central office. We think everyone from time to time deserves to be recognised for the stuff they do and deserve a bit of a cheer too.

That's why we're reminding you that nominations for the 2022 Public Education Awards will be open soon. With me today is Abbey Woolley, who is part of the team that oversees the awards each year. And I've got to tell you, I was there last year, it was an amazing night. Welcome Abbey.

Abbey Woolley: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Dale.

Dale Atkinson: Well, it's nice to have you. We all know it's hard to find some time to reflect on our achievements, particularly under the current COVID settings, and everyone's working incredibly hard. But I imagine the awards create a valuable opportunity for people just to take some time out and recognise the fabulous work they do.

Abbey Woolley: Indeed, they do, and a lot of the cases teachers are inherently humble. And so, it's nice to showcase and recognise the excellence that is out there in the department, and the awards give us that platform.

Dale Atkinson: So, they've been around since 2011. There's a little bit of a change that's coming in because normally individuals have self-nominated for the awards. So that's been the previous kind of set up. This year, what we're saying is that applications can also be submitted by a colleague on behalf of an individual. So why has that change been made?

Abbey Woolley: I guess it's been made because we really are looking for the best of our best, and like I mentioned, teachers can be humble and not necessarily want to put themselves forward.

We recognise that there are many outstanding staff that are reluctant to recognition, or simply not recognise the impact that they have with the students or their community. So this year, like you said, peers, leaders, and colleagues, we're asking them to consider if they work with an outstanding individual or team, perhaps that they should consider applying for them on their behalf and they can submit that application in collaboration with the person. But they indeed do need to seek consent obviously before submitting, or they can just tap them on the shoulder and say, hey, I think you're brilliant. Why don't you apply for an award this year?

Dale Atkinson: One of the things that really stood out at last year's awards is the sheer breadth of categories and the incredible range of things that people do that are amazing, but that they can also be nominated for. So, what are the types of things we're looking for and why should someone enter or be entered for the awards?

Abbey Woolley: We all know I guess that teachers are extremely passionate about what they do -   teaching and learning, and we really want to share their stories and showcase outstanding practice impact.

And that really does contribute to the department's world-class vision. Winning a public education award is a recognition of an individual team or the whole of the school community really. And it gives schools, preschools, and children's centres the opportunity to share their expertise and be recognised for that outstanding impact.

Dale Atkinson: And so what's the process of applying? What should people do and how do they get that underway?

Abbey Woolley: We've put together an application guide, which will be available at schools in a hard copy, but we do also have an online copy of that. So, visit our website for that. But, to apply, the first step is looking at the application guide, choosing a category, perhaps discussing that with your leader or your peers. And I guess when you're choosing that category, making sure that it is a category that you can most comprehensively answer all the criteria for it. The next step is seeking endorsement, because your line manager or principal will have to endorse your application before it goes any further in the process and then of course writing your application, this can be done on our online platform, or we have also provided some Word templates that are available on our website. Just in case you do want to collaborate or work on your answers offline before submitting online. We do say use plain English, read your application thoroughly before submitting it. We've just put those tools in place to make that a little bit easier for people.

Dale Atkinson: What are some things that people can think about to make their application kind of stand out for the judging panel?

Abbey Woolley: I can't stress enough, how important evidence is. Our judges are looking for evidence. Evidence is key, evidence, evidence, evidence. So, you know, real examples and details of lessons and the impact that they've had on learners, practical evidence of high quality, inspirational teaching, or approaches that enthuse, engage and motivate others, examples of how you have actively involved families in their child's learning, using quotes from students or colleagues to back up an argument or piece of evidence that you're providing. And I guess finally think about any additional opportunities that you or who you're applying for have created for children and young people for an example, extracurricular activities, or how you may have actively lived the public sector values, you know, and for more information on what makes a good application, we do have some more tips and tricks online if people want to explore that further.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, perfect. I mean, I think one of the things that kind of stood out at the awards last year from the videos of the awards' recipients, was just how the flow on effect of the work they did impacted their colleagues or the children they're working with, to try and drive those improved outcomes. And I think that's really one of the key things that we're looking for in the awards.

Abbey Woolley: Absolutely. And I think that, you know, showcasing this excellence and showcasing the fact that it is transferable, it's inspirational, but in a lot of the ways, these stories can be transferred into other sites and, and other central applications.

So that's what we're really after that, ripple effect of impact.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, and one of the great things about the awards is that winning an award contributes towards some professional development that people can get. All the winners receive $10,000 in a prize towards professional development. All the finalists receive $2,000 towards their professional development. What sort of things can the prize money be spent on?

Abbey Woolley: Yes. So, I guess there are many ways over the years that I've seen the prize money be spent. It can be used to either support you or your team's professional development. Some of our past winners have used the money for training or up-skilling or coaching. Some other examples of further tertiary study, attending conferences or events specific to your field of interest. And we've had previous winners and finalists learn from other jurisdictions as well, but you may not be aware that you can also spend the prize money on learning resources for the school or community, which is a great way to look at how that can be spent, and for it to benefit children and young people. So, some examples of that are e-learning tools, software, or hardware to support that, books, films, flashcards, anything that you can think about that you'd find in a classroom.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. I mean, one of the great things from awards winners is what I've seen previously, as it creates this kind of virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. So, they're away, they're using some of this money to work on some of their skills or to create these collaborative practice teams and really bring some of the knowledge back, extend that out to the broader school and partnership community. It's really impressive. It's great stuff.

Abbey Woolley: And I think Dale, like, that's what we want to get across. Winning an award impacts the whole community for the individual or team. That's really something that we would really love applicants to know.

Dale Atkinson: It's an amazing thing. Who are some of the previous winners that stand out for you, and what they've gone on to do?

Abbey Woolley: There are so many over the years, I've been with the program for, this is my fifth year now. And there's just been some incredible people that I've seen win, and be finalists. A few that do stand out to me, Antoinette Jones was the 2018 winner of the leadership award. She was the principal at the time of Mitcham Girls School, and she was very, very humble. And when we were filming at the school, she was very much about showing us what everyone else was doing, not necessarily wanting to put the spotlight on herself. And in true Antoinette style, she spent her $10,000 on providing a professional learning opportunity for her whole staff and invited community along and some surrounding schools to be a part of that. So, they all did a course on respectful relationships.

So, I think that that impact was felt quite heavily at that school, with her winning. Another lady that won, was Peta Thompson. She was Peta Tooley at the time of winning, and she was the recipient of the 2018 Early Years Teacher of the Year Award. Peta spent her money on a tour of Reggio Emilia, and she wanted to deepen her learning of that approach. And she came back, and she's since authored a book called Settle Petal which is a book about dealing with anxiety and children. And with that, she put together lesson plans to really embed that learning and key takeaways from the book, into the classroom. Yeah. They're just two pieces that make me smile, but there are plenty more.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's a real launch pad to think, almost creatively, about how you want to progress your professional development and your career. And you want to help out the rest of the people at your site.

Abbey Woolley: Indeed. And we are always here. The team are always here to snowball ideas or workshop ideas about, any professional development that finalists or winners may want to just talk about, and we can provide some advice where possible.

Dale Atkinson: Okay. So, it's exciting. What are the key dates? What do people need to know?

Abbey Woolley: So, applications are open from the 1st of June for the whole month. So, the 1st to the 30th of June applications will be open. On the 26th of August, finalists will be announced. After that time, we will go into a period where we will actually go out to sites and central offices, and film finalists, because at the award ceremony, we premiere a 1 minute video clip of them all. So that will be happening. And after that point, winners and finalists are invited, as we've mentioned, to attend the award ceremony, which will be held on the evening of the 4th of November at the Adelaide Convention Centre.

Dale Atkinson: And it's a fantastic night. It is one of those great opportunities, great, rare opportunities that educators have from across the state to get together and really celebrate the thing that we do, which is an amazing thing. Abbey, thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us. We're really hoping that this kicks off some conversations in those staff rooms and in corporate office and everywhere else about, you know, maybe somebody who's really worthy of being recognised or maybe get people thinking about, well, yeah, actually the work that I do is worth being, given some, recognition. So, thank you Abbey. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today.

Abbey Woolley: Not a problem, Dale. Thanks for being here.

Dale Atkinson: And thank you everyone for listening. If this podcast has got you thinking about applying for an award or nominating a colleague, make sure you visit our website at education.sa.gov.au/awards or you can check out the show notes from today's episode, which can be found at education.sa.gov.au/teach. Catch you next time on Teach.

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. I'm Dale Atkinson from the South Australian Department for Education

Georga Tyson: And I'm Georga Tyson, Largs Bay school teacher.

Dale Atkinson: Now imagine going overseas to study a teaching technique or, having a bit of space to write a book or create musical performances for the kids.

Well, public education awards winners have gone on to have those kinds of experiences while further developing their careers.

Georga Tyson: Today, we're catching up with some previous winners to hear what they're up to now and how the award changed their teaching career and how it could change yours. Joining us today, are Kilparrin music teacher, Lucy Standish, who won the 2019 Community Engagement Award, and Gawler and District College reception/year one teacher, Peta Thompson, who won the 2018 Early Years Teacher Award. Welcome to you both. And congratulations on your achievements.

Peta Thompson: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Georga Tyson: Why did you both decide to apply for the Public Education Awards?

Lucy Standish: I applied because I knew we were creating something really special that year. And that's why my principal nominated me.

So we were doing a big performance, the Music for All project and had that coming up. And so, I wrote the application with that in mind of what we were about to create. That was seen as something that was going be really special.

Peta Thompson: I had dreams of going to Italy to do some training in the Reggio Emilia approach.

But I knew that I would never be able to fund it on my own. I am really, really passionate about community and bridging that gap between home and school, and the whole Reggio Emilia approach is about the whole child, the community, the parent, the teacher, all raising and educating the child.

And I just dreamt of being able to go over and do that. So, I thought, well, this is the perfect opportunity for me to be able to actually obtain that.

Dale Atkinson: So tell us a little bit about what that experience is like going to Italy and what you learnt from there.

Peta Thompson: Oh, well it's phenomenal. Firstly, I don't speak any Italian so that was the biggest challenge.

So I actually went to the town of Reggio Emilia and it's a two-week course where you are immersed in the learning and the schooling over there. There are conferences every day where you hear from parents of kids who go to their schools, you hear, from community members and how they actually have a part in the child's education.

And yeah, you get to visit schools and look at the setup, the wonderful ways that they approach education, which is looking at the whole child. So I was really, really passionate about the community aspect of it. And I took so much of that away and have implemented that into the way I teach now as well.

Dale Atkinson: It's an amazing night, it's an incredible time to spend with your family and celebrate now the great things that can be done in teaching. Can you just explain a little bit about what the experience of the evening was like for you?

Lucy Standish: Such a fun evening. The Public Education Awards really put on a great, great show and I think my category was quite late in the night. And so the tension was, you know, happening the whole throughout the whole evening. And I was like, I'm not going to win. I'm not going win. And then I won and had to go up and make a speech. And then it was just fantastic. Yeah. We had lots of Kilparrin staff come along to support me as well. So, it made it a really fun night. How about you, Peta?

Peta Thompson: Yeah, the whole process actually was really enjoyable from woe to go. Once you put your application in, you don't think you're ever going to be selected. And then, a couple of months later, there was a little envelope in my pigeonhole and it was like the Willy Wonka's golden ticket and I remember opening it and seeing you're one of three finalists and you've been invited to the celebration, the awards night. And so again, you go along, you think, oh no, it's not going to be me. You see the videos of the other people that you're up against. I remember not eating a scrap of food because I was so nervous staring at my meal, thinking, oh my gosh, then yeah. They call your name out. And it's a huge celebration. Lots of staff and friends were there as well from our school. And then it's just a whirlwind after that.

Lucy Standish: I even had Eddie Betts come and, um, tell me that I was the finalist so that was a pretty special moment.

Peta Thompson: Was that you? I saw that.

Georga Tyson: How would you say winning the award has changed your teaching journey or what impact has it had?

Peta Thompson: It's changed me as a person forever. It is something that I really could never have dreamt of. It's incredible. As a teacher, as an educator, you know, every single day, we're always trying to refine the process in what we do and reflect on our teaching, and I just gained so many skills and so much knowledge about children and how they learn and why they learn the ways that they do.

And that really shaped my pedagogy and what I do in my classroom. I could not thank the education awards team more for the opportunity they gave me.

Lucy Standish: Yeah. From the moment that Eddie Betts walked in that was, you know, really exciting for my whole school and Kilparrin. The students still remind me of that moment, but after being a winner, it's really shown the music education that we are, um, doing really amazing things at Kilparrin with our music.

And partnered with SASVI as well. And with Connecting the Dots in Music, we are really innovative in our field and people are recognising that. Music Eviva in schools has also approached me and my colleague at SASVI, Lily Gower to run some professional learning for them on diverse needs and just making a difference with Kilparrin students who have multiple disabilities, deaf and hard of hearing, vision impairments, sensory needs.

We need to make sure that everyone is having an accessible music curriculum.

Dale Atkinson: Now, before we came on air, you were talking to us a little bit about performance that you had a couple of weeks ago. Can you just explain a little bit about how that works and how that reaches out into the community?

Lucy Standish: Yeah. So we've just put on our second Music for All project. And this time it was called The Nest. The first one was Fancy Pants. We were lucky to have Connecting the Dots in Music. Emily G is the project manager. She's a friend of mine and has contacted me again and said, look, we've got to do this.

So, we've been working on it for a couple of years. COVID's got in the way. We were lucky that Tia Martin, who also works for Connecting The Dots in Music, she was our lead teaching artist and she was able to get some grant money from Carclew, which made it possible for us to put it on. And so last week we had musicians in our school that were teaching artists.

And we all created the music with our teaching artists. They got to know our students. They got to know our students' ways of communicating, because most of our students at our school use alternative communication. So that was a fantastic week. We created the music and then we put on a big performance at the end of the week.

Dale Atkinson: Ah, sounds amazing.

Georga Tyson: Incredible Lucy. You were also planning on heading overseas before COVID disrupted the plans. What did you hope to use the funds for?

Lucy Standish: I had planned to go to Helsinki to the International Music Education Conference, where I was going to speak about the project that we did the Music for All project and yeah, that didn't happen. So, I'm really interested to see what they do in Helsinki, because there was a special education music centre there that seemed really interesting and very similar to students at Kilparrin as well. So maybe that's something that I might do. I'm just waiting to see how travel goes for a bit.

Dale Atkinson: There's a lot of opportunities. So that’s, you know, a bit exciting. Now, Peta, your focused on writing a book called Settle Petal to help children manage and reduce their anxiety. Why was that an area you wanted to write about?

Peta Thompson: I'm really passionate about children's wellbeing. And I think as a reception, year one teacher, I see a lot of anxiety in kids, especially starting school and you know, a lot of separation anxiety from mum and dad.

And I'm really passionate about getting the wellbeing intact of the child before delving into the curriculum. I love that saying that no child can learn unless they're in that state of relaxed alertness. And so, when I was looking for resources, there are so many amazing wellbeing resources out there, but nothing that I could find that specifically targeted anxiety and I suffered terribly with anxiety as a child.

And sometimes I knew why, sometimes I didn't know why, it was just a feeling. I wanted to create a resource that opened up that discussion with kids, and also with families. So, I created a teacher resource. I'm really lucky when I met my partner, his family are also in education and his beautiful sister, my sister-in-law Emma Thompson. She's also a reception teacher at Salisbury Park Primary and she's an artist as well. And so, I said, hey, I've got this book that I've written, and I need an illustrator. So she said she would love to do that. So, we collaborated, and we came up with Settle Petal.

So, it's designed as a teacher resource. It comes with a resource pack of activities for teachers, but it's also really important for parents as well. It's a great resource for parents to have a discussion with their kids and open up those lines of communication. At the back of the book, there's a whole heap of, talking points and discussion points that you can do as a classroom teacher, or you can do as a parent.

Georga Tyson: And what was the book writing process like while working as a teacher?

Peta Thompson: I mean, as, as you all know, teaching, the list never, ever ends there's always something to do. But I actually found it therapy for myself, go home after a long day at work and I think about the kids and what could I have done differently and how could I have supported them more.

Am then I would just sort of delve into a, you know, couple of hours a night here or there and, and write the book. And I found that really helped me shape the storyline. So, the process was phenomenal.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the things that kind of stood out about one of the things you said a bit earlier was around, it took someone else to nominate you to feel like you could then go and apply for the awards. And I think that is something that characterises a lot of teachers, which is a natural inherent modesty about the work they do. So, what advice would you give to anyone who's either considering nominating or considering nominating someone else?

Peta Thompson: Yeah, look, none of us think we're special. We don't think that we do anything special from day to day. Every single teacher is, you know, a miracle worker, the things that we do every day change the lives or impact the lives of kids, you know, constantly. And I would just say, if you can nominate yourself, go for it.

If you've got something to share, whether it's big or small, absolutely. Throw your hat in the ring and have a go. You know, this has been a life changing experience for me, and I've never considered myself lucky. I've never won a meat tray in my life. I didn't think there was any chance that I would be a contender, but you know, it doesn't come down to odds and a raffle.

It's putting what you do onto paper and sharing the things that you do in your classroom or in your school community and, you know, having a go. So absolutely. If you've got something to share, go for it.

Lucy Standish: Yeah. And I was lucky enough to be a judge last year. And I was really like, it's just so exciting to read about what other people are doing and you're doing something special at your school, you know, give it a go.

Georga Tyson: And what's next for you both?

Peta Thompson: Teaching. I've got 26 little people, report writing, yep, all of that. More books are on the horizon for me, I want to do a series of wellbeing books. And the beautiful thing about being in a classroom is you can see the need for things, so I'm getting my inspiration from that.

That's kind of the next direction for me. I'm also incredibly passionate about literacy in the early years. So, I would really like to get into doing some mentoring around explicit instruction.

Lucy Standish: After just finishing our Music for All project last week, just looking towards how we're going to create another one, version 3.

We're all excited from last week at school. Got to get our minds together and create something new, again.

Georga Tyson: Lucy, when you first did Music For All, were you imagining that you would go on to do a second and a third?

Lucy Standish: Not at all. No. I think before leading up to it, there was so much work involved, creating it and working out the model of how it was going to work. Now we've got the model sorted, we know how it works. We know how we could do the second one. We tweaked it here and there as well. Yeah. We are hoping that other schools will also see what we've done and then they'll continue and create something like what we did last week.

Dale Atkinson: I think that's the great thing about the Public Education Awards is that it's a wonderful recognition of, some personal achievements, but it also provides a real beacon to other schools, other teachers, leaders on really great practice out there. And, it's incredibly, incredibly motivating. So, I'd like to thank you, both Lucy and Peta for joining us today.

Peta Thompson: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: It was wonderful to hear your story and thanks to everyone for listening. You still have some time to apply for the awards for yourself, or on behalf of a colleague.

Georga Tyson: Catch you next time on Teach.

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. I'm Dale Atkinson from the state's Department for Education.

Georga Tyson: And I'm Georgia Tyson from Largs Bay School. Today, we are talking about one of the most complex things that is taught in the classroom, the skill of writing, which is also a focus at the 2022 Literacy Summit that brings together international, national, and local experts in the field of literacy improvement.

Dale Atkinson: That's right. And we are lucky to be joined by a couple of those experts now in the form of the department's very own Bev White, our Assistant Director, Literacy and Numeracy Policy. And from the UK professor, Debra Myhill, who is Professor of Education at the University of Exeter and also keynote speaker at the Literacy Summit.

Welcome to you, Debra.

Debra Myhill: Hi, good to see you well, hear from you.

Dale Atkinson: Nice of you to make some time available to us. So, you are coming to speak to us about the dimensions for learning to write, which is one of the most complex things that can be taught in the classroom. Can you talk to us a little bit about why it's such a complex learning area?

Debra Myhill: Well, I think it's because it makes such a high demand on brain power, on mental processes, because you are trying to do lots of things at once. But at the same time, it's making high demands of your language skills and what you know about language. And at the same time, you have to understand what the expectations are about writing.

So, it is very, very challenging to manage. And unusually, writing stays challenging as we get better at it. So even experienced writers find writing a challenge, but they've changed the bar as it were. So, it doesn't get easier, the better you get.

Dale Atkinson: But does it get easier to teach, the better you get?

Debra Myhill: Yes, I think it does. I think because for very young children in particular, there is a stage where they're working very, very hard on simply managing to get words out onto the page, even at the level of, you know, the motor skills to shape letters, knowing how to shape words, writing lines, writing fluently, all of that for very young children means that they can't focus quite so much on the writing itself because you're so busy getting ideas out. Once you've got past that phase and that's become more internalised and automatic, it does free you up to think more about the text itself and what you want to do with it.

Georga Tyson: And what are some strategies teachers can try to support their teaching of writing?

Debra Myhill: Well, I think the strategies really rely on teachers having a strong grasp of these three dimensions of writing. What I was saying earlier about the mental process is that's a cognitive dimension. What I was saying about the language is the linguistic dimension and understanding expectations and being an also sociocultural, if you really want to bring in strategies to help children, you have to think about what is it I'm trying to help.

So, if you do have, just going back to those transcription skills, very young children who are still struggling to write fluently, you might want to play some games that really just get them doing lots of writing and shaping. You may be wanting to teach them how to hand write particular letters and give them practice at that.

So that would be targeting the transcription. On the other hand, if actually they were struggling more with thinking processes around planning, drafting, and revising, because they're older children, some of the explicit things that teachers can do is to explicitly look at how you revise or how you outline text rather than just giving instructions to do revision. And that would probably be looking at a very focused issue. So don't say, let's look at how we revise this story. We might say, let's look at how we revise the characters we've described in this story. So, I think the key thing about strategies in the classroom is that they match the learner's needs in the classroom and that they will draw differently on different dimensions depending on those learner's needs.

Dale Atkinson: So, one of the things we were speaking about in an earlier podcast about the science of reading in particular, was the need to be really deliberately sequential about how you build the learning in that child through an understanding of their individual needs. Does that go doubly, triply so when we we're talking about dimensions for writing?

Debra Myhill: Yeah. In general, I think it really does because you have to know where every child is at in order to know what it is they need to do next. I mean, one of the other reasons that writing is a challenge to teach, as opposed to a challenge to learn, is that writing is multidimensional in terms of the things that you have to learn to do. So, you've got the basic act of learning how to write words and how to spell them or learning how to punctuate. But then you've got learning about how to write argument or learning vocabulary or learning about sentence variety. So, there's so many things you could be looking at, at any one time. And so, it's really worth knowing what is the children need next. The one exception would be, is not to put a feeling on children's imagination or creativity, because I think even very young children who may not have wonderful spelling skills, can come up with wonderful ideas.

So, there's a real thing about don't limit what they can do because often that demotivates children, so let the imagination and the creativity flow, but then what they produce really look at closely in terms of explicit teaching and incremental learning. So, I think the learning is often incremental. The one thing where it differs from, I think from reading, I wouldn't want to make too big a claim on the reading side, on the writing side is that learning is incremental, but it's also spiral or recursive. So, you know, your six year olds can be really good at creating a story, particularly they might do it orally and then write it down. But you know, you have great novelists who are still working on creating a story. Learning about writing is both incremental and spiral or recursive.

Georga Tyson: And what is the connection between learning to read and learning to write?

Debra Myhill: Symbiotic. I think the thing about learning to read and learning to write is they really do go hand in hand and, sometimes there's a bit of a myth that you learn to read first and then you can learn to write, but there's a lot of research that shows that as we learn to read, it improves our capacity to write. But likewise, as we develop as writers, it improves our capacity to read, they're really interrelated processes. So, I would always say, you know, when you are teaching, reading, think about how you might involve writing with the teaching and reading.

And likewise, when you're teaching, writing, draw on excellent reading texts and children's own reading experiences in order to help them think about being a writer and being an author.

Dale Atkinson: That's great advice. What, what advice can you give us about engaging children in the writing process itself?

Debra Myhill: Do you mean the writing process? The planning, drafting writing? Or do you mean writing generally?

Dale Atkinson: Well, all of it. Yeah.

Debra Myhill: Well, I think one of the things that we know from talking to a lot of children and young people is that sometimes they really dislike writing in school, because we make it a little bit dull even though some of them love writing outside of school.

So, I think absolutely at the heart of being able to do all this incremental explicit targeted teaching is also creating a classroom climate, which is conducive to writing. So, we often talk about creating a, a community of writers. In the classroom. And that might involve things like using writing workshop approaches, where children are given plenty of time and space to write, using things like free writing, where you just sort of effectively dump ideas on the page to get going is very motivating.

And that free writing of course is not drafting. It's just getting ideas out. Sometimes, I mean, certainly in the primary schools here where we've worked with the primary schools, having what the teachers here called messy books, where they've got space to write about what they want to write about prior to writing it in a more perfect form for an audience that can really, really work.

So that sense of valuing children's ideas, desire to write alongside, they're being explicit about teaching them things. And I think part of that is also about a community of writers where you create lots of opportunities for collaboration and conversation about writing. One of the wonderful things about collaborative writing and that could be collaborative writing as a whole class where the teacher leads it and, and does joint composition collectively, or it could be collaborative writing, probably in pairs. I think collaborative writing in bigger groups is slightly harder to manage. One of the real benefits of that kind of collaborative writing is that you have to offer ideas and justify why you're making those choices, which is a real learning conversation about writing.

So, if you have to rewrite a paragraph from a science book as a narrative, and you're doing that in a pair in order to do that rewriting, there's got to be a lot of conversations about the writing choices you make and the value is in those conversations. And I think the other thing that's linked to the collaboration and conversation is lots and lots of opportunity for sharing writing, not necessarily always in very formal ways of celebrating finished pieces.

But just regularly reading aloud, work in progress and trying to create that climate where children can say I don't like that sentence, or I don't like that word and can talk about it with others to seek peers’ advice. And of course that grows with age. You wouldn't expect necessarily your youngest writers to be doing that, but you start the habit early by having classrooms, which create that climate for being a community for collaboration and for conversation.

Georga Tyson: Why do you think teachers find teaching writing challenging?

Debra Myhill: I think, I mean, that's a, it's a difficult question to be absolute about, but I think there's two reasons. I think one is that teachers themselves may not be enthusiastic writers. Teachers are more likely to be enthusiastic readers than writers.

And of course in primary schools, we know that they're not always even enthusiastic readers. And I think if you don't write yourself, it's quite hard to understand that sense of being an author. That sense of power as an author you want to try and make your reader feel in a certain way or think in a certain way.

And also if you don't write, I think it's very easy to forget what the experience of being a writer is like. You know, when children get stuck or go off track, those are experiences that most of us have when we are writing. So, I think that's one whole strand of it is that teachers themselves don't have enough experiences as writers to share and be aware of what children are doing in the classroom as, as authors in the classroom and then contend to make it a rather formulaic approach. You know, you must plan your writing without understanding, for example, that, you know, not everybody plans in the same way, or some people have to write first and then form the plan.

But there's one thing I think the other thing though, is back to the thing I said earlier, that from a teaching point of view, when you're teaching writing, there's so many different strands of writing you could be teaching at any one time from, you know, how to shape your letters, to spelling, the punctuation, combining sentences, all the way through to paragraphing text structures. And all of that is what you might say is the form aspect of writing. But you've also got all the things about how do you create the right images for your reader? How do you express strong opinions in an argument? How do you write a scientific text that makes you sound like an expert? So, it's bringing together all the time, writing different aspects of being a good writer.

And I think the risk is that we could spend too much time on one end of it and not enough on the other. And depending on classrooms that can work both ways. You know, you can have classrooms that are brilliant at all the content side and the ideas and the thinking about what you want to say, but not enough explicit teaching about the text itself. Or you have it the other way around where there's just too much emphasis on the form, which just demotivates children about the purpose of writing, which is all about communicating ideas. So, a balanced approach, but it is challenging.

Dale Atkinson: Well, this is a challenging area and made a little less challenging thanks to the conversation with you, Professor Myle. Thank you very much for your time.

Debra Myhill: You're very welcome.

Dale Atkinson: Thank you. And we are lucky to be joined by the department's very own Bev White, our Assistant Director, Literacy and Numeracy Policy.

Let's talk a little bit about the Literacy Summit. What is the point of the Literacy Summit?

Bev White: The point of the literacy summit is really to bring the research to classrooms to actually support leaders and teachers to understand what the current research is and how that can really influence and support the choices they make in planning and teaching for writing and in particular in 2022, it's about learning to write and writing to learn. So, we've had a, a focus on reading for a number of years now, and we do know that people are really keen to learn more about writing. So, we are hoping that we are going to deliver a series of presentations that will support schools to learn together and to really develop their programs.

Dale Atkinson: Now it's a really comprehensive program with a number of speakers from right across the world, internationally, nationally, and locally. Who can come along? And, and what sort of experience are they going to have?

Bev White: We have 10 speakers. And the fantastic thing about it is it's on demand. Once they're loaded up onto plink, you can access them anytime you like.

You can access them during staff meetings, you can use them to support pupil free days. You can do independent learning if it's a real interest for you as a teacher. Anybody who has a plink account in the education department can access the presentations.

Georga Tyson: Who are some of the other speakers and what do they discuss?

Bev White: Well, we have three keynote speakers. So, as well as Debra, we have Steve Graham from the United States. He is a world-renowned leader in the teaching of writing, both reading and writing actually, and talks a lot about the things that really make a difference. The evidence-based strategies that teachers can use and because he and his colleagues have done so much research in teaching writing, he actually has the research data to support what he's saying. So, he's talking about evidence based practices for teaching writing, and he makes connections to reading and learning. So, a very powerful presentation from Steve Graham.

Our third keynote is particularly for the early years, so preschool and the early years of school and that's Iram Siraj. A lot of our preschool educators will remember Iram from, last year. And she's talking about the essential precursors to teaching, reading, and writing and talks about the meaningful conversations that you need to be having in those early years environments to build the language in preparation. Those are our three keynotes. The rest of the presentations are more focused presentations. So, we are looking at focusing on either a particular area in teaching writing, or a particular audience. So, we have Tutita Casa who talks about writing in the mathematics classroom. But how do you teach writing in Maths so that you're actually supporting children to reason and to explain their thinking in, in mathematics. So, it's like using writing to improve your learning of mathematics. So that's one of my favourites. If you're a science teacher, we have Gail Forey, he talks about teaching students to talk and write like scientists and really goes into how you teach the language of science to improve content knowledge and to improve writing and oral language in science. We have a presentation from Dr. Damon Thomas from the University of Queensland. Now, this is an extended presentation because Damon is talking about meta linguistic understanding.

So a lot of teachers are asking for support with functional grammar and Damon delivers. He talks about what you need to teach in the English curriculum in the early years of primary, the middle years of primary and upper primary in terms of functional grammar and the language features that are going to support kids to express their curriculum learning.

And it's pretty full on, but I'm sure that schools will love it. And it's the resource that teachers can go back to many times to really build their skills in that area.

Dale Atkinson: Wasn't an incredible array of speakers that’s available to us. What a resource for all the teachers and educators out there.

Now these can be accessed online. There’s a lot of different ways that people can get them. We’ll include links in the show notes and information on our website, to make them available to you. So, what would your message be to the teachers out here listening and thinking, oh, I should get involved in that.

Bev White:

I think you'll find it incredibly valuable. Like we say, it's all very current research. It really builds on what we've been doing in South Australia for a long time, but I think it really helps teachers understand why teaching writing is so complex. And when we look at all of those three dimensions and bring them together and you get the whole picture, it's almost like, ah, now I get it. Now I know what to look for in my students, and now I know how I can help each one of them to improve.

Dale Atkinson: If you've liked what you've heard from Professor Myhill or from Bev, with the excellent rundown of the keynote speakers and the presenters who are going to be at the Literacy Summit 2022. Please tune in, check the website notes and, get involved.

Thanks very much for listening.

Georga Tyson: Catch you next time on Teach.

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. I'm Dale Atkinson from the South Australian Department for Education. Our guest today is Jess Moroney. He's the principal of Stirling East Primary School up in the Adelaide Hills, with a student enrolment of around 550 kids, and just participated in the Future Leaders program, which provided the tools and resources to reflect on his leadership style and capabilities.

And when he was appointed as a leader, he was also provided with the program's leader advisor service, which helps connect people to experienced leaders for ongoing coaching and mentoring. So, Jess, thanks very much coming in.

Jess Moroney: No worries, thanks for having me.

Dale Atkinson: So you're the principal of Stirling East Primary School. Can you tell us a bit about the school?

Jess Moroney: Yeah. So, as you mentioned, we have about 530 students from reception to year six. We have those spread over about 19 classes. Adelaide Hills, very cold this time of year, but, lovely group of kids and highly experienced and expert teachers. So very fortunate to be there.

Dale Atkinson: So, was it always your intention to become a principal or is this something that you kind of fell into?

Jess Moroney: Yeah, and it seems a very common theme amongst most leaders that I had no ambition in being a principal, sort of started off as a specialist PE teacher for quite a number of years and transitioned into the classroom. And I guess then found opportunities where I was in, acting in leadership positions and quite enjoyed it. It just sort of eventuated that way.

Dale Atkinson: So, what was it that drew you to those leadership positions in the first place?

Jess Moroney: I think it was being able to influence larger and larger groups of students. Initially in a classroom, you have your, you know, 30 odd children in front of you and then through leadership position sort of coordinator roles, you have a chance to work with larger groups and more teachers and more children, and yeah. Seeing that opportunity to improve yourself and improve others, and eventually that has the student outcomes attached to it.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, right. So, tell us a little bit about how the Future Leaders program helped you make that transition smoothly.

Jess Moroney: For me, it was that turning point of realising that I was probably ready. I went down the path initially I was certified as a lead teacher back in 2015 and was really keen on leading from the classroom working two or three days a week in a leadership position. The balance in the classroom was fantastic for me.

And I guess I never really knew that I was quite ready to not step away from the classroom, but to take on a full on leadership position. And I guess the Future Leaders program was one that gave me the confidence.

The feedback that I received was essentially that I was ready and most of the learning now was to be done on the job in a formal leadership position. So, it was almost the kick that I needed just to take the plunge and apply for some positions.

Dale Atkinson: And what's the biggest change that you have transitioning from being a teacher into those leadership positions and being a principal?

Jess Moroney: I think for me, it was quite surprising how similar it actually was in the sense that I guess the difference is rather than having 30 students in front of you, you have you know, a number of staff who require their own levels of differentiation, support, challenge. And so, I guess the difference was working more with adults rather than children. And on a day to day, I guess you often get people when they're emotionally charged, could be, parents could be, students could be adults.

The big difference is probably the end of the day. You're pretty drained. Sometimes you can have challenging conversations from the start of the day, right through to the end. But all for the right outcome.

Dale Atkinson: So, you made the transition in the last couple of years to Stirling East Primary. What year did you start there?

Jess Moroney: I only started there at the beginning of this year. So previous three years at Lenswood Primary, which was sort of polar opposites, it was three classes, 65 children, small community school, but incredibly rewarding place to be as well.

