This podcast is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. Orbis would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay respects to all elders, past and present.

Pasi: Hello, everyone. My name is Pasi Sahlberg. I'm hosting this time, the Orbis podcast for you and I'm sitting here at the Woodville High School Special Interest Music Centre with, Ben Fuller and Paul Monaghan. And we have amazing five students from this school and this music program here.

And we're going to talk a little bit about things that have been happening in this school during the last few years. Paul and Ben, who have been participants of the 2025 Leading Future Learning program, have developed a change initiative of a project for this school that is centred on enhancing learner or student agency, as we call it, and collective responsibility by building the leadership capacity of student music leaders.

It's a really interesting and, for me, it's kind of a curious thing to learn more about. I learned this morning that there are 110 students enrolled in the Special Interest Music program, and you make amazing number of 70 performances during the school year. Is it true?

Michael: Yeah.

Pasi: Oh, that's fantastic. Michael, would you frame a little bit about what this initiative has included here and what has happened and why you would do something like this?

Michael: Yeah. So if I talk about why we've really been doing this, I'd say, at Woodville we have an empowering student leadership structure that's given us agency, which is decision making power to lead transformational change. But we really wanted this reflected in the learning and teaching practices at our school. The students at our school, and everywhere really, need to be adept at sensing opportunity, forming their own goals, taking risks, recovering from setbacks, and learning how to collaborate with others to solve complex problems that don't have easy answers.

Pasi: So, Michael, you are in year 12 right now.

Michael: Yeah

Pasi: So, you're just about to depart from the school. You must be happy to see something like this happening.

Michael: I am so happy to see something like this happening. Because I've gone through the class that they've been redesigning, and the way that they've redesigned it is truly amazing.

Pasi: Yeah. Ben and Paul can I talk to you about this co-design. Some people may not be familiar with what the co-design looks like in practice at the level of the school that Michael was talking about. Could you walk us through a little bit about the process in practice, what co-design looks like in this school? And why did you why did you decide to go that way?

Ben: Yeah, it's actually been a whole school initiative and it started with a little focus group that we've had which was called ‘Students as Researchers’. And the way it worked was we picked three curriculum areas and teachers from each of those areas got to work with a small group of students from each year level, just to think about one class that they had and worked together with the students to kind of co-design it. So we did that in some mathematics, we did it in English, and we also did it in music as well.

One of the great things too, was as part of the ‘Students as Researchers’, the students were actually given a choice of what teachers they wanted to work with. And so students were identified, and then they chose the teachers that they thought they could do some really good co-design work with.

Pasi: So we are sitting here with four year 10 students, and we are eager to hear from you, actually. How you experienced, what did you think about being part of the designing your own teaching and learning, that is not very usual anywhere or in any school, particularly high schools. But would you just briefly mention your name and how did you feel about being part of that, what was important for you in that? Who would like to go first? Let's go from here.

Ava: Okay, my name is Ava, and, it felt really good to be a part of this. It was like I felt like I was a part of, like, a team and a community, and, like, we were all trying to reach a shared goal that we were all working towards. And we were working together with the teachers. And, yeah, it was really nice to work with the teachers and like other students to hear how everyone's ideas and everything, to like create different plans that mattered to the teachers and students as well. So that was like, really nice to work together with everyone.

Pasi: Excellent. Who are you and how did you feel about it?

Izzy: Yeah, my name's Izzy, and I thought it was, like, really good. It made me think about how I actually like to learn because, like, sometimes, like, you're just in school. Like you just go through the motions. Like you don't really think about what you're doing or why you're doing it. But then it kind of just made me like, slow down and think, this is actually how I learn best and this is how like, we can improve what we're doing and everyone can, like, have more of an opinion. Yeah.

Pasi: Great.

