Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teacher Podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education. Today I'm joined by some people from Golden Grove High School, Chantel Lee, secondary teacher, HASS, English. Welcome to you.

Chantel Lee: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: And Joel Strauss. Now year 11 student, but year 10 student last year at the Active Citizenship Convention. Tell us about that. What was it? How was it?

Joel Strauss: It was fantastic to say the least. It was a deep dive into politics in Australia, having your own voice and knowing what's going on around you in the media and being able to interpret and get your own information, your own opinion out of things instead of following what others might do.

Dale Atkinson: Well. So it sounds exciting this citizen ship convention, but the reason we did that Chantel was specific, wasn't it? It's because we wanted to make civics and civics education more relevant, more engaging, more meaningful for students. What does that look like at Golden Grove?

Chantel Lee: Actually our school, so our principal will say that our word of the year was community last year and this year it's more of like connected community.

So our school is very much pro getting the students to have that student agency and see what they can do to make not just the world a better place, but our school a better place as well. So at Golden Grove that means that it's not just civics and citizenship education that we focus on. We also have a number of student leadership classes, peer support classes, our school captains are very active, and actually tomorrow, Joel is participating in a whole school forum. So it's like our own sort of school parliament. So I think our school is very good at supporting students and having that voice and feeling like they can do something to make their school a better place.

Dale Atkinson: Let's talk a bit about the whole school forum. What does that look like and what was the chrysalis of that as an idea?

Chantel Lee: So the school forum came out of one of our previous teachers. She really wanted to give the students more voice especially around decision making around the school as well.

So what happens is you have about two per class, per year level. So we have between one to 10 home groups, so from each home group and they will come and represent what they believe it should be, what they want to change in the school, offer different perspectives. So us as Grove teachers or home group teachers, we actually nominated students for this role and they talk about how they wanna see change at the school and what issues are affecting them and how teachers can better help them.

Dale Atkinson: And how is the Safeguarding Democracy initiative been interplaying with activities like that?

Chantel Lee: Oh, very much. Especially in our Disability Unit as well. So our Disability Unit did an amazing project as part of our professional learning collaboration team. So our year seven and nine Safeguarding Democracy team actually worked with them to integrate First Nations perspectives better into our disability curriculum. So now they all have First Nations names for each of their classrooms. The students did a lot of research on it. They actually had a full-on vote about what names they wanted to do, and that was shared with the whole school, which was really beautiful to see.

From my perspective as a senior teacher, a lot of it has been around student agency and encouraging students to have that voice and actually see specific changes to that they can make. So in my class, we did a social action project around how to improve toilet facilities.

One of the key takeaways from that was a lot of the girls said that they needed more access to period products and we actually worked with those girls to organize having them across the school because our campus is massive. So if there were in one area of the school, they actually had no access. So now they do.

I remember one of the girls saying to me, it's really cool to see that I can have an idea and I can make it happen and there's ways of doing that.

Dale Atkinson: Is that something you've experienced as well, Joel, in terms of having more of a say in the nature and activities that are going on at the school site?

Joel Strauss: Yeah, of course. The project actually founded off the convention. It was on the bus on the way back we decided, “hey, let's have a say, let's do this as our next big assignment and project”. So it wasn't like, none of us were fighting for a grade. After that convention, we all fought for change.

Dale Atkinson: Has it changed the way that you've interacted with your fellow students? Is it a different kind of conversation when you've got this frame of reference around like democratic activity?

Joel Strauss: Absolutely. I didn't know many of them to start with, but now that we've all got this understanding, we can work together to find solutions using methods that were shown at the convention using scenarios that they gave us.

Chantel Lee: And you guys were really proactive in getting your, that sort of stakeholder participation and understanding what it means to have stakeholders and thinking of the student body as separate stakeholders as well. And that not every student wants the same thing. So that democracy is a negotiation, it's compromise and having to learn to work through that compromise. Definitely.

Dale Atkinson: And how much of a push did you need to give the students, Chantel?

Chantel Lee: What was great about it is I'm very big on student agency and that democratic teaching process. So, I had an idea that I wanted to do a social action project, and like Joel said, we actually did think of it on the bus back from the convention because they were really activated and they were really excited. And I just said, what kind of project do you wanna do? Let's do something that's change from the school and that's the framework I gave them. I put them into working parties, so they had to collaborate and they all had very specific goals, but it was the idea that we're all working towards one goal. So for me it was more putting in place the framework, but the students were the drivers of what change they wanted to see.

Dale Atkinson: And how have you built that into your coursework and your assessment work? What's that look like for you in terms of effort?

Chantel Lee: I did have to look about what, especially applying some of that SA Curriculum dispositional work. So what disposition do I want to see? Luckily our school already has dispositions, so it's really easy when the students are familiar with that disposition language to encourage that. But it's if I want them to be discerning, what does that mean in terms of primary and secondary data on analysing sources? If I want them to think ethically, how does that incorporate other perspectives and perspectives that they might not agree with? How do I create a safe space for those perspectives that you might not agree with?

And we did have this motto at the beginning of the course that I gave to all of the year tens, which was - “No. You're not entitled to your opinion. You're entitled to what you can argue for with evidence.” And they would cite that back to me if I said something. So they'd go, Miss, where's your evidence for that? How do you know that? And even my class this year, they say the same thing. They'll go, Miss, what's the evidence for that? But just having that mindset, gives, puts you in that critical thinking mindset of actually how do I know this information? Can I verify it? Where can I find a deeper understanding of it?

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. It's such an important skill to learn. Joel, when you think about learning about democracy, why does it matter for kids and students?

