Keynote highlights were Dr Helen Street on wellbeing, mental health, diversity, discrimination, belonging, autonomy, agency – “the pursuit of wellbeing in schools is not working”.

Michael McQueen on the future of education and his comments on Virtual Reality and the Metaverse – “Best practice doesn’t stay best practice for long.”

There was an excellent student voice panel on the importance of curricula decolonisation, connection, open-mindedness, respect of pronouns, and belonging. “Young people must be taught open mindedness, to resist echo chambers and to listen to the voices outside those echo chambers.” (Char Palmer, Woodleigh School student).

I attended a couple of MYP workshops facilitated by Nat Erbes. Tension between structure and flexibility has swung too far towards structure, need to make the curriculum work for us, the MYP is a flexible framework, learner experience at the centre, encourage innovation, incorporate pedagogical/adolescent development research, from a single model to a framework that supports multiple approaches, moving from service learning to community engagement, design for coherence.

My favourite workshop was with Ted Cowan and Rebecca Smith from UWC Singapore on Approaches to Wellbeing. They spoke about belonging and shared vision, psychological culture and relationship culture. I particularly appreciated their reference to engaging and enhancing student voice and hearing about the relationship mapping project with Harvard’s Making Caring Common.

Olli Pekka-Heinonen, IB Director General closed the conference stating, “We are in-between worlds. The practices and mental models of the old world create an existential crisis. We don’t have the words for it or see it properly yet.”

 This will be the simplest hack you can possibly think of! The simplest ideas are often the best.

My starting point is that learning is a consequence of thinking. I am curious about how AI might help make students better thinkers. Most classes have behaviour management routines, so it makes sense to also develop routines around thinking, we can automate the approaches to thinking we would like to see more frequently. Many of you will be familiar with some of the thinking routines developed by Harvard’s Project Zero. Thinking routines are prompting tools, scaffolds for thinking, they are patterns of behaviour. They help nudge the model beyond teacher delivers, students receives.

Most teachers are familiar with the Think-Pair-Share approach, where students consider a question, discuss their answers with a classmate, and then share their thinking with the class. It helps to generate knowledge and to promote collaboration.

Credit to Sarah Dillard for this insight. One of the biggest tech-enabled leaps in pedagogy could simply be Think-Pair-ChatGPT-Pair-Share. ChatGPT adds an additional source of thought and perspective.

Take a thinking routine and add in generative AI as another step.

Here’s another one – Question Starts could become Prompt Starts

We know that when students ask more generative and constructive questions, and less procedural and review questions, learning improves. Prompt engineering for Generative AI can help us teach how to ask better questions and think more deeply. The better the prompt, the better the output.

Other tweaks to try might be adding an AI step into Give One, Get One or Plus One Notemaking.

Thinking routines are not static, they are designed to be adaptable.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, incorporate AI into existing teaching practice.

Teaching is a creative act.

I hope I have got you thinking.

Young people are entering a highly unpredictable world and the skills required to thrive in this environment are not captured in a ranking (Principals urge education authorities to scrap ATAR, 10 Feb). The ATAR score is a narrow and inadequate representation of a student’s 13-year journey, and it does not reflect their myriad individual strengths or talents. The excessive emphasis on the ATAR as a marker of academic proficiency has become overwhelming. Australia is the only country that employs such a system. It is essential that we create new metrics that are more than just academic, so that each student leaves school feeling confident, capable, empowered, and prepared for life-long learning in an AI world.

This is my speech for the book launch of Empowering Teachers and Democratising Schools

In her book Teacher, Gabbie Stroud beautifully encapsulates what is happening by stealth to the teaching profession:

“Good teaching comes from teachers who know their students, who build relationships, who meet learners at their point of need and who recognize that there’s nothing standard about the journey of learning. We cannot forget the art of teaching – without it, schools become factories, students become products and teachers: nothing more than machinery.”

I had the privilege of writing a chapter with Meredith Gavrin, a school founder in the US with expertise in Facing History and Ourselves, an organisation that uses lessons of history to challenge teachers to stand up to bigotry and hate. It helps me to find my voice when I write with colleagues. The central argument of our chapter is that teachers’ professional freedom and creativity are essential to democracy’s survival, yet schools are increasingly threatened by controlling bureaucracies and driven by performative measures.