Elena: I think it was a good thing of what the others are designed to do. Obviously, I wasn't a part of designing phase, but I was a part of designing how I could teach other people within our instrument groups, which is what these guys designed, and how this could help them learn. And I think it was good what they had done so that we had the opportunity to run how we wanted to learn. So working in that instrument group, obviously we all are going to have our own different problems and different ways of playing, practising and tackling problems. So I think it was a good thing that we put it, what these guys have done, really.

Pasi: And would you tell your name.

Elena: Oh, I'm Elena,

Pasi: One more.

Phoebe: I'm Phoebe, and I think it was really exciting to have input and be part of, like, actually part of the creative choices that happened within it. It made the work, even just if the work wasn't say necessarily better, I think I was more motivated to do it because I created it. I think it then drove and tied straight into the SACE board meeting that I went to with Mr. Fuller, how we were working on the student agency. And I think just being able to have input, even if that might not be the best approach because we are students.

Pasi: Yeah.

Phoebe: We've only been alive for 16 years.

Pasi: Right.

Phoebe: But, just doing it yourself made me at least feel more motivated to actually do it.

Pasi: I can tell you this, if these were my students and I hear something like this, I would be like, proud of them.

Paul: Absolutely.

Pasi: Can you speak a little bit about this? What you've seen from teachers and adults' point of view, when you look at these changes and, and ownership and leadership that these students are taking. How do you feel yourself as an educator? What are some of the important changes that you realised?

Paul: I think one of the great things that this work that's being done at the moment, has helped us with, is it's given a student perspective on things, of better ways of doing things that we have routinely done. So, particularly in this subject, we've had a system that's been in place for a very long time. But the students identified that there was a better way of doing it. So that's fantastic. And then I think what we've seen, from this particular initiative is that there's much greater engagement, there’s much greater ownership, and the work that's being done seems to be more relevant to the students.

Ben: Yeah, and just to add on to that, the big things that I've seen is particularly the quickness of the planning. I can't believe how quickly you’ve organised it, and attention to detail was amazing. Any teacher would just go okay fantastic. But just the level of leadership, the level of knowledge that they've gained out of it. More about their own instrument, but also other instruments and the level of professional conversation that's come out of the individual masterclass sessions. And then when we combined 2 masterclasses together, and share what kind of skills, strategies and techniques that we're using towards improving our performance practice. It's just really opened up an increased level of dialogue.

Pasi: Yeah.

Ben: And not only that, but more importantly, a safer space.

Pasi: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the individual moments or stories that you may have that you're carrying with you based on what you've done. Ben, I remember your water bottle moment or story. Could you share?

Ben: Yeah, it was like the first meeting we had, so we were in the room, we talked about the issues, the problems that were happening with this subject, and I said, ‘okay, so I'm going to stop talking now and you guys design it. You've got to put together like an 8-to-10-week program. You can organise it any way you want.’ And you know, I just listened to them start talking and then it's like my water bottle’s empty. So I'm like, ‘Okay, you can stay here and continue working on it. I'm going to go fill up my water bottle.’ So I went did that, caught up with another staff member because we had to have a chat about something else, and I walked back in the room like kind of, I don’t know, 15 or 20 minutes later, and they've shown me this document where they've got everyone from the class, they've split them into instrument group, they’ve turned it into like a 10 week program. They've worked out which people are going to be performing in front of myself and with the accompanist, they've worked out where all the other instrument groups are going to be grouped together. And then there was the next stage, which is like, okay, so we've got to do it. We've got to run a sectional. How are we going to do that? And then, well, you know, within the next 10 or 15 minutes, they like redeveloped and created this booklet of here's how you run a sectional, here's how to give effective feedback, which is actually something that was built on from our co-curricular leadership program that we actually started right at the beginning of this year. But the way that they actually took that and just redesigned that and put it into the context of the solo performance was just amazing.

Pasi: Yeah. So did this really happen?

Izzy: Yeah.

Pasi: Can you speak a little bit about your side of the story on this? Because it's pretty amazing to hear something like this, but how did you feel about that moment?