Joel Strauss: You don't want to be sent out into the adult world when you're 18 and go and vote and think, what am I looking at here? Especially with preferential voting like, they need the knowledge of being able to sort through information online, knowing what they're fighting for, what is misinformation, what's disinformation, what they're actually voting for because whoever they vote for could be the person who they have to be led by, and that's the life that they'll live. So without this information, they could be led down a road that they don't wanna be on.

Dale Atkinson: In terms of the actual citizenship convention itself, what was the day like for you, Joel?

Joel Strauss: You've got people from all different kinds of schools, from all over the state that you're just, you're meeting. And they have this lunchtime legends where you'd go down to the foyer of Adelaide Oval and they'd had players from Adelaide Oval. They'd had other local icons that you can go take a photo with, talk with, get 'em to sign stuff. And they actually had this little mission sheet, this little objective sheet that we had to go to get a photo with someone, get 'em to sign something, and they had a voting booth. We had to go there and vote for like parties that another school had created. And they were all convincing us to vote for them. We had to do preferential voting. They also had a basketball hoop there, so you can play with other people you haven't met before. Talk about the convention during the day. Talk about those scenarios you did and your little group sessions, or the voting techniques you'd done and have some lunch together. It was all around a great day for the overall message. Yeah.

Chantel Lee: And my favourite part of the lunchtime legends was seeing them intermingle with kids from all different schools that they would've never met otherwise, like from way out in the country or in the city, just of such a diverse range of students just getting to know each other and seeing what they have in common.

Dale Atkinson: And there's also quite a bit of fun on the day, isn't there?

Chantel Lee: Oh, so much fun. So we had the kids overcoming that shyness and they got really comfortable with each other. And that really culminated to the end of the day when we had Dem Mob, who really got us out of our seats and dancing and some kids up there singing and rapping. And they actually wrote a rap that students contributed to throughout the day. So they were gr abbing kids throughout the day to get them to add lyrics.

Dale Atkinson: What's the interplay for you, Chantel, in terms of you've got this big, structured event that's coming up on the calendar and you know that some of your kids are gonna go…

Chantel Lee: Yep.

Dale Atkinson: How do you design some of your coursework to reflect this big event and what's the structure afterwards?

Chantel Lee: So coursework wise, it's, we were in the middle of doing media literacy anyway, so we talked about what the panel was gonna be about, a bit about some of the issues that might come up, especially around AI. AI is a really hot topic amongst students and being able to verify information. So, it's very much, what can we get out of the day? What do we think we should, we want to get out of the day? What does democracy look like for us? And if the slogan is gonna be our voice, one voice, one like our impact, what does that look like? What does that look like on a local level? And how do we connect that to bigger global issues? Because a key part of the convention that I really loved and a big part of my teaching is you don't have to be the difference in the world, but you can make a difference. And so what's the difference that we wanna make. Afterwards, it was immediately obvious that the kids were really activated, really excited, and they really wanted to do something. They felt like they were part of a bigger community and they felt emboldened and they got more confidence around, hey, we are not the only ones who care. There are all of these other kids who care and wanna make a difference. And one of the great things in the, on the actual day was the way that they had people in the crowd asking students what they thought of. And as the day progressed, you could see that the shyness melted away and the students got more confident speaking and saying what they wanted to say, offering their opinions and not being so scared to offer that opinion. Because I do find with young people, they struggle to say what they mean or what they wanna say because they feel like they might be judged for it or it's not a safe place to have an opinion.

Dale Atkinson: So how do you surf that wave of enthusiasm when it comes?

Chantel Lee: You get the kids to tell you what their ideas are and you work with them to see what is doable, what isn't, within a framework of what you want them to learn. So this unit about, for our social action project was all about government policy and how policies get created. So we learned about; What is a working party? How do we get stakeholder information? what is the actual process if we want to make a facilities change at the school how does that work through Governing Council? When's the next Governing Council meeting? What is Governing Council? So we actually looked specifically at the governance of school and how government works and that made it a lot more realistic for the students as well. So I'm able to show you it's very much skills and process based and then the actual topic is student driven.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. Nice. And what Joel, what's it taught you about what's possible?

Joel Strauss: Anything's possible in the big picture, it's the work that gets there that drives a solution. There's a lot of communication that needs to happen, a lot of research that needs to happen, but eventually you will get there as long as everyone's willing to put in the effort.

Dale Atkinson: That's such a good message. What advice would you give to other students who are coming along to the convention this year?

Joel Strauss: Come to the convention with an open mind. You are going to learn something. Even if you think you know everything about media, politics, and just Australia as a whole, you are going to learn something different. Come to the convention knowing that, and you're gonna leave with so much that you're ready to go and be ready for the future.

Dale Atkinson: And Chantel, what, what advice for teachers?

Chantel Lee: Don't be afraid to talk to kids about what they care about because they actually care about a lot and they have a lot to say and it's worth listening to because they are our future and I'm so proud of these guys. They've made such a great contribution to our school and I can't wait to see what happens when they grow up.

Dale Atkinson: Chantel, Joel, thank you very much for your time.

Chantel Lee: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name's Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we've got some return visitors. We have Ron Berger, who is the senior advisor for EL Education. He's a bestselling author and he's a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ron, welcome.

Ron Berger: Thank you for having me.

Dale Atkinson: We've also got Gwyn ap Harri, who is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of XP Schools Trust up in the north of England. Welcome.

Gwyn ap Harri: Thank you. How are you doing?