School education is becoming a much more bureaucratised system, asking more of teachers, and getting less in return. It has become harder to exercise pedagogical freedom, which has been consumed by standardisation. Overpowering bureaucracies impose stifling regulations. Teachers are losing control of professional decisions as their tacit knowledge and experience is diminished. Tacit knowledge is the subtle nuance that is invisible to the untrained eye; even the best teachers find it hard to explain. In Alex Wharton’s chapter, he calls it the “unquantifiable, invisible work that teachers do”.

Our educational tensions are well known: punitive accountability, a climate of competition, over-reliance on numeric data, the negative effects of over-testing, and an epidemic of anxiety. The student rite of passage of shovelling a mass of content, cramming syllabus dot points, and being drilled to answer exam-style questions seems rather pointless in today’s fluid, connected world. Schools are largely driven by performative measures. The inspiring Melbourne Declaration and the more recent Mparntwe Declaration have been totally overshadowed by NAPLAN. Teacher colleague Deb Netolicky writes, “Teaching should not be a profession without accountabilities, but education is not an algorithm”. Quality assessment is more a conversation, than a number.

Thank you, Keith and Steve for the honour of being a part of this compelling book. It has been inspiring to witness a TeachMeet morph into a book. Teachers can thrive within democratic structures, but this is difficult while we work within layers of hierarchy and administration. Thank you as well for your acknowledgement of the Flip the System book that I was lucky to edit with Deb Netolicky and Jon Andrews. I appreciate the way that you skilfully build on the theme of teachers talking to teachers about teaching – such a deceptively obvious approach. We learn more in the staff room, the carpark, and the pub than in any mandated professional development session.

Teaching is an extraordinarily rewarding career. It is an art, not a delivery system. Every day is exciting. One of the allures is that there are no absolutes, no clear-cut answers. It is not our job to prevent risks, it is our job to make it safe to take them. The goal is always to make kids independent learners for life.

At the Woodford Folk Festival a few weeks ago, Anthony Albanese warned that democracies are under threat from “corrosive, insidious forces”. Democracy is something we have to fight for. Schools play a central role in any robust democracy. This needs to be relentlessly reiterated amidst the noise of high-velocity capitalism. Democracy only works when citizens are aware of their own role in protecting democratic principles. For democracy to thrive, a well-informed and thinking citizenry must thrive as well. Teaching is a creative, political, human act.

Thank you

The modern education system requires agile leadership that is capable of responding to an ever-changing landscape. Leaders must be able to build an adaptive, learning culture, build relationships and trust; create an inclusive and collaborative environment; and set a clear vision. This blogpost explores the qualities of successful education leaders in complex times.

Adaptive Leadership

While it used to be adequate for people to do as they were told, today people are needed who understand themselves and their world at a qualitatively higher level of mental complexity. The confusing, changing demands of modern life are developmentally inappropriate for most adults. The bar has been raised so high, so fast that the level of awareness and self-motivation expected today is far greater than anything required of previous generations. We no longer live in a world where we have the right to expect authorities to know the answers.

Complex, adaptive problems are solved with emergent practices, not ready to implement technical solutions. Leaders who thrive in complexity tolerate more uncertainty, ambiguity, and messiness. As the rate of change cycles at faster and faster rates, it requires more of a ‘learner’ and less of an ‘expert’ mindset. Adaptive leadership is about pointing people at the problem and mobilising them to do the work rather than being the one with all the answers. The people with the problem own the problem and the problem solving needs to be transferred to them.

Brian Cook, Social Studies Department Head at Dana Hall School, Boston says, “It’s about nurturing an eco-system rather than sticking to script. It takes time and it is messy and that is part of the process. You have to be OK with making mistakes.”

Psychological Safety

When a team operates in a culture of psychological safety, staff are energised to speak up when they see something going wrong. Leaders model that it is OK to make mistakes and acknowledge that they are likely to miss things. They are intentionally curious about people they disagree with in order to understand them. Differences generate conflict and creativity and help shape new perspectives. Instead of seeing resisters, leaders see people of potential. We can influence people by asking challenging questions and really listening to their answers. Where do they feel that little niggling feeling? What question are they asking that this might be the answer to? What do they want their learners to be like?