Izzy: Yeah, it was really exciting because we were like, we had these ideas about like how we could change our learning and we actually like, got to like, talk about them together. And we were all kind of on the same page, which made it like really good. So we just kind of we were excited about it. We quickly did it because we thought, we can implement this like soon as well. Yeah.

Pasi: Amazing.

Izzy: Yeah.

Pasi: Michael, you've seen a little bit longer these things than like the other 4 colleagues here. Do you have any particular moments or any stories, on this journey that you would like to share with us?

Michael: I remember doing the class that they've redesigned 2 years ago now or something, and just being able to talk with friends about how we thought we would run it. But, you know, back then wasn't doing a lot of the leadership stuff. So going ‘Oh, perhaps we can't change it. We don't really have a say’, to seeing this now where they are co-designing their learning, they’re being given agency. It's incredible to watch. And I've talked to a lot of the people in that class that have never been happier to attend one of these classes.

Pasi: Wow, let's talk a little bit about what are we actually learning from the way we do these things now, this co-design that you are collectively designing, what are you supposed to learn, in this case, in the music context? But why is it important, in particular in the times like this, that we are not just teaching you stuff, but we are asking, engaging you in thinking about what is important, what do you want to learn. Why do you think that is becoming so important? That it’s a big part of the your state's public education strategy as well. But why is that important from your point of view? Anyone.

Phoebe: I think I'm of the opinion that school is a place where you learn how to learn. It's not a place where you go to learn the specific content. So I think it's helping us learn these skills, to be able to learn other things outside of school and to be an actual functioning person. Like knowing my trigonometry is not going to help me, like, I don't know, live by myself.

Pasi: So you're talking about learning how to learn skills?

Izzy: Yeah.

Pasi: That you learn to learn. How about the others? That's really important. Why do you think this is important now?

Elena: I think specifically with music, if we want to take music for our future, it's teaching us how to become like this performer and how we can be appropriate, how we can introduce ourselves and how we can play. And then if we are learning how to play a piece and there are mistakes that we have along the way, this class is now helping us figure out how we can solve these mistakes and how we can practice appropriately to the piece we need to play. Yeah.

Pasi: Do you want to add something from your…

Izzy: Yeah. Like I think like the concert prac, which is the class that we kind of changed in that, it's always been like quite a scary class because you have to go up and like perform in front of, like your whole classroom, which can be quite a scary thing. But when, like, you split it into, like the groups of, like people that, like, understand your instrument because you all play similar instruments, like it's so much easier and you can like give feedback on like and actually understand like each other and like what you're playing and how you're playing it and improve.

Ava: Yeah. Yeah, I think the feedback was like a lot better this time because everyone understood everyone's instruments. And it was a lot better because normally people would just say like random feedback that they didn't really think about, but yeah, people really thought about what they were saying back to the performer, and that was really nice because then you actually got to work on this feedback that they were saying.

Pasi: Yeah, do you think we could do similar things, kind of with co-design and have students more engaged in planning in other subjects like mathematics or English? Do you think it would work?

Izzy: Yeah definitely.

Pasi: Yeah, me too. Let's go to Ben and Paul. I've been watching you all the last eight, nine months, in this Leading Future Learning program with Orbis, and I've seen a kind of a learning curve in you. Do you like to speak a little bit about your own learning? What did you learn through this change initiative in your own school that we are talking about here? Learn about yourself or learn about school.

Paul: Yeah, we did. We learnt about ourselves. We learnt a little bit about systems here at the school, but also about that value of how much more capable students are than we give them credit for.