Dale Atkinson: Very well, thank you. So, 12 months since your last visit. Perhaps a refresher for the listeners if they've not been across developments over the last 12 months. Expeditionary Learning, what is it?

Ron Berger: I work with an organisation called Expeditionary Learning, and it was founded 35 years ago from a collaboration between Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I teach and Outward Bound, the organisation that brings youth and adults into the wilderness, but not to teach wilderness skills, but rather to teach character, to help people work as a team, to think of others before themselves, to have resilience, to have courage, to have compassion. And the idea of expeditionary learning was let's make school more adventurous and more dedicated to making the world better. So, combining academics with character growth, that those things can work synergistically. You don't have to choose one or the other. And in fact, when kids are becoming better people at the same time as they're becoming smarter people, it all works together in a way that's really inspirational.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it really is. Now Gwyn, this is a foundational concept for you and the development of the XP Schools Trust and the XP School, wasn't it?

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah. Yeah. So we went over to America and met Ron and visited some of the schools. And we really took the two main structures, which are Learning Expeditions and CREW and we took them to England and when we made our schools, we made them central to our schools.

Dale Atkinson: Now, the reason you came here 12 months ago, and the reason you're back again now, is working with a lot of our schools around learning expeditions. What does that involve for a school and what are we, what experiences are we giving to the young people in that environment?

Ron Berger: We just returned from two schools in SA who have done learning expeditions this year and met with students and we were just blown away. We were so inspired by the thoughts of students about; one young student who said, I no longer wanted to be a background character in the world. I wanted to step up and do good in the world. Who said; I wasn't the best version of myself until I started this. And so the idea of a learning expedition is to take our academic research and our academic investigations and connect those to a way to contribute to the world in some way.

The school, the local community, the parent community, the whole city or state or the world more broadly. And it put kids, it puts kids on a mission to get smart to do good. And so we found that all the students we spoke with this morning felt empowered, felt excited. They couldn't wait to share how proud they were to have made a contribution to their work. And when I said, what's the most challenging work, they said, the research, we did really hard research. So it wasn't like, no, this is just charitable work. It was, it was the, a kind of professional level. We want to make a difference in the world, like professionals do, we need to step up our academics as well. But it's in service of making a difference. And so, we were both inspired and Gwyn runs the network of schools in England where the entire city is full of contributions that his school students have made. There are installations up, there's books written, there's changes made in the city. And now we're seeing that in SA. It's just really exciting.

Dale Atkinson: And what are you starting to see?

Gwyn ap Harri: We're looking at display panels on piers, talking about what lives under the pier. We've just returned from Christies Beach High School. They created a garden that allowed the kids to connect, not just to horticulture, but to how the First Nations know and use the plants. We saw a, what was the name of the plant Ron? There was a funny name for the plant, I can't remember.

Ron Berger: Pigface.

Dale Atkinson: Pigface. Yes. Listeners will know that.

Gwyn ap Harri: Yes. So I would have just walked straight past that, but now I know that pigface can be eaten, you can use it for stings, you can use it to season beef, all sorts of different things. Yeah. So we've seen those things. We've seen kids in primary schools standing up for the plight of chimpanzees, raising money, creating a food bank. There was an example of artwork in a town and the artwork…

Ron Berger: Tumby Bay. Yeah.

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah. And the artwork already exists but the kids were then adding QR codes to the artworks so you could see who, who created it, why they created it, the story behind the artwork. It's fantastic to see kids learning come alive in the SA community.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. That's brilliant. So, started off engaging about a hundred schools that scaled up to over 170 now. What's been that process of growth? And how's that come about?

Gwyn ap Harri: When we came over and we were just sharing our stories, Ron was sharing his stories about the schools in America, I was sharing our stories about the schools in England and, for me the agency that already existed in SA in the teachers, allowed them to step up really, really quickly and say, yeah I wanna do this work. It's hard and I want to do it because it's worthwhile. That agency in teachers is rare.

Ron Berger: Yeah. We are so excited, Dale, because we don't know anywhere in the world right now where these kinds of practices of connecting character to academics, to having kids contribute through their learning, is spreading more broadly, more quickly. There are individual schools, individual districts in other countries that are doing this, but the whole state has embraced it here.

I think it's the most exciting thing happening worldwide right now around this kind of work and I think it, it took us by surprise, but it took the department by surprise that it spread so quickly. We shared these things a year ago and then all year long we've been getting videos and examples of student work and kids who are proud, parents who are proud, communities who are proud, and when we came back, we were just deluged with school leaders who said, can we tell you about this project we're doing? Can we tell you about this? Can we tell you about how the parents are so excited in our community that their kids are giving back and that their kids want to learn right now? So, I think it's spread faster than any of us thought it would. It's just caught on. And I credit the leaders here in the Department, but also the teachers here who are willing to dive in and the principals. Like this is a fertile place for great growth right now in SA.

Dale Atkinson: There are three tiers to the work that we're doing at the moment. There's the Learning Expeditions Exploration Program as a kind of foundational component of introducing this program into schools. There's the Scale Up program, and then there's the Maintenance program. Can you explain a bit about what those three tiers mean and what that looks like in a school?

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah. So we've been involved in, so the basically, the launch of it. So what what are learning expeditions? And this time we've been involved in how we're gonna scale up. So this involves all the schools, the 114 schools that are already started and how they're gonna, how they're now stepping up to say, we wanna do more of this. So, we are bringing our stories around, just keep revisiting back to the why of why we do learning expeditions. Don't lose that because often you try and get big, but we have to keep the fundamental why. And then I've been sharing stories around our mistakes when we grew, when XP grew from one school to eight.