Jeff Evancho, Assistant Superintendent Secondary Education at South Fayette School District, Pennsylvania says, “I look for my toughest critics and start to build relationships. You have to be genuine. The art of listening. I set up in the library for a day, emailed all staff and invited them to come and challenge or critique me, whatever they wanted.”

Informal Leadership

80% of learning is informal and we must recognize our dependence on informal networks. Teachers learn more in the staff room, the carpark, and the pub than in any professional development session. They find out how to teach through informal learning: talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and working with experienced mentors. Leaders can identify the “seed carriers”, internal networkers and middle leaders who know how to get people talking to one another and how to build informal communities.

Brian Cook, Social Studies Department Head at Dana Hall School, Boston says, “Most enduring change comes about from middle managers. Every school has the teachers who have been there long enough to cultivate those informal relationships.”

Leadership Stance

Leading complex pedagogical change in schools requires patience for the slow and messy nature of the work, respectful and trusting relationships with people, listening with curiosity and authenticity, and respect for context and history. It isn’t about applying a formula; it is about engaging in a conversation. Effective leaders are intellectually curious, make people feel seen and heard, and invite people into change instead of telling them what they need to change. Too much education leadership focuses on procedural change and does not get to the deep change in teachers’ beliefs required for effective school improvement. Teachers are professionals with agency and teaching is a collaborative enterprise that requires constant reflection, examination, and inquiry.

Our leadership stance determines how we frame problems, see opportunities, and direct our energies. The quotes below are from three transformational education leaders. What can you infer about their collective leadership stance, and their views on learning and education?

“Instilling the same dispositions in the teachers and leadership as you hope to instil in students is one way to ensure that change has legs. It’s so powerful to invite people into change instead of telling them what they need to change.” – Kristen Kullberg, Making and Design Initiatives Coordinator at Washington International School

“If you are doing systemic large-scale change, you have to be focused on the adult learners first, not the children. The biggest mistake is not viewing adults as learners as well. If you don’t treat adults as professionals, you are [in a difficult situation].” – Elise Heil, Principal at Sacred Heart School, Washington DC.

“Have a genuine desire to listen and learn, to see your role as not the authority. Be truly curious about your learners, really care. Desire to listen and connect in an authentic way. See education as truly part of a civic effort. It is beyond passing a test; it’s about creating humans; it is more lifelong. When someone sees you as a human, that is really empowering as learner.” – Nathalie Ryan, Senior Educator at US National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Positive Leadership

Leaders question the status quo. In order to do something, we have to be able to imagine it. Becoming clear about our personal and collective purpose, is how we become leaders. When we know and document our values, and ask others to hold us accountable to them, it draws talented and motivated people to us. Clarifying your unique purpose and writing, distilling, and frequently revising that purpose can be transformational. Try providing your colleagues with a copy of your personal purpose, and ask them to call you on it if they see you not supporting those values.

People and organizations flourish when positive practices are given greater emphasis than negative practices. Ensure that after people interact with you, they have more energy. Three particularly important activities for promoting a positive climate include fostering compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude among employees. Leaders should be a source of life-giving or positive energy.

Erik Lindemann, 3rd Grade Teacher and Facilitator/Leader at Osborne Elementary in Michigan says, “Spend time with people who are the sparklers, the energisers, Spend time with the plusses. The ‘Yes, And…?’ people.”

Education leaders in complex times face a unique set of challenges. They must be open to change, embrace ambiguity, foster relationships, and cultivate a culture of psychological safety. They must also recognize the power of informal learning, understand the importance of a positive leadership stance, and sparkle with energy.

*Quotes in this blogpost are from my Churchill Fellowship.

The following summary is based on the Becoming Who You Really Are executive education course at Michigan Ross.

What is the one thing that is keeping you from becoming a great leader, and what are you doing about it? Leadership is developed through discovery and deliberate practice. Even Gandhi moved from being awkward and ineffective to an expert leader who could change paradigms and behaviours. In order to do something, we have to be able to imagine it. Because Gandhi had spent time with the lower classes, he was able to articulate what was real and important to Indians: salt and bread, basic needs. What is the bread and salt of your school?