Dale Atkinson: And how have you found it? Because obviously, I would say during COVID 19 times, not the easiest time to transition into a leadership position, how you found that and the challenges?

Jess Moroney: Look, to a certain extent, it was probably not a bad way to start at a new school that everything could be paired back.We talk about week zero and the first couple of days, which as a new leader coming in could be high pressure. At times I just had the opportunity to talk to the staff and you know, this year we had four days to get ready for the hybrid approach to some students online, some face to face. So, we basically took the pressure off and said, get in, get organized, get ready. And I just had the chance to get in and meet the staff and all hands on deck, as opposed to putting on a big professional learning series.

Dale Atkinson: And was the mentoring relationship that you managed to develop ahead of time and throughout the last couple of terms, was that something that was helpful in that scenario?

Jess Moroney: Yeah, I think you mentioned the leader advisor program, which was fantastic when I first stepped into a principal position. So, I was appointed a leader advisor who I hadn't met previously and didn't know a huge amount about my context other than what I'd shared with him. And often I'd see a pop up in my, my calendar as I had a three hour meeting with my leader advisor and thought, what on earth are we going to talk about for three hours? And every time I walked away and just thought, you know how remarkable it was just to have someone to bounce ideas off of and have those conversations where, you know, you're probably tossing up which way to go with some bits and pieces going on in the school and having someone who was sort of non-judgmental and just there to support was great.

Dale Atkinson: And so what are the sort of challenges that you're bottoming out with your mentor?

Jess Moroney: The day to day challenges that you have around certain contextual situations happening with staffing and, and students and families. And I guess just speaking with someone who's been there, done that before, and just knowing that these challenges are real and just being a sounding board really.

Dale Atkinson: That sounds like a really kind of positive thing. And, and not just during those three hours, there's accessibility isn't there, outside of that time as well.

Jess Moroney: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I always knew that my advisor was on the other end of the phone whenever I needed. And he would often just touch base from time to time just to check in and see how I was going and was there anything I needed. I think he was also a good reminder that as a leader, you had to make time for yourself as well. So, he'd often gimme a call and just say, look, if you're still working, put tools down and go out and do something and you know, that was great.

Dale Atkinson: And obviously a sort of different dynamic, different relationship than, you know, the mentoring relationship that you might have with your education director, there's a bit more freedom and flexibility there I'd imagine.

Jess Moroney: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, when I was reflecting on mentors, the leadership team and the education director within that is fantastic, but it was also nice to have someone who probably sat outside of that sphere. And you could just speak completely openly about everything that's going on and ask a couple of those curly questions as they popped up yeah.

Dale Atkinson: It was a bit easy than, uh, sometimes talking to your boss, I guess.

Jess Moroney: Yeah, absolutely.

Dale Atkinson: We're talking about one of the big challenges, I guess, under COVID situations for kids, for teachers, for all of us, I think is being able to manage the day to day work of, you know, trying to lift the academic achievement of the kids, but also supporting the wellbeing of your employees and supporting the wellbeing of the kids. How have you managed to balance those things?

Jess Moroney: Look, we had a bit of a trial run at this, that when I was at Lenswood, we had the Cudlee Creek bush fire sweep through just prior to COVID time. And so that was a pretty challenging time to be a leader and be a teacher and basically be anyone in that community.

I learned from that experience initially of essentially, we just had to pair back anything off of the calendar that wasn't absolutely necessary at that point in time. And that was hugely beneficial for the staff wellbeing, I guess we looked at everything and if it wasn't highly important right then and there in terms of educational outcomes for kids or wellbeing for staff and students, get rid of it for a short amount of time or permanently, and just focus on the things that were really important for us then and there.

So that's then continued through into COVID times and we're still right in the thick of it. And I think I'm finding now more than ever we're finding that staff are pretty flat. We've been working basically running on adrenaline for the last couple of years and ongoing changes that you can't necessarily prepare for too well.

So again, we are just back to, I guess, analysing everything that we do in a school and asking the question, how important is this right now? And can it wait?

Dale Atkinson: And so, what are the priorities that you've landed on for Stirling East?

Jess Moroney: One of the things that's been a true leveller, you know, right through the bushfire time and the pandemic is making sure that, you know, your key priorities remain consistent.

Just having that level of knowing what we're focusing on. We've maintained the site improvement plan, albeit we've given ourselves the capacity to say that some things can wait when we're tracking how we're going. If there's a couple of things that are still sitting in the orange or red for the second part of the year, that that's okay.

But we've probably just narrowed our goals and stuck with our initial goals of what we had on our site improvement plan and keeping everything else aside for now.

Dale Atkinson: Part of that leadership responsibility is deciding what you can green light, what you can red light, how you prioritise these things. And that's part of the challenge, isn't it?

Jess Moroney: Yeah. And I think, even though we are pushing ahead fairly heavily with our site improvement objectives, I think it's also knowing how we can alleviate some of the pressure on the staff there as well. And having conversations with my teachers, making sure that they know that we appreciate them fully, but often actions can speak a lot louder than words.

So rather than just thanking them, we've looked at ways that we can alleviate the pressure on them in a day to day or looking at ways that we can support them through it with additional release time or being a bit innovative to release each other in some of the challenging moments where they're busy writing reports, you know, interviews, assessment, schedules, those sorts of things, how do we help them through that.

Dale Atkinson: Just back onto the program a little bit, obviously it provides you a bit of feedback about your strengths and areas where development's needed, what sort of assessment process did you undertake to look into your strengths and areas for development?

Jess Moroney: And it was quite interesting because this was probably four years ago now. So, prior to coming in for the podcast, I had to look over my feedback again and I just realised how spot on it actually was about me, my personality, my leadership style. So, it was a pretty rigorous process. There was some self-assessments that you carried out a range of different surveys and then there was the day itself, which I probably won't speak too much about because I think the best thing about it was that you didn't really know what you were going into, but it was highly contextual in terms of putting yourself in scenarios that will become your every day to day as a school leader. So, then the feedback, I guess, that came from that was how you observed in different leadership scenarios.

So, for me, I found that the strength that came out were the bits that gave me a nudge to say, yep, you're ready. And the areas to developers, still things that I'm working on now, so it was pretty much spot on.

Dale Atkinson: And so how have you folded that into developing your own sort of personal development plan and the path to leadership?

Jess Moroney: Through the Future Leaders program, a development plan was created as well. So, it gave a few internal professional learning series that were worthwhile having a look at, but then also some external ones as well. So, one of those for me was the Crucial Conversations and Crucial Accountability courses, which through our portfolio, we engaged in. And then I guess I've just kept some of that feedback going. And some of the bits that I knew I had to work on in my PDP each year, with my education director. And so, yeah, I've just been sort of sticking the course with that one.

Dale Atkinson: So, like something that's incredibly focused and detailed. And if you go into it with an open kind of mindset, looking, thinking about what you can do to develop, that's where the richness of the conversation comes in, isn't it?

Jess Moroney: Yeah. And I think we all get into education, you know, knowing that we're always learning. As a principal, I'm always learning that I go back into the classroom and at the end of the day, I'd analyse my teaching and learning. Like I would expect my teachers to then likewise, at the end of the day or week, you have to have a look and reflect on areas where you've gone well and some of the areas that you need to rethink.

Dale Atkinson: What are the next stages for you four years in? How does this develop as a program for you?

Jess Moroney: For me, I think, as I just mentioned, I'm still, you know, still learning that I'm fairly early in my principalship. So, I guess it's just taking the time to look at what are the areas, where, and I think you have to celebrate the success along the way.

So, you take the time and look at the areas where you think you've done reasonably well, but conversely, the bits that you still need to develop as a leader. And when I look at the feedback from the future leaders, the areas that were highlighted are still things that, that I'll be working on for a number of years to come.

Dale Atkinson: So, what are some of the things that have surprised you about going from being purely a teacher in the classroom to being a principal.

Jess Moroney: I think, initially how similar some of it is, obviously contextually it's different, because you spend a lot more of your time working with adults than you do children, but the skills that you're required to be a quality classroom teacher or a teacher in, in any area are still very relevant as you move into leadership.

Probably one of the biggest surprises I had was how many interruptions you have in a day, and high quality and important interruptions. You'll often sit down to do something at nine o'clock in the morning, and it's still sitting there untouched at the end of the day, because they've been really pressing things that you prioritise ahead of whatever you had planned for the day.

So, I think I learned very early that you never leave anything to the last day to get it done, because that'll be the day where you have children needing your staff, needing your parents, needing you. So that's probably been the biggest challenge is to probably prioritising your time and managing that.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the things I've observed about principals is their ability to segment the day into very effective, productive 15 minute segments is an incredible skill.

Jess Moroney: Yes. Yep. And, and very needed.

Dale Atkinson: Jess Moroney, Principal of Stirling East Primary School, thank you very much for joining us and talking about the Future Leaders program.

Jess Moroney: No worries at all. Thank you.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome to Teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the South Australian Department for Education.

Georga Tyson: And I'm Georgia Tyson, Largs Bay school teacher. Today, we're talking about trauma informed practice and how you can accommodate the needs of students who have been through trauma.

Dale Atkinson: And we are joined by three very experienced people in this area. We've got the Department's Senior Social Worker for Children in Care, Tanya Russo, Senior Advisor for Child Protection, Deidre Lockley, and Merryn Gomez, Assistant Principal for Inclusion and Wellbeing at Eastern Fleurieu R-12 school, a school that is implementing trauma informed practice across all their five campuses.

I think that's right, Merryn is that correct?

Merryn Gomez: Yes, that's correct.

Dale Atkinson: It's a lot of campuses, I guess the first question for people who kind of aren't sure. And this is perhaps for, for you, Tanya and you, Deidre is what is childhood trauma? What do we mean when we talk about that?

Deidre Lockley: So trauma is anything that means that we have a response that we feel is overwhelming.

It might be to a real or a perceived threat. It overwhelms our capacity to cope, and it feels like things are outside of our control. And often it means that we respond in a way that is based on fear rather than what is actually happening around us. In the department, when we are talking about trauma, we're talking about trauma that occurs for children and young people in our schools.

And usually we mean trauma that's relationship, complex, relational trauma. And so that means that the trauma is stemming from experiences of abuse and neglect or sustained witnessing of family and domestic violence. And what that means is that often children and young people can have feelings of hopelessness and shame they're associated with that.

So it's not an individual stressful event that can cause a trauma. Like we might have a car accident that we find traumatic. When we're talking about trauma informed practice, we're talking about complex trauma that is the result of abuse or neglect or sustained family violence.

Georga Tyson: And what should teachers be aware of in terms of whether their student might be experiencing trauma? Are there signs of it say difficulty concentrating?

Deidre Lockley: So sometimes people may not know exactly what's happening for a child outside of school. Often there's confidentiality when other people are involved, whether it be a psychologist or child protection, but things that we notice in schools are things like difficulty in concentrating, like you mentioned, but often it's more than that.

We might see behavioural difficulties. One thing we know about trauma is it impacts the development of children and young people, and that's because it's happening at that really early stage of their life when their brain is developing. And they're also developing understanding of relationships and complex trauma happens in relationship.

And so that means that sometimes they don't know exactly how to maintain a relationship or create new friendships. And we know that when we are in a classroom, the key way children learn is through that relationship with the teacher or the relationship with their peers. So sometimes we'll see that as a difficulty as well.

Tanya Russo:I think another difficulty that a lot of teachers see is around memory as well, and about their ability to retain information, which can be quite frustrating for some teachers. So it might be that they'd forget their belongings or be disorganised as well. And that was also a really difficult thing for young people in school, because obviously we are relying on a lot of their memory to do their learning and, and to be ready to learn in the classroom.

Dale Atkinson: So what are the types of things, Merryn, that you're observing as a frontline educator at the moment. Are you seeing those sorts of behaviours playing out in the classroom?

Merryn Gomez: Yeah, we are certainly seeing those behaviours R-12. We are in reception to year 12 school, so we're able to have that whole sort of educational journey to reflect on and it doesn't matter what year level, I guess, or what age a student is in. If they have been impacted by trauma in those early years, or as their brains are still developing, then it will impact the way that they are able to cope in a classroom. And for some students even walking through the door of a classroom and being in a situation where they are around a group of peers and not I guess experiencing that felt sense of safety for them as an individual can come out as behaviour difficulties. So that is certainly something that I think every teacher at the moment can relate to and something that's really important for people to be aware of that there is always more to the behaviours that we are seeing and it's our job to understand them.

Tanya Russo:I was just going to add to that. We may not always know what the triggers are and the children might not be able to articulate that either. Because I think some teachers do want to know, you know, is there way I can prevent this? Or is there something that I can notice in that young person or prevent from happening, but we might not always know what they are.

Because it could be a smell. It could be a tone of voice. It could be the look of a person. And I guess that makes it a little bit tricky for teachers. So, we really do need to get them to know the children, to sort of identify what those stress cues are and really observe them and record, because that is a bit of a tricky thing, understanding their triggers.

Georga Tyson: You mentioned there, you know, about supporting the teachers. What is available to teachers to help accommodate the needs of students who have been through traum?

Deidre Lockley: So, we have a series of programs or professional development that's available to staff within the department around trauma informed practice.

They range from the Strategies for Managing Abuse Related Trauma program, otherwise known as SMART. We've been working alongside of the Australian Childhood Foundation for the SMART program for 17 years now. And so people can access that online through plink, through face to face training that we often hold at at EDC, but we also provide that in schools for the whole school, if they'd like it, or for small groups, if that's say a school has a small set of SSOs who they would like to provide some more information to around trauma, we have the SMART program, but then we have a large program called the Trauma Aware Schools Initiative. And that's where we have non-government providers who are experts in trauma, come and assist our schools to really build strong understanding of what trauma might mean, what it might look like in their school and different approaches that they might take. And I think Merryn will talk a little bit more about that in a minute and what it means in her school, but we've had over 200 schools in the last five years, undertake some kind of training through that initiative.

We also provide scholarships each year to graduate certificate in Developmental Trauma programs. We have a master classes for school leaders in Implementation of Trauma Informed Practice. We have an online learning community for anyone who undertakes any of this kind of training in Flinders Street, we have a team called the Child Protection and Trauma Informed Practice team who will very happily chat about any of these in more detail, if that's useful.

Dale Atkinson: So, Merryn, what was your journey as a school and professionally, individually at Eastern Fleurieu what was your journey in terms of coming towards implementing more trauma informed practice at the school?

Merryn Gomez: So, Ian Ken, our principal, identified pretty early on that we were seeing some really challenging behaviours across all of our campuses and that a lot of those students were sort of being stuck in that cycle of suspension and exclusion and relationship rupture without the opportunity to repair and reflect and look at how we were doing things and how we could do things differently.

So in his sort of investigation we thought what can we do differently? How can we look at this differently? In another way, he came across the Trauma Aware Schools Initiative, which Deidre talked about and signed us up straight away as a leadership team. And what that meant was that he was able to choose between three external providers to provide some training to all of our staff. Initially, we went as a whole leadership team and R-12 leadership teams and we did the four day Berry Street education model. That looked at understanding trauma, its impact on students, in a really practical way where there were strategies that you could take out of that and implement in your classroom the next day. The experience that we had as leaders involved in that training, it had so much impact on us that we actually decided that our entire R-12 staff, so teachers and SSOs included really needed to be immersed in that training and that understanding to be able to have the impact that we wanted to have on our students. So, from there, we went on to put our whole school through that four day training, interrupted here and there by COVID, which was really, really tricky, but that was the initial steps.

And from there, what we did was we identified a key team of leaders across our R-12 staff who would be the key implementation team. And we called them the, the TIPI team, the Trauma Informed Practice Implementation team to work on our whole school strategy and our whole school approach. And to monitor the effectiveness of that.

Dale Atkinson: What has the effect been? What have you seen?

Merryn Gomez: Oh wow. That's a huge question. We've seen not only a change in student engagement in the classroom, but what we've also seen that was quite unexpected, was a shift in the understanding. I think of ourselves as educators and how our own brains were functioning and window of tolerance and the strategies that we could use for ourselves when we are stepping into a classroom or when we are alongside a student who is dysregulated to be able to ensure that we are staying regulated ourselves in order to be able to help co-regulate those students. So, we've seen a huge change in behaviour. We're still seeing some really tricky behaviours. I think we always will because that's the nature of putting that many kids in one place and trying to teach them. But what we are seeing is the way that we are responding to those behaviours has changed and the way that teachers understand relationships and the importance of that has really shifted in a positive way so that we are now able to intentionally plan moments throughout our day to create positive interactions, even with the kids who are resisting that the most. And what then happens is over time that builds into them feeling that felt sense of safety and being able to participate in learning in the classroom. So, it's been, I could talk for hours about the difference that we've seen in individual students. But an increase in engagement for sure. And a decrease in those difficult behaviours, but the most impact has been the change has been the change, that paradigm shift to understanding behaviour as communication, and then looking at how do we respond to that and how can we ensure that those ruptures and that cyclical suspension process, we can interrupt that and create more understanding for that student around self-regulation co-regulation and most importantly, repairing those relationships.

Dale Atkinson: It sounds like there's a really profoundly positive impact on the experience that the student has through this, but is there also a personal benefit to the teacher around their own mental health wellbeing, their ability to cope with these scenarios?

Merryn Gomez: I think when you walk into a classroom, right, and you've got 30 or so kids, and there's always going to be a few who you need to do things differently for, to get them feeling calm and regulated and to be able to engage in the learning.

And initially, you know, as a new teacher, you often think that when you're seeing those behaviours it's to do with your lesson plan or your topic, or the way that you've sort of structured that lesson. And look, it really can be, but it's often about those relationships. So, when you understand that as an educator, you're not so upset that your lesson hasn't gone to plan because you understand that at the moment, what that child needs is connection. And once I get that connection, then I can focus on the learning because if we don't have that connection, no learning is going to happen.

Georga Tyson: Merryn, how do you bring a team together to support a child?

Merryn Gomez: We use a team around the child approach that Ian brought in when he came to Eastern Fleurieu School. And it's around a set of protocols that bring all of the providers or stakeholders or important people in that young person's life together with a team around the child. So, we call it a TAC. And what we do is we work really closely with support services. And if the children and care team are in involved, any other providers, DCP anybody involved with NDIS and we bring everybody together and have a discussion about that young person, identifying their strengths, identifying what their growth points are and how we can support them to move forward.

Whether that is with a new enrolment in the school or whether it. Some difficulty that they're having or whether it is just things are going well. And it's a check in and a time to, as Tanya said earlier, celebrate those successes. The team around the child approach has been absolutely crucial in supporting some of our young people in care and has really been the difference between there sometimes being, I guess, conflicting priorities between different providers to bringing a whole team together with that young person at the very heart of every decision that is made and really making that clear. That is what that team is there for regardless of anybody else's sort of motives and wants and needs for that child, it's about them and what they need and the importance of working together so that we can create that consistent and predictable routine for them in an environment where they begin to feel safe and feel seen and heard is what makes that successful.

Dale Atkinson: That sounds like an enormous relief in some respects to have that awareness around, you know, your own professional practice.

Georga Tyson: Are we seeing more and more schools becoming trauma informed, more and more sites?

Deidre Lockley: So, we see more and more people who are interested both as individuals, but as sites. And I think that's because in every classroom and every school, we are seeing children who have more complex needs and more complex behaviours. And I think we have staff across our system who are really seeking to know how they can contribute and how they can help out.

We're also seeing that in other systems that work alongside us, like the Child Protection System, where we see more and more children who are coming into care.

Dale Atkinson: And who should teachers contact to access support?

Tanya Russo:So, for children that are actually being removed, so we've got the Children in Care service. So that service was established by the Department for Education in mid 2019 as a systems improvement response to increase and support education outcomes for children in care.

So, we actually sit as part of Student Support Services and work alongside the Multidisciplinary Team in Support Services. But we also work really closely with Deidre's team in the Engagement and Wellbeing section, but also with schools. So, a lot within our agency, but also across with DCP, in their service as well.

So what we realise, what we need to do is to improve the visibility of children in care within our department and really promote those trauma informed practice principles that we've been talking about, about a safe and predictable environments and I'm increasing those safe relationships with trusting adults.

And I guess our job really is about building that educated capacity to be empathic toward these children and have an understanding about what their needs are. Having opportunities to celebrate the success. Success for these young people might look a little bit different to others, so we need to really tap into that and celebrate those things.

But also, and that not give up attitude. These children have got a right to be educated as well, and they should be at school and a lot of our children in care, actually in part-time for a whole range of reasons, but we are there really to advocate at an individual level, but also at a system level about their needs and their right to be at school full time. As part of our role, we are actually identifying some of those system gaps and working collectively with DCP to work on those.

We have a joint action plan with DCP, which we work very closely with Deidre's team. So, every year we have a number of actions. It's about 11 actions for 2022. So, we have a joint commitment to try and identify and collectively support these young people at a really high level. And we know that from research that none of this can be done in isolation.

So, the children in care service can't do it on their own. And a teacher at a school can't do it on their own, really need to collectively do it with our policy people, but also alongside our DCP partners as well. So, and we really want to promote that school can actually be a place of healing as well. With those really strong relationships school can be one of the most protective factors that they've experienced before they were in care, but certainly afterwards as well. Because we do understand that some of the placement options for young people in care are not ideal at the moment. And there's lots of resource issues around that as well.

So, it's really about trying to support them. And we have a duty social worker available at our office, so you can contact us through Felixstow Education Office and we have a duty social worker to help and we provide some consultation and advice and information, and that could be from a child in care, being enrolled in a new school that could be about identifying what's the process around ISP funding. It could be about how do we use our transition funding money for children in care, or it could be that we can't get in touch with DCP, we don't know what to do. Because we understand that a lot of the communication barriers are impacting young people actually engaging in schooling too.

So, we need to sort of refocus on what the child needs and be really child centred about our practice.

Dale Atkinson: And we'll have information about contact details and other programs in the show notes. One of my final questions, I think probably for you, Merryn, is what's the message to other teachers and educators, other schools who might be considering undertaking some training in trauma informed practice?

Merryn Gomez: I think acknowledging that it's a journey that there's no end to, you know, we've been on this journey since 2018 and initially I thought we'll have a list of things to do, and then we'll be a trauma informed school, but it is certainly not a checklist and we can always continue to improve. And that's really a part of that continuous improvement cycle that all schools go through.

But I think that probably the key message that I would love for every teacher and leader and SSO to know is that as Deidre said earlier, she was talking about relational trauma. So, trauma that happens within relationships, particularly for young people where their brains are still developing. And the way that we heal brains from relational trauma is within relationships.

And as educators, as individuals and as collective sites and partnerships, we can actually make a really significant difference in healing trauma within those relationships that we develop. And if we don't do that, and if we don't do that together, then those young people's brains, they won't heal, and they will continue on that same process and that same cycle.

So, I guess what I want people to know is that every single one of us has the opportunity to have a huge impact on that healing and that it does happen, it happens in schools, in those little micro moments every single day. So, when you're running welcome circles or brain breaks or whatever it is that you are doing with your class, those moments of connection are the moments that are making a difference for those kids.

Dale Atkinson: I think that's a lovely way to wrap up the podcast. Merryn, Deidre, and Tanya, thank you very much for joining us to talk about trauma informed practice.

Tanya Russo:Thanks for having us.

Georga Tyson: Catch you next time on teach.

Teach podcast: death to the spelling contract

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. I'm Dale Atkinson from the South Australian Department for Education.

Georga Tyson: And I'm Georgia Tyson, Largs Bay school teacher. This episode is all about spelling. Our guests today are literacy coaches who are calling for the death of the spelling contract and have some ideas for practical activities to support quality spelling instruction.

Dale Atkinson: That does seem extreme. With us, Ashlee Dewet-Cowland and Daina Wilson. Welcome to you both.

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Thank you for having us.

Dale Atkinson: So first off, can you tell us a bit about who you are and what your roles are?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Sure. So this is Ashlee. I've been working with the Literacy Guarantee Unit now for a year and a half and I have to say it is the best job I have ever had. In fact, it's not a job. It's just me doing what I'm very passionate about every day. I've been a JP teacher for over 22 years in Victoria and South Australia. So it's just been a very long journey to get to this point.

Georga Tyson: And you are working in schools as well?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Yes. So, part of our role as literacy coaches, we work in identified sites and work towards building quality evidence-based literacy practices in the school, leading to greater literacy outcomes for our students.

Dale Atkinson: What about you, Daina? Where have you come from?

Daina Wilson: Very similar. It is absolutely the dream job. So lucky to be working with a group of like-minded people who are passionate, and we get to talk all day, literacy, all the time. JP background. So came a bit later to teaching in my more mature years. And so have been teaching for around 10 years and have then come into this position with literacy coaches.

So the same, we work with a wide range of teachers across many different sites and working with them to improve their knowledge and understanding about reading development.

Dale Atkinson: So, you operate in schools, but you also provide some guidance through the literacy guarantee conferences. Now, the name of your seminar was ‘Death to the spelling contract, the fundamentals of quality spelling instruction’. What are spelling contracts and why do they have to die?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Well, it comes back to the purpose really, of spelling activities. But I guess if you want to go a little bit deeper, it actually is about teacher knowledge of spelling. And what we've found is, and I am putting it out there, I have absolutely used spelling contracts. In fact, I brought some along today to show you both that I call them chewing gum for the brain, because really there's no purpose often to these activities. And the reason for that is that teachers use them in place of explicit instruction because many teachers don't really understand how to teach spelling.

Spelling is a linguistic skill. And we didn't learn this at university. I'm lucky I have a linguistics degree, so I have some knowledge or I had some knowledge of language before I started teaching. But spelling contracts really, they lack purpose. When it comes to teaching children about our language and spelling.

Georga Tyson: I think what you're saying is true, there is a lot of unknown for teachers about spelling and absolutely the title, ‘Death to the spelling contract’, definitely hooked us in. And that's why we're chatting with you today, but how do you think the teaching of spelling has changed?

Daina Wilson: Well, I think a lot of it, and Ashlee and I have had this discussion over the last few weeks leading up to our conference presentation, and I think this is the catalyst of some change, is this knowledge and understanding behind our language and the structures behind our language. I think in the past few years, we've had a lot of resources and development into our junior primary sort of sector around teaching phonics and that early reading development and what's happened is that it's then teachers are going “well, what do we do next? So where do we go from here?”. And so, I think a lot of it, it has been about teachers really wanting to implement strategies and practices that create impact and create that improvement for their students, but not quite sure about how to go about it.

Dale Atkinson: So, what is the key to quality instruction in this area?

Daina Wilson: A lot of it is about evidence, so we know so much more about how the brain learns. There’s so much out there, research and evidence across multiple countries, multiple languages about what happens in the brain when we learn to read. And obviously then when we learn to read and write. And so that has definitely increased, I suppose, the conversations that come about, about how we teach reading and then obviously, and spelling which is the focus of ours.

Dale Atkinson: Why do you think some teachers might be stuck with the teaching of spelling?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: I found it when I was starting this science of reading, science of learning journey quite a few years ago, it was really hard to find information. And I wasn't sure where to look. We asked children questions. Well, what do you think about this? Well, if they don't know anything about a subject, they don't know what questions to ask. All I knew was that my students spelling in their writing, wasn't reflecting what I was teaching them in my spelling lessons or phonics lessons. So, it made me wonder, what am I missing here? What do I know from my background? So, I would bring in lots of morphology and vocabulary into my lessons, but other teachers weren't. So, it really led me down a path. I discovered Lyn Stone. She was probably one of the first people I thought, oh, okay, now I'm getting it. So, it requires this deep knowledge of how the English language works. And when we understand that our English language is made up of many different languages, Anglo-Saxon, French, Greek and Latin words that allows us to understand why we have certain patterns in our spelling. And so, all of this started to come into make sense to me. And so, it just led me down this path of learning more.

I ended up doing a master’s in leadership, but it changed my direction and actually brought it back to, well, how do we improve literacy practices in schools through transformational instructional leadership? And it was down one of those rabbit holes where I found more knowledge to help me. So, I think teachers are stuck because they don't know where to look for help.

Georga Tyson: Of course. I agree with that.

Dale Atkinson: Can you tell us a bit more about Lyn Stone and what it was that gave you that ah-ha moment?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: It was when she was talking about orthographic mapping and how children transfer knowledge from their short-term memory, into their long-term memory. And we have this place in our brain where we store letter patterns. And when we've learned things explicitly and we've mastered these letter patterns, and we understand when we use 'ai' and when we use 'ay' and can differentiate between them and I'm telling you right now, reception children can do that. Then that helped me understand how to hook that learning into my student's brains. So orthographic mapping, and as soon as I had that word, I thought, right, I'm Googling this and off I went, I discovered Lyn Aierie, David Kilpatrick, Tessa Daffern who will be coming out in October to our LGU conference. There's a lot of rot out there. So, you do have to be a critical consumer of research and articles and products, but really our goal is to develop teacher knowledge so that you don't need products. You can teach from just using your explicit instructional routine. So, a really good bank of activities and making spelling fun.

Dale Atkinson: So, what are those practical activities and, and where can teachers find them?

Daina Wilson: There's lots of really good activities. And again, in our presentation, we talk about these spelling knowledges. So, we talk about four spelling knowledges. So, we look at the phenology. So, the sound of our language, the sound within words. We look at the orthography, so the spelling choices and the spelling patterns. We then look at that morphology, so our English language is a morpho phonemic language. So, it's made up of sounds, but it's also made up of meaningful parts. And so that's that next level. And then the final level is that etymology or that origin of language. So, when we have a look at our kids' spelling patterns, we need to really understand which component or what stage these students are in, so we can really target the activities to the needs of our students. For example, if we are looking at that phonological level, students will be missing out letters. For example, if they're writing jumped and they're writing ‘jupd’, so they're missing out a sound within that word. We know that we need to do phonological activities. We need to make sure that they're being able to segment and hear those individual sounds within words. So, things like oral activities, manipulation, word chaining, sound boxes, Elkonin boxes, which also helps with the next level of that orthographic. So, the actual spelling choices that we make and Elkonin boxes which are now a fairly common strategy that is, is out there is a really great, powerful, easy strategy to use to really map those sound letter correspondences in words.

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Um, and it's really important that everything we do in spelling, children are writing it, because the more repetitions you have with writing the more that learning is going into that letter box in their brain, holding that learning in their long-term memory.

Georga Tyson: And what, what other resources are available to teachers to help them with spelling instruction?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: The best advice on writing spelling came out. So, you can find that on EDi. There's lots of great advice there for number one, the theory behind spelling. So, they talk about the four knowledges of spelling, and you'll find practical ideas in there to help you reinvent your spelling journey, shall we say? So that's certainly where you could look and what the beauty of the science of reading community and science of learning community is there's a lot for free. So, there's great Facebook pages, and I'm sure people are already on them. Reading Science in Schools, Sharing best practice, Think Forward Educators, well I could go on all day. They are fabulous communities where you can go online, people share ideas, just put spelling into the file section. You'll find lots of great ideas on there.

Dale Atkinson: And we'll include some links in the show notes for listeners if they want to access those a bit later on.

So, I am the father of a reception age daughter and you mentioned earlier that even at that age, they have an ability to understand while the sound may be the same, the letters are different. How does that work with someone so tiny?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: When I work with schools, I talk about a roadmap. So, when they're planning for learning, think of your roadmap in your head. And number one, I talk about having a scope and sequence. So, there are scope and sequences out there. And coincidentally, the department has just released the R to 2 phonics and spelling scope and sequence, which you'll find on EDi and watch this space because the 3 to 6 spelling scope and sequence is in development as we speak. These scope and sequences are developed, according to research about the most common or most frequently seen graphemes in writing or in their writing, it's actually based on the work of Carnine he came up with the idea that, you know, you should introduce these letters in this order order.

So, you have a scope and sequence. You need some really good explicit instructional routines in your classroom. So, you need to ensure that every day you are doing a daily review. So, you are reviewing the learning from yesterday, from last week, from a month ago. You are being really explicit with your learning intention, you are guiding them through the learning in small steps.

So, here's our new grapheme, repeat after me. Let's sky write it. Sky writing is hugely helpful, especially for reception children and beyond. Are they reading words with that grapheme? Are they spelling words with that grapheme? Are they leading to hand write that grapheme and when you put this together in a routine, what you're doing is you are reducing the cognitive load for those students.

They know exactly what they're going to do at every point of the phonics lesson. And you are guiding them through the scope and sequence in a logical order. So, you can find advice online through EDi. We've got our LGU instructional routine lesson plan on there that you can look at, but even better, you can watch our online phonics lessons. So, Our Learning SA, just navigate to the primary resources, literacy phonics, and watch our coaches teaching reception, 1 and 2 lessons. So, with that in mind, that's the roadmap. And so, you know that you are guiding your students through their learning. Logically you are matching that learning with decodable readers. So, they're reading these graphemes, they're practicing these graphemes in connected text. So, it's all part of this wonderful phonics routine that we go into schools and ensure that schools are using them. Because the department have actually, we don't mandate much, but we've mandated that, in the early years, students and teachers are using an explicit instructional routine and synthetic phonics.

Dale Atkinson: And I think that really draws us neatly back to the original premise of this podcast, which is death of the spelling contract. Cause what you've described there is really conscientious, deliberate, structured, ordered approach to education, which really makes perfect sense from the outside. And it sounds like it makes all the difference when you're in the classroom

Daina Wilson: Yeah. And exactly that point is we know, and people like Lyn Stone, who we've spoken about earlier, talks about the fact that we want to ensure the activities or the strategies that we are using are actually developing and improving their ability to use those skills. So, in spelling, we want to ensure the activities that we are using are helping them to map those spelling patterns or those generalisations of our language.

And we know that our language English is complex, but it is actually quite logical when you know the history behind it and the reasons why words are spelled in certain ways, there are logical reasons behind it.

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Absolutely. I mean, I'm just looking at this spelling contract here that I just downloaded off the internet, “use Scrabble tiles to add up the value of each spelling word”. So that's ultimately, it's a maths activity when you scramble letters and have to put them back. And what word is going to magically appear when I unscramble these letters. But put yourself in the shoes of a child, living with dyslexia, they don't have this ability to do that. So, they need this explicit instruction and systematic instruction. So, if we are teaching everybody with explicit instruction, a systematic instruction, then no child, theoretically, should be left behind.

Dale Atkinson: And I'm assuming here that the experience for the child is actually a bit better too, that the engagement levels go up when you approach it in this way?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Yeah, absolutely. Just if I can share a little story, I was running a presentation yesterday in one of my sites and one of the teachers said, “oh, can I just share a little story? One of my boys told me what a great job I'm doing now. He actually gets reading and spelling now. So, he congratulated me on my new informed practices.” And I actually started crying in this staff meeting because the impact we are having on children by making small tweaks, leading to big changes, that's all we're asking just to rethink, you know, the activities you're putting in front of your students think about it, is this relating to their phenology? Is it relating to helping them understand letter patterns and where they are in, in words? You know, there's some great textbooks out there to help teachers. One of the first books I recommend to my teachers is The Next Step by Anne Italiano. Really simple way of identifying when to use this letter pattern. Why we use this letter pattern and here's some words that contain this letter pattern. Lyn Stone, Spelling for Life, is a fantastic resource. It actually instructs you in how to do a spelling lesson.