Ron Berger: We are acknowledging with people that this is hard work. Hard work for leaders and teachers and kids. And that just starting it off, that's the right place. But you have to keep working. You have to keep renewing this work. You have to keep dedicating yourself to, we're gonna make sure that learning is exciting for kids, that it's really challenging for kids, new community connections, new ways to contribute, new ways to fold in complex academics to it. It can't coast in this work. And so Gwyn has shared many stories and I have shared stories from America about how schools keep renewing themself to keep getting good at this work. You can't just decide, we got it, it works now. We don't have to think about it. You have to keep refining and critiquing your own work. Are these expeditions good? Are they making them more proud of who they are? Do they have a new sense of themselves from this? And if not, what can we do better?

Dale Atkinson: So what is… back to you, Gwyn, because I really noted that you were talking there about the challenges of going at scale and transitioning an approach that, works in one environment into another, and presumably that's a challenge that doesn't just exist from site to site, but from year level to year level, class to class. What have you seen that works and what have you seen that might not be as effective?

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah, so the main advice that we've been giving is to start with quality and focus and not, don't go too big. So, a lot of the time we get really excited about this work and we want to do the best learning expedition that the world has ever seen. And that's great, but it comes with lots of risks and jeopardy. So, we really preach to build success on success.  So start with really high quality, but maybe not even all the elements of a, of an expedition. Maybe major on an authentic product and a presentational learning to an authentic audience. Then bring in experts, then try field work, and try and build a culture of critique over a term. We're, we are well really yeah, preaching about that quality and focus rather than size. That, that really works.

Things that you've got to be careful about is the quality of communication as you get bigger tends to reduce. Teachers have different journeys in terms of learning expeditions. So you might have 2, 3, 4 teachers who are really pumped to do this work and then you go, right yeah who, who wants to do this now? And the new teachers will say me, me, me, me. But they've not had the same journey as the original teachers. Yeah. So they might not get the why, the fundamentals. They might think they know what a learning expedition is. So we've, so again, that message is always return back to the fundamentals and just reference all the things that Ron said that are really important about learning expeditions.

Dale Atkinson: So what's the role of the leader Ron, in that environment where, you know what you're going after I guess as an end result is agency and engagement from a young person and so you want them to be driving the program. Where does the leader sit in all of that?

Ron Berger: I think most importantly, the leader has to have that safe culture of growth in the building. So what both Gwyn and I have been sharing is that the most powerful engine of quality is making learning public. So students making their learning, public, sharing what they're learning, being able to articulate, this is what I was struggling, this is what I'm better at now, this is what I'm proud of right now. That happens when the teachers in the building are willing to say, I'm gonna share my plan for my learning expedition, or plan for my project, or plan for my product, and I need guidance and critique from the rest of my peers. That takes courage. And we're amazed that so many SA teachers are stepping up with that courage to make their practice public.

There's a history, as you know in education, of staying in your room, staying in your silo. Like I, I teach my kids, I don't want anyone else in there. It's a big step for teachers to say, I'm going to make my practice public. I'm gonna make my project public to you. I'm gonna take critique from you, and then when we finish it, I'll put it out again and listen to your critique about what I could have done better. That takes tremendous courage. That only works if the leader has built a safe culture in the school of “this is a culture of growth, not a culture of hide in your rooms and stay safe”. This is a culture where we make our learning public, where we share our mistakes with each other, where we share our victories with each other, where we share our growth with each other, and the leader has to be a model of that growth. When the leader herself or himself is vulnerable, where they say, I did this really well, but I didn't do this that well, I didn't support you in this way. Teachers feel like it's okay to be real here. It's okay to discuss our growth.

Dylan Wiliam from the UK who is an international leader of this work, said if he were to look at one thing that makes a great school, it's an environment of continual growth by the teachers. If the teachers are no longer growing, then the school is no longer gonna be a great school. And so I think the, if the leader sets the tone of this is a place where we're all growing all the time, then you can have a great school.

Dale Atkinson: Gwyn, Ron said a number of very nice things about your schools and how the students had engaged with the local community earlier. Why is it so important for the learning to be grounded in their geographic and social space for a young person?

Gwyn ap Harri: I think Doncaster actually shares a lot of things around community and how important community is with SA. We have kids who were disenfranchised with their community, who did not have civic pride, who didn't connect with the various different elements of community and so that, we saw that as a challenge and an opportunity. Connecting with your community just allows you to think about yourself and think about yourself as a person and say to yourself, you know how, rather than I'm gonna move out of this place and go to a better place and that'll be better for me. It's, how can I make the place around me a better place and that'll make me a better person. I think that's the real key to engaging with community and I really see it around here in SA with the similar and different challenges in SA and where the opportunity is to bring community into the school and to bring school into the community.

Dale Atkinson: I think that's linked Ron with a bit of what you talk about sometimes where, you're very strong on the purpose for education as a grounding, and education as an activator of civic purpose for a young person.

Ron Berger: Yes, exactly.

Dale Atkinson: Sometimes we don't state that boldly as educators.

Ron Berger: I agree. I agree.

Dale Atkinson: Why is it important to do so?

Ron Berger: Because the world right now is full of people who may be smart, but who are not using a good moral compass. When we look at the issues in the world today that we're all grappling with, we realise that having a good ethical vision, moral vision, having a good civic mission for everyone matters as much as being academically strong. Because many of the worst people in history were bright academically but didn't have the heart and caring for other human beings as they should. And so, I think we need to unite that vision of what are schools for? They're to create citizens that are going to run our world like, and we need people with a moral compass as well as great academic and other skills.