Pasi: Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And for us, this sort of journey started even before we did our Orbis course. We had a PD session last year where Michael was a very important trigger for this whole journey that we've gone on where we were talking a little bit about curriculum and we were talking about, about the idea of practising your instrument. And when we sort of posed it to Michael about, you know, do you actually know how to practice? Have you been taught how to practice? And it became quite clear that we had a lot of expectations that students knew how to learn about the things they needed to learn. Like you said, but that wasn't necessarily the case. So that that kind of really sparked the idea of where we set off and when we began our project, our change initiative for Orbis, we sort of started looking at that whole idea of a student's role within an ensemble, but then also how they can be responsible for the output of the whole ensemble, and it came back to practice. Which tied in really nicely with some other work that we're doing at school with our professional learning teams here at school. And part of our strategic work here at school, about student agency, and for us it sparked a professional learning team approach of practice strategies that we used, as part of this initiative, that we had input from students on and it was a really exciting journey, but it changed a lot throughout the time.

Pasi: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: So what we started with is completely different to what we're now talking about.

Ben: It is really interesting. One thing, I'm going to talk a little bit about the strategies and, so, you know, as a professional learning team and through talking with a couple of students, we thought, ’Ok we need to come up with some actual direct strategies and lead some of this learning ourselves so that we can start to set up an idea of, this is how you practice effectively.’ And in talking to a lot of professional musicians, and we actually had a special guest come in the other week, Mark Bain, who works with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and even he was saying ‘I wish I knew an effective way to practice before for school’. So we kind of set up that idea, and then we kind of introduced these strategies to the students. And there was one great moment from you Pheobe, when we were sitting in there and I’m saying, ‘Right, you've got to reflect on your practice strategies’. And she goes, ‘Well, a lot of these strategies are great for woodwind and brass players and stuff, but I’m a singer. And so these are not particularly, I would use this strategy in this way ,and I would actually use this one, which is a different strategy.’

Pasi: Yeah, yeah.

Ben: So, and that has also led to some other things. There was one thing that Michael mentioned. We talked about using practice diaries and he would say that, ‘Well, when I would practice, you'd asked me to fill in a practice diary and I'd spend half my time filling in the diary and not actually doing any practice’. So, but then, and I think the students who, you know, have a few comments about these as well. But, we went into this phase where we said ‘We're going to do practice videos. These videos, practice videos’. We actually made them hand up a practice video kind of every week, and that gave us the idea to, we would watch these videos so we would understand how they were going about their practice. So we could then guide that further. And then by the guidance we provided them, that led them to guide themselves into further practice.

Pasi: Yeah

Ben: Particularly when we got to the next stage and I'm like, ‘Thank you for handing up all those weekly videos. But do you actually watch them back?’ And they’re like, ‘Some of them, yeah’ and others were like, so then that got us into the discussion around the metacognitive strategies behind practice and reflecting on your own practice, which is kind of part of our next and continuing journey that we were working on.

Pasi: Yeah, yeah. Oh, this is excellent. I'm really excited about, you know, not only being in the school and seeing what you do here, but hearing what you have to say. Now we are coming to an end here and I'd like to give you an opportunity, the students first. If there's anything that you would like to tell the teachers, there may be teachers here, Paul or Ben or somebody else, or teachers who are listening to this in other schools, about this type of approach to teaching and learning and work with you. Is there something that you would like to share as a word of encouragement, or word of warning, or any anything that you think is important to be said and, you know, if you can, if you want to address to your teachers here, that would be great as well. But any thoughts from your point of view that would be important to keep this amazing process not only going, but growing and getting bigger and broader. Who would like to go first, what do you want to say?

Ava: I would just say I think it's like a great idea. I think, like, more teachers should introduce this because it's a great way to, like, involve students’ thoughts and ideas and it makes the classes a lot more effective. When the students are enjoying the way that they're learning these subjects and the teachers are enjoying the way that they're teaching them. And so I think it actually just makes it really effective in the way they do it. And it just, it fits everyone's needs and interests, I think. I think more and more teachers should introduce it into their classes.

Pasi: And not only in music.

Ava: Not only in music, in like most of the subjects. Yeah I think that would be really good.

Pasi: Thank you. Who’s going to go next?

Izzy: I think it makes it a lot more interesting for both the students and the teachers, like co-designing, because then you're both like, the teachers can understand how the students would like to learn and like they won't be doing the same thing every time as well. And it's just more interesting for everyone I think, yeah.