Dale Atkinson: Alright well, I am entirely convinced I'm on-board death to the spelling contract. Ashlee, Daina, thank you very much for joining us.

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Thank you for having us for having us.

Georga Tyson: Catch you next time on Teach.

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders, past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education. Today we're going to hear about the Special Education Resource Unit, or SERU. It's made up of a team of former teachers and disability experts who can provide advice and resources for educators about how to support learners with additional needs.

Rachel Scheuboeck is the manager of SERU and she joins us on the phone now. Welcome, Rachel.

Rachel Scheuboeck: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Rachel, this is a bit of an unusual job. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do and how you ended up there?

Rachel Scheuboeck: I've been teaching, I think for about 27 years now, which is all horrifying to admit. I started off as a general teacher working in a mainstream site.

I've also worked in disability units and in a special school. I then worked as part of support services as a special educator and then as a manager, and I ended up at SERU as the manager about two years ago. And I guess the other part of my journey, which probably might give you a bit of a sense as to why I get a little bit passionate about this area is the fact that I have an 18 year old son now who has a disability as well. So, I was in disability before I had a son. But, it's not just professional, it's personal too for me.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. And so, the combination of personal and professional there is really brought you into quite a, an interesting place and fascinating insights, I guess, into what it means to educate a child with specific needs.

Can you tell us a little bit about what SERU actually does?

Rachel Scheuboeck: The reason I feel for me it's a really, really good fit is we are a service that supports not only our education department staff, but also families. It's really exciting to be part of an organisation which is quite unique in South Australia.

I'm not sure that there's another sort of organisation quite like us within Australia. We have a resource library which educators can use and access lots of different types of equipment or resources or reference materials or assistive technology. We've also got access equipment.

So, for students who might need some help around personal care, perhaps if they need a change table, they might need a hoist. They might need a specialised seating tool just to help them sit in the right position so that they can access their learning. We also have support through assistive technology, so for those individuals perhaps who have a physical disability or might have a vision impairment, we have support through a technology that might be on a laptop or an iPad.

That supports them in their access to education. We've also got some services that come out of our SERU as well. We've got the early intervention, deaf and hard of hearing support, which is for students from birth all the way through to school. And we've got a number of teachers and a speech pathologist who support families, young children and babies. We also have a conductive education service, which is quite unique and again, it's one of those services that a lot of people don’t know a lot about, but it really is concerned with physical movement and supporting movement through education. And conductive education is run out of three sites.

We have three conductors at the moment who support us. They all come from Hungary, which is where the training originates from. They provide support around getting the most out of students' physical needs and helping them to be as independent as they can. And the last service that we have is our inclusive practice team, which is our teacher team, which provides a lot of support around helping parents or educators to find resources that might have more of a chance of sort of supporting the student. And also providing training and development for teachers and SSOs.

Dale Atkinson: So, if you're a teacher listening to that, and that's such an extensive range of services and resources that are available, if you are listening to that and thinking, well, actually there is something that I could really use some assistance within this specific area. How do they go about getting help from SERU?

Rachel Scheuboeck: Well, there's probably three ways that they can access us. They can either give us a call and our fabulous admin staff will direct you in the right direction. You can just ring up and say, look, I'm looking for advice or support in this area, and they'll put you onto probably the best qualified person.

You can also use our web. We have a website, and through that we also have like even a catalogue of all our resources so you can actually even order things and borrow things through the website. And the third way is actually to physically come down and visit us. We are located on the same grounds as the Fulham Gardens Primary School, and we're at Henley Beach. We're not overly convenient for everyone, but we're in a great spot we think, near the beach.

But there is an extensive resource library here and you can come and have a look and see what we've got.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. So, plenty of access points for any teachers out there interested in getting some assistance. Can you talk to us a little bit about what the experience might look like from start to finish for a teacher who gets in touch with you?

Rachel Scheuboeck: To register to be part of the library service it's a free service to all education department and staff. So, you can easily come in and register or we can send you out a registration form. It's also a free service for all families, regardless of whether they're part of the education department or the private sector. So, we do offer that support to all families to support their child with a disability

Once you've registered, you'll get a code. So, you can actually go on and use our online catalogue. You can see all the resources that are available, which teachers might use for things like trial and evaluation. For example, an OT might suggest that you try a wobble stool or a wedge to support a child who fidgets and isn't able to sit very still.

So, you might look and say, Oh look, I don't want to go out and buy one of those, I'd like to try it first, so you can ring up SERU, you can go on our website. You can say, have you got a stool that I can borrow so I can trial it? We can send one out. It all works through the courier, so you don't actually have to physically come on site.

It is great if you do come on site because you'll get to see lots of things, but you certainly don't have to. That way we can service all country locations as well. The courier goes out widely and we can get all resources out to the country or out to different sites or locations within Adelaide.

Dale Atkinson: One of the experiences in education in this area is the identification, I guess, for teachers that perhaps a student has a need but not an understanding of how to satisfy that need. Is that something that you can help with?

Rachel Scheuboeck: Absolutely. One of the things that we do try and do, we've got a number of staff in our teaching area who are our inclusive practice team, and those staff have amazing skills and expertise and experience. Most of the staff that we have here, have worked in a range of options.

All our admin staff know exactly who the right people are with different skill sets and different expertise. We have staff here who are really good in the learning difficulties area for those students who might have dyslexia. Or might be really struggling with their understanding of supporting their written skills or their reading skills.

We also have teachers here who are pretty well experts in the area of augmentative communication. One of our staff here has worked extensively within special schools and has a really, really good understanding of communication and supporting children's communication need. We also have teachers here who have done extensive work around personalised learning.

We have teachers who have worked really closely in support services and been special educators and worked really closely with a range of schools. We've got two teachers here who are experts in the area of inclusive technologies, and they will do family consults, they'll do teacher consults, they'll support finding the best fit for a child because there's lots and lots of inclusive technologies out there.

But what we need to do is actually find the best fit for the student. So, they're feeling in control. And we've also got staff who have expertise in the area of inclusion. So, it's a really wide range of skill sets, and you know, we also have people who've just got that broad overview of having worked with students with specific or significant disabilities or physical disabilities or autism.

So, we can really use skills of the people here to support teachers who might be at that point of like, what do I do? I've got a child, I'm not seeing any growth. How can I support them in their learning?

Dale Atkinson: What times of the day can teachers get in touch with you and parents get in touch with you?

Rachel Scheuboeck: We're open every day. On Tuesdays we close a little bit earlier because we have staff meetings, so we close at 3pm on a Tuesday, but every other day we're here from 8.30am to 5pm. In the school holidays we close at 4pm because we tend to find that people don't come in after about 4pm anyway. But we're available all school holidays and any day of the week up until five o'clock, except for on the Tuesday.

Dale Atkinson: Can you actually, just on a personal level, can you just describe one rewarding, memorable experience that you've had in the role?

Rachel Scheuboeck: Oh, I'm not sure I could think of one in particular. I know that there's so many things that happen on a daily basis, which I find incredibly rewarding. We had a situation recently in 2020, soon after the pandemic was announced, and we had number of parents that contacted us about online work for their child.

They'd been given some plans or programs from their teachers, but we have to remember at that point, teachers were trying to teach and do online learning. So, what they were able to produce for parents was not of the quality of what we're doing now, because they didn't actually simply have the time. So, teachers were providing a program, but it wasn't necessarily always differentiated. At that point, we had a number of parents that contacted us and said, my teachers given me, these ideas and these activities, but my child can't do them and I don’t know what to do.

And so, we actually as a team sat around and looked at some of the advice and ideas and then came up with some differentiated activities that the parents could try. And that was actually one of those points that you realised the parents were so grateful and we found that they kept coming back to us and saying, look, I've got this and I've got that.

It's not the case anymore because I think teachers are doing an amazing job of actually providing that wide variety of resources. There's a lot of things out there for parents with disabilities. But in that very, very early timeframe, we felt that we had a really amazing opportunity to really support parents and to support teachers.

And we ended up getting teachers contacting us as well, saying, I'm trying to send all these things out to my students. Can you help me with how I might differentiate this to some of the learners in my class who aren't going to be able to do it? So that was one experience that I think, you know, you think about these times where things have been a little bit tough and I think it sometimes brings out the best in everybody, and it was a really lovely opportunity to really work closely with some schools and also some families, and then getting that feedback of how that had gone and being part of that loop that, yes, this was working and thank you, that was helpful and helped my child to feel that they could participate.

Dale Atkinson: That's a really great illustration, I think, of what SERU is really all about, which is meeting the child, the teacher, and the parents at their point of need and providing that real expertise over the top of it, isn't it?

Rachel Scheuboeck: Yep. And it was having our extensive resource library, we were able to just package things up and say, come and pick them up from the door, or let's send them in the courier so that people had things that they could grab from their hand, you know, they could grab immediately and have, and could actually put into place straight away.

Dale Atkinson: So, what advice would you give to an educator who's listening to this today with a learner with some additional needs that they haven't experienced before?

Rachel Scheuboeck: What I can say is it's really important to take time, to get to know each individual student.

It's really important to know what motivates them and how to engage them, knowing what skills they have and what are their next opportunities. Listening without judgment and if they can't communicate effectively, giving them a tool or a device or a system, otherwise you get your unwanted behaviours.

Those sorts of little bits of insights really help us to direct and support and come up with some ideas and to work hand in hand in saying, perhaps this resource, or have you thought of this? Or is there something we could do to support you here? In that area of special ed, I've worked in it for many years, obviously, and it's one of those careers that I kind of fell into, not by choice, but I fell into it.

But I've stayed by choice. It's been the most rewarding place to have worked. I've met the most strongest, resilient, amazing individuals in my classes. And yes, they've often been challenges and at times it's been really, really hard. But keeping those realistically high expectations and never making assumptions is really, really important.

And it's one of those jobs where there's no two days are the same. We've got these amazing kids. It's such a rewarding place to work. And you know, it's one of those careers that I've found, I've been able to really have that sense of actually really making a difference. So, I would say, you know, you have to at times ride the wave.

At times it seems all overwhelming, but the benefits and the, that sense of actually finding that right resource or helping that student to actually overcome some behaviours or helping them to learn something are those moments that make it absolutely amazing and the most rewarding job, I think.

Dale Atkinson: Rachel, I couldn't wrap it up any better than that. Thank you very much for your time. That's Rachel Scheuboeck from the Special Education Resource Unit. It's down at Henley Beach, located on the grounds of Fulham Gardens Primary School. It's a team of former teachers and disability experts who can provide advice, support, and resources for educators about how to educate learners with additional needs.

Teachers can ring SERU at any time to talk to an expert. Actually, there are specific times, but they'll be in the show notes along with other information on how to get in touch. They can talk to an expert, go down and visit them, get a whole bunch of ideas and tools and resources to help that learner for free. And the child can try some of these tools out in the classroom. Find out what works for them before the family, or the school has to commit to buying them.

Rachel, you and the team are doing fantastic work. Thank you very much for your time and thanks for speaking to us today.

Rachel Scheuboeck: Thank you so much for taking the time to get in contact with us. We really hope that we can support and connect with some of the teachers out there.

Dale Atkinson: Thanks, everyone out there for listening and speak to you next time on Teach.

Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders, past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we are talking about the department's new practice guidance resources for supporting all learners and in particular, those learners with additional needs.

The practice guidance has been developed by educators for educators. Those educators who developed those resources are with us today in the form of Jen Mathwin-Raymond the Manager of Practice Guidance, and Rhoni McFarlane, the Director of Inclusive Teaching and Learning. Welcome to you both.

Jen Mathwin-Raymond: Thank you.

Rhoni McFarlane: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: So, first of all, I guess the main question is what are the practice guides and what are they for?

Jen Mathwin-Raymond: They're actually very practical, basic learning strategies that anyone, no matter whether they're an early career teacher or a later career teacher, can pick up and learn something from. They're written by teachers for teachers and they are the sorts of things that might have been put into place today, or they can certainly be put into place tomorrow. So that is the focus, it’s something that is achievable. It is not reliant upon funding. It is something that anyone can pick up and do tomorrow.

Dale Atkinson: In my hot little hand, I have a white binder that says ‘Practice guides for learners with additional needs’ and in front of me on my laptop on EDi I have the page for practice guidance. Can you tell us how these two things work together and what teachers should do to get their hands on the resources where they need to get their resources?

Rhoni McFarlane: I think one of the challenges that we face is that teachers are really busy and the fact that we've produced practice guidance in two formats means that when a teacher needs a really quick response to something and to try something, they can go to a fact sheet.

But when they want to do that deeper dive and really develop an understanding of what's behind potentially a child's need. They can go online and look at EDi and explore deeper, click onto links that will take them to more information if you know they're seeking it in their own time. I think the readiness of having the practice guides in the hands of teachers via the fact sheets in schools and then the longer version online allows for them to engage at different levels at different times. That's around language as well.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, and it's really beautifully compiled on EDi, it's all together in a really easy to navigate, easy to find space, and I think educators out there are going find this to be an incredibly useful and easy resource to use. So where did the initiative for the practice guides come from? What was the background of that?

Rhoni McFarlane: Yeah, I'd love to take credit for this, but I've only been in the role for three months. It's sort of multifaceted. Our previous executive director, Carolyn Crosser-Barlow, had a conversation with an old friend who happened to be a teacher and she was expressing at the time the frustration that she had with not being able to meet the needs of a young person that she was struggling with in her own classroom and just wish she had something in hand to be able to rely on, to inform her of some approaches she could do in the classroom.

And then I guess emerging out of that was a piece of research that the department requested that really highlighted ways that we could be working to have greater inclusive practices. And one of those key elements was practice guidance. Like how do we make sure we get really evidence informed approaches in the hands of teachers in classroom? And that being one lever for a really important practice.

Dale Atkinson: When we look at schools and the profile of students in schools, one of the things that teachers are always trying to do is meet that individual student at that point of need. But the difficulty can be very diverse environment with lots of complex and competing demands on your time as a teacher and as an educator, is understanding who that student is, but also what the specific plugins that might help them. So what are the role that these have in helping bridge that gap that you might have as an educator?

Jen Mathwin-Raymond: One of the things that each of the guides will outline from the word go is that every child's an individual. Many of them come with a specific learning need, but others will come with a complex range of learning needs that are all interrelated.

And so it's important to look at the guides and say, maybe match the two guides or three guides together and then think to yourself, okay, so knowing my learner as well as I do, how can I actually cherry pick the bits that will work the best for this particular child? And try and see. And if it doesn't quite work, then go back and try some others.

Because the practical nature of the way in which we've laid them out and the fact that they're written by teachers, for teachers, then there is always something else that you can give a go and something that will meet with success. Maybe a little bit of success initially, but then we build onto that.

Dale Atkinson: So this is something that's really going to, I think, come alive if you're using this in a team sense with the rest of your colleagues, isn't it, that you can bring these down off the shelf and have a real kind of, granular discussion about how you can help individuals and children.

Rhoni McFarlane: Yeah, I think it's one of the things that we've been talking about with the team is really how do we know that this is actually having an impact? And one of our measures is actually how teachers are talking to each other about the strategies and how they're implementing them, so that I know that, you know, my colleague in the next room has tried some strategies from one of the practice guides, they can talk to me about how they've worked and then I might be able to say, oh, okay, well if you've used that approach, I might be, you know, willing to test that as well. And then we can compare and say, well, if this worked for me but it didn't work for you, you know, maybe we could tweak or maybe we could try another strategy.

I think that collegiality in a shared experience of having the same evidence-based research in front of us with strategies that we can both apply, but again, individual students so they can work in some context and not in others.

Dale Atkinson: Now, I know you've been engaging a lot with teachers, leaders out in the field. What sort of influence have they had over the development of the guides?

Jen Mathwin-Raymond: Well, they were quite pivotal, of course. One of the things people will often say to me is, how did you choose the topics for the first 16? And we've got another, a range of them on the go. Basically, we asked pretty much everybody, so we asked teachers when we met them out in the field.

But we also put together very early in the piece a practice guidance board, quite high-level people, but we also put together a reference group of teachers, leaders, practitioners, people from support services, and we said, what do you think is needed at the moment? And then we sort of prioritised. And one of the priorities that you'll see as soon as you pick up the guides is there's quite a significant number of topics that are around the provision for autism.

And that worked out quite well because it is quite topical at the moment. We do have a number of children, for all intents and purposes, we're trying to meet their needs, but they're quite complex and so, I certainly have had great deal of feedback from people saying that that was really helpful and they certainly have been applying them.

Dale Atkinson: What's something that you guys have really enjoyed about this process of developing these guides?

Rhoni McFarlane: From my perspective, I just love when we can create a product that's really valued and needed, and if you can deliver something that is going to help a teacher in their core work, that's ultimately the win, right?

I was recently in a forum where I had the privilege of hearing a young man speak about a year 10 boy who's autistic, and he was talking about his experience as a young person and, and a mixed experience about his learning environment. And he talked about a teacher who tried and then tried something else, and then tried something else again until he found something that worked. And what was the most valuable thing that this young person described was not the fact that they had success in their learning, but actually that their teacher believed in their success and that they kept trying. So for them, they felt that they were valued.

And I think we all want to be valued. And how we can express that in the classroom is by trying and not giving up, but keep persisting and finding ways to reach the young people in our classroom.

Jen Mathwin-Raymond: Every child deserves to feel a sense of belonging that this is their place and that they have a right to be there and they're respected and valued.

And if we can do anything to support that, then I reckon we're on a winner.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, and I think these are incredibly powerful tools in terms of helping that to happen. Now you mentioned that these are just the first suite. The plans are already underway to broaden the offer. What if teachers are out there and they're looking at these and thinking, well, that's great, but I've got students who need X. How do they get in touch with you and what should they be telling you?

Jen Mathwin-Raymond: It's at the bottom of every practice guide. You click on there and let us know. Just send us an email and say, look, I like this bit about it, or maybe you could expand on that bit, but also could you then start talking about developing something on, whatever.

Dale Atkinson: So you guys are the real face, the real people behind the behind the email address. That's great. We will include a link in the show notes to where it lives on EDi, so people will be able to access that, who are listening to the podcast, but it's a brilliant resource, both in hard copy and on the web. So well done. Thank you very much.

Jen Mathwin-Raymond: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: And we're also joined by Andrew Gravestocks who's the principal at Ceduna Area School. Andrew, how are you?

Andrews Gravestocks: Good, thank you. Good.

Dale Atkinson: Hey, Andrew, you've been involved in developing some of these resources. Can you tell us a little bit about what that process was like?

Andrews Gravestocks: I was really pleased to be asked to be part of that working party, to look at the practice guidance for learners with additional needs, because I think sometimes, we haven't done that as an education department. We've constructed those types of guides without a very wide variety of people to consult within different circumstances.

So having people from remote country schools, city schools, but different educators with different experiences and support services. And looking for what is best practice outside of our system has been something that has been really unique for me to be part of. And I think it's, it's really added to the depth and the value for schools.

And I think the other part for me too is that it's really been upfront from the beginning that this is the first iteration of the guides and that they will evolve and change as more information and that becomes so that ultimately staff know they can go this resource, and it will be the current up to date, best practice information that the education department has.

Dale Atkinson: Can you tell us a little bit about your school?

Andrews Gravestocks: Yeah. So Ceduna Area School is in the far west of South Australia. We're about nine hours from Adelaide. Pretty diverse student population and community. Lots of different people move in and out of the space, given how west we are. High Aboriginal population and a reasonably high population of students with disabilities. We tend to have kids who can't access special schools and stuff nearby as well. We've got the two special classes on our site, but probably the level of disability within them is above what you would normally find in a special class.

Dale Atkinson: That presents some reasonably universal challenges across the public education system, which is what do you do as a teacher in terms of meeting each of those students at their individual point of need? And I guess the question that you guys are trying to answer with the practice guidance is, how do we service these kids?

Andrews Gravestocks: We've put a lot of effort into working with our support services group who are based in Port Lincoln, but we've got that four hours of distance between us and them. So we're really seeing the practice guides as being a really key component of what teachers can look at in the first instance, talk about, but then it can be that reference point for support services, teachers, leaders, students, parents, this is what the best practice is saying for your child. And then we're trying those things and then we can keep working on it from there.

So, you know, through the use of technology, we can be actually working on what the best way to support a child in their education is. With the guides as well, on a more regular basis and, you know, hopefully more timely and a better service for all.

Dale Atkinson: Particularly, you know, Ceduna Area School, but a lot of schools are dealing with an enormous breadth of issues among their students.

And it can be difficult as a teacher to understand the nuances of various different challenges that students may have. So something that provides a bit of clear guidance around the specifics of need is incredibly useful, isn't it?

Andrews Gravestocks: It certainly is. And I think the other part that is really helpful for that too is that it's, it's online so staff can access it anywhere, anytime, even if they've got, an inkling that this might be something they're thinking in their professional judgment, a student needs to support them. They can go and have a look, and they're almost, you know, we're going to be in a better place to be able to work with other agencies and families and the student themselves ultimately to support them because teachers have got that quick go-to, they can go to. And they're not too long, they're not too complicated and it's got where to go to from there for supporting other supports as well.

Dale Atkinson: Is it also useful in terms of teachers and leadership engaging with parents of children with these needs?

Andrews Gravestocks: I believe so. You know, having not done it yet, but I think we can put that on the table and say, here's what the practice guides are saying. What do you think and feel as a parent, would this support your child in their learning? And that will be a real, as I said, a really good focal point and a reference that we can use with families and staff. So where it can all be on the same page and hopefully working together as best we can.

Dale Atkinson: And what does it look like from the point of view of a leadership team or teaching teams?

Are these the sorts of things that you will get together as a group? And this, there's a nice thing about talking to you while you're actually physically out in a school, because the bell just went off in the background there, which is lovely.

Andrews Gravestocks: Yes it did, its end of lunch. Yep.

Dale Atkinson: What does it look like in terms of, you know, groups of teachers or a leadership and teaching group, how are these useful and how are they, how will they be used, do you think?

Andrews Gravestocks: I mean, we are very much at the infancy of that process, but we were going to begin tonight, even at our staff meeting, looking at the positive behaviour for learning classroom practices and can we get teachers to, you know, have consistency, coherence, and clarity around that practice for kids in our classrooms. And so this document does give us that opportunity to have that conversation.

Dale Atkinson: Well, thank you very much for your time, Andrew, and good luck making use of the practice guidance.

Andrews Gravestocks: No worries. Thanks Dale.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education and today we are meeting with Sylvia Groves from Salisbury High School and Ruth Mussger from Murray Bridge High School. Every year we have what's known as Leaders Day. It's an opportunity for all the principals and preschool directors to come together in the morning. They hear from the minister and the chief executive and other senior people in the department about the department's strategic direction, some of the priorities for the year ahead. And then in the afternoon the really enriching part takes place, which is where the leaders come together and learn from one another. And Ruth and Sylvia were giving presentations at this year's Leaders Day, and they were speaking about their high schools, their improvement journeys in those high schools, and the outcomes that they've been able to achieve for their students.

So that's the reason why we're speaking with you today. So, Sylvia and Ruth thank you very much for joining us. So, Ruth, to you first, can you just give us a bit of context around your site? What's unique about Murray Bridge High School?

Ruth Mussger: Sure. Murray Bridge High School is a large rural school. I think one of the things that stands out for us is that we are the only feeder high school for our community. So we have lots of small primary schools that join together with us at high school. We are an entrepreneurial specialist school and a music focused school.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. And you've got a fairly diverse student background as well don’t you.  The number of children from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island?

Ruth Mussger: Absolutely, yes.

Dale Atkinson: In addition to that, as a result of the industries that are up there, quite a number of children from international backgrounds as well.

Ruth Mussger: Less so while Thomas Foods, which is the major employer in the town, is rebuilding after the fire in 2018, which had a devastating impact on the community, and we saw a lot of our families having to leave to seek employment elsewhere. We're really looking forward to this year when Thomas Foods back online.

Dale Atkinson: And Sylvia, you're an hour and change away from Murray Bridge High School. But I think in terms of student population and parent background, we're talking about a sort of similar  sort of setting aren’t we?

Sylvia Groves: We're a Category two school and with a high degree of complexity, which I'm sure Murray Bridge is as well. Our numbers currently sit at just under 1100 and we have over 30 different cultures represented at our site, which adds richness that we love. 11% of our students are Aboriginal, which is high for a metropolitan school and which is also growing rapidly. We have 77 special needs students who also add a richness to our site. We have 234 students with an identified disability. We have 528 students identified in CCD, a third of our students that your students and that's growing 55% of our students are school card, which adds another layer of complexity and our families experience significant social disadvantage, which has been exacerbated by COVID, which continues to take a toll. Of our enrolling students in year seven, 37% were below and in year 8, 36 were.

Which one of our priorities is helping our kids to learn how to read. And in previous years that deficit was closer to 50%. So we've had to train our teachers how to teach reading and now moving into the numeracy space, we’re well supported by families who believe the school will make a difference to their children. And for some time we've had waiting lists to get into our school and we are a positive sitewith minimal staff movement and there is something about the school in the community that tethers staff to our school, which is great for stability.

Dale Atkinson: But one of the things that kind of jumps out as you talk is actually one of the things that also is very apparent in Ruth’s presentation to the Leaders  day, which is you both have a very clear focus on who are the kids that you're working with and you've got a really deep understanding of that. How do you go about gaining that deep understanding of your student cohort to help drive the improvement journey?

Ruth Mussger: For us, it's been a matter of going out to our feeder schools and really spending a lot of time working with the teachers and with families to really understand what students bring to the table so that we're starting from the point where they're accessing learning already rather than assuming they're an empty slate. That's been really important to us. We have similar statistics to Salisbury in the number of students below standard of educational achievement in literacy and numeracy. So the mantra of a year's growth in a year for us can't happen. It has to be more than that and significantly more than that if we're going to get our kids to catch up.

Dale Atkinson: Is that a similar experience to you Sylvia?

Sylvia Groves: Absolutely. And we've got significant programs in place to support that. In terms of students, we have to know our students and relationships are the critical thing at our site. So we have a care program where students from year 7 to 10 stay with the same care teacher, and then in 11 and 12 they will have a different care teacher.

I also take a care class, which helps me have a greater understanding of families and have that same connection with students. And our mantra is no surprises. So we need to know all the time where our students are at and we expect that of our teachers as well. So we have a five weekly reporting system. That's what our clients want and while that is onerous for our staff, it does make a big difference.

Dale Atkinson: So those things don't happen by accident. They build over time and done in a very deliberate way. How   have you gone about that in terms of approaching that with your teams, with you, with your teachers, and approaching that with your parent community?

Ruth Mussger: The focus has been on, yes, we're a complex site and yes, we have our challenges, but let's focus on the over 95% of students who are there and just want to get on with learning. Let's work out what the systems are, the processes are that enable them to do what they need to do best and then add support layers for those who need additional help.

Sylvia Groves: I think too developing a culture of high expectations was really critical to our site because many years ago, and I've been lucky enough to be there for a long time, getting over the line was the main thing. Very few kids went to university and even the attitude of staff to students wasn't high. So developing that strong culture of high expectations for both staff and students was really important at out site.

And the mantra with no surprises so that we know what's going on at all times. So we worked really hard on getting helping the kids to believe that they can achieve and achieve well and they can compete. They're not defined by their postcode. But we also had to develop strategies to support our staff, to build the belief for them and have the courage to give our kids 20s, to know what 20 looks like, and to put structures in place so that the staff feel supported because initially they felt like we were overreporting and we do overreport. But that's what we need to do because we need to know. So we listen to what our staff are saying. We put strategies in place to support them, whether it's no meetings during snapshot time. And when we get our results, we look at what sort of support do staff need, what strategies can we put in place so that they feel the process is also about them as well.

Dale Atkinson: And Ruth  in your presentation, you I think, there were a couple of very individual personalised stories from some of those students about some of the work that had gone on in terms of building their ambition and lifting their sights in terms of where they wanted to be.

Ruth Mussger: And I think that teaching fraternity are absolutely critical in having those conversations. Kids have got to trust first, and I think that we're exactly the same. And once you build that level of trust, then you can have the hard conversations around, what are you doing with the rest of your life? Let's work out where you want to go, what direction you want to take, and how we can support you to get there. So the individualized pathway planning is a very strong feature of our senior school.

Dale Atkinson: Is that something you focus on as well?

Sylvia Groves: So we've used a multi-pronged approach. So we have the positive behaviour for learning, we have positive education and career development and those things sort of steer the ship and we're constantly working on that. So we're always hunting for the good. We're looking at ways that we can move forward, not just for our students, but for our community as well. There's a lot of training and investment in those.

Dale Atkinson: What sort of focus have you put on in terms of creating those teaching teams and those communities of learning among your staff?

Ruth Mussger: One of the critical things is that we had to create time to allow good things to happen and schools are busy places. You can't expect that teachers will develop incredible lesson plans and do all the work that they need to happen during the day and also come up with great new ideas. So creating think tanks and opportunities for people to be involved in those has been really important for us.

Quarantining time for teachers to work together. It means getting rid of the extra, we always saw that the one hour staff meeting was an essential element of our week and we discovered that, you know what, a half hour or 20 minute online briefing every week is enough, which frees up 40 minutes for other things to happen.

Sylvia Groves: We’re similar. Every Wednesday we finish the school day at 2.15 and that time then is quarantined for professional learning teams and very much  the same, intentional lesson planning using data to make sure that we're getting the planning right for our students. The English teachers who are doing the literacy blocks in year seven and eight, they get half a day a term to support them in their planning for that.

So it is very much valuing what the teachers are doing, but also creating that space because if you don't create that space, it's not going to happen. There's too many competing demands. So that's been really critical for us, is having that time and listening to what staff need and professional development has to be highly valued and teachers have to think that they have access to it, which they do with a large part of our budget goes towards professional development.

Ruth Mussger: In our situation. It's not just about teachers coming together in learning areas, but it's also around teachers who all teach common students together and finding out what it is about that student. Why are you getting success here where I'm not? What's happening in your class? It's different in mine and I think that's been pivotal.

Sylvia Groves: We've also created an innovative pedagogies team of people who could put up their hand and say, I want to be part of that, who are leading forward more innovation that they can share with other staff who have less time. And that team is now looking at powerful learners and trying to build agency for our students because our students like things to be done to them. They don't actually want to have to think as much. So our drive now is to move from the teaching of embracing and getting the students to take more ownership of their own learning.

Dale Atkinson: As you describe that, it strikes me that these things build a momentum of their own, but I'm assuming that it takes a little bit of a push to start that ball rolling. Is that fair to say?

Sylvia Groves: Well, definitely with the PBL. So we've been a positive behaviour learning school for a number of years, but we sort of do it on our own and it's just come at this opportunity where the department have realised that this is a really good practice and they've invited us, which to our surprise, because we're already doing it. And we went back to our staff to ask them if they thought it would be good for our school to do. And everyone about one said they wanted to do it. Getting the buy in from staff is really important. So as a leader it's really important that I give them all the information on why we should do it, so that they also have ownership, and that's been a really big part of anything we do. And keeping the focus narrow so staff remind me don't deviate too much, don't make us do other things. When we’re on the literacy path which we've now broadened. But initially they would say to me, But you said we weren't going to do anything else. So I have to listen to the staff a lot because that is that professional trust. But I also have to let them take risks and they do and they don't always work out, but they feel confident that they can put up their hand and say, Can I try this? And we will finance it and give them the courage to do it. And nine times out of ten it will benefit our students.

Ruth Mussger: Getting permission has become so important in our lives, hasn't it?

Sylvia Groves: And releasing for us too.

Dale Atkinson: You touched a bit earlier, actually, before we came on air a conversation about stability within the workforce being really important, how are you able to kind of maintain that? I think Ruth you said that in your presentation as well, that you've been able to keep a core team together.

Ruth Mussger: Yes. And I think for the first time in a long time, also having teachers from outside of our area reaching out and saying, gee, I'd like to come and work at your school, which is an absolute breath of fresh air. It is around building that reputation for teachers to be able to get on with what they love doing best and that's teaching and learning. Removing barriers that teachers often see are the stumbling blocks for what wears them down and makes life too hard. So having processes and procedures in place, supporting everyone to work together has changed the culture.

Sylvia Groves: Culture is very big at our site and we have a lot of young staff, but we do have older staff as well and we value all different levels of experience. We try and also make it a social aspect. So at the moment following COVID, we have a themed happy hour. The tech studies did The Block  and things like that. We're constantly trying to bring our staff together and value them and meet their needs. Whether it's not to be isolated cause COVID did isolate us for quite a while. But Salisbury there's something that gets in that staff's blood. They want to stay there. We have many people who are there long term. And probably our biggest issue now is that we have a lot of emerging leaders who want leadership at Salisbury, but they don't want to leave and I can’t provide enough leadership jobs. And I see schools around me who don't have that stability. That's one of the major reasons they struggle because they're constantly training and getting people up to speed and it takes time.

Ruth Mussger: And going back over old ground when there's a new influx of people.

Dale Atkinson: As we're talking, we are a couple of weeks out from year 12 exams. We are by the time this goes to air probably will have been sat. Can you talk to us a little bit about your ambitions for this year? What are your expectations?

Ruth Mussger:  I  have huge expectations for seeing some of the processes and initiatives that we've put into place actually play out in a real sense. Our focus has for the last two years been on Aboriginal learners and their achievement and success and SACE completion and lots of work there in building capacity of staff and students. One of the areas that we've identified is that our students generally in an exam situation would be a grade lower than what their other grades are showing.

The temptation for a lot of us to say, well, they just need more exam practice is something that I've had to really fight, because what we know is that it's the language that our students don't have, the sophistication of that language. The tier two and three words that help them tell what they know is what's lacking. And that's a longer-term process. And that's starting as we do in year eight and seven in building that capacity and then seeing that change happen.

Dale Atkinson: That shift between not just understanding the concepts but being able to describe the sophisticated term.

Sylvia Groves: And right now we're working with every single year 12 student to maximise their opportunity because we have been hit by COVID. And these students for three years it’s embedded. And as I was speaking to before, attendance has been an issue for us. The competing demands of an opportunity for our students to get part time work and extensive part time work has impacted on their studies. So while we are expecting some really good results and one of our Aboriginal students is going to have exceptional results, which we're super excited about, we know that our results are not going to come on the trajectory we've had for the last number of years, which is a little bit disappointing for us because hard work is still there and students have also been less resilient and that will be a challenge for us in the future. When in doubt, they've opted out and no matter how much we've wanted them to remain in their schooling, that's been a challenge as well but we don't give up and we will to the to the deaf knell will br working with every student to make sure that they can maximise their opportunities.

Ruth Mussger: And I think we're in exactly the same boat. The other area that we have developed is our independent learning centre, which currently has around 120 students from ages 16 to 21. So that the opportunities to reconnect with learning and to make that final step to complete SACE is still there for those kids who take that easier route when when the going gets tough and we've had some above average state improvement in SACE completion through our ILC.