So it, it's not just the skill preparation, it's the cultivation of good character. And it's also Dale, what every parent wants. Like, the most important thing to every parent, even though we talk about exam results, we talk, the most important thing to every parent is, I want my kid to be a good person. I want my kid to be respectful and responsible and kind and courageous and capable and resilient. That matters more to every parent, no matter what their background, no matter what their income level, no matter what their faith, that's what they care about most deeply. And when people say well that's not really the job of schools, that's the job of family or faith and I think, it sure is the job of schools, because we have them seven hours a day. We are shaping who they are. They're either learning to be more respectful or not, more responsible or not, more courageous or not, more compassionate or not. And if we're not intentional about building good citizens and good people, we are actually doing damage. And so, we have to take that on explicitly and intentionally in our schools of thinking we're, we know we're shaping people, let's shape them to be the kind of human beings we wanna run our world.

Dale Atkinson: It's a pretty inspirational message Ron. Thank you. Ron and Gwynn, thank you very much for your time and looking forward to having you back in October this year.

Ron Berger and Gwyn ap Harri: Cheers.

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 Professor Bill Lucas, who is internationally recognised for his work on creativity assessment and educational leadership. He's Director of the Centre for Real World Learning, the Chair of the Global Institute of Creative Thinking Advisory Board. He's the co-founder of Rethinking Assessment and - that's quite a long list here, Bill - honorary professor at the University of Nottingham. Bill, thank you very much for your time.

Professor Bill Lucas: Thanks a lot. Great to be here.

Dale Atkinson: Now you're here for a number of reasons. You're meeting with some of our schools and the Secondary Principals Association; talking about the future of learning and assessment in particular, the future of assessment. I was fortunate to sit in on a little presentation you gave this morning and one of the opening set of slides that you provided was, some images of major innovations throughout history. You went through the wheel, the plow, the pencil, the printing press, some of those things. Now, what has changed in terms of what we need to know over that time and what's actually changed in how we learn?

Professor Bill Lucas: So, when we lived simple lives and the plow was a major breakthrough, the amount of learning in the sense that you might understand it in a school way, so knowledge and skill, it's relatively little. You needed to understand how to clear a patch, how to plow a patch, where to get your seeds from, how to store the seeds over the year, something about the cycle of the seasons, when to harvest, when not to harvest, how to water, all those kind of things, so that was a really authentic mix of knowledge and skill.

If you then landed somewhere in the middle of the 19th century when both in Australia and England, the Industrial Revolution is going full steam, and steam is the driver of that, then you would've seen a shift from small homesteads to large urban areas and in those large urban areas, a whole range of different employment opportunities and a kind of the beginnings of an early baseline, which was called, rather perhaps unhelpfully, the three Rs of the kind of things that were an indicator a bit like an early version of ATAR that you weren't completely hopeless. So, something about your reading and your writing and your arithmetic. As I was saying this morning, interestingly, the fourth R was wroughting, which meant using your hands – making – so you were a shipwright or a wheelwright, and that fell off because of course education has always been a very political issue. And then if I jump forward another a hundred and something years, we're getting to the big inventions that your listeners will be familiar with, the mobile phone, the internet, during the pandemic especially the use of Zoom, the kind of online tracks transactions that we're able to have and right up to date AI. And throughout that strand, what I've been trying to argue is that there have some been some things that we've always needed to know, some skills that we've always needed to have and some - to use the language much loved by me and by Martin here in the state - of dispositions. There are some things we need reliably be able to put into action in the real world in different contexts. So, as we've watched different technological innovations happen, we know that yes, we need a certain level of confidence and fluency in what we might call the contemporary three Rs. But we need some other stuff too. And we need young men and women who can have ideas for themselves, be creative, who can communicate with a whole range of other different folk, who can work in teams, so be collaborative and have a range of registers of language, so auricity skills, and at the heart of all of this, which wasn't there, so back into the 19th century, the model of instruction was, I've got some stuff in my head, I want to get it into your head. I'm going to instruct you. Now that still exists. We may come back on that, but these days, of course, there are so many other things at play. There's my relationship with me, with you. There's my ability to keep going when I encounter a topic, which is tricky, my et cetera, et cetera. and we might call this metacognition or learning how to learn. And I'm arguing that's absolutely the core of what we need our kids to be able to do today.

Dale Atkinson: So there is a sense among some commentators in education that some of these approaches perhaps lack a bit of rigor and that it's complex to implement. What would you say to that?

Professor Bill Lucas: I would say that anything that's worthwhile in life is complex. So, I would immediately push back on that. It's been my privilege to co-chair the recent PISA Creative Thinking Test. That is very complicated. That was very complicated. We have 140,000 15-year-olds who took our scenario based online test. Australia actually did very well in this. You were number seven in the ranking order. Weirdly - this is part of my answer - you didn't celebrate that. Knowing what I do with many Australian friends, you are the first to congratulate yourselves when you do well, as you unfortunately do too often when you are playing us on the rugby pitch or cricket pitch. So, there's something about complexity that I'm unashamedly for, and there's something about a growing evidence base for everything that we're gonna be talking about here. I think it's deeply unhelpful if any academic like me over claims for any underpinning research, but in the area that you are going into, which is predominantly the relationship between knowledge, skills, and dispositions, we began to chat about that at the beginning, there is a growing evidence base that, and here I'm gonna take on four direct criticisms of this kind of approach.