Becoming clear about our personal and collective purpose, is how we become leaders. If we know our values, document those values, and allow others to hold us accountable to them, this creates a power that attracts talented and inspired individuals. “I would like you to hold me accountable for these.” What are your deepest beliefs? Do people around you know who you really are and what matters most to you? Exposing who you really are moves people.

Clarifying your unique purpose and writing, refining, updating, and constantly reviewing that purpose can be transformational. Understanding your life’s mission can increase your positive thoughts, help you perform better, and improve your ability to impact the performance of others. Why don’t you give each of your direct reports a copy of your deeply held values and personal highest purpose, and then instruct them that if they ever witness you acting in a way that doesn’t reflect those values, they are to call you on it?

As we become purpose-driven, we begin to use personal stories to convey the higher purpose of the school. These personal stories deliver a level of authenticity that can motivate other members of the team. When we show ourselves to be vulnerable, and speak with authenticity, we build trust and commitment in our teams. Telling authentic stories from our own life can be a source of power.

When purpose is clarified, some people will realise that they don’t belong at your school. This is a good thing. As you replace these individuals, you will be able to attract talented people whose purpose is aligned with the organisation. As a leader, your goal should be to connect your team to the higher purpose that drives the school as a whole. Could you take your strategy and translate it into a few pictures? This helps to convey the school vision in a way that allows everyone in the school to contribute to success. A school doesn’t truly have a purpose until it is clear to everyone.

We can empower people by encouraging them to think about the question, “what result do you want to create?” rather than handing them a solution to a problem. There is tremendous pressure on leaders to be the expert, to have the answers and solve all the problems. Stepping out of the expert role is necessary if team members are to be empowered to think and act for themselves. Leaders should try to act as though they are the dumbest person in the room. You should go into every meeting genuinely trying to learn from the people there. Let others be the experts. Be vulnerable and authentic. Make it possible for other people to grow.

Leaders challenge the status quo. School culture stifles risk-taking. If every year you don’t risk your job, you aren’t doing your job. Schools must choose between deep change or slow death. Leaders must work against the natural school biases toward stability, structure and bureaucracy. School resistance to change is deeply held. As pressure to change builds within a school, the initial reaction is denial. Leaders must expect and confront denial.

Instead of seeing resisters, see people of potential. “Failures” of people are really failures of leadership. When people don’t follow, it’s the leader who is the problem. The best way to create an environment of trust is to listen and be empathetic to those around you. When these things are done effectively, leaders are often amazed by the energy and performance of their teams. In order to convince people that they can do what they know they cannot do, a leader must have their complete trust. A leader helps people do what they think is impossible. We can influence people by asking challenging questions and then truly listening to their answers. Challenging questions can help people to think and to become self-empowered.

Are you willing to invite feedback from others? Have you been explicit about your desire to receive feedback? Have you created an environment that makes it easy for others to approach you and offer this feedback? Feedback is essential to learning. Unfortunately, most people don’t feel comfortable giving or getting feedback. In order to grow, we have to open ourselves to feedback from others.

Schools are in our Kodak/Blockbuster moment and we need to change radically or become irrelevant. Our central learning challenge is helping people cope with a faster rate of change as digitisation and exponential acceleration fundamentally reshape the world. We all need to become more aware of how we are algorithmically shaped by our tools. For the workforce of 2040, the competitive advantage will be the ability to offer value beyond an algorithm. The new world of artificial intelligence, globalisation and flexible work requires people who have the skills, capabilities and mindset to see possibilities, seize opportunities, to make a difference in their communities and be agents of change. Learning is a biological, evolutionary necessity for survival, not an institutionalised practice. Education will be a key driver for the innovation economy and a focus on literacy and numeracy is no longer enough. While writing is still important, it needs to co-exist with the ‘non-text’ media of graphics, colour, lines, animation and sound. I am particularly interested in the gap between schools and learning.

“Every weekday I walk into my first class period exhausted from the previous night’s homework. For 55 minutes my teacher teaches, I take notes, and then the bell rings. I scribble down my homework, get up, and repeat. Seven times. Five days a week for the past six school years.”