Dale Atkinson: It strikes me as speaking to both of you that there's a sort of an underlying philosophy of being really strict on the things that you're going after, but with the flexibility about how you approach those things. The need to be adaptive to contexts and shift your thinking when the circumstances in front of you change. What are your priorities given COVID and some other things that have gone on in the last 18 months, what do you priorities moving forward within the structures that you've already set up?

Ruth Mussger: The key thing is nothing new unless you take something away has been our mantra. Where does what we're initiating fit into our improvement agenda? And if it doesn't, then it doesn't happen. We had to remove a lot of barriers to learning, in particular the digital solution. It didn't matter how many different leasing and you know, those kinds of arrangements we had in place, we never got more than 50% buy in from our families and in the end we made the decision it is a crucial element and luckily we did. It was just before COVID to say we're just going to buy a device for every student. Everyone then has a level playing field. That changed a lot of what we were able to do in those early years in really maximising online learning opportunities, which for a lot of our kids when they were away and this year it was the teacher was away one week and then the student was away next week and then another group away the week after. There was no continuity and it wasn't smooth, but we were able to set up systems where there wasn't that lack of availability of resources for kids. The backwards mapping of skills and literacy demands has been our biggest buy-in for staff. They can see that if kids need these skills in year 12, they don't need magicy arrive in year 12 with them. They have to be developed and nurtured. So how do we design learning that enables that to happen? And once again, having the pockets of brilliance within our staff that take an idea and run with that Murray Bridge writing guide is an example of that. We know that our site improvement plan focused on literacy and numeracy, but in our complex sites there is more that goes on than that. And so developing a strategic plan around all of those elements and how they all fit together was really beneficial.

Dale Atkinson: So how do you as leaders create time in your day to day for the instructional leadership piece in the face of you know, those operational reactive demands, how do you keep a real focus on student outcomes?

Sylvia Groves: That is always a challenge and you can only have so many hours in the day. I'm very fortunate that I have an exceptional leadership team, so that allows me freedom and also because I have a lot of trust in them to do that role. We also have strong levels of communication structures, so that allows staff to reach to me and to other leadership and to support the voice across the site, which is really important. I make time for key meetings, but also fine tune the meeting so if it's not necessary, it's not going to happen and really value what's going on in those meetings and make sure I'm visible as much as possible so that I'm in tune with what's going on at the site. Observations has become a big part of what we do. Make sure that I'm in classrooms and the best part of that is it affirms what's going on in the school. And I get a lot of joy out of seeing what's going on and listening to the kids love it as well. When you come in, you know, they like when you sit next to them and they hear and see what you're doing, give feedback to staff, which, you know, they don't work in silos. They're part of a bigger system. That's been something we're really working on as part of our school processes and is embraced by the staff as well. I constantly try and listen to staff and find ways that we work smarter, not harder. What are the important things? So for us it's positive. behaviour for learning will be a big thrust to school and the giving the student agency.

But we can't let go of the work we're doing in numeracy and literacy and we also have to look at what are the good things we've got, what do we keep? Let's not keep changing for the sake of change as well. Having a clear class, being on the front line in terms of parent interviews, year 12 kids getting them in, all those sorts of things. That's what staff see as well. So it's really important. I'm not just in my office, I'm not just doing emails which you could do all day, but honestly, if you could. But that that's I need to be really visible and whether that at happy hour, in the classrooms, walking off and I'll be at the front gate in the mornings. The first lesson I often walk around to make sure kids are getting into class, it’s that visibility that's really important.

Ruth Mussger: And I'd go one step further also and say that good leadership teams don't happen by accident and it is leading from the front foot. We've found that like you we have so many staff who have spent their time want to head into leadership, don't necessarily have a leadership experience. So providing the opportunities for that training and as a whole leadership group, 24 of us all spent the whole of last year on leadership training and then carrying on this year into the Orbis instructional leadership.

The mantra is that we are all instructional leaders and it's not just about me getting into a classroom, it's about every single leader being in classroom and being visible around the school. And I think that the key thing for me, if it's not in my diary, it doesn't happen. So I do have to schedule get out of the office. That would be my key message to anyone.

Dale Atkinson: Well this is a conversation that I think could probably go on for another couple of hours, to be perfectly honest, if you didn't have to get out of the office and back out to running schools. Thank you very much for your time. This has been really great, so we thank you very much for your time.

Ruth and Sylvia: You're welcome.

Dale Atkinson – 0:00:00 to 0:00:16

Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the South Australian Department for Education,

Monique Miller – 0:00:16 to 0:00:19

and I'm Monique Miller, primary school teacher at Westport Primary.

Dale Atkinson – 0:00:20 to 0:00:30

In this series, we'll take you to a different school every month where you'll meet engaging educators who are working hard to inspire our students and make sure they are prepared for an ever changing world.

Monique Miller – 0:00:30 to 0:00:53

Today we're at Pennington R-7 in Adelaide's northwestern suburbs, which is on Kaurna land. We pay respects to elders past and present. Today we're talking about literacy. Shortly you'll hear from one of the guest speakers at this year's Literacy Summit about the science of reading. Plus, you'll hear from some awesome educators about how they've improved reading outcomes at their school. But before then, Dale, what's making news?

Dale Atkinson – 0:00:53 to 0:01:28

Thank you, Monique. As you just mentioned, the Literacy Summit kicked off last month for the first time ever. It was an online virtual event featuring literacy experts from right across the world. There are 13 presentations you can catch up on. You just have to head over to plink. And while you're on there, if you're a year one teacher you can register for our phonics screening check training sessions.That training is mandatory. There are three options to choose from based on your level of experience. This year's checks will take place in term three between the second and 27th of August.

Monique Miller – 0:01:30 to 0:01:48

Today we're at Pennington R-7 talking literacy. Literacy supports student learning across the whole curriculum and is fundamental to learning. Earlier, I caught up with Professor Pamela Snow from La Trobe University to talk about the Simple View of Reading and how it can help teachers and students.

Professor Pamela Snow – 0:01:49 to 0:04:04

Well, a Simple View of Reading is a theoretical framework. Can I say first of all, that I think the Simple View of Reading, the word simple is a bit of a misnomer. I like to refer to it as the elegant view of reading because it pares the reading process back for the novice to core skills and processes that have to be in play in order for children to achieve the final purpose of reading, which of course, is extracting meaning from text. So the simple view of reading is a formula, really, that's got two elements to it. One is the child's ability to decode or to identify the words on the page. So knowing that the black squiggles are in fact a code, that written text is a code for spoken text. So being able to crack the code that could be coding part of the formula and the other part of the formula is their language comprehension. And that's because we know both of those processes have to be in play in order for children to achieve that in point of understanding text. Importantly, the mathematical operator in between those two elements of the formula is a multiplier, not an addition sign. So it's not decoding ability plus language comprehension ability, it’s decoding ability multiplied by a language comprehension ability because anything multiplied by 0 is 0. So if you don't have skills on either side of that ledger, you're not going to be able to comprehend what you read. Or if you have weak skills on one or both of both sides. That's going to contribute to weakness in the reading process as well. So all children need to have capacities in both decoding and then in understanding what they're reading. It's possible to decode something that you can't understand. It's not possible to understand something that you can't decode.

The best example I can give you of that is the fact that I studied French for six years at secondary school a long time ago. I've forgotten an awful lot of my French vocabulary, but I do still know how French language works from a decoding perspective. I understand French autography, the writing system. So if you gave me a page of French text, I could read it out loud. But I couldn't really tell you very much about what it means, because my vocabulary store now is very thin. On the other hand, if you gave me a page of text in Arabic, I wouldn't be able to decode it. And therefore I wouldn't be able to understand it because I don't understand the autography of Arabic.

Monique Miller – 0:04:48 to 0:04:52

How does it provide guidance for student assessment?

Professor Pamela Snow – 0:04:52 to 0:06:52

Well, it helps us to break down some of the core component skills, and it's important to say to that more recent workers have broken down the simple view of reading into its component parts. A well-known example of that is the Scarborough reading rope that was produced by Paula Scarborough, back in. I think that was published around 2001/2002, and many listeners to this podcast would be familiar with the reading rope. But if they're not, a simple Google search will pull it up. And what Hollis Cabra did in that was to break down really the elements both in the decoding part of reading and in the language comprehension part so that teachers are very cognoscente of processes that they need to be addressing at an instructional level and also skills that they need to be assessing, um, in emergent readers. So if we look at the word recognition side of the rope, we're looking at phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, knowledge of the alphabetic system, the alphabetic principle, the recognition of some high frequency words that perhaps are leaning more towards what we might call less regular and maybe a discussion for another day. But it is generally thought that it's helpful for beginning readers to recognise a small number of high prescience words immediately on site like the word I and my and So that's the word recognition part of the decoding part, the alphabetic principle, technological and phonemic awareness. And then the language comprehension, part of the, um, Scarborough Reading Rope, which is also the language comprehension part of the simple view of reading, are factors such as the student’s background knowledge, their level of vocabulary, the extent to which they can understand their new syntactic structures to represent sentence structure and meaning, their verbal reasoning ability, their ability to grasp the fact that language is sometimes used literally and sometimes used metaphorically. So when we say something like, um, a piece of cake, we're not literally referring to a piece of cake on a plate we’re saying that it's really simple. And then, of course, there's also knowledge about print and print concept.

Monique Miller – 0:07:32 to 0:07:37

How can teachers like myself use the simple view of reading in the classroom?

Professor Pamela Snow – 0:07:37 to 0:08:21

It's been said that we have a language brain, but we don't have a reading brain, and I think if teachers keep that in mind, it helps to reinforce for them the level of difficulty that some children face in getting across that bridge. Some children will get across it quite seamlessly, it seems, and that's fantastic. But we have to have early years classrooms that cater to all children under the curve, and especially children who are packed closer to the tail of the curve and may need quite a specific boost in both of those components of the simple view of reading.

Monique Miller – 0:08:22 to 0:08:33

Absolutely. I can see in my classroom how some students can be fantastic at decoding, but their language comprehension just isn't there. So absolutely.

Professor Pamela Snow – 0:08:33 to 0:08:47

And they're equally reliant, equally important, and they're mutually reliant, so you don't become a successful reader if you've only got one of them, you have to have both of them.

Dale Atkinson – 0:08:47 to 0:08:58

Professor Pamela Snow from La Trobe University there. Let's go local now and hear from two educators who have embraced this theory. Principal Georgina Grinsted and teacher Stasha Andrews. Welcome to you both.

Georgina and Stasha – 0:08:58 to 0:09:00

Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us.

Dale Atkinson – 0:09:01 to 0:09:05

Georgina. Let's start with you. Why did you decide to adopt the simple view of reading at your school?

Georgina Grinsted – 0:09:06 to 0:09:34

Okay, so we had been working on the teaching of reading like everyone else for a really long time. But our results weren't really showing us that children were getting it. And so we knew that we needed to do something different. Two of my staff attended the literacy summit back in 2019, where Pamela Snow and others spoke. And in the process of that, people got really enthused about there's something new and different here that we could perhaps be looking at. We knew that it wasn't working, so why not have a go? So that's really where the whole thing started from.

Monique Miller – 0:09:34 to 0:09:39

And what was your experience with the simple view of reading? When did you first hear about it?

Georgina Grinsted – 0:09:39 to 0:10:19

Okay, so that was that was my first time. I guess some of my leaders, particularly my literacy mentor, had heard about it already and was already doing some preliminary work. We actually started this whole journey, though, on writing. So we started with how language works, and we wanted children and teachers to be able to understand how language actually functions. So we had done that whole as a whole staff, Um, and out of that, teachers started to say ‘I didn't know this stuff. I didn't know all of this information, so how could I teach it?’ And then they started saying, and I went to uni and I never actually got taught how to teach children to read, so we went okay, this is the journey that we need to go on.

Monique Miller – 0:10:20 to 0:10:25

My next question is for Stasha. How did the discovery of the simple view of reading change the way you teach?

Stasha Andrews – 0:10:25 to 0:11:26

Just building off of what Georgina said earlier. I'm an early careers teacher, and I had that same thought of I haven't been taught how to teach reading appropriately at uni. I hadn't been exposed to the Simple View of Reading. I had a pretty limited experience with it. So I've been on the same learning journey as everyone else, familiarising myself with a simple reading and learning about it. So I think for me, I now know the strands required to be a fluent, proficient reader. Through Scarborough's Rope. And I think one of the big learning areas for me has been understanding that vocab is crucial to making meaning, and it's connected to knowledge of the text. Um, so this is definitely changed the way that I teach changed what I teach, how I teach it. I've been focusing quite heavily on teaching vocabulary, one of the strands quite explicitly. So vocab’s been something that we've been working on as a whole school as part of our site improvement plan. It's also been part of our PLT teaching sprints and vocab being part of our teaching sprints has provided me with opportunities to engage in robust dialogue and discourse with my colleagues, with leadership and with our literacy coach here as well.

Monique Miller – 0:11:26 to 0:11:29

I really want to know more about these sprints you're talking about.

Stasha Andrews – 0:11:29 to 0:12:15

Yes. So we started with writing first on sentence structure. And then we’ve progressively made our way into reading. Um, so last year, we focused quite a bit on the vocab instructional routine and how we could work that into our daily program in our daily schedule. Um, so the instruction routine is all about introducing words and breaking it down, teaching it explicitly. Um, I modified the routine slightly just so I could focus on the more forms of the words a lot more. I added more activities to provide students with multiple learning opportunities to actually practice the knowledge that they were learning and actually apply it. Um, so we started with a vocab instruction routine, and now we've moved into a space this year where we're looking at comprehension. Um, and the complexities that come with teaching that.

Monique Miller – 0:12:15 to 0:12:38

I love. I love I've been teaching vocabulary as well, and to see that in their writing. It's just so fantastic and using it, and they're noticing it more and more of a upper primary lens, as opposed to what we think of, um, learning to read in the phonetics of it all. So, yeah, yourself as a upper primary teacher. Yeah, to sort of look at it through vocabulary and that more

Stasha Andrews – 0:12:38 to 0:13:28

sophisticated vocabulary. Yeah, definitely. I used that same term sophisticated vocabulary in my classroom as well. And it's been great because their writing has improved, their sentences have improved. Their vocab choices have improved where, you know, the kids say ‘Miss, I'm using more sophisticated terminology. I'm using more sophisticated words’, which is great. Um, so I've seen that change in their reading and they're writing, but I've also placed an emphasis on oral as well. I said, I don't want to just see it in your written stuff for your reading. I also want you using it in your oral language. Even the other day, I was on yard duty and a student walking around with me, and she was telling me a story about her grandmother, her maternal grandmother and I had explicitly taught maternal as part of my vocab lessons, which was great because she just naturally worked it into conversation so I could see her actually applying what I'm teaching. So that was really good. It makes it all worth it. Definitely.

Dale Atkinson – 0:13:28 to 0:13:41

So Georgina. Here we are. We're at a category two school with a really kind of diverse and interesting group of kids. Can you talk a little bit about the struggles that the students were having before you implemented the explicit teaching of reading?

Georgina Grinsted – 0:13:42 to 0:15:20

Certainly. Like I said, our data was really bad, and I guess we are a very data driven system. So for us as a school, we were putting in lots of effort and it wasn't actually going anywhere. So we really had to question What is it that we're doing? And is it having an impact? And that's really where the sprinting comes from because it's about teachers looking at one very small aspect of their practice and then trialling that for five weeks and then, if it doesn't work, getting rid of it and actually then replacing it with something that does. So for our children who don't have resources at home. They haven't got lots of rich language experiences. They're not being exposed to classic literature and good text materials. Despite the fact we were doing that old immersion concept wasn't working so as Stasha said what we needed to do was actually be more explicit. So the explicit teaching, I guess, was the fundamental aspect of what we changed and what we did differently. I also talked to my staff a lot about the fact that for children, a learning journey in a school should be like a trip around Australia, not a trip around the world, because there should be commonalities. There should be a common currency. There should be a common language. There should be sets of the culture should have things in it that are the same wherever you go, so that every year you're not spending the first term getting to know how this teacher does stuff. So I think for us, that's really been the next part of this is now we've got a consistency. Everyone speaks the same language. Teachers are doing the same activities. The sprinting brings year level groups together, and two and three classes are actually practicing the same technique with their children to see if it’s effective.

So for struggling readers, um, that whole notion now of being accessing the resources they need. So we got rid of all of the P M benchmark books, and we now use the decodable readers. So until a child can read, they don't see any other text other than decodable. And that's made a really, really big impact.

Dale Atkinson – 0:15:39 to 0:15:49

What's the, you correctly identified that we’re a very data driven system. What's been the overall shift in those numbers that you've seen since adopting the technique?

Georgina Grinsted – 0:15:49 to 0:16:34

So we've seen improvement across the board, particularly by year three level alongside of all of this, we've also implemented a synthetic phonics program, which is called Red Write Inc. They have a program called Fresh Start, which which we've used as an intervention with our older children, because until children have the letter sound connection, until they have really clear phonological awareness phonemic awareness, until they understand all that, no matter what level they're working at, that was very I guess, that was an aha moment for many of our upper primary teachers. We can keep pushing away at what we've done. But if children have missed those basics, it doesn't matter how hard we push, it's not going to change anything. So that's I guess that's really been one of the biggest direction changes for us as a school

Monique Miller – 0:16:34 to 0:16:42

start of what benefits have you seen for students into using the simple view of reading? And have these had impacts on student outcomes?

Stasha Andrews – 0:16:42 to 0:18:15

Yes, definitely had positive impacts on the ship and incomes. I think the improvement has been as a result of our understanding of how this learning takes place to the science of reading and how to actually address the breakdown. Before I started learning about the simple view of reading, I didn't know much about it. I couldn't address or identify the breakdown, but now I can identify the breakdown. I can figure out the problem. I can figure out what needs to happen next for that child, and I feel that all of us teachers have been on that journey, and we now can identify the breakdown, and now we can give them that tailored program. And so now the kids are actually getting what it is they need rather than some other program that's not really serving the purpose, and I think as well in my class I had groups of students who they could accurately decode what it was they were reading. But they weren't actually understanding the words they were reading. There was there was no meaning there. But then, on the opposite side of the spectrum, I had other kids who were focusing so much on the word recognition side of things that they just cognitively just didn't have the capacity to take in the meaning. And so we've implemented the explicit teaching of reading. We've upskilled ourselves with simple view of reading. We implemented the program that Georgina mentioned earlier for the older students, and so it's worked. They've got the alphabetic code now. I had one student who worked his way through the program. He now has his alphabetic code. He's reading with more fluency. He can decode unknown words, and with that, he's actually more confident now. And he's more engaged in reading. Before, it was like a chore for him and now he’s like ‘Miss Miss Miss, when’s novel study?’

So I've seen an overall confidence changed demeanor.

Dale Atkinson – 0:18:20 to 0:18:29

Have you noticed if that’s had a positive impact on that student’s overall experience at school? Does the confidence kind of expand out into other areas?

Stasha Andrews – 0:18:29 to 0:19:19

Yes, it has. Um, it's definitely helped him being more confident with his writing as well, because he's able to read all of the background knowledge, and his fluency has improved as well with it. I'm just so proud of this child. Sorry. So he's because he can decode the unknown words, his fluency has improved. So when we are doing tasks, he's actually understanding the knowledge and information that he needs in order to write about the topic. So there's more confident with his vocal choices going into his writing. His writing is improving, so it's just it's just been a bit of a flow on effect for him, and it's not that he's forcing himself to participate. He's actually genuinely wanting to engage now, and he's actually excited about reading or his writing. So it's just been an overall kind of positive.

Dale Atkinson – 0:19:19 to 0:19:23

Sounds like the most incredible thing is that something you recognize in your own teaching experience?

Monique Miller – 0:19:23 to 0:19:58

Absolutely. It warms my heart. It really does just hearing other teachers as well, being outside of the classroom and getting to meet you and hear yourself talk about it. I can relate to it so much as well and really understanding what part of reading that they're missing, um, to have good reading comprehension. Is it the decoding? Is it the language comprehension and being able to realise that and fix it really changes, make some outcomes. Georgina. What impact has the explicit teaching of reading had in your school?

Georgina Grinsted – 0:19:58 to 0:21:36

Well, I think first and foremost, it's had a big impact on teacher confidence. So it's not just about children. If teachers know and understand what it is, they have to teach, then they're going to be much better at doing that. So I think fundamentally, it's been about that. It's been about confidence. It's interesting. They've been teachers who've come and have been resistant along the way because as teachers, we get used to doing what works for us sometimes, and not necessarily what works for our children. Other teachers have said, ‘Oh, you know I did university, Why am I doing this again?’ And other teachers have said you've actually made me a better teacher. So that that's rewarding knowing that if you take, this was a risk, you know this wasn't something that just happened. We had to. We had to take a big risk. We we had to get people, teachers convinced that this is going to be better. And in the beginning they had to abandon a lot of things that they had been used to doing. And that takes a leap of faith. So I'm really grateful that I had such an amazing group of teachers who wanted to take that leap of faith with us. Um, and even those who were reluctant in the beginning, like I said, have come to it and realise that they are now more effective in their teaching because ultimately we want, we spend a lot of time and energy. A lot of thought goes into the work that we do. But if we're not having an impact, then why would we keep doing it? You know, that's a bit like banging your head against a brick wall. Um, so that's been a really big change. Like I said, the consistency there we now have the language that we all speak. The fact that the conversations in the staff room have changed, the conversations that I have with teachers are changing, and that's really important.

And then the flow on effect of when you see children for the Read Write Inc program, for example, we've just done a new round of testing because obviously we've got new children into our school for the start of the year. And children who come racing up and go I've moved from the pink group to the, you know, to see little ones really, really excited and know that they're progressing. You know, I think for many of our children they used to come to school and they didn't actually know whether they were making any difference for themselves. Um, so I think there's been just a very positive change to the culture of the school. Um and also that's had a, you know, an outgoing impact on the achievements and the results.

Monique Miller – 0:22:14 to 0:22:30

You’re so right, that consistency is key. And when you find something good, you really want it to run from reception, right through to year 7. Yes, Absolutely, So ladies, what advice would you give to a teacher or a school considering assessing and using the simple view of reading?

Georgina Grinsted – 0:22:31 to 0:23:15

Let's start from the whole school perspective. I think you need to take a risk. You need to say what we're doing isn't working. We need to do something different. And so, as the leader, you need to have that vision. Then, in my case, I've got an amazing team around me. Um, we chose because there was no real training and development we could access externally around this. We chose to do it ourselves. So we chose to upskill ourselves so that we could upskill teachers so that they could up skill children. So it has to be on all of those levels. Um, and basically, you need people who are willing to be learners who are willing to be vulnerable, who are willing to take on the challenge. Um, and willing to say, ‘you know what? This isn't working, so I'm going to try something different.’ That to me, I think is fundamental, Stasha?

Stasha Andrews – 0:23:15 to 0:23:34

I think from my perspective and maybe even the perspective of early careers teacher as well, I think one of my biggest things is make sure that you know and understand how our language works, have a good grasp of the of the language and also have a good grasp of how best the teacher, how students learn at best.

You know, we didn't learn a lot of this stuff at uni. Um, and so go out. Do your homework, do your research. And it's a journey. You're not gonna get it just like that. You've got to keep keep at it and keep learning. Um, you know, we've been on that journey now as a school for the last couple of years, and I think the science and the research is really clear on what we need to know and do to make a difference. It's just a matter of looking at the research. Look at evidence based practice and just give things a go. Just give it a go, trial it out and see how you go.

Monique Miller – 0:24:03 to 0:24:13

I love that. And finally, I have one last question which we're going to ask at the end of all our podcasts. What is one thing that you love about your school?

Georgina Grinsted – 0:24:13 to 0:24:39

Wow. Um, there are lots of things. I don't know that I can name it in one. But I do think going back to what I just said before, I do think it's about the commitment of my staff to make a difference for children, you know. As a category two school these children need all the help they can get. And everybody here I know comes to school every single day to do their very best for kids. And as a leader, I couldn't ask for better than that.

Stasha Andrews – 0:24:39 to 0:25:08

Look, I mean, I can't pick just one thing. I really, really love working here. I really love this school, and I love a lot about it. Um, but I think I would be I think I would agree with Georgina. I love how dedicated how committed we all our staff members. It's just even like Georgina said, the conversations in the staff room are changing. Everything we do is for the betterment of our kids, and that's probably one of my favourite things. Just how hard we're working to make sure that we have better outcomes for our students.

Dale Atkinson – 0:25:09 to 0:26:21

What I think walking in here this morning, like the enthusiasm and the energy kind of really just shows through it. I think it's just such an incredible place you've got here and the way the kids are kind of interacting. It's just such a positive vibe, and I think there's so many great things that are going on. So, um yeah, so thank you very much for your time and taking time out of the classroom. So I'd like to thank Georgina and Stasha for sharing their experience of teaching in South Australia and trying something new in the classroom. It's been fantastic hearing about how you both used and adopted the simple view of reading to improve outcomes for your students. Just a reminder to everyone that the simple view of reading is addressed in the advanced phonic screening check training session, which you can register for on plink. Thanks to everyone out there who is listening. We hope you've enjoyed today's podcast. Don't forget, you can subscribe to Teach on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts or head to our website education.sa.gov.au/teach. And we'd love to hear from you. If you have a question we could all learn from get in touch with us via Twitter or  Facebook or email us at Education.TeachPodcast@sa.gov.au.

Catch you next time on Teach.

Dale Atkinson 0:00:07 to 0:00:16

Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education.

Monique Miller

And I'm Monique Miller, primary school teacher at Westport Primary.

Dale Atkinson 0:00:19 to 0:00:29

In this series we will take you to a different school every month where you'll meet engaging educators who are working hard to inspire our students, and they may have had their own trials and triumphs along the way.

Monique Miller 0:00:30 to 0:01:05

Today we’ve travelled to Kapunda Primary School, which is an hour north of Adelaide on Ngadjuri land, we pay respects to elders, past and present. Are you an early career teacher like me? Perhaps you've been teaching for a while now and wondering what next step you can take. Today we’re talking about building your career in the teaching profession. There are four stages you can go through as a teacher, graduate, proficient, highly accomplished and lead. Shortly we're going to hear from two lead teachers, Belinda and Jemma about their experiences and advice for teachers, plus why you could have a lot to gain from teaching in the country. But before then, Dale, what is making news?

Dale Atkinson 0:01:05 to 0:02:36

Well we’re into April, so there's a lot going on first and foremost, consultation is now open on the next chapter of our workforce strategy. The workforce strategy is aiming to enable every person in the workforce to perform at their best. So together we can achieve growth for every child in every class, in every school and preschool. The focus this year is on designing a workforce plan for educational leaders and teachers. To help us shape this plan. We want to hear from you and your thoughts on the key issues, opportunities and also the barriers that are in the way of achieving our goals. You can have your say by completing an online survey, which we’ll share the link to in our show notes. Or you can submit a written submission via education dot workforce strategy at sa dot gov dot au. The consultation is open until April 30 and while we're talking jobs and developing your career, the department has hundreds of permanent secondary teaching positions available to start in the 2022 school year. This includes positions arising from the year 7 to high school move, So whether you're a public school teacher looking for a career change, maybe you're a graduate looking for your first job or a contractor to seeking a permanent role. And even if you knew to the public education system, you can apply for a secondary teaching position in a South. Australian public school. Applications open soon, so if you're a qualified teacher, keep an eye out for what could be your next great job at www dot education dot dot gov dot forward slash recruitment.

Monique Miller 0:02:37 to 0:02:45

Today we're at Kapunda Primary talking about how you could develop your career in education and why you might want to consider becoming a highly accomplished or lead teacher

Dale Atkinson 0:02:46 to 0:02:47

I reckon before we start that Monique.

Because you're quite an early career teacher at the moment. And I think you've got quite an interesting story in terms of how you got into the profession. So what? What made you want to become a teacher to begin with?

Monique Miller 0:02:58 to 0:03:24

Well, initially, I wasn't always planning on being a teacher but in that sort of important time in year 12, I had a really influential teacher, Anne, if you're listening, she truly made a difference in my life at that time. And then it became my dream to then have that impact on students in the future and yeah, that's when I guess I realised maybe I want to be in school for the rest of my life.

Dale Atkinson 0:03:24 to 0:03:33

That's understandable. But you, in terms of getting your break, your current position, I think essentially, you just made a bit of a pest of yourself.

Monique Miller 0:03:33 to 0:04:16

Absolutely. I was TRTing around the western suburbs at the time and working in some fantastic schools meeting students teachers all around And that's when I fell in love. I fell in love with my school and the culture, the leadership, the kid's effort, when I would go to work at that school, I just felt this magic. And I said, Well, this is where I want to be, went into the deputy's office and said, I want to be here. And if I have to TRT for four years, that's what I'm going to do because I want to be here. I feel a part of the furniture already so, and that's when they sort of said, Well, we’ve actually got a contract for you next year. So that was the best

Dale Atkinson 0:04:16 to 0:05:09

day. That's amazing. So it’s that combination, isn't it of like passion and persistence and really sort of being out there like it’s really about letting it known what you would like to do and demonstrating that to you, to your future employees. Really, which is a great story. You're doing really well out there. I know because I've spoken with your boss. We're also joined by Belinda Ramsey, who’s a lead teacher, national assessor and assistant principal at Roxby Downs Area School, and Jemma Worrell, who's the lead teacher and student wellbeing teacher at Kapunda primary school, which is where we are at the moment. Kapunda Primary in the Grain Belt, home to Map the Miner. I think also the town home to Is it the most haunted town in South Australia? Is that the thinking and we’re in a building that I would suggest is probably 150 years old? So any bumps in the night here?

Jemma Worroll 0:05:10 to 0:05:19

There has been some sightings in this building in particular, people have felt a bit of a presence. I've never seen anything but certainly heard

Dale Atkinson 0:05:19 to 0:05:36

Well, that's exciting. I think we can all feel a little bit more anxious. So away from the spooky bumps and over to Jemma. Jemma Can you tell us a bit about your role as a lead teacher and how it's different from other teaching roles because it's not something I think that's well understood.

Speaker 3 0:05:36 to 0:06:32

Sure. So my job now as a lead teacher and as a leadership member, at Kapunda Primary is to create that magic I guess that Monique was talking about. So making sure that that spark and fire that you want to help spread. So I think it's my job as the lead teacher at this school to help lead mentor, support early career teachers and to help them find that magic. Because we want more of you and Belinda And I were saying last night that opportunities that have risen from becoming certified and like today we've said yes to those opportunities. So I guess it's about constantly saying yes. The other role that I have gained from this lead teacher process is being a mentor for our early career teachers. And there's one particular teacher at the school who I've supported through, and I want to see her become credited as a highly accomplished or lead teacher because she is phenomenal. So that's really rewarding is creating the Moniques in our schools.

Dale Atkinson 0:06:33 to 0:06:39

So Belinda, you're also a lead teacher. What was it that it initially made you want to become a lead teacher.

Belinda Ramsey 0:06:39 to 0:07:36

For me it was about the culmination of my teaching career. I've been in teaching for 23 plus years, and it was kind of the natural progression for me. It was the next step. It was my own personal growth but also my impact on others working in a country site where we have a large number of early career and graduate teachers. I felt that it was a part of my my role and my personal responsibility to ensure that we maintain the high expectations that we have in all schools across all of our sites in South Australia, but also the exemplary practice that we see in classrooms it's so important for doesn't matter which career stage you're in your journey. It's about our impact on others it’s about our impact on our colleagues. It's about impact on every student that we teach. So for me, it was absolutely about supporting those and leading others around me.

Monique Miller 0:07:36 to 0:07:56

And good leadership is really what makes the difference in school as an early career doesn't matter where you’re at, if you've been teaching for 10 years, if you've got good support from leadership you want to go to school every day.

Jemma Worroll

And good leaders learn with, you know, they learn on the floor, on the ground with you. They needed to be modelling out, demonstrating and learning with you not telling you what to do.

Belinda Ramsey 0:07:56 to 0:08:25

Yeah and also the privatisation of the practise. It's about modelling, that exemplary practise and going in and doing classroom observations and the learning and the constant feedback because we're all learners and we're all growers in this profession. And that, to me, is one of the most rewarding parts of my role that I'm really passionate about. We need to ensure that our early career teachers have the opportunity that I guess Jemma and I had when we first came out in our first teaching roles.

Jemma Worroll 0:08:25 to 0:09:00

I think also the process for Belinda and I, we talked about as a lead teacher now, and Monique you already sound like you're doing this. It's just measuring your impact. So not, after teaching a lesson, what worked, what didn’t. How has my impact been measured and you reflect after every lesson. It's not just done and dusted. So you're asking the kids did that work? Did that not work? So you're just constantly reflecting on what you're doing as I guess a live learner. I think that's that's different from other teaching roles and that you're constantly reflecting,

Speaker 2 0:09:00 to 0:09:37

I think too, as a lead teacher, we’re kind of experts in the standards field. We know the standards inside out upside down because we lived and breathed it throughout our certification process. So the 37 descriptors at the league level Jemma and I could we could talk for another hour about those but we won’t. I guess just having that expert knowledge and sharing that with the people that we work with on a daily basis and bringing it to the fore of all of our coaching conversations and mentoring conversations our line management conversation. Because ultimately, our goal is to improve the outcomes of every student in every class.

Monique Miller 0:09:38 to 0:09:56

And constantly thinking about that throughout your practise, not just when it comes to putting together a portfolio or moving to the next level or anything like that. So I am really interested in the difference between a highly accomplished teacher and a lead. What's what's involved in that? And is it? Does it run as a timeline? Do you go to highly accomplished and then lead?

Belinda Ramsey 0:09:56 to 0:10:21

No, it's not fluid. Obviously, we start our teaching career at graduate, and then we moved to proficient. Some teachers might choose to stay at that level. Certification process is voluntary. So depending on what's actually happening in your site and your context, some choose to become highly accomplished or they choose to be lead. Depending on if they are running a lead project in a school again, it just depends.

Monique Miller 0:10:22 to 0:10:27

You might start the highly accomplished, then go to lead. Or, if you are leading in a certain area, you can go straight there.

Belinda Ramsey 0:10:27 to 0:10:36

So for Jemma and I. We both went from being proficient, proficient practitioners in our classroom context to lead.

Jemma Worroll 0:10:36 to 0:11:03

And the descriptors at the highly accomplished level talk about supporting colleagues. So it might be, I'm in my middle primary team and I might support the teacher next door. I'm helping support her, and I'm supporting her kids. At that lead level. It's leading a school, leading a group of teachers and having an impact on that more school wide level, so the difference is highly accomplished might be supporting one or two colleagues that lead is, I guess, leading by example,

Belinda Ramsey 0:11:03 to 0:11:07

which could filter into partnership level as well.