Pasi: Yeah, so you would encourage to go further.

Izzy: I would encourage, yeah.

Pasi: Excellent.

Elena: Yeah, I totally agree. I think all these teachers from different subjects should do it, because I feel like the students will respect the subject and will respect the teacher more. I feel as though music has always been a completely different subject altogether from all the different subjects have been during high school, and it's a completely different environment. But we know our peers and our teachers more in music than we would usually do in our other lessons. But co-designing this unit has only made this connection stronger, and not only co-designing this unit, it has also helped teachers learn about students, and teachers learn about other ways of learning. And it's helped everyone get to know each other and how they want to learn individually, in their own individual ways.

Pasi: Thank you so much.

Phoebe: Yeah, I think that when students are part of the process, they care more and take real ownership. And I think we saw that first hand and we actually cared about what we were doing. And I think that for teachers, it's that co-designing doesn't mean losing control. It means gifting it to someone so they're not taking it off you. You should want to give it to them.

Pasi: Yeah.

Phoebe: And sharing that control in a way that does motivate students.

Pasi: Nice. Michael, you're leaving school soon so you can say whatever you want.

Michael: I would definitely say to any teachers looking at doing this, give it a go. Like just from this particular one, I can see that it's created a safe environment in the class, a respectful environment between students and teachers. Students are way more engaged with their learning, and when the more engaged, they're more likely to attend and succeed in the class. It's taught them, like skills that they'll take way beyond high school.

Pasi: Yeah. And now closing, Paul or Ben, is there anything that you would love to tell these amazing students that you have here, or students anywhere, about this, how you see the role of co-design, doing things together, having more kind of a collective approach to teaching and learning.

Ben: Yeah. Well, I've really enjoyed the process. And the thing that's come, well it’s come from our leadership in that they gave us the autonomy and trust to develop this. And I then pass that autonomy and trust onto the students, and I would just like to say, you know, awesome job because you've proven, just, you know, just how engaging you can be and just how your critical and creative thinking and the way that you are able to work together and collaborate as a team to actually just design something has just been absolutely awesome.

Pasi: Yeah.

Paul: It's actually blown me out of the water.

Pasi: Yeah. Me too, and I've seen only that little here.

Ben: So, our next kind of thoughts for these guys is, you know, ‘Where can we go to next?’ like, what other subjects can we do it in, within their own music thing but also across the school as well. Because these guys don't just do music, you know.

Pasi: Right, many other things. Paul.

Paul: I think we're incredibly proud of the work that they've done. We have a very strong community here in the Special Interest Music Centre and I think this is really enhanced the relationships between students and the staff members. I think that that whole idea of a safe space to do things, but being given trust and autonomy to actually do something which is incredibly innovative, which we don't necessarily get a chance to do as teachers, but to have that input from the students has been absolutely amazing. And our challenge now, I guess, is to make it more than just a project that we've done once. And, so it's not just a one off, it's about how do we expand it, not only in the music centre, but then also make links in the wider school. Because a lot of the things that we're doing, we were talking yesterday in the alumni event is, very similar to work that happens in other subjects. We do chunking, we do repetition, we do all those things that happen in other subjects as well. We've just got cool names for them.

Pasi: So now I have a special kind of a bonus question for you if I may. Yeah, so we're sitting here in the Woodville High School Special Interest Music Centre which means that music is everywhere. And I happen to have a birthday coming this weekend, and you guess my question. Would you be at all willing to sing me a happy birthday? Would you do that? We have some amazing singers here.

Ben: What key do you guys want to do it in? [indistinguishable chatter]

Everyone: Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Pasi. Happy birthday to you.

Pasi: Amazing, the best birthday present ever. Thank you so much, and thanks also for this conversation and those who are listening. I hope you enjoy this one and go and follow the advice from the students and colleagues. Thank you so much.