Number one is that it's somehow dumbing down an academic diet. This is simply not true. From the PISA test, we discovered that those who did very well on the test and are very creative, many of them did very well in their math scores 'cause we were able to look across at their PISA math scores. So that's a huge oversimplification. It's an implied sense that there's only so much space in a human being's head, that if you waste some of the space for helping you to become more creative, you can't do so well in your ATAR scores. Simply not true. In fact, the reverse is the case that some approaches to the development of critical thinking improve your numeracy scores. So you can see where I'm going there. So it's not an either or. So the strand to my answer is don't be binary in your thinking. This is not an either or, it's an and. So what I believe Australia needs and South Australia's modelling brilliantly is real deep understanding of knowledge and real deep exposition of knowledge in action - let's call that dispositions. And there are some test beds across the world. So these organisations like the OECD, the World Economic Forum, UNESCO, most of the global bodies get this and are arguing for this as being an evidence-based approach to the kind of things we need if we're gonna have kids who flourish.

The second opposition to this, and it's often brought about by people who don't want to do it, is that this is too vague. And if I take my special subject creative thinking, I can utterly refute that. I was privileged to take some of the work we've done and draw from others to the PISA general board and persuade them to get this over the line. That this was gonna be rigorous enough in all of the OECD countries who were gonna opt into this test and we were successful. So there is an evidence-base for what it is, but if you're going to promote any disposition, you've got to have that underpinning architecture that says this is what it is and this is what it looks like as it grows over time.

The third thing is, and I have some sympathy with my colleagues - I come from HE myself, from university land, when we are looking at kids coming into our university, we've got a ready metric and we rank all our kids from one to a hundred. It's really simple and so we're gonna use that. Thanks very much. We don't want this other flaky stuff that you're doing over here. Well actually this flaky stuff that you're doing over here is rather interesting, because the profile gives you a much more blended platform of what you can do. It's much more strength based. We know that some very bright kids drop out of the first semester of their very good university, and that won't work for universities. We know that in many cases universities getting judged by their dropout rates. So there's a matching issue here, which I think this more strength-based holistic assessment can benefit HE. Interestingly, there's something that I'm exploring and I know you are exploring, which is that, let's suppose you are heading for an engineering degree. It might be that there are some dispositions that particularly prepare you for that life and that might be what you want to major on, or it might be that you think that's a too diminishing view of education and you want to stay broad 'cause you're not absolutely sure, in which case you might not want to go down that route. So I think there's some genuine exploration that we can do with our HE colleagues.

And the final of the four points is the opposite of vagueness. That is, oh my goodness, this is too complicated. I just want to teach these kids. It's Wednesday afternoon, they're a challenging class, blah, blah, blah. And my first response to that is empathy, 'cause of course, being a teacher is really joyful, but hard work. So, I think we need to offer the teaching profession some really highly structured, high quality professional development opportunity, some good resources and some support in the way they do that. And I think we must not ask them to do everything all at once. So, this is a five-year gig, I think. So we've got to roll it out carefully, but thoughtfully over time as we do this, and I think this is again what Martin’s colleagues are doing so well here. We've got to bring all our stakeholders with it.

So, when I was working with the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority and they were first introducing tests of creative thinking, when critical thinking, critical and creative thinking were first introduced, this is immediately after the Melbourne Declaration, we did a big piece for the Melbourne Age, which was popularising the kind of things that we were saying we were wanting to test kids on. Guess what? Parents loved it. Employers said that's what we've been talking about for the last 10 years. We want kids who come to us, who can think for themselves, who can have ideas, who can work with others, who can communicate fluently, et cetera, et cetera. So, we are going with the grain of what many people want, but there's often a kind of lost in translation moment because we tend in Education to speak edu-babble and it puts off colleagues outside. So, there's a big translation, communicate, communicate, communicate job.

Dale Atkinson: So, in terms of that metacognition and learning how to learn, one of the things we're going after in South Australia is drawing out the dispositions within our learners. Interestingly, you pointed out in your presentation this morning that it's not a 21st century set of skills. This is something people have been talking about for a long time.

Professor Bill Lucas: It is, and I think that because, like you and Martin and others in the state, I'm an educational reformer – I think we've missed a trick when we've used slightly glib phrases like “21st century skills” because they sound vague and they sound evangelical. And actually, there's good evidence as to which of those are particularly pertinent now, and which of those have always been valuable and that's what we need to focus on. So, I was arguing this morning that one of the things that I think that is particularly appetite today is adaptive expertise. So if the world is changing so fast, then you need to be able to learn something in one context and apply it in another. So we were having a conversation about the degree to which adaptive expertise is a bit like a conversation about learning transfer. So, can I learn something in a science lab and then apply it on the sports pitch or then further apply it when I'm back at home or out in the community? And the answer is yes, but there are metacognitive processes involved in doing that. So, you need to know what the “it” is, you need to practice it in a safe space, in one context, you then need to get feedback from maybe a peer, maybe your teacher, maybe your family, and then you need to try it out in different contexts, until you become so confident in it that it has become a disposition. So, the etymology of disposition is, here is something that I'm disposed to do. I'm not doing it because Dale has told me to do it. I'm doing it because I believe it to be the best way of operating here and I've even stopped noticing what it is because it's become part of my, kind of intellectual DNA.

Dale Atkinson: Let's unpack that a bit more. What does that actually look like within a classroom setting or a school setting? How do you go about creating that experience for a young person, for a young student?