Dale Atkinson 0:11:07 to 0:11:24

Belinda, you're a national assessor, which I think is an incredibly intimidating sounding title. So I guess the first question is, Is it intimidating? And what are the key things that you're looking for when you're assessing teachers for certification?

Belinda Ramsey 0:11:25 to 0:12:24

Interesting question. I don't find it all intimidating. I guess I've been on both sides of the fence, so I've been through the certification process stage one and two and becoming a nationally trained assessor, I guess, it just harnesses more of my ability to know the standards and have that expert understanding off them and that deep understanding of what actually happens at classroom level and what we are saying with our impact widely amongst our teaching crew. Being an assessor has absolutely allowed allowed me the opportunity to network more widely within our department. Having conversations with like minded assessors about what we're actually looking for, and it's a very rigorous process that are aspirants at HALT go through and for us as assessors, we are looking for clear evidence of teachers alining their practise to the Australian professional standards for teachers.

Monique Miller

So what skills have you continued to develop by becoming certified teachers?

Jemma Worroll

One of the criteria to become certified as a lead teacher is we had to provide evidence within our portfolios of leading a whole school initiative that would have looked different for Belinda myself it was leading change, improving the pedagogy of teaching students with autism spectrum disorder. This school have made significant progress and growth with our pedagogies at that consistent level amongst all of our teachers. So in answer to your question, Monique, the skills that I've continued to develop since that time of submitting their portfolio is I've continued to roll out whole school initiatives and some of the things that I've done as a student wellbeing leader at this school is I’ve introduced wellbeing assemblies every fortnight to talk about wellbeing. And I guess, topical concerns within our school, topics such as casual racism, bullying, using great manners, the things that we're seeing in our yard. I bring to the forum every fortnight and speak, and it's a bit of a Jemma show, but the entire school gets the same message, and then we talk about it within the fortnight, which I've introduced. That sounds so it's so powerful. I want more. So those were just some of the initiatives that I think I've introduced, and I think having to provide proof of your lead initiative and that portfolio it hasn't stopped, like you just keep on saying Look, it's a bit scary. It's a bit out of my comfort zone, but I believe in it. I'm passionate and I'm going to roll it out in our school. So yeah, that's one of the things that that I've kept going since being certified.

Belinda Ramsey 0:14:05 to 0:15:27

I guess a skill at lead level and also at certified level is the skill of I guess diving into someone else's practise and knowing what we're looking for and aligning that practise with the standards. Also, I guess knowing our impact, the impact that we have on others, the skill of being able to communicate the language of the standards is really, really important when we're having pre-observation conversations with colleagues. So that's an area of focus for me is having the ability and I guess feeling very privileged, to be on that side and help support other people's practise and move them along and support them with their career. That's really exciting for me, the modelling of exemplary practise, using data supporting teachers to use data to inform their teaching practise is an area that we do dive into quite deeply at our site and consistently again using the language of the standards. Highlighting the importance of national certification as well. You know we want to be the best teachers that we can be and we have some amazing operators in sites across all of our schools in our state. It's really important to keep the conversation flowing about the importance of that. And we have a lot of teachers that are aspiring, aspiring to be highly accomplished and lead teachers. And Jemma and I feel that it's our role and our responsibility as leads to support with that.

And when you have the opportunity and I feel blessed in our site that we do have a large number of early career and graduate teachers, they're the ones that are coming through uni that have already put their portfolio of evidence together. They have a very clear understanding of the standards. They know about the career stages. And just because we're lead teachers, we don't know everything. So we learn from our early career teachers, and I have a really big respect for our early grad teachers that come out to our sites.

Jemma Worroll 0:16:04 to 0:16:05

Well, said Belinda.

Dale Atkinson 0:16:05 to 0:16:19

For those who are kind of on the cusp of this and thinking, God, this might be something that I'm really interested in doing, but well, it seems like quite a involved and detailed thing to get involved in. What's the What's the message for them?

Belinda Ramsey 0:16:19 to 0:17:36

Have a go. It's one of the most rewarding experiences in my career. It's actually the pinnacle and a highlight of my career to be certified at national level. A really big thank you to everyone in the national teacher certification team who supported Jemma and I on our journey. It's something you can't do alone we as teachers are naturally collaborators. We work together, we work as teams. We need to lean in and ask for support. Can you please come and observe me? Can you offer me some feedback on my lesson? How do you think I could do a warm up for this particular lesson?  It's vital that we have that. And for me, I really would like to get the message out there that it's really inspiring the networking that comes with being certified. Being able to attend HALT summits. So Jemma and I have attended two or three of those listening to Professor John Hattie talking about knowing thy impact. We know that that's what we do on a daily basis, and that's what we hope going through the certification process does for everyone that we work with is knowing our impact and that positive impact that we have on not only students and teachers, but also our parents and our wider community. And it filters out again to our partnership.

Jemma Worroll 0:17:38 to 0:18:05

That collaboration is so important. You do need someone to support you. You need to have someone hold your hand and you do it together. And you can do that with a colleague, a line manager, find somebody. But if you're thinking about it, get some support and go for it because there are plenty of pits of despair that you go through because there's a lot of work. But if you're doing it together, you're having opportunities to share with each other. You can get there, but you do need support for sure.

Belinda Ramsey 0:18:05 to 0:18:35

Our department provides that support to the national teacher certification team runs workshops, which Jemma and I both attended. And I think that's when I first met you, Jemma. You were presenting at one of them. So we have day one day two and day three, and that outlines the whole process from collecting your evidence to submitting your portfolio of evidence, annotating the artefacts and that stage one and then moving into Stage two, which requires a site visit from a nationally trained assessor.

Dale Atkinson 0:18:36 to 0:18:56

I don't have a teaching degree, but I'm going to email you about how I could become certified too. It sounds like an incredible thing, and you guys are so passionate about it and such incredible advocates for for all of it, I mean, it sounds like an incredible benefit for the school. It’s an incredible benefit for the teachers, most importantly, an incredible benefit for the kids.

Belinda Ramsey 0:18:57 to 0:18:57

Thank you.

Jemma Worroll 0:18:57 to 0:19:23

And look, teaching is a really busy job and, you know, finding the time to put your portfolio together is tough. You need to dedicate some school holidays to it, but highly worthwhile. And if you've got the support and some time, you've got to make that time happen if you want it enough. But as I said, we're both in leadership roles now. But this certification process and becoming certified as a lead teacher is still my proudest achievement in my teaching career this far.

Dale Atkinson 0:19:38 to 0:20:03

So we're also, I mean, obviously out in the country. We’re speaking to two country teacher's, country assistant principal Belinda on the way up in the car you were talking about working in Roxby Downs and going into work, dodging emus and kangaroos along the way. You’ve been to Kangaroo Island. You've worked all over the country and out in the regions What's the great thing about working in country towns?

Belinda Ramsey 0:20:03 to 0:21:29

There are so many, there really are. Jemma, you would agree, I guess being born and bred in the country for me it just means instantly you are supported and you know so many people that can help you, regardless of where you are in your journey. I remember walking into Roxby Downs Area School in 1999 and we had a staff of about 59 instantly, you know, 59 people, and then when you have your weekend barbecues or whatever you're doing, it's you meet partners and family. So you feel immersed in the community from day one, and that's exactly how I felt in all of the schools that I've taught in. And it's also getting to know the parents. I think they’re pivotal in the daily work that we do having our parents as a part of the process of educating children is, I guess, a number one for me. It's a priority to get to know my students inside the classroom, outside the classroom, what are their interests, who are there brothers and sisters, where they from before Roxby. What's their story? And how can we tap into that? And I think I have seen a lot of early career and graduate teachers come to Roxby that have fallen in love with it. I had a three year plan and 22 years later, I’m still there and still loving it and still a part of the community, so it gives you the option to become integral in the community in a range of different ways.

Monique Miller 0:21:30 to 0:22:26

So that leads me to why should teachers, maybe graduate teachers or experienced teachers consider working in rural and remote areas?

Jemma Worroll

I think that obviously Belinda's context and my context is very different. But we're both country. For Kapunda I guess we’re at a gateway to so many beautiful spaces, We’ve got the river 45 minutes away. We've got the Barossa just down the road. The drive to work is where I am able to reflect on my job. I am driving past the vines and I love the vines because without sounding like a poet, you really see the seasons. You've got the stark wood in the winter, you've got the budding green blooms in spring. You've got the fruit in the summer and the beautiful autumn colours of the leaves in the autumn. It's just it's a beautiful space, and we can link into those natural resources,

Dale Atkinson 0:22:26 to 0:22:38

Like the exposure to the range of different great things but different problems that schools face. So the breadth of experience is so much broader than it would be potentially in some of the metropolitan schools.

Belinda Ramsey 0:22:38 to 0:23:48

It is, and I guess we learned to be very resourceful. We don't have the opportunity to attend a training and development from 4 to 6 on a Wednesday night at the EDC, so we tend to tap into our local expertise. So it might be teacher stepping up and running, training and development sessions it might be tapping into Andamooka Primary School or Woomera Area School, depending on what we're doing. But we we really learn, to, I guess, grow our own talent and tap into that. I think that's very, very important living in the country where distance is a factor and distance absolutely comes into it. You know, it could even be if students are going on school camp before we get anywhere. It's a four or five hour trip. So I guess just having that in the back of your mind when you early career or graduate teachers come to I guess when you look at a place like Roxby it’s rural, it's remote, it's isolated and it is in the desert, so, you know, be aware of things like the heat in the summer and distances that need to be travelled. But so many positives, the beautiful sunsets.

Jemma Worroll 0:23:48 to 0:25:11

And, I guess for early career teachers that are thinking about heading to the country, I guess in Kapunda we've got when you move into a school that has so many parents and family members that are involved in the school, those people are so highly invested, their kids and for the community as a whole. So it's like a family around a family approach. And that's what happens here. We asked the why we know the families, as Belinda was saying, it's really invested that family feel.

Monique Miller

Now we don't have much time left, but I do need to ask you, What do you love about your school? Jemma, do you want to start us off? I’m looking around there’s so much, it’s so beautiful.

Jemma Worroll

Yeah, I guess it is about the community. So many people are willing to help for our students with high needs that don't have food. We've got community members that are making meals, freezing them. We've got local businesses that are donating money so that a child in care can get braces, they reach out. We've got local churches that are on hand. If I text her and say We've got a family that needs a meal, she will go to ALDI. She will get the food and she'll drop it off that day. So it's just We've got so many people that will put their hands up to say Who needs help? We're here. We're here to help.

Belinda Ramsey 0:25:11 to 0:26:10

For me, the camaraderie that we have on our our staff. We've got quite a large staff and we all work really well together. It's a hard working team with high expectations and every teacher, educator, parent at the heart of what we do every day, are our students. It's about working hard for them. It's about getting better at what we do every day and ultimately supporting the students and improved outcomes for all of the students from reception right through to year 12. But also we have the luxury of our students quite a few of them stay in Roxby and work because obviously we have the mine at Olympic Dam and for me I'm seeing that next generation come through. So it's really nice walking into Woolies in the afternoon and you get the Hi Mrs Ramsey how are you, and I guess you still have that connection and that contact with the students that you've taught. So I guess it's kind of like a big family in the desert.

Jemma Worroll 0:26:10 to 0:26:19

That’s right, and it's about the soul of the school. And if you've got the right team that are invested in the school like at Roxby, like at Kapunda, then it's going to work for the kids.

Dale Atkinson 0:26:19 to 0:27:15

That's great, thank you very much. Belinda and Jemma, you’re both incredible advocates for I think, working in the country and pushing yourself in terms of professional development and career progression. And I think I reckon we'll get quite a few enquiries and a lot of follow up off the back of this. So thanks to everyone for listening, we hope you've enjoyed today's podcast. Please don't forget you can subscribe to Teach on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listened to your podcast, actually, or you can head to our website, which is education dot sa gov dot au forward slash teach, where you'll also find our show notes and there'll be a lot of them there, including some email addresses and things that you might want to use to contact and find out more information along with your own listening. We encourage you to listen to the podcast during staff meetings to generate some discussion. And we'd love to hear from you. So if you have a question we could all learn from get in touch and send us an email at education dot teach podcast at  sa dot gov dot au

Monique Miller 0:27:15 to 0:27:16

Catch you next time on Teach

Dale Atkinson 0:27:16 to 0:27:18

See you guys. Thanks for listening.

Nick Kyriazis: He came up to me and goes 'man, this stuff is awesome, I can really concentrate on just teaching rather than trying to invent the wheel again'. And that's when I thought, yeah, well, that's exactly what it's for.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and I'm Monique Miller, primary school teacher at Westport primary school.

Now in this series, we normally take you to a different school each month. But today we've got a special episode that's taken us to the Education Development Centre in Hindmarsh in Adelaide's Western suburbs on Kaurna land. You probably know this if you've done any professional development in the city, if you've come to Orbis, if you've done your RAN training in the city, this is essentially,  where we are.

Why are we here today Monique?

Monique Miller: Today we're talking about something that affects all teachers. Curriculum. Curriculum is what we use to plan, monitor and assess student learning. [00:01:00] Here at the Education Development Centre, new South Australian curriculum resources are being developed that simplify the Australian Curriculum to support teachers and leaders.

Dale Atkinson: And we're joined by Alex Semmons. He's the Assistant Director of Curriculum Development with the department. Welcome Alex.

Alex Semmens: Thanks guys. Thanks for having me.

Dale Atkinson: So tell us a little bit about your role, because you know, as with all these job titles, it can be a little bit opaque. So what is it that you do here at the EDC?

Alex Semmens: Uh, I guess simply my role is supporting our brilliant curriculum managers to develop, um, the advice that we're using to support all of our teachers and leaders across the state. And another big part of my role is connecting, um, with as many people as we can to kind of get their input and their support and their advice to make sure that these resources have the biggest impact, um, to supporting teachers and leaders and making sure our students get the curriculum that they need.

Dale Atkinson: So I was talking to one of my friends the other day, uh, who is a late career change, uh, going to teaching. So he started out as a lawyer did quite a bit of court work, and he's moved now into a, being a, an English studies and [00:02:00] a legal studies teacher.

He was talking about the experience of going into the classroom for the first time as being roughly akin to having a big trial case where you're standing in front of the judge, you've got an entire jury, you've got an opposition barrister. You've got media in the, uh, in the courtroom too. And he said the anxiety and the pressure that's on you to perform is really similar in the classroom.

So, how important is it to have a strong curriculum and planning tools in place as a teacher when you go into that court back slash classroom environment?

Alex Semmens: Yeah, it's incredibly important. I mean, there's the, all the research, you know, PISA, TIMSS, ACER they all talk about, um, making sure you've got a really visible, viable curriculum for the students.

And as important as that is, Um, the Australian Curriculum, um, can be quite complex, um, in many aspects. So, you know, having the support behind you to really know how all the elements fit together, um, how the three dimensions of the curriculum [00:03:00] can be implemented for each learning area. Um, having that level of support is, is, is critical.

Curriculum planning is a really difficult thing. So the resources are there to support schools and teachers and leaders to identify any gaps. Um, make sure there's no unnecessary repetition and providing that support so teachers really have the time to think deeply about the kids, um, the students that are in front of them.

So how do we take the Australian curriculum and how do we shape it? How do we really align it to the context and make sure that our kids can engage with it and learn and achieve in those high bands.

Dale Atkinson: It's interesting because ACARA has put out recently a fairly substantial review of the Australian Curriculum.

They've gone out to the public and said, look, what do you think of this? And, you know, looking through the media coverage, which kind of pulls out various different elements. The thing that kind of jumps out is the size of this product and the complexity of everything that goes into the Australian Curriculum.

Within that context. Obviously, teachers [00:04:00] need some support with the curriculum planning, um, and we've heard that within the department, which has led us to produce the curriculum resources that we have. Can you sort of talk us through, you know, what's being created and how that's being used?

Alex Semmens: Yeah. I think it's really important to know that and remember that all of our teachers are on a, kind of a different journey with their curriculum.

We have amazing experienced teachers that are super confident in doing just fantastic work. Um, we have teachers that are new to the profession, teachers that have come from a range of different backgrounds and a different experiences as well. So when we talk about the support that we're providing to teachers.

It's really important to acknowledge that, um, the wide range of teachers that are all kind of brilliant and doing the best work that they can. Providing these resources from the scope and sequence to the units of work. And then, um, the planning tools that really kind of a comprehensive package that will hopefully give all teachers and leaders an opportunity to really reflect on the curriculum work that they're doing.

And then also have some really kind of clear advice that's going to help move their work forward [00:05:00] as well and make life easier and make their time more efficient and more effective because it's just so difficult being a teacher and finding the time to, um, do everything you need to do to give the students the support they need.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you talk about the scope and sequence documents. You know, if you're a teacher looking at this, what is it that specifically being provided how's that helping them in the classroom environment?

Alex Semmens: The feedback that we got from, from teachers across the state was there was a need there to make sure that the Australian Curriculum was accessible and easy to understand.

The Australian Curriculum is a great piece of work that's evidence informed and, um, you know, it's really robust and, um, helpful to our teachers, but the next layer to that was making it really obvious and easy to understand. So the South Australian scope and sequence documents, have taken the time to make sure the language is accessible, make it really clear what's thought at every year level, the key concepts and content and what to pay attention for, um, kind of stand out and taking every opportunity to kind of describe the elements of each learning area, the strands, the sub-strands and the threads, and make it visible, how those things work [00:06:00] together and connect.

We've also tried to bring as many kind of helpful elements into those resources as possible. So providing kind of a clear context statement about the learning areas and what's the essence of the learning area and breaking down the achievement standards. Um, as well and putting them all in one place. So any heavy lifting that we can do and put that into one piece.

So our teachers kind of have one document, can all be having the same conversations and, um, exploring the Australian Curriculum with real clarity when they're doing their planning.

Dale Atkinson: And I guess the piece that sits underneath that and the scope and sequence documents is the units of work, um, which are the doing, how do the units of work apply?

Alex Semmens: Yeah. So the units of work fit together to provide teachers with really high level advice for implementing each learning area at each year level. So a lot of curriculum planning has gone into that work. So all the units fit together and they provide that conceptual development and then really kind of targeted specific evidence-informed advice for teaching each learning area.

So what are the high impact strategies they're going to help our students learn the key [00:07:00] concepts and content for mathematics and science and HPE that are delivered in the most, um, supportive way, having that all in one place where teachers can feel really confident. That if they deliver those units, the way that they're intended, that the students who have, um, access to the curriculum, as well as the flexibility to kind of think about, well, what are my students really need?

Where are they up to? What is what's going on in my school and my site and how can I kind of tweak this and adapt it and shift it. Um, that really works for me and where I'm up to in my teaching and where my students are up to us as well.

Dale Atkinson: And I guess the final piece of the puzzle sits around, um, the support that's being provided around curriculum planning.

So if you look at the curriculum planning tools, what is it that teachers are getting from, from that product, which helps them to kind of deliver the work they're doing?

Alex Semmens: Well, I know the mantra of that work is, you know, how do you know and how do you grow? So, really helping, um, schools and teachers, uh, do a deep dive into where their curriculum planning is at, um, and there's four interrelated layers of whole-school learning area year level and [00:08:00] teacher.

And how do we know what we're working with? Really look at where we're up to and how are we going to implement the curriculum to avoid those gaps and repetition, and really provide the learners with the key concepts and content for where they're up to as well.

Dale Atkinson: The impressive bit about this work and the amount of work that's gone into it is that, I mean, this isn't something that's been generated from central office with us, just kind of thinking alright here's some great ideas, let's just plant these on top of the schools. I mean, this has been a very much a kind of grassroots built from the bottom up with schools and teachers involved, what are the benefits of having approached in that way?

Alex Semmens: It's just critical. There's no other way to do it. As I said, the advice is really targeted for every single learning area and it's written by teachers for teachers. So mathematics teachers, writing advice from mathematics to be used by their colleagues and I think the collegiality of this work is, is really obvious when you start reading through it, it's got this powerful authenticity [00:09:00] and it comes from a place of genuine help and support the team of curriculum managers are expert teachers and working with seconded teachers with current, you know, classroom experience, developing, you know, really high level advice that we know will resonate with teachers and really reflect what's going on in, in schools currently.

Um, and the other piece of that is working really closely with our principals, our education directors working with, um, Educators SA and our associations to get kind of constant feedback and input and advice on, um, how these uh, resources can have impact and really get to the knees of what's going on in the classroom.

Dale Atkinson: And we get to meet a couple of those teachers that have helped you um, very soon

Monique Miller: But before we continue our conversation on curriculum resources, Dale, what is making news this month?

Dale Atkinson: Thanks Mon. Um, if you're liking what you're hearing about the curriculum resources and, uh, and other supports and would like to be a part of shaping curriculum resources and developing these products, uh, then you might want to take part in the curriculum development skills register. It provides South [00:10:00] Australian school-based teachers and curriculum leaders, the opportunity to work in the curriculum development, directorate, and contribute expertise and advice about curriculum, teaching and learning. You can have your say on the curriculum that can be taught in our classrooms. If you'd like to share your expertise and want to find out more, including how to apply head to the curriculum development skills register page on EDi.

Uh, we'll put a link up here in our show notes as well. Also happening this month. Are you looking for a contemporary way to engage students? And if you are, then why not learn about how to use Minecraft in the classroom? The kids bloody love it and, uh, they're all over it. So, uh, we've got some free training coming up for those listeners that don't know, Minecraft's an open-world game that promotes creativity, collaboration, problem-solving. Um, the course that we've got going is most suited to teachers of students from year three to nine. Uh, the trainings available face-to-face or online, but please get in quickly because registration is closed on Tuesday, may 18. We'll share the registration form show notes as well. And lastly, next week [00:11:00] is National Volunteers Week.

This year's theme is Recognise, Reconnect, Re-imagine. The theme highlights an opportunity to explore how volunteering might be re-imagined through more flexible and inclusive roles, including back on school and preschool grounds, now that COVID restrictions have been eased somewhat. To the more than 20,000 volunteers working in our schools, preschools and centres, of course we say are very big thank you.

Monique Miller: Today, we're at the Education Development Centre in Hindmarsh learning about new South Australian curriculum resources that have been developed. Like many teachers, you may already be using them to help plan your classes. With us is Alex Semmons, Assistant Director for Curriculum Development. This is a huge piece of work and what I'm wondering is how did you go about creating these resources?

Alex Semmens: Yeah, it's, it is, it's a huge bit of work and the responsibility and the opportunity is so motivating for the team. It starts with research, you know, what does the [00:12:00] evidence tell us about curriculum and the importance of curriculum planning and what that looks like?

Um, what is the research and evidence say for each of our learning areas about helping our students achieve in those high bands and move their learning forward, and then lots and lots of collaborations.

Monique Miller: As all teachers know, time is precious and I guess this is fair to say that. This is going to be a real time-saver in the classroom.

Alex Semmens: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. From the feedback that we've got already from teachers about the great help, that it provides at that really high level about how does the curriculum kind of fit together? Um, how do all those elements combine and what does that look like for our students to just really kind of clear intentional advice around literacy and numeracy, and what does that look like in Hass and science and, um, taking the brilliant advice from those guidebooks and putting it into a kind of a learning area context has been a great help.

The hardest part of being a teacher is, um, the time that's needed to develop curriculum for your students to develop those resources and plans and this work really speaks to how much heavy lifting can we do? What does all the [00:13:00] resources and guidance and modelling that we can provide that gives teachers as much time as possible to think about the learners that they've got in front of them. And what are those each individual students specifically need? How can we take this resource? How can we use it? How can we adapt it to our students' needs to make sure that they get the entire curriculum? I think we're on a really exciting journey with this work.

There's going to be lots of collaboration over the next few years about um, the impact of these units and how we can always constantly make them better, how we can, um, provide better advice, better resources, better support, um, getting in as many teachers as we can through the, um, skills register to kind of contribute to this work.

So we're always responding to what's going on in every single classroom in South Australia and provide really high level, helpful advice that teachers can grab a hold of and shape to make sure it meets the needs of their kids as well.

Monique Miller: Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely agree and using these resources is not going to be a one size fits all.

We're going to be adapting [00:14:00] them to, to, as you said, to every child in our classrooms and for me, what's so important is building these relationships with our kids, knowing what they need and sometimes, um, you know, planning can be overwhelming as well as meeting all the other needs. Um, that you need to of a teacher.

I want to just go back to these units of work. How do classroom teachers adopt and adapt them in their classroom?

Alex Semmens: Yeah, there's lots of opportunity within the units to think about the advice and then what it means for the students in the classroom. The teacher tips, um, in particular, I think are incredibly helpful, uh, taking the high-level advice and then thinking about what does it mean for me and where am I up to in my teaching and where did my class look like?

So those tips are really targeted and draw on the experience of, um, the amazing curriculum managers and seconded teachers that we've got working for us. Or working with us, sorry to go you know, what have I learned? What have I picked up along the way? Or what's an opportunity here to do this a little bit [00:15:00] differently or what are some additional resources?

So, um, the teacher tips in particular, within the unit are designed to be really conversational piece between the resources and in the teachers using them as well. So I think, um, they're going to be, uh, an incredible support that takes the teaching and learning advice and assessment advice, and kind of opens the doors to how can we do this a little bit differently and how can we kind of cater for the different needs of our students as well?

Monique Miller: Now, I know you're releasing resources every September. You had some come out last year and I'm actually really looking forward to what's coming this September as a year four teacher. Can you give us a bit of insight into what's coming?

Alex Semmens: Yeah. So we'll have scope and sequence documents coming out for languages, um, across a range of those disciplines, building on the English, maths, HASS and science resources in years 3, 4 and 10, and our first suite of resources across years, 5 to 8 for the arts, technologies and health and PE. So, uh, really exciting that we're, um, working across all of the learning [00:16:00] areas and we can really get the curriculum implemented at a really high level right across all the disciplines.

Monique Miller: Amazing. I cannot wait to get my hands on those. So most importantly, where can we find them?

Alex Semmens: Uh, EDi. So on the EDi site, um, under the teaching and learning menu, there's navigation to all of the resources there.

Monique Miller: Thank you so much, Alex, as the assistant director of curriculum development, it's been so good to hear from you and now you've invited some seconded teachers in today, uh, to tell us a little bit about how they've produced these resources.

Alex Semmens: Yeah. We have Nick Kyriazis from LeFevre and Sam Moyle from Brighton. They've just been outstanding individually and then collectively all of our seconded writers, just a wealth of knowledge and expertise and current classroom experience just our work lives and dies with that. So it's just been absolutely fantastic having access to people like Sam and Nick.

Monique Miller: I'm actually a  little bit starstruck here. I've got one of my old high school teachers, uh, Nick Kyriazis [00:17:00] and, um, I was actually wondering what's it like being a seconded teacher and working away from the classroom on the curriculum?

Nick Kyriazis: Oh, it's been great. When I got the call to get invited, to write some material, I thought what a tremendous opportunity to check practice. And I've been fortunate enough to be influenced by some pretty reasonable, heavy hitters in, in, in around the maths industry. So it was really good to get that all down and then get it out to the maths community. It's a bit scary though, cause you're worried everyone's going to judge you by your work.

Um, but just to get it down on paper and get it out there and you have an opportunity to really place a microscope on yourself and it's quite humbling as well, I suppose, um, and realise where your own flaws are and to get that all right and, and share. It's been awesome. It's been really good.

Monique Miller: Yeah, we all sort of have a little bit of imposter syndrome stepping out of the classroom, but we, you know, you are the expert in your field and it's awesome to be able to share that with maybe new graduate teachers or really anyone.

These are [00:18:00] accessible by any teacher, maybe you're moving year levels or, um, specialties. And how about yourself, Sam? How have you found uh, working on the curriculum?

Sam Moyle: I've really enjoyed it. I was surprised at how much I've enjoyed it, the challenges that it posed, uh, the opportunity to really connect with the, the research and the best practice.

Uh, I'm a little bit lucky. I have the opportunity to continue teaching point 2 at school. So I'm doing my year twelves and they're a particularly special group so I really wanted to stay with them, but I've really, really enjoyed this experience far more than I'd expected to. I usually like a challenge, but this has gone beyond.

And so I've been lucky enough to be seconded for a second term. I'm really enjoying it.

Dale Atkinson: Like looking back on some of the products that have been created, what, what are the things that you're most proud of, of having done?

Sam Moyle: Uh, I guess the, the opportunity for me to write a couple of new experiments and then to build in, uh, my, my ideology has been very much about innovative and dynamic approaches to the curriculum, [00:19:00] lots of hands-on and kinesthetic approaches. So being able to build that in and perhaps empowering teachers to be able to do experiments, particularly the challenge that, and to really engage students, as opposed to using a video, things like the iodine clock reaction, and I've even managed to sneak in the Briggs-Rauscher, or even if schools don't have the actual materials just to have that video, but to really show the forward and reverse reactions with chemistry.

And so, yeah, having, having those opportunities to, um, to create new things and share them.

Monique Miller: I do like the sound of, if you don't have the resources, we've still got, you know, a video that you can watch, that you can experience what it is that you're teaching.

Sam Moyle: Yeah, absolutely. There's a number of different options and I guess high tech and low tech as well.

So if you're, um, Uh, not advantaged by having the technology in the classroom. There are other ways of doing that. So there's lots of different ways to skin a cat, really. And so providing those in the teacher tips, uh, for schools to be able to implement.

Dale Atkinson: Well it's really about imparting  some of the benefits of your own wisdom [00:20:00] really isn't it.

In terms of you spent quite a bit of time in the classroom, build up a body of knowledge and understanding and wisdom and, in terms of what works and has it been sort of something that's enjoyable to be able to pass some of that information on to, um, to other colleagues.

Nick Kyriazis: Oh, it's been awesome. I've got two little stories.

I had a really fresh rookie and this person didn't know that I was one of the writers and I like Sam I'm teaching uh, just one class at school. Um, cause you've got to teach something, right? Like we're teachers. Um, and he came up to me and goes, man, this stuff is awesome. I can really concentrate on just teaching rather than trying to invent the wheel again.

And that's when I thought, yeah, well, that's exactly what it's for. And then I had a real seasoned, uh, lady, um, who I've known for a long time who was sort of stuck in the old way. And she's really now just changed their outlook. And most of the part is looking at this conceptual. Conceptualised way of delivering the maths.

Um, and it's really changed the way that she's done stuff and [00:21:00] she said she feels like a young out of uni teacher again, because she's getting to learn all the new ways, which is really good, which is really good. I was really pleased. And so they're the things I'm sort of proud of the effect it's having on the teachers that are already out there and getting them to come along with the ride with us.

Monique Miller: Fantastic. Um, what sort of support is available for you when working on these documents.

Nick Kyriazis: I've never felt alone. We're in a team and we're all bouncing off each other all the time. Um, our manager Catarina, she's always in contact and we meet regularly. If I ever think I need something here, I just can't think of anything.

I'll just send an email out to my network and somebody's got something. So, you know, we make these units, but they're definitely not a hundred percent ours. It's like, uh, it's almost the whole community coming together. Get these things out. We're just sort of a conduit sometimes. And yeah so the support is really good.

Sam Moyle: Yeah. It's definitely a collaborative thing. Um, we've been doing the same thing through teams, uh, sharing documents or websites that might be useful, but I also bounce ideas off of [00:22:00] the team back at school and ask for their opinions on, on how to deliver this. And do they think that that would be useful in the classroom and the support that I've had from my leadership as well to, to be involved with this has been really good.

Monique Miller: It really goes to show that it does take an army.

And for any, any teachers out there that are thinking of taking some time out of the classroom and sharing their knowledge, um, would you recommend teachers taking part?

Sam Moyle: Do it. Absolutely do it. It's been the most amazing professional development for me, the opportunity to really dig deep into the research and the best practice which we always talk about but don't always have the time to implement when we're teaching full time. So having that opportunity has been amazing and that's part of why I've been enjoying it so much. Don't be scared. It's been really good. And the flexibility of the work too has been amazing. It's lessened the burden on my wife as well, because I dropped the kids now off in the morning. Um, she can get to work, um, and then they get picked up [00:23:00] by their grandparents and then I'm going to work in the evening anyway. Cause if you're in the classroom, you're working. So I just catch a bit of time. It's nice, have the dog next to me most of the time.

Monique Miller: That always makes a difference. Now I almost did forget on this podcast we do like to ask, uh, what do you love about your school? What I did want to ask instead was what's one of the best things you've been able to do here that might help a school?

Sam Moyle: I guess, really challenge, uh, old sort of pedagogical approaches, uh, not to get rid of them, but to really extend them and then to incorporate the, the technologies, uh, and perhaps the more innovative pedagogies or newer pedagogies as well, but not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but to really combine and enhance the learning.

Nick Kyriazis: I spoke at one of our faculty meetings about, it's not about changing who you are and what you believe in, but it's about developing your practice into something so that it can evolve through time. It's not just sitting still. [00:24:00] And that's what I think these units are doing really well. I know their purpose is you take the whole unit and you use it, but, you know, we don't need to change experienced teachers.

We just need them to move forward with the education that's happening. Rookie teachers will need more but can you imagine if everybody goes on this journey, if everybody does this and I have no doubt in my mind that it would change the outcomes across every school, every student in the, in the state. Yeah. And parents seeing the experiences the kids are now getting, hopefully you can get more of that parental support at home.

I was just listening to the radio this morning and the data being pushed out was kids. They surveyed thousands of kids. I think it was in Indonesia, one of the Asian Pacific region countries. And it was the parents who supported that kid's schooling more at home, did better. And hopefully this gives kids a better experience they share with the parents and they get involved with it all.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. It's just such a, such an important piece of the puzzle. Um, so I want to thank Alex, Sam and Nick for [00:25:00] joining us today. The curriculum resources are out there. I think, you know, the one thing that's really come through today from, from the discussion with all three of you, is these products have been designed and developed by the teachers who are out there in South Australian public schools.

And they're specifically targeted toward the things that we know are going to provide uplift and support, um, and a great outcome for our kids. Um, they're out there, they're free. They've been designed by your colleagues and they're really very accessible on EDi and also in the show notes. So it's just, you know, it's a, it's an amazing thing.

Please go out there, check them out if you haven't already. Um, if you're using them really think about whether you want to come in and, and help to, you know, design the next lot, because you know, this is something that we are going to be putting out and pumping out every year and updating as we update the curriculum.

So please think about coming in and, uh, and providing the support. So yeah, when it's a fantastic thing. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. And thank you all for listening. We hope you've enjoyed today's podcast. Don't forget you [00:26:00] can subscribe to Teach on Apple podcasts or follow us on Spotify. If you're enjoying the podcast, leave us a review.

Tell your teacher friends, uh, or get in touch via our email education.Teachpodcast@sa.gov.au. You can also head to the website education.sa.gov.au/teach where you'll find all the show notes, including information on where to find the curriculum resources. Thanks for listening.

Monique Miller: Catch you next time on Teach.

Natasha Paffett:: It helped that I felt valued with the skillset that I brought from primary school. And I had to continuously remind myself that I didn't have to let go of that and that I could hold onto those skills and still use them, embed them into my practice here in high school. And that they were still valued.