Imagine if you had to move to a different office and focus on a new problem every hour, sitting down for the entire time, with repetitive work to do after hours, and to top it off, the managers who supervise your various commitments don’t communicate with each other. This is the daily experience for high school students, and teachers are just as restricted: 25 new people enter the classroom every hour, meetings usurp preparation, and unfinished planning follows them home. Nobody benefits from the frenetic pace.

Time is the most controlling structure and the scarcest commodity in schools, and the traditional school schedule is the greatest impediment to educational innovation. Any attempt to redesign the schedule runs up against the intricate constraints of parental custodial expectations, teacher comfort in the known, part-time staff, curriculum mandates, bus schedules, sports schedules, objections from unions, and high-stakes tests. Teachers are held hostage by the sacred timetable, warned that one small change will cause a disastrous cascade.

While flexibility in time and space will define the workplace in this century, students get little experience deciding how to learn, where to learn, and when to learn, because schools account for every minute. Schooling is predicated on the perception that busyness is good. Treadmill schedules leave little time for deep learning, quietude, or human connections.

• What does our allocation of time say about what we value in the teaching and learning process?
• How can we provide time to enable young people to take more personal responsibility for their own learning, in line with the adolescent predisposition to begin taking charge of their lives?
• If flexibility in time and space will define living and working this century, how can school best prepare young people for this?

Stephen Covey wrote about Big Rocks, the things we value and feel are truly important. Big rocks are our priorities, the things we want to make room for. If school schedules reflect values and priorities, then we currently value speed, uniformity, and quantity over depth, individuality, and quality.

In Finland, students only spend about five hours a day in classrooms and they have little to no homework. The rule of thumb is 15 minutes of recess per hour of work. Deeper learning advocates recommend daily schedules where students study three or four subjects for around 90 minutes at a time, rather than the usual six 50-minute blocks. Steiner’s model of a deep learning period, where students focus on a single subject for at least two hours, is another way of shaking up the traditional school day. However, there is no optimal class length. The best length of a class period will be different depending on the age of the students, the culture, the number of students, and the experience of the teacher. How teachers use the time they are allocated is more important than the length of the lesson. It is not about how long we teach for but how well we teach with the time we have.

Australian teachers are doing more face-to-face teaching than the OECD average, yet Australia’s performance in PISA has been steadily declining. Countries with higher-performing students give teachers more planning time. Teachers in Shanghai have much more planning time than Australian and US teachers. Planning and collaboration time is critical to teacher job satisfaction and we should make it a priority, a big rock that we put in first.

Some students (and teachers) discovered a new sense of autonomy and flexibility during Covid-imposed remote learning, relishing the loss of early start times and being able to choose when to eat or move instead of responding to bells. Shifts in thinking about time ground evolving educational practices like flipped classrooms, blended learning, and block scheduling. In Australia, Simon Beaumont leads a school which uses a self-directed learning model that needs less face to face class time and builds independent learning habits. Andrew Beitsch wonders, “if we could start the concept of the ‘senior study period’ earlier in secondary schooling as a first step and maybe provide some space for educators to collaborate at the same time?”

At St Luke’s Catholic College high school students can opt for a supervised study session at 8:30 am three mornings a week, or they can sleep in and start at 10 am – a decision guided by research into sleep and teenage brains. Sir Joseph Banks High restructured timetables to allow senior students half days. Trinity Grammar School has a fortnightly lesson-free ay for Grade 12. At Element College, families are able to choose when they take their 12 weeks of holidays per year, without any disruption to their child’s learning or anyone else’s learning.

In a century that is being defined by flexibility in time, we no longer need to be held hostage by sacred school timetables. If we value deep learning and human connection, then this should be explicitly built into the school schedule. Cutting back on sitting, listening, and repetition, will result in more engaged, thoughtful, and creative learners.

This week I’m doing some school visits and talking with counterparts. Here are the questions I have come up with to ask:

1. What are you doing to break the cycle of deliver and test?
2. How are you developing students’ abilities to cope with increasing independence as they become older?
3. Where are you tinkering with your timetable?
4. What are you doing about staff workload pressures?
5. How are you building capacity in your middle leaders?
6. How are you challenging traditional notions of schooling?