Professor Bill Lucas: If you take dispositions as the kind of top level of what we're trying to get at, so you've got knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Dispositions are a set of complex skills, and so like creativity or creative thinking is made up of a number of sub elements, so you need then to embed that sub element in a particular context. So in a science lesson or in a geography lesson, or a whatever lesson, and sometimes you want to start with things that go naturally with the grain of that subject, especially if you're trying to bring teachers on board. Sometimes you might want to take something that's a little divergent in approach and you then need to think about your curriculum development in a different way. So my colleague, Guy Claxton and I have this phrase, split screen planning, which means that you are thinking, for example, today we've got a lesson about the history of Australia and at the same time I'm inviting you to develop your critical thinking skills and to think about perspective and primary sources and secondary sources, and possibly even to empathise with some of those who had terrible things done to them. So, you're combining these two so that no longer does a syllabus just look like a – here's a set of stuff we've got to get into you, and we'll test it by largely memorisation and regurgitation. Not entirely, so I'm stereotyping to make a point, but actually now we're gonna embed this and it's going to have a reality and an authenticity that maybe it doesn't have if you've got one without the other. So I'm not saying one is better than the other, they're just different. And we need to understand that difference and make it easier for colleagues to do that.

Dale Atkinson: The classroom experience for that young person who is taking on that, the complexity of all those different things being woven together within the class experience, is that increasing their cognitive load? Is that increasing the amount that we're expecting our young people to engage with? Because there has been some discussion around perhaps; you know the benefits of direct instructional learning is that it reduces some of that cognitive load and makes it easier for the child to engage in the learning and acquire the knowledge that they need.

Professor Bill Lucas: You're using two concepts there. Direct instruction, which is a very broad church and cognitive load, which is just a very poorly understood aspect of the learning sciences. And there undoubtedly are, the first time you meet something that is absolutely novel to you, there is probably only so much that the human mind can assimilate and then do something with, so at the common sense level, but it doesn't need to be dignified with the expression, cognitive load, common sense applies in the learning of any new skill or the grasping of any new knowledge. So that's just good teaching and learning. Where it becomes obsessive is if it leeches into, so the only way of doing this is if I, the teacher, decide how much your load is and how much I can put in, that's very unhelpful because if I'm teaching you, something relatively simple like basic addition as opposed to something relatively complex like ethics or aspects of ethics. Relatively simple, like the weird way that we have decided to spell English, whether we're in Australia, the States, or England, as opposed to something much more complex like scientific invention. Then those are gonna have very different load bearings. So it becomes silly to talk about that as if it's a thing. It's as silly as in the early days, this is pre much more thoughtful descriptions of neurodiversity, we had a mantra called learning styles, and that mantra meant I can only learn in one way. And it was actually an unhelpful thing for young people because if they couldn't somehow master it in this way, then they weren't going to be able to hack it. And the message from all of these examples is that we need a certain kind of professional diversity in the classroom, so we need to understand which kind of concept needs to be carefully, directly instructed or modelled, or both, and then how you explore that or playfully experiment with it if you're a younger child, how you then make it your own in science or in geography, your own history. And then it needs to come out of that setting and go for a walkabout in another setting, and it needs to discover that what one classroom teacher calls improvisation in another classroom is called drafting, and in another classroom a design and technology experience is called prototyping. So then suddenly we're beginning to see connections. The human mind is wired to make connections. It's not wired to be filled up as an empty vessel. So the direct instruction model or a parody of it, is like the model we had of learning in the 19th century, which is of you as an empty vessel, only able to be filled up with a certain amount of stuff. There's an element of truth in that and there's a huge element of unhelpful oversimplification. So my mission is to put an S on the learning sciences, because there are a number of complex ways of understanding the ways that kids learn and indeed adults 'cause it's not just kids.

Dale Atkinson: Can we talk about assessment a little bit? Because one of the easy things about assessing how full you've made that empty vessel is you can just measure the depth. Within a broader set of thinking around capabilities and creative and critical thinking and ability to collaborate, how do we go about assessing some of those things?

Professor Bill Lucas: Let's go back to first principles. So the purpose of assessment is a coaching one. It's not a sitting in judgment one. It's a heartfelt desire to help a learner know where she or he is in their journey, and then to choose the best methods to get to their or our collective chosen destination. So that's the absolute grounding for this discussion. Now, assessment will have a role in accountability, in mapping progress, you would call it ATAR and NAPLAN, from one place to another place, you might call that a university or a TAFE experience, it will have that role, but its primary role is improving the process of learning. So, it's a direct cousin to metacognition. And some kinds of learning are assessed in some ways and some in others. So, if you take a classic example in maths, the regime would typically be, in some cases there will be one right answer, we'll give you a mark for it. But we're very interested in showing your workings and giving you another mark if you can explain to me that there are two or three different methods for getting to that answer. That's a classic example if you were teaching kids multiplication or long division, where over the 30, 40 years I've been involved in education, I've watched my kids be taught different ways and they've learned those, and that just reminds me there are different ways of doing this. So, we're still operating at relatively simple, assessable items within a broader educational experience. Within a subject, it is perfectly possible to devise a test of your knowledge. It's perfectly possible to devise an opportunity to show me the skills that you have. And it is very often the case that those two get confused. So the test you get is a test of memorisation, largely in recall, not of your ability to apply it. So, in my world of critical thinking or creativity, I might be interested in the techniques you have for coming up with a good idea. And you might be able to tell me that I sometimes use an Edward de Bono technique plus minus interesting, I sometimes use brainstorming, I sometimes use… and you would carry on with that list. That's of academic interest to me, but my real interest is - if I throw you a challenge what are you gonna do? Are you gonna use it? And how well are you gonna use it? So that then takes us into a different kind of assessment, which is by and large, not one method.