Sting: Teach.

Dale Atkinson:: Hello and welcome back to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson: from South Australia's Department for Education.

Monique Miller: And I'm Monique Miller primary school teacher at Westport primary.

Dale Atkinson:: We're four episodes in now and we would love to hear from you. What are you liking about the show?

What do you want us to discuss? If you've got any thoughts, send us an email at education.Teachpodcast@sa.gov.au.

Monique Miller: We're down south today at Wirreanda secondary school, it's one of the three pilot schools that welcomed to year 7s to high school in 2020, from 2022 year 7s will be part of high school for all public school students in [00:01:00] SA.

This move brings us in line with the rest of the country. Now it's a big change. So today we'll find out what's worked well for Wirreanda, what some of the hurdles have been and how they've overcome them.

Dale Atkinson:: Caroline Fishpool: is the principal of Wirreanda Secondary School. And Natasha Paffett: is a former primary school now year 7 high school teacher.

So welcome to you both. Thanks Dale. Thank you. So we came into this morning. I mean, there's still a little bit of a construction field vibe here at Wirreanda as you prepare for next year. Um, can you tell us a little bit about what's going on and a little bit about your school and what you're trying to achieve.

Caroline Fishpool:: So building wise, as you've walked in, we've been under construction obviously for the last 12 months.

And we've been really fortunate with funds coming into the school and also to increase capacity. So we kicked off this year with around 1100 students and we anticipate that will increase to a maximum size of 1300. So we've had a number of, um, building sites happening across the school, which has been absolutely fantastic.

And I think you know, ultimately teaching and learning wise the new facilities have really enhanced that work that [00:02:00] we've been doing as a school we see ourselves as a really, I think, unique secondary school. So we do say quite proudly that any student that arrives we can cater for really richly. So we are a complex site.

We've got 14% students with disabilities, 12% ATSI. We're a special entry specialist, sports school, one of two officially recognized in south Australia. And we obviously have an incredible disability unit and a special class program on site. It's a really rich culture as well that we have across the school and because of that and I think that's why we're also really passionate about bringing the year 7s into the school.

Dale Atkinson:: So you were one of the three high schools to put your hand up to be a pilot school for year 7 into high school. What's it like being the guinea pig?

Caroline Fishpool:: Being the guinea pigs been really interesting in saying that we wanted to be the guinea pigs. We were incredibly passionate, including myself as the principal that year 7s belong in secondary schools. Um, and you know, when certainly the rumblings had started a long time ago through the government that the year 7s were going to move, we were, as soon as it was announced, it was happening we made that jump and really put ourselves into the space that we want it to be considered to be a pilot.

So for us. You know, we'd launched into a [00:03:00] considerable change journey, which has been ongoing for the last six years here for us, with particular, with middle school transformation, and work we were doing in the senior school, the year 7s, were in essence, we felt the final piece of that puzzle that we want it.

Um, and hence, we went after it and we were announced as the pilot, which was really excited for the work we were doing.

Dale Atkinson:: And how's it feeling so far? We are just a little ways in, but you've got a bit of a flying start on everyone else.

Caroline Fishpool:: We have. Yeah. And we quite often talk about the fact that we've been in an incredible situation to be a pilot. We've been given fantastic support by, you know, different units of the department to actually make that leap and we've also done it with a few little baby steps. So think schools are raring to go and preparation mode at the moment to actually do that double cohort. And that's a really, really big step for schools coming into, you know, the move across south Australia next year.

Monique Miller: I'm curious how the year 7 students have been fitting in? The

Caroline Fishpool:: The year 7 students been an absolutely fantastic addition to our school. We expected that. And I think one of the biggest surprises that we've had in a really nice way is how they've [00:04:00] contributed to the community in that they're kids. And it's been a really nice addition to the school and around the place, but they've fit in really well.

Natasha Paffett:: And all of the other year levels have really embraced new students as well. We allocated a specific place around the school that the year 7s could go if they needed to have their own space and not many students actually use this area, majority of them have integrated into the whole school and all the other year levels have been playing with them.

And, and. And hanging around them as well.

Dale Atkinson:: Yeah, because I think that's one of the anxieties that, um, teachers and parents have about the move. Is that how do you transition kids who are younger into an environment where there are adults essentially, you know, you've got 17, 18 year old kids at year 12, what's that dynamic like?

And how do you smooth that out?

Caroline Fishpool:: We were really bracing ourselves when we were preparing to bring in that first cohort of year 7s about that, there was huge anxieties. We were being told about the little, little year 7s coming into a big secondary school in saying that when we actually took the year 7s in, they were raring to go to come into a high [00:05:00] school, they absolutely were. The anxieties I think that we then very readjusted ourselves with the approaches we had were from parents and particularly parents that didn't have students in a high school setting yet. So what we did do, and I think we've aligned it really well with our year 7 move is, and we do have a vertically grouped house structure. So obviously we have, um, 7s, 8s and 9s within the home groups together. And then we have 10s, 11s and 12s. But what we have seen is a restructure of our student leadership and some structures across the school where, um, our senior school students do work with our middle school students, including the year 7s. And I think the year 7s have really embraced that as well.

Dale Atkinson:: And are there ways like transitioning the year 7s in has created opportunities as far as the whole of school environment, set up. Is, is it something that's kind of really stood out as a, as an improvement that's happened?

Caroline Fishpool:: Yeah, absolutely. I think I talk about the for us as a school daring to dream really early on was important with our middle school transformation piece.

And that was because, you know, we're making improvements with our, you know, senior school outcomes and we knew that we [00:06:00] couldn't get them. Um, long-term unless we actually had the middle-school transformation piece logged in. And I think as well, one of the big things that we've seen is. Student leadership and the opportunities, because we did do a complete restructure across the board of what that looked like.

And particularly our year 7s and 8s within that piece, whether it's about student voice every day or student leadership have been incredible. And I think sometimes we, perhaps when we were planning for the year 7s , didn't give the year 7s enough credit for what they could do when they come in to the big school.

Monique Miller: Yeah, it seems like they've, they're adapting really well.

And they've got the support and you're making the changes that they need and ready for them.

Natasha Paffett:: From a curriculum point of view, for some of our NIT teachers with subjects that band from year 7 to year 8, it's really easy to say the progression, if you've got the year 7s as well. You know what they've done in year 7 and you can progress them through year 8 and so that's really helpful as well.

Dale Atkinson:: Yeah. So you're feeling that. Uh, in your own practice in the classroom, that you're able to kind of provide some continuity and, uh, and really picture and step out what's going to happen over coming years.

Natasha Paffett:: Absolutely and what's been [00:07:00] helpful for me is coming from the primary school perspective.

I can also see the progression of where they've come from and see where students are at from that progression as well.

Monique Miller: What did you do with your leadership team to welcome our year 7s?

Caroline Fishpool:: Probably a few different approaches that are happening as compared to what we did. So there's some schools, obviously leadership wise that are restructuring to come in.

Once we got them, we did kind of front-load and fund resources ourselves to bring that team in really early, probably 12 months before. And we had the year 7s. So we as a leadership team restructured some additional positions within that vertical group in system that I talked about, and particularly the complexity, like I talk about with a focus here with individual student growth.

Um, I think probably the really clear thing though, when we were appointing those leadership positions was a really clear focus on, um, that, you know, people weren't being hired to maintain the status quo was really clear when we went looking for people and built capacity within the site as well, um, that we wanted things done very differently.

Um, it we've been, you know, really successful within that. But I think developing that shared vision within that, you know, daring to dream piece in [00:08:00] middle school transformation was really key for us.

Monique Miller: And you're also saying that, um, having primary school teachers come in has been super beneficial. How many primary school teachers have you brought in and what value do they bring to the school?

Caroline Fishpool:: That's a difficult question to answer. So within the pilot, we did specifically bring into early on and we had some different processes within that. However, in saying that we've always been a school that's gone looking for primary trained teachers and tried to work with HR and how can we, we can employ them because I think primary teachers have got incredible skills that some secondary teachers don't have.

So it was really interesting when we talk about schools being really clear about why they want to employ primary teachers. We do, we want primary teachers. All of our current positions advertised. We've got 15 permanent positions that are all tagged with primary teachers can apply for these. So very deliberately.

You know, we talk about that middle school transformation piece, individual students, and being able to progress individual students with some agility in classroom practice. We've seen that primary teachers have got those skills. When I talk as a principal, what's one of the biggest surprises that we were not [00:09:00] expecting.

We had completely braced ourselves and organized structures around how are we going to induct people like Natasha, et cetera, into this very different environment. It's a big secondary school. It's particularly curriculum areas. As soon as we got the primary school teachers, we had to do a full 360 and readjust ourselves because we suddenly realised that it wasn't about inducting them into our school.

It was about them maintaining their skills and sharing that with the staff. And that was a big shift for us. With the process we had put into place. We had to do a full 360 and readjust ourselves. Um, to that, and I think we've managed to do that well slightly.

Monique Miller: Yeah. So how did you find that induction and the transition?

Natasha Paffett:: It was smoother than I thought that it would be Caroline and the team here put a lot of things in place and a lot of induction days in place. And so it was, it was quite a smooth progression. I also think that it helped that I felt valued with the skillset that I brought from primary school. And I had to continuously remind myself that I didn't have to let go of that.

And that I could hold onto those skills and [00:10:00] still use them and embed them into my practice here in high school, and that they were still valued. And I think that was really important. And for leadership here to show me that they were valued, I think that really helped me.

Dale Atkinson:: What's the mindset and the ways of thinking that perhaps is different between primary and secondary, that you've been able to bring across.

What are you bringing to the table? I guess

Natasha Paffett:: There's a lot of individual differentiation strategies that I have brought from a primary perspective and the use of, uh, of knowledge of what each student, the level that they're actually at and how you would differentiate and cater for those students. I think that that's a key element seeing the progression of learning, because you can actually see where they've come from.

And we've got some students at our school as many other high schools where they're actually lower than the year 7 level. And so for myself, I can see where they've come from and have that knowledge there, which I think is really helpful. Uh, there's a lot of key pedagogical strengths as well about how you conduct lessons. And there are definitely some strength in breaking up, uh, tasks and the way that, that things are delivered as well.

Dale Atkinson:: Money's nodding so much. [00:11:00] Yeah.

Yeah. It's amazing. Isn't it? There's so many complimentary skills and have you found that some of the secondary teachers are seeking you out and looking to you for some support with the, with the year seven level students?

Caroline Fishpool:: We all do, don't  we? I

Natasha Paffett:: I was really surprised when I first came in, how many people pulled me aside and were asking me for really specific ideas and the way that they would do things and telling me their situation and what their class structure was like and how I could help.

That's been fantastic for me. I think that people actually value the skills that I bring. And now as a leader, when I'm doing observations and things that I can also give them ideas, which they wouldn't have thought of before, because I can, yeah coming from a slightly different lens,

Dale Atkinson:: Which as a principle Caroline is incredibly valuable.

Caroline Fishpool:: Yeah, absolutely. Hence why, you know, within the current employment process, we have certainly opened all 15 permanent positions for primary teachers to apply for them because we are, we are still on the hunt for some [00:12:00] fantastic primary teachers to bring into the fold as well.

Monique Miller: Before we continue the conversation and answer some of the questions our listeners have sent through Dale, what is making news this month?

Dale Atkinson:: Did you know, our website is full of new look year 7 to high school information for school staff, students, and families. Visit education.Sa.gov.au/7tohs for details on everything from enrolment to student benefits, country considerations and job opportunities for teachers as well.

Also on our website, schools can access a new suite of bullying prevention resources, including videos and printable guidance to address peer to peer bullying, the topics cover diversity, online safety and protective physical environments that reduce bullying incidents. Guidance is also available for parents and carers, which is useful to share with your wider community.

Uh, we'll put the link to those resources in our show notes.

Teach

Monique Miller: We're at Wirreanda Secondary School today, the school welcomed year 7s to high school last year with us, is [00:13:00] principal, Caroline Fishpool:, and year 7 teacher Natasha Paffett:. So in terms of curriculum, were there any areas of the curriculum that challenged the year 7s moving into high school?

Natasha Paffett::  I think in terms of the curriculum, I, I feel like they were you know, ready for what we've got to offer here. However, some schools and primary schools in the partnership might not necessarily have as much technological use or access to the technology. And so some of our students coming into a school where they're using technology more frequently, um, might be a little bit more challenged.

However they've quickly adapted. The students are now across all of our, we use Google documents and the drive and Google classroom. And they excelled in all of those areas. They pick it up very quickly.

Monique Miller: Have you noticed that there's been any difference between year 7s to year 8s starting high school?

Caroline Fishpool:: Yeah, I think like I talked about, I think, which has been a really nice addition, the year sevens are kids. One of the main observations I made really early on was year seven's being in the, you know, even when, out in the yard, when you go out there and they're playing chase and they want to interact with people on [00:14:00] yard duty, et cetera, meant that year 8s then started to go, okay, we can be kids as well. I think there's always been really big pressure in that year 8 age group, where they come through to us and there's pressure to be a high school student.

You're a young adult. And I think that shifted the year 7s where they are immature. There's a real rawness to them, which we really like. That's meant that the year 8s have gone yeah. We can be kids as well. In saying that they're much smaller. We said really early on compared to what we're used to and they need breaks within their learning and certainly we've been doing that as a school with some professional development around our long learning blocks.

Dale Atkinson:: So you actually need to think about how they're learning and their developing brains.

Monique Miller: Space for growth as well. Yeah. So it actually kind of leeways us into, um, Vanessa's question from Coromandel Valley primary school.

She has emailed us asking how play will be supported at high school. She says, she believes that play has often been reduced too early and that age appropriate playgrounds and equipment should promote challenge, activity, and [00:15:00] wellbeing for older age groups, she sees year 7, joining high school as a great opportunity to make it available for adolescents.

So to what extent can we promote play through high school?

Caroline Fishpool:: Well, that's a question that we could talk about for half a day isn't it? That's a great question. And that's certainly something that we can talk about because I don't disagree with components of that question. We, um, very early on had our year 8 interdisciplinary groups doing some research around that.

So one of the things we were talking about before we had the year 7s here is do they need play equipment? There's two sides to that part of that, we were hesitant to put in young base play equipment because they come into high school and they want that high school experience. But we also completely embraced the fact here that kids need movement and play time.

So our year 8 groups actually did some research a year and a half ago and pitched them to myself and some other panel members. So they actually went out into our primary schools and did research with 5s, 6s and 7s coming through about what would those students like to see? There are projects that are now going to be done.

And there was a whole mixture of kids [00:16:00] talking about, we don't actually want little kids play equipment, but we do want some equipment. So some of the things that the kids pitched were obviously the good old handball courts and they are going to be rolled out, um, there was certainly some um, equipment such as adult type swings, et cetera, including for wheelchair access, which is applicable here at our school.

And there were also some areas pitched in regards to nature areas where students can sit et cetera, and some kind of ninja type adult recreation equipment. So we are certainly going to continue to do some work on recreational spaces, but we've made a conscious decision not to put primary school type play equipment in because they're in high school.

And I think students are coming into year seven seeking out that high school experience.

Dale Atkinson:: You've had the year 7s for, for just over a year now. For both of you, what have you learned? Is there anything you'd do differently?

Caroline Fishpool:: I think one of the things that we also learned was not to forget about the year 8s, particularly in that double cohort move come in to next year. So as a school we've really embraced and tried to celebrate with them that [00:17:00] they were coming in as not the youngest cohort. Ever, you know, that's the first time that that had happened with a year 8 cohort. So we've really tried to celebrate that fact and with the year 8s coming in with the double cohort of next year.

Dale Atkinson:: Yes. There's a few rites of passage, things that you need to celebrate as well. Isn't it?

Caroline Fishpool:: Absolutely. I think I was worrying about budget allocations and strategically aligning visions, et cetera, and all the year 7s wanted to talk about was graduation and jumpers. Rightly so, because when we talk about rites of passage, that was what was important to them.

So, you know, that was, I think, a good adjustment for me at the start to make sure that I was not just focusing on those big pieces systems wise, but also the stuff that mattered to the students.

Natasha Paffett:: Coming from a primary background, I've seen year 7 students who've been eager to learn eager, to be stretched, very energised.

And I was worried that coming into a high school setting that would be dampened a little bit. However, that's not been the case. These, these students are still extremely eager to learn and be stretched. They've got a lot of energy movement's important within classes and lessons, and that's [00:18:00] been fantastic to see

Monique Miller: It's so great to hear that the transition has gone so well. And because I have been hearing from people who were a bit worried and a lot of the teachers from my school, you know, they're so little, they're not ready. And a lot of the kids are stressed as well. But is there any advice that you would give to teachers and leaders about the transition to year seven from seven to high school?

Caroline Fishpool:: Transitions are a really important area I think. Natasha and I were just chatting about this this morning. I think some schools do transition really well, it's one of those schools then, you know, transitions, not a new thing. So, you know, there's lots of discussion happening at the moment with the year 7s moving in about transition and so some schools will continue to do what they're doing in saying that there does need to be a really shared understanding across the primary site sthat feed into secondary sites. And obviously some schools have a lot of schools that feed into them, but that shared understanding of transition and what it actually looks like.

And I think one of the things we really embrace and model here is that transition is not just that term 4 transition days, it's ongoing. Um, and for us transition is year 5s and 6s as well before they get to us in [00:19:00] year 7.

Natasha Paffett:: Routine is  key. When they're coming into a high school setting where there's a lot of changes and they've got different teachers, different subjects. Within your own subject I think it's really important to have some familiar routines because they've coming from such a routine based environment into the high school.

Dale Atkinson:: Is there anything that surprised you over the last 12 months, that's really knocked you back on your heels?

Caroline Fishpool::  I think how confident the year 7s are early on when we were trying to kind of gather some different information about what we needed to be prepared for that so it wasn't gonna catch us out. I think we probably didn't give the year 7s as much credit as we should have before they got to us about how resilient they are and how confident they are. As much as I talk about the, you know, them being kids and that rawness that we really love at this school with them coming into the community, that resilience and confidence we didn't probably give them enough credit until we got them and realised that that was the case.

Monique Miller: I can say, they're going to, they're going to smash it for all schools. They're ready. We can't finish our podcast without my favourite question. Uh, what do you love about your school? Natasha, do you want to start?

[00:20:00] Natasha Paffett:: Yeah. I love so many things about our school. Uh, one of the main things I love about our school is the passion of all of the teachers and the drive and the want for, to improve and success.

And that the focus is always around our students and how we can best support them. So I think that's fantastic. The other thing I really love about our school is the relationships that I have with so many of our students and we have some wonderful students. I think that really is what makes your day as a teacher to have those genuine connections.

Caroline Fishpool:: Yeah, I'll think I'm a bit biased, but I do love our school. Um, I think probably two of the things that I really love about the school is obviously community. Like we've talked about today and I think students and we're really proud to be a part of the Wirreanda Secondary School and Morphett Vale community in general.

Um, but also I think one of the things that that makes me really proud is that we're so future-focused and agile and we're constantly trying to with really clear purpose, get better at doing things. So, yeah, it's a fantastic school.

Natasha Paffett::  It is. It's an absolutely fantastic school.

Dale Atkinson:: It's so positive. And just what you said there [00:21:00] about being future-focused and agile, I think it really shines through, um, just your willingness to take on the challenge of, of having year 7 into high school. I think you guys have done an incredible job so far and, and listening to both of you, it makes me incredibly optimistic and positive about the transition next year. This is a huge thing for any education system to undertake and for any individual school to undertake. But, um, the way that you guys have gone about it and looking around here, the positive attitude and, and the great vibe in the, in the school is really just blows me away.

This is going to be a fantastic thing for you guys, a fantastic thing for the system. So that's great.

Natasha Paffett:: Primary school teachers give it a go. If you have any thought in your mind that you might want to come to high school, give it a go. It was a brilliant step for me.

Dale Atkinson:: Yeah, that's amazing. And that's, that's great to hear.

Thank you, Caroline. And also Natasha for joining us today. And we'll be back in just a few weeks time with another episode. See you soon.

Tara Budarick You know, I'm an Aboriginal person. I'm Ngarrindjeri. So it's an opportunity for me to give back to community, but also learn more about myself and my identity as an Aboriginal person. And so when you get to go to work every day and you're working with community and you can see what students are getting out of the program, it's absolutely incredible.

Dale Atkinson: Teach. Hello and welcome back to Teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education,

Monique Miller: and I'm Monique Miller, primary school teacher at Westport Primary.

Dale Atkinson: Today, we're going to learn how Aboriginal students are fulfilling their potential in high school and beyond through a range of opportunities offered by the South Australian Aboriginal Secondary Training Academy or SAASTA. You may have heard of SAASTA before it provides Aboriginal high school students with a unique sporting and educational program.

Monique Miller: Fresh off their Santos Aboriginal Power Cup win, we've headed north to Para Hills High School, which [00:01:00] is on Kaurna land. We pay respects to Elders past and present. Just last month Para Hills High School made a clean sweep at the power cup, both their girls and boys football teams won. SAASTA students secured the curriculum excellence award, and one of their academy students Tamryn Walker won the award for best guernsey design.

Dale Atkinson: And it's a beauty. Uh, so there's lots to celebrate, with us today is Tara Budarick, the academy's specialist academy's coordinator and Nick Drury, SAASTA's school operations and VET coordinator.

Welcome guys. What is SAASTA?

Nick Drury: SAASTA is a senior secondary program. So it's a SACE based curriculum generally where students in 10 to 12 participate in what we call academies, uh, hosted in schools around South Australia. It's a culture based education program. So we use sport and health and all kinds of other things from around community to engage the students, but at the core of it, it's a SACE curriculum that gets students learning about their cultural identity.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's interesting. Isn't it? Cause I mean, I think like from outside of the system, the thing that's really [00:02:00] visible is like the football team, the netball team and the power cup, but there's so much depth to it as a program. Can you sort of go through how the two elements of those sort of the sporting and the academic interact.

Nick Drury: I guess we sort of touched on it before in the introduction that anything we do such as the Aboriginal Power Cup Santos, Aboriginal power cup that we recently did, it's really grounded in the education component first. So students do weekly curriculum in their line structures or come to an academy to do the program.

And that's an Aboriginal studies curriculum or an integrated learning curriculum. So again, SACE grounded, but the students need to complete certain tasks in the build up to a visit from Port Adelaide Football Club or in the build up to a carnival so, it's really that reward based program where we're going to ask you to put a little bit of effort in, in the classroom and the reward is the sporting component all those, those really fun things that we get to see. We try and make it fun in the classroom too. But generally that's the reward at the end of the day is that if we do all of the appropriate things, get our attendance up, get the work done in the classroom. Then we're going to reward you with really cool experiences like the football carnival.

[00:03:00] Monique Miller: I was wondering how many schools are involved in SAASTA

Tara Budarick So we have, uh, over 60 schools that are involved.  I guess we should talk about how SAASTA is actually made up and what our programs are. So the school-based academy here at Para Hills fits into one of the programs that we have, and that's our school-based academy, of which we have 22 across the state. So the APY lands have their own programs, but otherwise students across all the other areas of south Australia can access, uh, one of the 22 school-based academies that we have, and that's where our SAASTA head office staff provide curriculum support to schools to actually implement the program with their own staff and students.

Some of those academies, um, have students who come from schools in neighboring areas so that they can access the program and then we have our specialist academies. So we run 6 specialist academies at the moment where we deliver the programs and students apply and attend the out of school programs one day a week for the entire year.

Again, that's targeted towards students in years, 10, 11, and 12. Um, five of them [00:04:00] are sports-based so netball, basketball, soccer, men's and women's AFL. And then we have, um, STEM academy, which is obviously looking at science, technology, engineering, and maths, and it's a combination again of education and then the engagement with sports or, or the science component.

Dale Atkinson: So it's really, I mean, pointed toward helping kids complete their high school education and attain that SACE, isn't it?

Tara Budarick Absolutely. It is that very fine balance between curriculum and SACE or VET subjects and engagement to support people to our young people, to connect with culture, but also, you know, be really successful, in their education and, and SACE completion.

Dale Atkinson: Really interesting. And you sort of touched on this before we, we started the interview about some of the partnerships that have been formed with businesses outside of, uh, outside of school. So I guess like the VET pathways is really key for a lot of these kids in terms of being able to see what the opportunities are that exist beyond schooling.

Nick Drury: Yeah, definitely. So that's been a real growth process for us as well. So we started out in the VET space, really just doing the sport and recreation, which was a fantastic tool to engage, but also [00:05:00] teach some of those employability skills, transferable skills that can go across a lot of different sectors.

Then that sort of moved on to us then identifying that students wanted to look into those different pathways more and more. So diversifying our VET certificates to offer things like hospitality, construction, community services, maritime. So like really trying to diversify to make it more of an individual choice as to what you want to do. And then that's with the department's new policy that's sort of being implemented ready for next year. That's been another level of growth for our program to move towards to create what we've called the ACE program, Aboriginal Career Exploration. And that's really around starting at a year 10 level at getting students to understand what it is to be in the workplace.

So employability skills. Working really closely with the workabout team to try and embed some of that learning at an earlier age bracket, but also giving the kids a chance to work through some industry engagement activity. So they understand what it's like to be in different workplaces and start the conversations about where they [00:06:00] want to go.

Dale Atkinson: And what's the response been like from, from businesses out there?

Nick Drury: Oh, fantastic. People are jumping on board left, right and centre. So, I mean, it's, it's a building industry that people want diversity in the workplace and they're seeing not just that it's a ticket box anymore, that there's real value in having diversity in your workplace.

And I think we're sort of at the real ground roots of that, where, because we've got an access to such a variety of kids across the state, people are coming to us to say, well, how can we connect in so that we can really start that learning early, but then embed some young people into our businesses and our operations. They're going to stay with us for a long time.

Dale Atkinson: Really encouraging. Tara you sort of touched on this a little bit earlier about the diversity of opportunities across the entire state. Can you just talk a little bit more about the support for rural and remote students through the VET pathways?

Tara Budarick I feel like one of the key components of the program is connecting with the community that the students are living in.

So it's not just our amazing teachers within the schools that are pivotal to the program success. Um, it's about connecting with community organisations that are specific [00:07:00] to where the young people are living, but also, you know, the roles that Aboriginal people within the school, like our ACETOs play in, you know, connecting school life with home life and community life. And, um, really having that really holistic approach to making everything successful.

Monique Miller: And how does the Aboriginal studies module fit into that?

Nick Drury: In the school-based academies, if we look at that specifically, that's really the core subject that the students are doing. They will come in and there's four tasks that are part of a SACE subject at a stage one level.

So the students will essentially do three before the power cup. And then one of them will be based on some of the activities they do there and come back to participate back in their school. But all of those tasks are really wrapped around learning about Aboriginal history and learning, I guess, because we've got an all Aboriginal cohort, we get that real ability to learn a little bit more about culture and identity as well.

Bringing in Aboriginal people to deliver it is really central to that approach. So if the school don't have an Aboriginal teacher like a Tara that, you know, we can just place out the front straightaway, then they need to go out and they need to [00:08:00] engage with the community, engage with their ACETO and bring people in who have that relevant knowledge.

And get them to be delivering and co delivering in the classroom so that the students are learning about that sort of true history stuff, what their place in the community is and what positive role models have gone for them and use that moving forward. So that's really the core of the Aboriginal studies topic.

Dale Atkinson: But it's such a complete kind of package of, of educational options really, isn't it like, regardless of where the kids are, or like how engaged they are in various different paths of learning or what their interests lie, there's something that can really capture them.

Tara Budarick Yeah, I think when you see the students engaging in the program and they're in a room full of peers, um, who all have similar interests and experiences with education. It's really, really heartwarming to see students actually wanting to be engaged and you talk to primary school students and they, they know the SAASTA program and they aspire to be involved because they know that they can go into a program and experience success and just feel super connected to community and I guess the educational [00:09:00] process.

Dale Atkinson: Is that something you've experienced Monique with, with kids at your primary school?

Monique Miller: Oh, absolutely. Always looking for more opportunities and ways to connect with their culture. Yeah. So, so important. I was wanting to know a little bit more about the benefits of events, like power cup, which brings remote, rural and metro students together. And how does that benefit with peer to peer learning.

Nick Drury: It's really a community event at the end of the day, like the curriculum is obviously in the classroom and that's that real specific one-on-one sort of learning that they're going to do in the classroom with their peer group. And like Tara touched on before you've got cluster academy.

So you've got eight or nine schools coming together one day a week. So that's that sort of first touch point where they come together. And then from there, when an academy comes together with another 450 kids from completely across the state, that opportunity to come together and I guess, celebrate culture, celebrate their achievements.

And then football was just that, that real vessel, that across a lot of our communities in Australia that everybody's really heavily involved in. So it's just a really nice, [00:10:00] fun way to wrap it all together and get those experiences where they get to sort of talk about what they've been doing in their own schools and put it on show in front of everyone else.

So it's really important as that sort of hook to, you know, keep doing the work in the classroom. And then that's the really fun, engaging community experience that you gonna get to bring at the end of it.

Tara Budarick I think because their involvement in the SAASTA, um, power cup is not granted or given automatically is they have to earn their spot through, um, their attendance, engagement and work completion throughout the semester in the lead up.

So when they earn their spot and they know that they're actually going to be playing in the team, They're super excited. And it really is a whole community event where families come along and the community organizations find a way to link with students while they're there as well, 500 students and all family members coming out to celebrate and to support really is super amazing.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it sounds like an incredible event. And can I ask you about your highlights? And I think there are a couple of very obvious ones. For both of you, what are the highlights for you over the last 12 months? What are the things that you really [00:11:00] enjoyed about the program and being teachers?

Tara Budarick So for me, it's more specifically with the specialist academies or, or being involved in an Aboriginal organisation or an Aboriginal program.

Because when I grew up, I grew up in a, in a community that was quite isolated and we didn't have many opportunities to connect with culture. And so I grew up doing Aboriginal studies via open-access as a year 12 student. And so then when I went on to become a teacher, I have specifically worked in Aboriginal schools because, you know, I'm an Aboriginal person, I'm Ngarrindjeri. So it's an opportunity for me to give back to community, but also learn more about myself and my identity as an Aboriginal person. And so when you get to go to work every day and you're working with community and you can see what students are getting out of the program, it's absolutely incredible because I know myself as a student, I didn't have that opportunity.

Um, and I really, really believe, and we have the data to go along with it that the outcomes for our students are, you know, so much higher because of their involvement in these programs. They're going on to aspire to higher education and, and transition to [00:12:00] university and TAFE studies or employment. And we, you know, slowly working away at increasing the outcomes overall for our young people, which is incredibly exciting.

Nick Drury: How do you go after that. So I guess for me I've been in the program for a really long time. So I've seen a lot of the change points in the program. And one that I'm really proud to have been a part of in the last six months is the ACE program that we spoke about before, I think it's, it's really getting us to a point where we're making it student centred, it's really around what's your pathway? What do you want? So you might experience 15 workshops in all these different industry areas. They're the most boring things you've ever done, but when you walk into that one workshop for an hour or two, and you're just engaged from the minute you're in there, and this is just me and you see the eyes light up and the kids come away and have those anecdotal conversations.

That's just so powerful for me to, to have those chats and see the looks on their faces when they say. I never even thought this was a job. I didn't know you could do that. And now this is I'm desperate. I want to do this. Tell me more, give me more like that's my highlights is when you say the looks on the kids' [00:13:00] face for that, you know, you're getting it right and that we're helping them get what they want.

Monique Miller: That's so wonderful. It sounds like they're in good hands and they're getting the best experience and they have got the connections with their community and yeah, it's really, really wonderful. That's happening here.

Dale Atkinson: So awesome to hear. So Tara, Nick, thank you very much for your time.

Monique Miller: And here we have Timothy a senior student from Para Hills High. Tim, can you tell us a little bit about what you do with SAASTA?

Tim Tuikaba: Uh, yeah, sure. We're pretty much given a wide variety of like assignments and stuff, but personally, um, one of the assignments that we've done was a Indigenous health issue where you have to research it and respond to it. And so myself, I did like a podcast and a petition and also had the opportunity to speak to Steven Marshall himself.

It was at an award event, a multicultural award. I went out and spoke to him and got some information. That's kind of like an example of how we go in and engage with the community and connect with other people and, um, kind of step out of our comfort zone's a bit.

[00:14:00] Dale Atkinson: I saw the photograph of you with, the Premier and then a little bit of the background on that. So the health project that you were looking at there is essentially around, um, the lack of dialysis machines in APY lands. Is that right?

Tim Tuikaba: Yep. Yeah, that was it. Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: And so what were the, what were the findings of your studies?

Tim Tuikaba: So I found that there was a bit of work being done at Coober Pedy so it was about, I could be wrong on this last one, which that goes like, oh, $5,000 or something being raised. It probably could be more, but, um, there's still quite a bit of, um, lack in other areas such as, uh, like Leigh Creek and other rural areas.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. So it's a kind of a combination for you so you just sort of touched a bit earlier on the fact that you're an international Gridiron team. So obviously that's one element of the work you're doing alongside your studies. Can you talk a little bit about the sports element of what, what you're in involved in?

Tim Tuikaba: So I do you find SAASTA, I did play basketball for a little bit as well. So I did, um, I was a part of the specialist academy for basketball.

That was a very good experience as well. They provided these pathways where students could choose from so like sports, recreation. I'm really grateful that they provide all these opportunities [00:15:00] for us to choose from, and then you choose it and then they kind of tailored to what your interests are and how you want to learn.

Dale Atkinson: And so you're looking at potentially sort of health sciences yourself because you're in year 12 this year.

Tim Tuikaba: Yeah. Yeah. A bit of health sciences and sports. They've been really good at putting me in contact with people that helped me out with that. But a great example was Karnkanthi or Wirltu Yarlu at the University of Adelaide.

They've helped get me in contact with one of those guys.

Monique Miller: How long have you been part of SAASTA?

Tim Tuikaba: So I've been a part of SAASTA from year 10 until now. I do believe they're starting to implement a program called SAASTA connect. It's more of an entry into SAASTA.

Monique Miller: You can get those kids from younger years, kind of getting ready to get in.  How have you found your experience overall?

Tim Tuikaba: Overall I've found my experience really well. Definitely going to miss it for when I leave, like reflecting on it, I'm really grateful for having all these opportunities to connect with my culture as well as to be surrounded by other Indigenous kids and people that share the same culture with me, it's really [00:16:00] empowering and really motivates me kind of to, you know, like learn more.

Connect more with the students, as well as like power cup itself. It's like really great to see that many other students in the same position as you to come together and play the sport. And it's just really empowering, you know?

Dale Atkinson: So, so what would your message be to, um, you know, other kids 12, 13, 14?

Tim Tuikaba: Looking to join SAASTA or.. Yeah, I'd definitely advocate for them to join SAASTA and give it a shot. It's really fun. You learn not only about yourself, but more about your community, other communities, how to really put yourself out there and apply for jobs. Just being more socialable as well. It's really good.

Monique Miller: What do you love about your school and SAASTA?

Tim Tuikaba: I really love that my school's like really  cooperative with SAASTA. They understand that I'm going to be gone one day a week. They kind of tailor my not only education at school, but they take into account that I have other work from SAASTA and they're really like easy to blend the two together, so like equal efforts on both sides.

Monique Miller: Yeah,it seems like, you know, SAASTA is there to support your learning. So [00:17:00] therefore for them to be accommodating is super important.

Dale Atkinson: Thanks very much for your time, Tim, and appreciate you coming in. Thank you all for listening. We hope you've enjoyed today's podcast. Don't forget you can subscribe to Teach on Apple Podcasts or follow us on Spotify. If you're enjoying the podcast leave us a review. Uh, you can also head to our website at education.sa.gov.au/teach where you'll find our show notes.

Monique Miller: Catch you next time on Teach.

Dale Atkinson: Cya.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome back to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. It's been a little while as we've had a little kind of COVID related hiatus, which has prevented us from getting out to school. So we've slightly recalibrated the format.

We're talking to a few people from within the department, um, about some things that hopefully important to you and useful to you. Today, I'm in conversation with Claire Wood, who is the department's Manager of Literacy and Numeracy practice and we're talking about phonics. Now, the reason we're talking about phonics is that since 2018, we introduced a Phonics Screening Check in South Australia at Year 1 level. And we've done about 13 to 14,000 students per year for each of those last few years. The results have been pleasingly heading in the right direction, which Claire, you could probably take some credit and comfort in those [00:01:00] results as that's really good.

So phonics, let's talk a little bit about what it is. Now I am the father of a three-year-old daughter who has I think comfortably one of the most annoying educational toys imaginable, which was purchased for her by my mother, who is a teacher. And it is a soundboard, uh, with a number of noises, I think, designed to move her away from the Sesame Street style alphabet to perhaps a more sounds based program.

Now, presumably mum bought that for my daughter, for reasons beyond upsetting the tranquility of my domestic existence. What is the point of this thing? What is phonics? What are we trying to achieve with this?

Claire Wood: I think there are probably more annoying toys out there, but, and I think your mother probably did a really good job at choosing this toy.

Phonics is one of the six components of learning to read and to be a skilled reader you need all six of them and [00:02:00] oral language is the first one. So I'm sure you talk lots to your three-year-old and improve her oral language, then it's phonological awareness. Can they hear those sounds of languages are distinct you know distinctly.

Phonological awareness, I often describe it as that idea that, you know, when you're hearing somebody speak a different language you can kind of pick up the rhythm of that language without knowing where one word starts and ends. And of course we get we've improved children's phonological awareness as they go through kindy and school and they can actually distinguish the words from the, the sound.

And then phonics is the really important bit then. That we attach those sounds to letters because when you think about reading, what you're doing is you're just ciphering letters and letter strings from the book or the passage that you're reading and you're making it back into speech sounds. And so phonics is a really, really important part of learning to read, because if you don't know that those letters [00:03:00] represent a sound, you can't read. And so we called it a foundational skill. And of course, with phonic knowledge, you can lift the meaning off the page. So you can build your vocabulary. You can comprehend what you're reading and you can become more and more fluent because you can automatically read them.

Dale Atkinson: All right, with that in mind. What is the phonics screening check? What are we looking for?

Claire Wood: The phonics screening check we brought in three or four years ago. And, um, we brought it in because it's a really important screener, because if we're saying that phonics is a foundational skill and everything else really builds off and if you have phonics, you have freed up your brain space to learn lots of other things across the curriculum.

So when you think about how are children going with phonics. We usn't  to be able to know. And so in 2018, we decided to do a trial on how our children are going with phonics. And we implemented the check to see, could we improve the learning for the children at [00:04:00] the level that they're at? So it does exactly what the name says.

You know, the phonics screening check screens children, for their ability to decode. That means  read phonics in mind. So it's a very short check. It takes five to seven minutes it's done by the child's teacher. And the results are the most important thing, because what we want teachers to do is to act on the results that they get from the phonics screening check.

We have those, as you said, 20 real words. And you know, sometimes the children may have just memorised those words, they've heard them before and that doesn't really check their phonic knowledge. If it's just something that they memorise that word and they just say it, but the pseudo words or the nonsense words, you know, the non words that we have in the check, the 20 words, they really are purely checking their phonics.

And if you think about those pseudo words are really a great leveler because you don't have to have a huge vocabulary. You couldn't come from a literacy poor background, or you could have be a learner of English and everybody's on the same playing field because nobody's seen this word before and you're using your skills that you've learnt, the decoding skill, you've learnt [00:05:00] to read that word off the page.

Dale Atkinson: And so from that, the teacher gets an understanding. Gets a small set of data about that specific student. And what are they looking for in those numbers and how are they responding to what they see?

Claire Wood: Well, with teaching the Australian Curriculum, the students should be able to easily and comfortably read 28 out of 40 of those words and they possibly know more. And those that are struggling will know less. The first thing that you get is information about the pattern of your class. If you think about it that way, you've got a group of students who are probably fluent decoders, and they're the ones that are going really well. You've got a group of students that are developing decoders and so they're going at the pace that you've set for them, but you may have one or two that are struggling and they're the ones we're screening for. We're going to give them extra support if they need it. We want all children to be fluent decoders obviously. So that's the direction we want to head. So the teachers can have an opportunity to see the pattern of their class. And from that pattern, they can decide where the teaching needs to go.

Dale Atkinson: And what are the interventions that you're [00:06:00] looking at for those students who aren't quite at that standard that you would hope they would be?

Claire Wood: So the very first thing we ask teachers to look at is, is their teaching program, hitting the mark.

And we'd like them to think about what happens in their daily routine. Should they be doing more of something or should they be doing less of something? Or should they change something all together? We know that phonics is, is most effective when you do it frequently and often interleaved with other things, not just once a week or once every couple of days, but every day and maybe even more than once a day.

And so we often advise teachers to do more and we have a kind of a, a mantra that is don't teach  until they get it right, teach until they can't get it wrong because we're looking for automaticity. We want to really free up brain space for children so that they can learn right across the curriculum.

Dale Atkinson: That's an incredibly powerful sentiment, I think, um, teach until they can't get it wrong. So what about for those students who, who are in that space where they can't get it wrong? Who are performing [00:07:00] really well. What's the, what are the interventions in terms of stretching them to go even better? What are we looking at?

Claire Wood: Yes. Some of the teachers have been very pleasantly surprised to see that their children can do more than the expectation of the Australian Curriculum, because once you get to a certain level of decoding, you're kind of self-teaching. So of those children can be stretched with a whole range of new reading. They can be given materials in their, what we call the zone of proximal development. So those kind of materials that will stretch them just a little bit more and keep them up with their learning,  and we know that the phonics knowledge that you gain helps with your spelling and your writing. So all of those things can help with those children who are already doing well at decoding.

Dale Atkinson: Part of your work of you and your team has been to provide a lot of training to the Year 1 teachers and I think you've got about 1400 or so, who have gone through some level of training over the last few years, which is, uh, which is a really good achievement, but for those who are outside of that year 1 area. This is obviously still something that's incredibly important for students to learn. What's [00:08:00] available to teachers in other year levels?

Claire Wood: We have a whole series of best advice, papers for the big six and phonics being one there's a whole best advice paper on phonics, eh, it's also throughout all of our guidebooks. So it doesn't matter whether you're starting to build foundations or you're right up there at stretch. There's going to be something of that phonics in the guidebooks.

We have a whole series on plink. That's available for teachers of all levels and leaders as well to understand how phonics fits. So I would always say to people who are interested in this area, the first thing you should do is the plink course called literacy from the experts and Maryanne Wolf's particular uh, module is fantastic for, uh, giving you the idea of the neuroscience behind why we've chosen this direction. We know that the brain has to be rewired to learn, to read, and Maryanne is a very, very good presenter and she lead people through that understanding of why explicit teaching of phonics is [00:09:00] so important.

Dale Atkinson: That's awesome. And I would recommend that for everyone.

Claire Wood: I didn't even mention that of course we have two other plink courses directly for the phonics screening check as well. And as you already said for the year 1 teachers, we have those three differentiated courses. Those courses, although they are funded for year 1s we invite anyone who's interested to come to those courses.

And most of the leaders across the state have attended. We've also had, uh, teachers, uh, for reception and year two and a lot of high school literacy leaders who have had children coming through who clearly missed out on the stages of the phonics.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. So it can really be picked up in and is useful at, uh, at any level.

The final question is obviously risks, uh, moving into slightly culture wars areas, because phonics sometimes is something that is used as a, as a bat to beat the teaching profession with a little bit on some of the pages of the Australian and, uh, and other newspapers. Um, so what are the misconceptions that exist around phonics and the teaching of it?

Well, I'd like to say we don't [00:10:00] have them anymore. I mean, you know, honestly, we've moved so far away from those misconceptions here in South Australia, and we've got, as you pointed out a thousand, I think it was 1,600 teachers every year, come to the phonics screening check, professional learning. And so that information has now disseminated across the state and we really have addressed all those misconceptions and teachers themselves can see the progress of the children.

And so they know that this is, um, it's just a furphy, it's just a distraction. Um, listening to anybody, learning to read or learning to do anything, first of all, can be, can sound laborious. You know, children sounding things out and then blending them together, can sound laborious. And during the training, we actually introduce our teachers to that feeling of learning a new code, you know, cause the alphabet is a code and you know the code so you can't unlearn reading once you know it. So we put them through a whole process of learning dingbats, you know, dingbats. So we [00:11:00] introduced them to a new code and we get them to learn it and it's quite funny to listen to them, very laboriously going, S ah,  D sad. Sad. And they feel that challenge that the children feel, but they also feel the satisfaction of getting it right.

And I actually did that myself and that's, you know, that's the beauty of phonics. The children get very independent very quickly. And so a lot of those old ideas that phonics is slow and laboured they go out the window once people understand what it's doing for your brain, it's rewiring it and helping you to read better.

Dale Atkinson: And that reward that comes through for those kids and for the teachers, it sounds amazing

Claire Wood: Yeah. That's good. That's good.

Dale Atkinson: Well, that's fantastic. And thank you so much for your, for your time today. Um, we'll put the link to the resources, including the phonics screening check explainer documents, uh, and those plink phonics  courses up in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening and thank you Claire very much for your time. That was amazing.

Claire Wood: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome back to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education,

Monique Miller: and I'm Monique Miller, primary school teacher at Westport primary school.

Dale Atkinson: This week, we've launched new and improved school and preschool improvement resources to use in your planning for 2022, they include refined school improvement, planning, handbooks, and templates.

Minor updates to the preschool quality improvement planning template, new scope and sequence resources, and units of work, digital literacy and numeracy guidebooks and better access to data for every teacher. These resources can support your curriculum planning.

Monique Miller: To find out how you can use the resources available to you. We're at Linden Park primary school in Adelaide's east, where they've put a big focus on improving writing.

Dale Atkinson: Deb O'Neill is the principal of Linden Park primary school. And Kane Watkins is a year seven teacher here. Welcome to you both. [00:01:00] Thank you. Thank you. So, uh, first of all, I mean, look, I'm going to start with a lazy assumption about Linden Park primary school located in the eastern suburbs, that it's got a big group of affluent kids. This is going to be an easy place to teach, but that's not the case is it? You have quite a diverse backgrounds of students. Could you tell us a bit about your school and your school community?

Deb O'Neill: So we are a very, very large primary school, the largest primary school in the state. We have over 960 students from reception to year seven.

We have over 70 different cultures represented and our English as an Additional Language and Dialect is, is up around the 70% mark. So we are very diverse. We do have a lot of students who have extremely high expectations and families that have extremely high expectations of their students, but also of the school. So it can be quite complex.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. So we're not talking about a simple process of, of teaching, writing to a group of kids who are receptive and ready to rumble. Why was writing an area that your school decided [00:02:00] to focus on for improvement?

Deb O'Neill: When we looked at our data and analysed our data, we found that our students were scoring in higher bands consistently in numeracy and reading yet the same students were not scoring as much in higher bands in writing.

And it was actually going up and down depending on the year. And so when we looked at our NAPLAN data, and then we examined our PAT data, we identified that there were some gaps in writing. And those gaps we put down to basically, um, teaching. And so what we decided to do then was to improve and to work on our quality of teaching that we provided in writing for our students.

Dale Atkinson: And you have brought along your school improvement plan which is obviously the key tool that you're using within this process. Can you talk a little bit about your approach with it and how you've set it and how you're using that moving forward.

Deb O'Neill: So our school improvement plan is quite detailed and we use it as a roadmap for us. So we have a lot of staff engagement and buy-in [00:03:00] with the plan. Um, staff are instrumental in identifying what areas we need to focus on and then they're recorded in the site improvement plan. Staff are then are involved in reviewing that and doing constant checking and monitoring as to how we are travelling and refining the plan. If, if things aren't going quite well or things need changing, we refine the plan.

Dale Atkinson: What does that process of refinement look like? Cause I think as we're talking here, Monique's kind of nodding her head, which is obviously an experience that you have had yourself. So what does that process of refining and working with the teaching staff look like?

Deb O'Neill: Once we identify our priority areas. So for example, writing, we look at what resources we need to deliver that. And so one of our major tools, which I know Kane can talk about in a minute is around using the Brightpath assessment process. And also something we engaged in with our whole staff was a program called Writing Plus, which was a partnership initiative around the teaching [00:04:00] of grammar, functional and traditional grammar to our teachers.

So that those teachers actually knew the aspects of writing that we needed to teach. When we do our Brightpath assessment, we also do an analysis of which aspects of writing are going well. Um, from looking at the student work and which aspects of writing, we need more input and more staff training. And then we engage in another training cycle.

Staff are involved in keeping track of the plan. So they, they look at the targets, they look at the success criteria in their learning teams, and then they give themselves a score, whether they're on track or it needs attention or whether it's not on track at all. And then we start developing some programs and plans to achieve that criteria.

Monique Miller: Kane I'd love to hear how you're involved in that process?

Kane Watkins: Sure. So specifically with writing, basically all staff are provided with adequate training to try and upskill them so that they're better able to actually teach explicitly the curriculum. So the writing plus training and development that Deb spoke about was [00:05:00] one of those training and development that we all undertook.

And there's a strong focus there on functional grammar, which better enables you to actually direct student learning to key areas that are needing development. We also, we've done smarter spelling training as well, which is about the teaching of synthetic phonics as part of your language curriculum and the Brightpath assessment and writing tool as well. That plays a huge part of, I think, of our success in terms of just delivering the curriculum.

Monique Miller: And so important for the whole school to be on board, taking that same training and implementing it across from reception to year seven.

Kane Watkins: Yeah it just ensures continuity of learning across the site. But also I think it allows you or enables you to have those professional conversations and dialogues with colleagues that are really what, that, that that's sort of the foundation of what moves learning forward.

Deb O'Neill: So we engage in moderation in our year level teams. So all the year seven teachers would get together and look at different assessments, samples and do a, I guess, a cold score. [00:06:00] And then they discuss it and do some moderation, but we've also done moderation vertically, teachers from reception to year seven, each bring a sample of writing that they would consider a medium sample and then they share it amongst each other and they look at the aspects. And so there's a lot of that vertical as well as horizontal moderation. So we are all on the same page in relation to our Brightpath assessment.

Kane Watkins:Those conversations are really key. I think it keeps everybody on track and make sure that we're, we're all working towards the same goal. It also just makes sure that we're constantly checking in with the site improvement plan for making sure that what we're doing is true to purpose.

Dale Atkinson: And what sort of frequency are you looking at for those sorts of activities?

Kane Watkins:So the Brightpath moderation side of things, we do that in term one and term three, and that's hugely valuable. Term one more as a formative assessment tool. Um, term three, you can almost draw out some summative assessment as well in that, but those conversations are happening in the moderation process.

They're really what empowers us [00:07:00] to pass relevant and timely feedback onto the kids that we're working with. And it also enables us to have those conversations with the students when we get them looking at their own writing and using that same assessment tool.

Monique Miller: And you would use that to set goals and things they're writing, using those teaching points from the Brightpath

Kane Watkins:Absolutely so, um, the process typically is we'll actually as, as staff within our year level teams ,we will um, once the kids have sat the Brightpath reading assessment, we'll get together, then the school actually provides support for that as well. So we're released to do this, which is really valuable. We sit together and we'll actually cold score each of those writing assessments for all the students in our classes, we'll often have those conversations, collegial conversations around justifying why you gave the score that you did, um, which is hugely valuable as well, because it really gets you to think about what am I looking at here and, and on, on, um, on balanced view.

Exactly. Thank you. So once that process is done, we go back to the students. We get them to use the same assessment tool that [00:08:00] we use in Brightpath to assess their own work. And we do that without actually telling them what we've scored their paper at. And then we give them our score and them to have a look and compare.

And does the score match up, if it does match up that's fantastic. If it doesn't, why doesn't it match up? So just developing that metacognition around why have I got the score I've got, if I'm looking at what's the next step for my writing, I should be able to look at what's in my writing and the assessment criteria, and then identify this is what I'm doing now. This is what I need to do to move forward. So just trying to build student agency into the learning.

Monique Miller: Fantastic.

Dale Atkinson: As we record this, we're towards the latter half of the third term. So we've just had the NAPLAN data come back. We've just finished the phonics check for the year ones.

How's the data and information from those sources being used to kind of inform the broader practice across this area?

Deb O'Neill: Within our writing action in our site improvement plan. We've also had a strong emphasis on phonemic awareness and the teaching of phonics in [00:09:00] the junior primary, and also the teaching of spelling from reception to year seven.

So we've engaged with a whole school approach to spelling as well as, um, a junior primary phonics assessment. So our data so far has seen a huge increase in our achievement of phonics, where we have the majority of our students scoring well above benchmark in phonics. So scoring in 37, 38 39 achievement.

We also have seen a huge increase in our NAPLAN higher bands, achievement across years, three, five, and seven. I think a really important aspect of our plan and our planning processes that it is not a stagnant plan. It doesn't sit in my office. For example, the smart spelling we identified last year, that our spelling achievement wasn't great across the school.

So we really put a lot of effort and time. And as Kane mentioned, a lot of resourcing into skilling up our teachers in that area. We are seeing the results in [00:10:00] our NAPLAN achievement for 2021 with an increase from years, three, five, and seven, and also a higher band retention. In fact, a growth from years five to seven in higher band.

Dale Atkinson: I mean, that's so encouraging and motivating in many respects, isn't it. To be able to see the numbers. Reflecting the hard work.

Deb O'Neill: And it's also a really good point of celebration because our teachers engage with our plan. We're all on the same track. We all know what our goals are and what our achievement is. We now can go to staff and say, wow, look at what we've done. You know, this is amazing. And the students, as Kane said, the students are involved in assessing and evaluating their own achievement and setting their next steps in learning.

Monique Miller: You've already been looking at NAPLAN data, and I believe you're having regular check-ins and getting feedback as teachers about where to next. And what are your next goals?

Deb O'Neill: So we've [00:11:00] done an analysis of the aspects of writing from NAPLAN and identified that our spelling has increased, we still need a little bit of work on our cohesion. So that then is going to be the next step for us to analyse the different aspects of the writing data that we've got and develop some plans around, okay, is that, is that across the board? Is that a consistent area for development and is it reflected also in our Brightpath assessment? So we don't just look at one data source. We look at a few data sources and then say, well, what do we need to do as a school to move that on.

Kane Watkins:I would potentially just add to that as well, that where the NAPLAN is more sort of a, I think we use it more as a sort of a summative assessment tool. Um, and that's really what have we done really well. And now what are the areas that we need to sort of look to, um, improving the Brightpath tool is, um, probably more a formative assessment tool and that's ongoing. And that actually informs the pedagogy that's going on in the classroom as well, highly [00:12:00] individualised for each student which is fantastic.

Monique Miller: Have you been using any of the literacy guidebooks to support with your...

Kane Watkins:Yes. So I can talk to that a little bit as well. So our reading program in year seven, and I know it's used across the site as well, we've taken a lot of the pedagogy that's actually explored in the literacy guidebooks and applied that to the day-to-day interactions in the classroom.

So an example of that would be in reading. We have started using book club circles where there's again, high level of student agency, student led discussion. And the teacher really is sort of a facilitator in that group. Those conversations that the students are having between one another is another form of formative assessment where, um, you're able to sort of check in and see where are the understandings relative to this particular text and what can I do next to move this learning forward? What are some questions I could potentially ask to prompt student thinking a little bit further?

Deb O'Neill: Our teachers in the early years use the literacy [00:13:00] and numeracy continuum and to make that explicit with the children to change it into students speak, but to use it as I guess, setting goals.

So bump it up walls in a sense, but also for students to actually see the progression of their learning as they go. With the literacy and numeracy guidebooks we also use um, the high impact teaching strategies and so really important aspects of formative assessment. Uh, differentiation we've looked at at a whole site. So how do we challenge and stretch every learner at our school is I guess a little bit of our mantra.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I guess the flexibility that sits within those resources to kind of take them off the shelf and plug aspects of them depending on the nature of issues that you're trying to deal with at a local level is reasonably useful too.

Kane Watkins:Absolutely. Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: So you've had a school improvement plan in place, Deb, since 2019. What would you say you've learnt and how's it evolving? What are, what are you planning to [00:14:00] do differently into the future?

Deb O'Neill: What I've learnt about improvement planning is that it needs to be really detailed. It needs to be student focused. So the success criteria needs to be what we would see students doing and that, that is developed and written by teachers. So in our next plan, we start with what our success criteria would look like. And then we work backwards from that. So, um, what we would see students doing, doing so therefore, what actions do we need to do based on analysing our current data to make that into a reality.

So we're just about to start our improvement planning process for the next three years. We've done a whole school reflection on our plan. We've identified some areas that we need further investigation in. One of them is numeracy, for example, in the early years. And so then we'll start working on how are we going to achieve that? What resources do we need to put in place? What training do we need for [00:15:00] teachers? And also how we share that with our community.

Monique Miller: Do you have any advice for teachers, schools and leaders when approaching their school improvement plan?

Kane Watkins:Yep. It needs to be a whole-school approach. So you need to work as, as a whole school community, but you need those professional conversations happening at sort of the grassroots level between teachers, but also with students.

I think that it sort of needs to be a cultural shift towards working together as a team and breaking down traditional barriers of working in isolation from one another. Not that that's here, but, um, If I were to give advice to any school, it would be that just embrace working as part of a team and, and, you know, sharing your ideas.

Deb O'Neill: I think any planning needs to be really refined and it needs to be simple. Like it doesn't need to include every single thing you do. You actually need to choose a couple of actions and do them well. And you'll see the spinoff. And then the continual looking at that, refining it, adding new things as it [00:16:00] progresses, um, is important.

So. Writing our plan when we wrote it in 2019, looks very different to our plan now. Our challenge of practice is still the same. However, our actions have actually become quite refined and quite targeted that way we can celebrate, because we actually know that we've achieved what we set out to do.

Dale Atkinson: It's been a great discussion and I think the thing that's really coming through for me is the focus around the planning that sits across sort of a cascade from, from a whole of site-based, um, kind of thing to a year level to individual classrooms and then laterally up and down. And it, it seems to be something that you've managed to get the whole kind of teaching community to buy into and the leadership to buy into.

And it's, um, it's really impressive.

Kane Watkins:It's a cultural thing.

Deb O'Neill: And what I'd like to see is us involving the students more in that. So bringing them to the table in the planning process and having them identify aspects of learning that we need [00:17:00] to improve on as a site and understanding what we're doing and why we're doing it. So that is our, I think our next step.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. So the journey continues.

Deb O'Neill: Yeah, absolutely, never stops.

Dale Atkinson: That's great. Um, thank you very much to Deb and Kane for your time today and for letting us see your wonderful school. So keep it up, I think is the message. It sounds really encouraging. Um, so thanks for your time.

Deb O'Neill: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

Dale Atkinson: As we know from the last couple of years, September is school improvement month at the Department for Education. Our intranet EDi has a lot of helpful resources and they've been built because we've gone into classrooms across the state to show you how school improvement is being rolled out in schools from Barmera to Eudunda, there's planning, handbooks, and templates, literacy, and numeracy guidebooks, and tips on how to use the improvement dashboard and achievement profiles.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome back to Teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education today, we're in the state's Innovation Hub at Lot Fourteen, where a few hundred students from around 20 schools are learning more about career options in the defence space and cyber industries.

We've just launched the department's new student pathways website, which is a key piece of the puzzle in terms of raising the visibility of vocational pathways for our students and helping them to plot their way toward a career that matches their passions. Joining me today to talk about that website and the department's refreshed approach to vocational education is executive director for student pathways and careers, Clare Feszczak, and alongside her is a man who wears a lot of hats.

But in this instance joins us in his capacity as a member of the South Australian Skills commission, Dino Rossi. Welcome to you both.

Dino Rossi: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: So, first of all, the last 18 months for the Department for Education, we've delivered a fairly [00:01:00] significant change in our approach to vocational education and training. Clare, give us the elevator pitch on what you and the team have put in place and the motivation behind it.

Clare Feszczak: Yeah, South Australia is taking a nation leading approach into pathways, career education, and motivating students to think about careers post school. So the last 18 months to two years, we've been working on the VET for school students, policy reforming VET within schools. So it's the highest quality it's actually aligned to industry need.

And it creates a pathway that students can start within school and then complete post-school and get into their career sooner. As part of that, it's been the development of the website, which you've mentioned Dale has been launched today, and we've been very excited about the website. The website really gives students an idea of all the possibilities and helps them to understand the world of work and understand what it means to actually have a [00:02:00] job in certain industries and what's required to actually prepare for work post school.

Dale Atkinson: One of the key things that stands out for me, and as a guy in his early forties, was that for us careers education and the understanding of where vocational education and training could take you was extremely limited.

My career's exposure was probably, um, you know, a couple of half-hour sessions with a bloke who was normally the geography teacher. And you talked a little bit about I don't know there was a, there was a tick box on some things that you might be interested in further on, and then they gave you some subject options and that was pretty much it. You were left to your own devices. So this is really about recalibrating, a lot of that and giving students a lot more agency in making their decisions. Isn't it?

Clare Feszczak: Certainly is. Yeah. So this is about, um, really inspiring students to think about their interests and what their passions are. It's certainly not about locking in students to a particular career. We know that students will have multiple jobs, multiple careers, multiple industries. So it's [00:03:00] really about them understanding what they enjoy, what industries they might be interested in and then exploring those opportunities as much as possible through career events or through tours of different industries or through work experience or even volunteering.

And the research shows that the sooner students do that and get involved in those kind of things, the more informed they are so better informed to understand what the options are. And I think one of the challenges today is that there's so many options available. You know, we, we live with that. You can be anything, you can do anything. And in many ways, that actually is quite overwhelming for young people. So by giving young people, the agency and the opportunities, making it easy for them to explore all these options, it helps them to hone in on what they're really interested in.

Dale Atkinson: An interesting thing, I think is that the website effectively is a product that's flown on from an awful lot of other work around essentially linking those [00:04:00] vocational pathways with the areas of study. Um, and the areas of training that we know will, will get them into jobs or get them into careers where there are job opportunities.

Clare Feszczak: Yeah. So vocational education and training is a great way to actually learn technical skills. That industry value. Vocational education and training in schools gives students the opportunity to start that workplace training as early as possible. We know that vocational education and training is designed by industry for industry. It creates a real feel of what it's like to actually work in the job and what we've done with the development of flexible industry pathways, as part of this reform, we've worked with industry to say, okay, what is the vocational education training?

What are the the skills, what are the industry certificates that young students in school need to actually enter into your industry? So the flexible industry pathways, as part of the VET reform really provide that pathway [00:05:00] to areas where we know there's jobs and we know that industry actually value students coming in through that route.

So it's actually quite a significant change in the way that VET's delivered in schools in the past. It's a pathway that industry endorsed that leads to jobs in South Australia. And the important thing with this reform as well is we actually want to keep South Australians in South Australia for young people to see that there are opportunities and how to get to these job opportunities is really important to us.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. That might be an opportunity to bring Dino Rossi in on this conversation a little bit, because I guess in your role with the SA Skills Commission and externally, as I mentioned earlier, you wear a lot of hats. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you do, and a little bit about how that's helped Clare and her team to, to shape the conversation around developing those tips.

Dino Rossi: Yeah, sure. So first a little bit of my background. So I did come through a trade. I finished year 12 and took the pathway to do a trade. I'm an instrumentation tradesman. And very, very proud of it. As I mentioned to someone today, I still pay for my, for my license, [00:06:00] even though I don't practice it and haven't done for many, many years, but subsequent to that, um, yeah, then I, uh, continued training, ended up doing a Diploma of Information Technology at TAFE, um, have worked in the IT industry pretty much my entire career, and then subsequently went on and did higher education in business management training as well as, um, some research as well.

So, um, you know, my career very much started as, as being an apprentice and then growing through that apprenticeship, looking at further opportunities and where that apprenticeship could take me and what the skills offered. And now I find myself enjoying a variety of different roles, mainly focused around industry partnership.

My role today on the commission I'm chair of the industry skills council on the commission, which covers technology, cybersecurity, creative industries, and business. And my role is to inform and bring together industry and to inform industry of what the various options are available for them to be able to secure new, emerging talent and to work with the department. and work with Clare and her team on how we can [00:07:00] create those opportunities for students and not just students, but also for their advisors. And when I talk about that, I'm thinking of parents I'm thinking of career advisors, I'm thinking of their peers. I'm thinking of teachers and helping inform them of what these options are because often they simply don't know.

You talked before about some of the challenges that vocational training has had. So let's just say over the last 20 years. And that hasn't just been from the perspective of students as Clare shared, it's also being from the perspective of industry. Industry has lost contact in some ways there's a lot of industries out there that don't clearly understand the opportunities for them in partnering with vocational training to secure the next emerging talent that can be used for their industries.

Dale Atkinson: And it's a, it's such an important role. So we're at Lot Fourteen today. And I think the listeners will be able to hear a fair bit of work going on in the background and construction work and the important thing about Lot Fourteen is it is an innovation hub. It is a space where, you know, new careers are being created new [00:08:00] industries are being created. How important is it in a workforce and employment environment where you know, there are so many emerging jobs that there are so many changes in workforce need that we are linking up the schools with the industry, with the education and research institutions. How important is that?

Dino Rossi: It's unbelievably critical. If I, if I lift this up to start with and talk about South Australia, firstly, it's an exciting time. It is really exciting. So you mentioned Lot Fourteen there's also the Tonsley district. There's also Mawson Lakes. We've got the defence sector really starting to emerge really strongly. We've got space emerging. We are attracting a lot of international organisations right now into Lot Fourteen and they are excited to be here. That means talent. We need to continue to grow our talent pool ensuring that all of our educational institutions from vocational training to university research institutions are tightly linked with industry, industry informs the education institutions or what it needs out of emerging talent.

[00:09:00] Um, so that linkage is unbelievably critical. The other piece to that, that I would add as well. It's also incumbent on industry to do that. Um, so if industry is looking at needs talent, it can't just simply point a finger over at an education institution and say, oh, you're not giving me the talent. I want. Now's the time to engage with them, which is what we're doing to ensure that, I use the term a lot, but this emerging talent that's coming out has opportunities. And doesn't, you know, doesn't meet the needs of industry.

Dale Atkinson: I guess that's one of the key functions of the website, Clare is really essentially acting as a shop window for students, but also there's a need for the industry to bid into that isn't there, that they have a role in terms of making themselves visible and available to kids.

Clare Feszczak: Yeah, that's right. The, the opportunity with the website is, as you say, Dale is for the students, but also for industry employers too. And we hear all the time that industry and employers do want to connect with schools, but actually don't know how to, and the website, gives a means of, uh, industry and employees actually posting opportunities and being been able [00:10:00] to contact over 500 different schools in the state and promote those either jobs or even industry-based projects that students could pick up as part of the curriculum and part of their timetable.

So the website certainly is aimed at students and families but also industry and employers, and there's an industry employers section on that website, which we are heavily promoting with, with employers to actually have a look, see what you can do and then post your opportunities.

Dale Atkinson: Let's talk a little bit about the additional functionality that sits in that website because it's really been built with students in mind to make them able to see the opportunities that are available, but also to record some of their experiences and to be able to create a portfolio of skills and activities that they can then use as they transition into work.

Can you tell us a bit about those?

Clare Feszczak: So the website is the first for, for South Australia, and I think it's probably a, um, a world leader in terms of bringing different components together. The website has a [00:11:00] couple of places where students can actually register. The first is the world of work challenge and this is a self initiated student part of the website, where they can actually go and discover different experiences and log the hours that they've been involved in those experiences.

When a student reaches a hundred hours, they actually gain a certificate. That certificate then is verified by their teacher in their school or the career advisor in the school. And that contributes to a profile for the student that then when they do apply for jobs, they've got a certificate of experience, which gives them some credibility with future employers. The world of work certificate also automatically goes into a, a CV builder which is on the website. Another area of the website that's specifically designed for students and the CV builder is a template for building a CV. The CV builder is, has been designed in line with [00:12:00] LinkedIn. So we all have an LinkedIn profile, we're familiar with that technology. The CV builder is LinkedIn for school students without the social media and the connectivity. It's a safe place for students to actually think about what a CV looks like and start to build their CV and use their experiences that they've gained through the world of work challenge to populate the CV, the CV then can be downloaded and it can be customized and it can be sent off to employ.

Dale Atkinson: It's a really active and living thing. And I know it's going to develop over the coming years as the industry gets more involved in terms of ah posting things up and as, as the kids start to engage with the world of work challenge and other things like that. So it's a, it's a really powerful tool, uh, in that regard. So I think it's great. So I guess, uh, the question I have for both of you and I'll ask you separately is. Where next for, for the VET team, where next for the way that industry and the sectors engage with, with education, Clare I might start with you.

Clare Feszczak: So this is just the start, so we're very [00:13:00] excited to have the website and to be launching Flexible Industry Pathways for 2022, but really it's the start of bigger, bigger things. What we are aiming for is every student has a career plan with multiple pathway options. Career plan is developed with the student based on all their experiences, based on the discovery and the use of the website and their world of work challenge and, um, students are then setting themselves up for something post-school, which is meaningful for them.

So at this stage, the focus has been very much on VET and the flexible industry pathways, we'd see those expanding to be much more than just what they are now. So 2022 is an exciting year, but it's the starting year for this work. I think South Australian students deserve this. They deserve the best opportunities possible. And South Australia as a state deserves it too.

Dale Atkinson: And Dino where do you think we should be in five years from now?

Dino Rossi: Where we should be in five [00:14:00] years, um, where we should be, is having for me personally, right, and I think for my industry skills council, and my perspective is number one, have a really wonderful and exciting high-tech industry sector in this state. And we're sitting in the middle of it now and seeing that continue to grow and succeed. Number one. Number two, for our industries to provide really good and clear pathways and opportunities, right. For our emerging talent because that is the future of our state and expand on, I suppose it affects what industry pathways with actually flexible what I would simply call career pathways options.

When we talk about things like apprentices, when we talk about traineeships and these kinds of things, there's often a fixed perspective of what that looks like. Our work on the commission at the moment is challenging that. The new Act under the South Australian Skills Commission gives us a lot more flexibility. So when we start talking about things like dual traineeships, dual apprenticeships, hire apprenticeships, you [00:15:00] know, the notion of what an apprenticeship or a traineeship was or currently is and what it could be in the future. We're looking to challenge that because we think there isn't just one pathway for children, students to enter the, uh, the workforce. And there's not just one pathway for industry to engage in that. So we want to be able to provide flexible options for industry and flexible options for students that ultimately give us a really, really good base of talent in our state to support, for example, the emerging industries that are, that are growing so rapidly.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. And I think, um, you know, one of the great things about being here today at the defence space and cyber expo is you can see so many parts of the puzzle together. You've got education, you've got sort of industry sectors. You've got people from the skills council, you've got politicians, teachers, educators, right across the spectrum.

And there's absolutely no shortage of passionate enthusiasm and, and interest in [00:16:00] making this work. And I think, um, one of the really great things within the framework, and the FIPS and the website and the work that you guys are doing together is we're really moving forward in a really exciting and, um, and great way. So I think we're going to be in a great spot in five years and even better as we move forward. So Dino and Clare thank you very much for your time.

Dino Rossi: Thank you.

Clare Feszczak: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome back to Teach the podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education and today we're talking about education in the country with a man who's spent a fair bit of the last 12 months touring our regions to develop our first ever country education strategy, that man is  Luke Fraser, the director of Government Relations and Policy. Welcome to you Luke.

Luke Fraser: Thanks for having me.

Dale Atkinson: Can you explain why it is that we are now looking at doing a country education strategy?

Luke Fraser: I think for us, we've got a bold vision at the moment we're getting after world-class, but we know that depending on the settings and depending on where you are and what's going on, there needs a specific focus.

So, so we know that even in the country, when we say countrywe've got isolated schools, we've got regional hubs. There's a lot of different nuances to what happens in the country and so what we've decided is that we need a point of view on, on, [00:01:00] on how to support, um, the particular challenges, the particular opportunities that occur in the country when it comes to teaching and, and education and care. So we've kind of gotten after that and we want to make sure that we've got a particular focus to our strategic direction in the country.

Dale Atkinson: One of the major parts of developing this strategy was going out and meeting with the principals, meeting with teachers out in country areas, talking to governing councils and other representative from the regions. And what were they telling you about the pinch points for them specifically as a country or a regional school?

Luke Fraser: I think the interesting thing is all of the perspectives are different. So we spent time in the far west, we spent time in the, in the sort of mid north places like Lower Eyre Peninsula, regional hubs, like Mount Gambier, but also the Riverland and Southeast and so forth. And so it's good to take those different perspectives because the regions are different. But when you start to break down the differences in perspectives, students told us a lot about three things, continue to resonate every time. And that was the wellbeing of their peers um, particularly they're really hot [00:02:00] on the career opportunities that they can or can't see.

And then the, the subjects that they love to learn, particularly as they're going through SACE and starting to decide about their future. When you talk to leaders, it was, you know, there was heavy emphasis on workforce challenges and so forth. And, and that seemed to resonate through our Aboriginal support staff as well.

And then parents talked to us about kind of different stuff, like, like ICT enablers and how do they connect with their schools digitally. So the perspective really matter when you're doing a piece of work like this, because they are all different.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. So the, the individual issues at a site level are unique, but there is some sort of key themes that kind of came out through the research work. And I'm just going to go through the three main goals that you've identified in the strategy, which are, um, number one, quality leadership and expert teaching in every country, school and preschool. Number two is better access to digital infrastructure, student support services and business admin systems for country schools and preschools.

And number three is access to quality learning and career study and training [00:03:00] opportunities for country, kids and young people. So we might go through those just, um, just one at a time and, and have a look at, um, how are we going to address those. Issues that have been identified out there. So the first one around quality leadership and expert teaching in every country, school and preschool, what's going to be the approach in terms of helping to support that out in that regions?

Luke Fraser: One of the first things that we saw as a big opportunity is really strengthening the, kind of what we call the sort of pipeline of, of teachers that come into school. So we know that a lot of teachers get their first start, you know, in country regions, but there's a lot of work that can be done to strengthen that.

So. So we're going to be as part of this strategy, we're going to be working with the universities in particular, to make sure that when teachers, uh, are in training with the universities that they're getting to do practicums that are for the right period of time so that they can immerse themselves in the country.

We'll also be reducing barriers. So we know that some of our best and brightest teachers that are studying. They might not, um, take up practicums in the [00:04:00] country because let's say they're working at IGA on the weekends. And actually it's, it's a cost burden for them to come and do that work for a decent chunk of time.

So we're going to be funding a lot of those barriers that exists to make sure that when they're making a decision about coming to the country, it can be one that's based on a good experience in a decent chunk of time out there. And they can make that decision either way. But when they do make a choice, when they're thinking, 'Yep, I think I can come out and work in the country.' We've got a secondary program that we're kind of building that's going to be about the transition between when they decide that they're going to teach in their penultimate year in the country and then kind of really making that a smoother transition. So we're going to be looking at things like part-time work, but they can do in a country school where they can start to bond to a particular school, making sure that there's onboarding supports for them.

And you know, where, where are they going to live all these kinds of things when they're making the big leap we want to make that smoother for them. So we'll we'll invest some time and funds and effort into, into that process so that, you know, they're not just kind of lobbying in and, and sort of, [00:05:00] um, landing and, and it's, and it's a tricky, tricky time.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. I mean the essential thing, I think that was relayed in this process is that to capture some of these younger people as they go out there at age 20 21, 22 for their first teaching experience that really they've got to be part of the community and help to form those connections and bonds quite early. That's right. Isn't it?

Luke Fraser: Absolutely. And, and, you know, if we can make that easier and smoother for them, a lot of our great principals and, and great teachers out in the country have kind of found a life out there and they, and they just love it. They wouldn't come back to the metro for quids. So, so we want to kind of just make that easier so that they can settle their roots in the country and enjoy it.

Dale Atkinson: So onto the second aim of the three goals, one of the things we're looking at is better access to student support services. And I know that there's some issues around particularly things like psychological support, speech therapy, which may not be particularly well serviced in the regions that we're looking to address as well.

Luke Fraser: Yeah, absolutely. This was one of those things in our work out in the country is just loud and clear [00:06:00] how much pressure on our teachers, when some of those supports for students with needs aren't available or aren't coming quickly enough. And so, um, we're alive to that, and we heard that call and, and so one of the pieces of work we're going to do at the moment, we've just started to recruit at the moment.

Actually, some people who are going to be working, um, particularly in speech pathology and psychology, which the two of the pain point areas and doing more telehealth in that area for the country. So, we know that just like our teachers and our sort of allied health practitioners, it's a struggle for our allied health people to get good people and keep them out in the country as well.

But what we think is going to be really helpful is to increase our telehealth, which will help us with reach because we might not always be able to get out there every time to do psychology work with students or so forth. But tele health is one of those things that's, that's better than nothing. So we're going to be focusing on that to make sure that there is somebody there that can support a particular student and, and support the teacher to support them with whatever needs they have.

[00:07:00] The other thing that we're going to be doing in, in this sort of, um, what we call the triple S space or the student support services space is investing in a, and we're just going through it with procurement now um working with private providers. So we might not be able to get our, um, psychologists out to a particular region, but there might be private providers that can and do work out in those areas. So, so leveraging the private sector. To make sure we've got better rates and better quality in the service that we're providing.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. It's one of the most important, powerful things. I think particularly out in the regions, that's going to be a bit of a game changer for a lot of the schools. One of the things that COVID 19 has taught us is just how much digital access is such an essential service for everything. We've had seven. We've been lucky, actually. I think we've had seven statewide remote learning days since the pandemic began but if anything, that's highlighted the need for quality systems. And it has been over the years, a disparity of access to digital infrastructure in the regions. Now the SWIFT program to connect schools to [00:08:00] fast, reliable internet services is, is part of the piece of the puzzle. But you've identified something else as well for, for country schools?

Luke Fraser: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we've made brilliant gains in sort of getting high speed internet to all of our schools now. And that's a big increase and a big boost for our schools, but then that's not really worth much unless you have good internal infrastructure, cabling, servers, these types of things.

And so one of the things that we've noticed and we've started to do work in our ICT team has been going out to some of our schools and they do what they call a health check. But what that actually means is specialists in ICT infrastructure will go out and look at what's going on in terms of the internal infrastructure and they'll make an assessment.

And then, and then we basically negotiate and, and fund that infrastructure to be built up to a world-class standard. And it's made huge gains already but what we're doing through the country strategy is accelerating that work. So we've got guys out there at the moment that are doing what we call these health checks.

So they'll be out to our schools. They've almost been to all of our country schools now um [00:09:00] just taking a look at what's going on. By the end of this financial year, we're going to have upgrades to all of our internal servers and so forth. And that's going to mean that the speed of our internet, the access that kids get to work digitally and our teachers get to work digitally as well is just going to be a huge boost for us. So really proud of that work is happening right now.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. It's going to be a lot of exciting applications that, uh, that come out of that. And I think that's partially linked the digital access to, to the final point, which is around how we broaden curriculum options for the country kids, how we make pathways more available to them. What are some of the steps we're going to be looking at there?

Luke Fraser: That's a really important one. And it kind of cuts through the main thing here, which is how do we support the students to, to learn the things they love to learn. And so one of the things we sort of came across in in our, in our work and it's happening in other jurisdictions as well in country areas is, is the idea of local curriculum delivery across a given.

Yeah. We know that the workforce challenges remain and we're looking to solve those, but in the interim, there's really innovative work that's happening in patches, around [00:10:00] schools, working together to make sure that, you know, if a student wants to study, um, science in for their SACE they can access a, a teacher in a, a neighbouring country school. Um, and they can do that as part of their normal studies at their school. And so that's been work that's kind of already starting to happen and has happened in patches and where we're doubling down on that and making sure that we're going to work in sort of supporting that. So, so I think the department needs to play a role.

So there's kind of. You know, there's a lot of support that can be provided to make that happen in terms of coordination of the work. And then sort of some of the more nuanced work around sort of teaching and learning and practice. And so we're going to kind of get in and sort of support the local delivery that occurs in patches.

And then start to talk about the good practices happening because everyone's kind of doing it differently, some works some doesn't work. And so we're going to kind of put a spotlight on that to make sure that the offering across a given area or a particular student is there so that they can study the things that they want to, they want to learn, but also do it with teachers that are [00:11:00] highly skilled in that area, that teaching in their own discipline that they love what they do.

Dale Atkinson: It is exciting sort of right across the board really. And I guess one of the things that's really important is that, and I'm holding in my hand a lovely glossy brochure setting out what the country education strategy looks like, but this is not going to be sort of a static kind of piece of work that actually country perspectives are going to be something that is going to be built in more broadly to policy direction and policy development within the department. Can you explain how that's going to work?

Luke Fraser: One of the great things that we've been able to do through as we've developed this work is really bring the right voices to the table will be at some of our students.

We've been working with the rural youth ambassadors, for example, who've had had a lot to say and been really impactful in how we've thought about this, but also some of our country leaders and people that are passionate about country education. So I think what we're going to be doing through this is setting up a country education reference group that can support that department.

We've got a big reform agenda that we're getting after. So we we're doing work in VET we're doing work in, in improvements to work force, lot of different [00:12:00] areas where we're going after system level impact and country needs to be at the table in that pursuit of how we do that. And because of those nuances and differences in how country education operates.

So, so we'll be setting up a country education reference group. That's going to be talking to our people who are leading reform, be it policy or practice, and that'll be a continual voice. And I think that's going to be the real game changer as part of this strategy is making sure that we're thinking about when we're designing, how we operate, making sure that we're paying attention to the voices that matter in the country to.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, as part of this, we've created a dedicated country education section on the website. Um, and there'll be some information in the show notes about how to access that, which includes links through to the country education strategy. You can go there and find a bit more information about what Luke and his team have been doing over the last 12 to 18 months.

It's a very exciting space. There's going to be a lot of things rolling out over the next three years. It's a seven year strategy though. So there's going to be some pretty broad horizon stuff that's, uh, that's going to be coming through. So stay [00:13:00] tuned over the next few years to see, um, the announcements in some of these programs that are going to be rolling out.

So Luke, this is exciting work. Thanks for your time. Good luck.

Luke Fraser: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome back to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education,

Monique Miller: and I'm Monique Miller, primary school teacher at Westport Primary.

Dale Atkinson: In September, we expanded our suite of curriculum resources to help you prepare classroom learning for students.

We added new units for Health and PE, Technologies and the arts, and we added extra year levels for English, maths, science, and HASS. Today, we're going to hear from the teachers and curriculum team who have made these ready to use classroom units of work, and we're going to learn how they can help you plan for your 2022 curriculum.

Whitney Schultz is the curriculum manager for primary mathematics and Henry Johnson. Is the curriculum manager for secondary science. Welcome to you both.

Whitney Schultz: Thank you.

Henry Johnson: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: So, first of all, you've been building these units of work over the last year, year and a half. What are they, how do they work?

Whitney Schultz: So, within each learning area, the curriculum is broken up into eight units. So every year level has eight units, these are organised by concepts, true to the Australian curriculum. And then within the units, you'll see a sequence of learning, which is a sequence of the overall concepts within the unit, not individual lesson plans. And then you'll see a suite of resources, including PowerPoints, word documents and PDF documents.

Henry Johnson: And also one of the reasons why we've done the units of work is to help teachers translate the Australian Curriculum. Uh, sometimes it can be a little bit ambiguous and we're tracking the nice South Australian contexts and also practical ways to embed literacy and numeracy into your teaching.

Dale Atkinson: So let's talk about the Australian curriculum because it's a beast of a document, right? Like you go onto the website and it is just page upon page of information, which is broad. It's very high level. There's so many different ways of interpreting it and moving from that Into actually standing in front of a classroom of, of students and being able to understand what it is that is going to be able to translate from the Australian Curriculum, into the teaching for these kids. That's a daunting task, particularly if you're a new starter, that's the work you guys are doing, right?

Henry Johnson: Yeah. Correct. And like you said, with the new starter, a new grad teacher, these units of work provide the resources so they've got the confidence that they're embedding an authentic curriculum, and they're not missing anything.

I'm speaking on behalf of science here, but I think maths follows suit. It’s such a conceptual narrative that we need to ensure the students receive at each year level to build upon their knowledge and their, and their prior work. So yeah, having these units of work, it really puts an emphasis on that to ensure that continuity.

Whitney Schultz: And I think being an early career teacher as well is a seemingly endless list of challenges. You're dealing with parents, you're dealing with behaviour, you're working out how to set up your classroom and all the nuances that come with it and taking that load off teachers to give them a planning resource that has really been done for them is going to make their life a lot easier. I think back to my early years in teaching and how long I spent scrounging around on the internet for some resources to use, um, that weren't actually best practice resources, but you can be rest assured that what we've developed is based on research and evidence and is the best fit for our curriculum and our students.

Dale Atkinson: Is that the kind of experience that you've had Monique, you're obviously a year 4 teacher earlyish. How many years now?

Monique Miller: This is my third year.

Dale Atkinson: Third year in. Is that an experience that you also felt like early on that there's an overwhelming amount of information that you've got to try to deal with?

Monique Miller: Yeah. Those first years, um, these resources weren't available. So just trying to find any, anything and everything that I can get my hands on to make my life a little bit easier. You know, I'm already starting to think next year I'll be moving to a different year level. I've been pretty comfortable where I am. So I think these resources are going to be awesome to expose myself to a new curriculum that I'll be teaching. And it's, it's got everything that I need for that year level.

Henry Johnson: I think going back to what you were saying, like you're looking for resources on the internet. As we all know the internet's very, very vast and not all the resources on there, are hitting the required curriculum either. So it's yeah, so another, another reason as to why we should be looking at these units of work and seeing what we can embed into our teaching.

Dale Atkinson: So, how do teachers actually use these things, like what is it? That's in front of them and how's it apply to the class?

Whitney Schultz: Well, if I was starting to plan for my year, I might be working with my professional learning community in my school and working out, uh, what sequence or approach you want to take, to planning our year. The units are sequenced from one to eight in a logical order. So you could very much pick them up and go straight from unit one to unit eight, or you can rearrange them based on your school's needs. So if you're doing some kind of, um, whole-school event, let's say a market day or a fete, for example, you might strategically embed a HASS unit alongside a mathematics unit that focuses on money and data.

There are, of course, some certain prerequisite units that need to come first. So your place value in your number units. You'd want to be making sure that you're doing those early on in the year to set students up for success for the following concepts. If I was opening up a unit of work, um, it really depends on what kind of learner you are and how you tackle them.

If you're a visual learner, I’d jump straight to those PowerPoints. Um, particularly in year 3/4 maths, we've made the visuals really strong. So have a look at how those concepts unfold visually and then pair it up with the unit plan and all of those teacher tips, misconceptions, alerts, adjustments, et cetera, that can support you in delivering.

Henry Johnson: Yeah. And I think for science it’s slightly different in secondary science. Um, from what Whitney was talking about with primary maths. We still have eight units of work per year level, that doesn't change, but the way you can do those units of work is entirely up to you. Some schools might only have one or two science labs, so you can't be doing, you know, you can't have 10 classes during the same science experiment, logistically it won't work.

So we have written them that they can be done in any order. And it's important to note that you don't have to do them prescriptively. It's open for you to adopt and adapt, and how you see fit given your site. Um, for example, your site might have a beautiful ag area so you might want to teach body systems through using animals that you've got rather than what we have we have in the units. And that's perfectly fine.

Yeah. It's good to read them to get a few ideas. And also that conceptual narrative that I was talking about before that really comes through heavily in the unit. So it's important that you do read the units to it. You don't just take bits and bits and pieces because it works as a whole, not just individually.

Monique Miller: Where you guys have sort of catered for different sites, knowing that all schools have different resources and access to different things. So people can get in there and access what they can use for their site and potentially use something and not the rest of it. So, it's really awesome the way that you've made it accessible for all school sites and teachers.

Henry Johnson: That’s a big tick.

Monique Miller: We've talked as well, really a lot about early career teachers, but it's not just for early career teachers. Someone more experienced can definitely get their hands on these and use them?

Whitney Schultz: Yeah, definitely. And we know that teachers are doing amazing things out there in their classroom. And, um, we're not out there to reinvent the wheel of their already fantastic practice, but we are here to offer something that may compliment their current planning and their current units. Even with our experienced teachers, they just don't have the time to keep looking for more and more resources online and, and plan this kind of work. So we've done the heavy lifting for them and it might just offer some new ways of teaching that they weren’t previously aware of.

Henry Johnson: Whitney and I we’re experienced teachers and we found that managing and helping writing these units that we thought, ah, okay, I've never thought about teaching this concept like that before using this context. it's a nice way to self-reflect on your own pedagogy. And so I feel that's where experienced teachers can get a lot out of these units by just reading through them and saying, okay, they’ve done this a bit differently. Why have they done that? Then they can look at the evidence behind why we have put that in place in our units. And yeah um, like Whitney was saying it's just really complimenting they're teaching.

Dale Atkinson: So is this something you’d sort of recommend maybe groups of teachers that are at a site or partnership level, getting together and maybe discussing the units and how they might apply for, for their work?

Henry Johnson: Yeah for sure. I really recommend, um, looking through these as a faculty and looking at your year and what you've got planned and seeing where you can fit these. And also again, you've already might have something great that you use on site already. It might be like a STEM week or something that you may be doing or a science week. So you might want some different units around those types of times, but yeah, really getting down and looking at these units and how they can be placed across your site.

Whitney Schultz: I might just build on that as well. If you're working with teachers across your professional learning community, you might choose the resources to use, to support some observation from cross class observations.

So you might choose a task throughout the units and use that as something that your team can really plan to and think about how would you adopt and adapt in your context? And then go and observe one another and reflect upon what are the key, high impact strategies throughout this task. And how can we continue to plan with this kind of model in place.

Very much we're about adopting and adapting to what the units offer. They're not prescriptive, although there's a certain sequence of learning that needs to take place. Teachers can certainly adapt to their own contexts. Um, we do get a lot of feedback saying, Hey, if I was teaching this lesson or this concept, I would do it this way and that's fantastic, but we've really had to pinpoint, well, how can we make this general and accessible for a statewide audience? And then teachers see themselves in the work and be able to adapt from there.

Dale Atkinson: What do you think the things are that you’ve personally learnt from the experience of building these resources?

Henry Johnson: Yeah, good question. Um, I personally learnt that I wasn't as good a teacher as I thought. Like I was saying before, um, these units give you opportunity to self-reflect in your own pedagogy and in the science units, it's very concept heavy as it should be, not content heavy because it's the concepts that we want students that after year 10 science, we want them to carry forward with them, not the, not the content itself. So I reckon that's what I really learnt is, you know, teach to the concept, not content, that's that's imperative in science.

Whitney Schultz: I've learnt a lot about the research that underpins a lot of these mathematical concepts and how to go deeper with it. So writing the units of work, um, in years, 5, 6 and 7 for maths, I felt almost a little bit like a fraud at first and what I was writing I had never taught anything that well, but that's just because I simply didn't have the time to plan to that extent and to research and to read or those, you know, those name dropped researchers and books and things that people mentioned throughout professional development.

I had the time to sit there and read the whole chapter and then make those decisions based on what the research said and how the concept should be structured and embedded to avoid misconceptions in the learning.

Monique Miller: That's really the great part about it. We've got people who are working hard with the time to find all these resources and really get deep with the curriculum, making sure that we're provided with everything that we need. So it's really awesome. What's something you've put in your own learning areas, work that you think teachers might find particularly interesting. So, um, Henry you’re in secondary science. How about you?

Henry Johnson: What I'm particularly interested in and I know other teachers are as well are the contextualisation of the Aboriginal science elaborations. So what we've done is we've put at the forefront, this Aboriginal science elaborations, where we look at the Aboriginal ways of knowing, understanding and where we can, we've put a South Australian context as well. So we have another curriculum manager, he works closely with the nations groups around the Adelaide area, where we look at the knowledge that they hold and how we can implement that into our units of work.

Whitney Schultz: I'm really proud about the way that the year 3/4 mathematics units in particular make the mathematics really visual. So we've adapted a model called the CPA model, which stands for concrete, pictorial abstract. So we've made sure that students have the opportunity to really go deep with a concept, use concrete materials, see in a pictorial representation before moving to the abstract concepts to really deepen their understanding.

So throughout the PowerPoints, you’ll see some really strong visuals of what those mathematics concepts actually look like, which I think will support not only student understanding of mathematics, but teachers as well.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's interesting. And, and have you both been in touch with teachers out in the field, have you got a bit of feedback on how they've received these units over?

Henry Johnson: Yes. We've had several teacher focus groups. The teachers range from having a couple of years’ experience to your HALTs and Cat 1 schools through to Cat 7 schools. So we do get a range of feedback. And we also work with seconded writers who we grab from schools, um, for a term. And again, they come from a range of different Cat schools and as well as experience themselves. So these are very much written by teachers for teachers.

Whitney Schultz: Yeah, throughout the writing process um, keeping in touch with teachers has been really important to make sure that it reflects what teachers need in their classrooms. So earlier this year, I had a small group of teachers who I worked with and touch base with, who were implementing some of the draft work in their classroom and giving feedback.

And they were able to see that their feedback was applied directly to the units. Um, we've obviously also had our teacher reference groups and, um, presenting at Educators SA to teachers, um, even across our Catholic sector as well, who are really excited to get on board with the units. Mostly from first look at the units people say, wow, the heavy lifting has been done for them. And there's things that they don't have to worry about now because they know that it's been done to a really high level and they can focus more on supporting their students.

Monique Miller: It's really great that testing, reflecting and improving is all sort of happening um, before they're published.

Whitney Schultz: I might just add on that as well after all of our units are written we'll be going through a review process. So it doesn't stop there. We'll keep continually refining and improving the units as we go.

Monique Miller: If teachers have any questions? Where do we go for those?

Henry Johnson: Uh, so if teachers, do you have any questions, I can give an email address, but it's pretty long winded. So if, when you go onto EDI and you go to the units of work, it's just at the bottom of the page, but for people that want to know it, education.curriculumdevelopmentdirectorate@sa.gov.au.

Dale Atkinson: Beautifully done. And we'll have that in the show notes too. So just check that out online. Thank you both for joining us, Whitney and Henry. Yeah, that was a, it was a great chat. And obviously we are coming towards the end of the year. So if you haven't already taken a look at the units, please do so in preparation for 2022, it's terrifying that that's the year that's coming up. So thank you both very much for your time. And, um, Monique, thank you for your time.

Everyone: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome back to Teach the podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education. And today I'm joined by Roy Page, who is Principal at Heathfield High School for a bit of an informal chat about the year in review. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of these details, Roy, but it's what about 800, 900 students about 90 staff?

Roy Page: That's right. And we'll expand to about 1,050 next year with the year sevens coming into high school.

Dale Atkinson: It's a pretty exciting time. So we're just talking to one of the leaders just about what it's like to be a leader in a public school. And just to look back on some of the things that have been achieved and look ahead at what's being planned for 2022. Just the first question 2021 was supposed to get easier after 2020. Right. What happened to that?

Roy Page: Well, look, you know, it's that ever changing pandemic called COVID and of course, for us, a lot of anticipation about new building works. We of course started the year with the infamous falling crane. So I went from a high to a low, quite early in the year, but there's been lots of things to celebrate. And I look forward to getting into those through this conversation.

Dale Atkinson: You touched on the building works, but let's talk a little bit about the complexity of the school that you lead. So you've got 800, 900 students. You're going up to a thousand next year, 90 staff, you've got 9 VET subject areas. You've got a $13 million capital works project underway as the leader of all of those various different strands. How do you stay across it all?

Roy Page: You've gotta be able to have a strong team around you and trust, I guess, the delegation of your leadership structure, to be able to carry out really important functions and with their support and having really clear, I guess, vision and school improvement, planning processes in place. It's that support that enables you to keep across it. Cause if you didn't have that, it would be extremely difficult to keep across at all.

Dale Atkinson: So at the start of 2021, what were the goals that you set yourself as a school and as a leadership group.

Roy Page: Well, we're always about building the capacity of everyone in the site. And so from a curriculum perspective, that was about really trying to engage with the curriculum resources from the DFE this year, and trying to incorporate those into what were our existing unit plans, taking the best from the DFE and adding value to what we already did. And then I think also, we've had a really long term focus now for the last three years on high grade achievement.

So Heathfield's a category 7 school and our community rightly so has really high expectations on us. And we have therefore high expectations on ourselves and the students to meet their potential. And so meeting that potential really looks like using VET as a pathway. Students this year, 14 of them got apprenticeships before the end of the year, which was our highest ever. And then we're on track to probably get our best SACE results ever. And so we're really excited by that and we're excited that our curriculum, but also our pathway conversations with students led by leaders and home group teachers is really supporting students to make the right choices on pathways earlier.

And we're starting to see dividends from that in terms of first choice university entry or out to work then into a pathway that there's passion in. And then that success that we're seeing within apprenticeships from school.

Dale Atkinson: At the time of recording were a couple of weeks away from those SACE results coming through, which you've referenced there. What have been the challenges about, particularly in that senior secondary to keeping the kids on track in the kind of COVID setting that we've had in the last two years now?

Roy Page: I've been really impressed with the resilience of the students because we hear a lot of airplay around young people not having resilience. And what I, my observation in the last 18 months is that our students have had bucket loads of resilience and have been, I guess, in partnership with us around raising any concerns they might have around the external environment and how that might impact on their learning.

So, you know, for example, once the crane fell over, there were year 12 classes in corridors, in halls and in outdoor areas. And, you know, they put up with that for, for three to four weeks and were really on board with the school going through the right channels to say, hey look, you know this is working for us, but this isn't, what can you do to help us out? And so I was really impressed with that maturity and the fact that they still had the focus, even though they might have been unsure of what it meant for their future. There still was a focus on the future and doing well.

Dale Atkinson: So I guess there's a correlation there, between the key skills, I guess, of leadership and what you're trying to build in, in your students, which is adaptability and resilience, is that right?

Roy Page: Yeah, absolutely. And I think student leadership is really important and the school has a long history of that through it's big brother - big sister program, where we have 48 students from year 11 and 12, who sit next year in year seven and eight home groups for the full year.

And they're working through with the youngest students around the challenges of going through a secondary school and what they need to do to build that character in each year, those year 11 and 12 students put their hand up and apply to become a big brother - big sister, cascading that experience down and building the capacity of the student body over time.

Dale Atkinson: And how's that going to continue when you introduce your year 7s to high school next year?

Roy Page: So we've just expanded the program. So instead of having what would have been 25 big brother - big sisters next year, we've got 48. And we actually had more people applying for those roles, than we needed to place. So, and so I guess there's a legacy of giving back to the community. That's built into the culture of the school, which is fantastic.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. It's also about sort of more rounded development of your students as well. So you've got the academic pathways, but you're also trying to make them good corporate citizens.

Roy Page: Absolutely. And I think one of the real successes and highs of this year has been the development of student leadership through a range of different avenues. So we've been partnered with Melbourne University, SASPA and across sector project and Learning Creates Australia on how do you actually improve student agency across the school site. And the partnerships with other schools we've worked with Glenunga and looking at their excellent work on the learner profile register.

We've tapped into work that was done at Craigmore High School some years ago on building student agency around curriculum and assessment. And so we've taken the good work from other schools and really tried to use that, to inform what that means for us and how are we gonna use that and that's been really successful. And I think one of the things that we've been asking through these pilot projects, particularly around the development of student capabilities, is if we get that right, then the sense of belonging in school increases, the achievement is there, but we then end up now with a well-rounded situation. And I wouldn't say it's embedded yet, but we're getting close to it.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's really exciting stuff. You spoke a little bit earlier about the $30 million capital works project that's going on at your site. Has managing or helping to manage those big projects been an area of personal development for you as a leader?

Roy Page: Absolutely. You know, it was an opportunity to upskill other leaders in the school, particularly the business leader who took on a real project management role, and that's been challenging for all of us, because there are a lot of moving parts and knowing the responsibility and accountability for where certain decisions lie and who you can influence in that situation has been an ongoing challenge.

Dale Atkinson: So do you think you've deepened your understanding of how the departmental systems have worked for you as a leader?

Roy Page: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the support there from whether it's capital works or year seven transition to high school. There's always been people monitoring behind the scenes and getting on the phone or setting up meetings to try and assist when he could say things, you know, and particularly during the crane incident could be unpacked or, you know, support could have been provided to the school.

Dale Atkinson: So one of the things you've been doing this year alongside a very big leadership role in a very sizable school, is working a day a week at the central office helping to shape the policy and providing sort of frontline experience to the decision making process here at 31 Flinders. What have you learned from that experience and what value do you think you've added?

Roy Page: What I've learned is that our system is massive and that creating change systemically is very complex work. And if it was easy, we would have done it yesterday. And so understanding how every person within Flinders Street has the same aspiration and vision as we do in schools. And we all want that vision of a world-class education for all our kids that, you know, any student going to school in South Australia has got as good a education, or if not better than anywhere else.

So I think that that's something that I've learned is that the centre has the same and is driving that, aspiration and everyone working here has that vision as well. So the value then of being a part of the reform coordination team, I think has been to just provide a school-based lens to how we maybe receive information or process policy ideas that come into schools and how we might interpret something or how it could be packaged differently to support implementation in schools.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the things that our Chief Executive Rick talks about a lot is increasing their kind of permeability , in central office with, I guess, a greater sharing and shifting of roles and relationships with schools and the centre and people moving in between the two, the experience that you've had. Is that something that you would recommend to other leaders and teachers to come in and get a sense and provide their experience internally?

Roy Page: Yeah, I think it's an absolute value add that we can all have, and there are lots of different places teachers and leaders could do that. You know, so you've got the full range of roles that we have within schools could be influenced certainly in the centre and taken back into schools.

And I know that there's certainly an appetite for that model of people coming into the centre, doing a bit of work, and then going back into schools to try and take that permeability or which is really information sharing backwards and forwards into school because obviously any change that is systemic by the time it's embedded in schools can take a while and any action or strategy that can kind of shorten that timeframe for the benefit of students is obviously a good idea.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. An incredible experience. Speaking to you, it's been very mutually beneficial. I think a bit of a change of gear - you got any advice for educators in terms of how they unwind or should unwind over the holidays coming up?

Roy Page: Yep. Turn your emails off, make sure you put the out of office reply. I know a lot of people do that. Personally, I find, unless I go away, it's really hard to switch off, which now that we've got open borders at time to actually leave the area, so to speak, so that you're out of contact in a different, complete physical context certainly helps me to unwind. I find that unless I go on a holiday somewhere, I find it hard to actually switch off. So that will be my plan over the holidays.

Dale Atkinson: I think it's probably double for you. You're also married to a principle, which I think begs the question. When do you to actually get to see each other?

Roy Page: Generally between 7:30 after the kids go to bed and 10:30 on the couch where we both have our laptops continuing to, generally, we don't, we're not working because you're not very productive at that time, but it's usually talking about things that have gone on in the school day and you know, how would you do this? How would you do that? But yeah, it's generally that time. They're just between the witching hour of 7:30 to 10:30 at night.

Dale Atkinson: I think you both probably deserve a bit of time away, somewhere, very different. And this is an ambitious question to ask a father of small children, but what, if anything, have you got on your holiday reading list?

Roy Page: That's a good question. I was looking at Steven Pinker's book, which I've got for awhile, which is, I think in called Enlightenment, which is basically, it's been on my list for a couple of years, but there's a lot of statistical analysis in there saying that actually today's time is the best time to have ever lived in history and given that we, I think at times at the moment have a quite pessimistic view of the future. This book provides quite a lot of counter-arguments to that, which I think is really important as a school leader to be, I guess, optimistic for the future, both for young people and for our colleagues.

Dale Atkinson: There's probably never been a better time to have some sort of reinforced optimistic messaging.

Roy Page: Yeah, absolutely. Because there was something that I ended the year 12 graduation talk on a couple of years ago when COVID was just coming out, was actually guys, you know, you've got to understand that the media that's going on around, and we tend to pick the most negative stories. Actually, there's lots of positive stuff going on and it's about paying attention to that as well.

Dale Atkinson: Is that going to be the same message to the kids this year?

Roy Page: It was, and it was also that being a young person in South Australia, there is lots of opportunity. The other message was refine the uniqueness within yourself that whatever your result says about you, it was just, I guess, a reflection of a point in time achievement. It's not you as an individual, but more around their experience over the last five years and how they improve their ability to think relate to others is actually going to have a much bigger impact on their future than their ATAR.

Dale Atkinson: I think there's something in that for all of us. Roy Page, thank you very much for your time.

Roy Page: No worries. Thanks very much for asking.