So what I and my colleagues in the rethinking assessment movement would describe this as multimodal assessment. So I need to get something from your perspective as the learner, and I need to use my teacher judgment, ideally against some kind of progression or continuum document or rubric, so I know where you are on your progress, potential progress, and then I need something else to put that together. It might be a real world, authentic demonstration of it through a presentation to a group of third parties. It might be whatever it might be. But if you like that kind of idea, then you realise that teachers' confidence in using a variety of assessment methods is really key to the mission that you're rolling out here in South Australia. At the very top level when you bring it all together - and you're doing fantastic work here, I love what you're doing – in the learner profile or the portfolios that might lead to a learner profile, when you're leaving school alongside your SACE and alongside your ATAR score, it's going to be strength based. It's gonna describe all those other things you can do. So it’ll tell me how good you are at your chosen four subjects, but it'll also tell me what other experiences you've had. Whether you're a great athlete, whether you've been taking part in DE, it'll tell me something about the pride you take in the work that you do, it'll give me hints as to your metacognitive current status. It's a bit like a learning LinkedIn. So I'll see that in a kind of dynamic CV for a young person and I'll also be understanding where you think you are moving and where your teachers think you're moving in terms of the dispositions that frame all this. So, remember where we started, so knowledge, know-what, skill, know-how, and then what ACARA and most of the Australian states call capabilities or competencies and then what I'm calling and you’re calling dispositions or habits. So those are all of those things taken together, wrapped up, and then exemplified in practice. Now sometimes in a world of AI, we're gonna need to say so, okay I trust you, but nevertheless, I need you to show me. And so we're turning off all devices. We're turning off the internet, and you are gonna show me, and that might be in the case of a dialogue… so I'm inviting you to tell me you, you report that you are achieving this kind of, progress within your creative thinking, give me an example of when. So I'm getting you to give me real examples that I can check in with and check out with and we are really in a, almost like a viva situation where we're having a combination of conversation and demonstration.

So when we're talking about dispositions, these are knowledge and skills in action. So you wouldn't expect knowledge and skills in action to be tested in a hot gymnasium on a particular day when that's what the state has decided we're gonna do. In fact, it would look ludicrous. It would be as ludicrous as if I have three kids and each of them can drive a car, but if I just set an arbitrary date and said, this is the date when you're gonna do your theory test and you're gonna go out on the road, people would laugh me out of court. Or if I take another example from music or dance or drama, there are levelled qualifications. If I take another example, why on earth do we do it at the same time? You may be able to show me that you've got this concept in maths and you're ready for the next one. So we can start to use processes which were seen as summative, as formative.

So a lot of the AI tools are developing adaptive feedback. So you’re doing something, and it could be almost anything. The app that many people of your listeners will have heard of is Duolingo, where that kind of technology's being used in language teaching. But let's take a consecutive subject like maths or language teaching. It will be able to, the smart bot on your shoulder, will be able to either ask you questions or say, yeah, I think you've got that. It's a bit like in the, and again, I was talking about this morning, in the uniform groups, in the scouts and the guides, you come to me as your coach, as your leader, and you say, I think I'm ready for a… and that might be your latest badge, and you'll say, yeah, I think you are Bill, or I think you've got a little bit more to go, mate. And so I'll go off and I'll do that and I'll come back to you. In this dance around assessment, we're going to encourage more young people to be more engaged and to be more owning of their learning. So there's a massive student agency benefit to be derived from this. Now that's the very short tutorial on assessment because it's a very complex subject. I wouldn't want any of your listeners to think that rather simplistic description doesn't have behind it a really nuanced and rigorous evidence-base. When you put the podcast out, I'll send you some stuff which you could make available perhaps for colleagues to read.

Dale Atkinson: And we will have that available in the show notes, for those who are listening. You touched on this when you were talking there; what's the role of self-reflection from the student in all of that space?

Professor Bill Lucas: So it's essential. We know that learning and teaching is a relational activity. So at its heart it has mutual understanding and trust. We know that the best teachers know where their learners are in their journey. And the first articulation of that is to encourage a learner to say where she or he thinks they are on that journey. Now we're all human. So sometimes they may overemphasise or overexaggerate or indeed underemphasise. That's fine, because we're gonna use that data as a kind of initial connecting point and see how that then works out over the course of work or the expedition they're going on, or the syllabus that they're undertaking and the great thing about that is that we've got a series of points where we can check-in. So I can give you back your self-assessment, maybe a month into our learning together and say, okay, so here's what you said when I first discussed this with you. How do you think that now? And maybe just turn to a turn to a mate and see and just ask each other some questions about that and see if you're still agreeing.

As I was explaining this morning, most young people who self-assess discover that although they may have rated themselves quite well, it's actually a bit harder than they thought. So they go down. So you would expect to see that in a good lesson. So it's not a lack of progress, it's a better understanding. It's also telling me whether you are understanding what the heck I'm on about. So most of us just sit on transmit. I don't mean that. So many good teachers that I've seen and worked with today and all over the world. But the danger is that we have certain amount of stuff we need to get through. It's in the syllabus and it squeezes out the time. And we think that's a waste of time to ask for the student engagement. Quite the reverse. Without that, it's just gonna not land. And so there's a lot of wasted endeavour by the teacher. On almost every research metric self-reflection and formative conversations following that, are right up there in terms of the impact on attainment and achievement in learning.

Dale Atkinson: One of the examples you gave this morning is some work that you're doing in Western Australia with some very young students. Can you talk about what that looks like? Because surely if you can start with the very young, it could be applied pretty much to anyone.

Professor Bill Lucas: Yeah. So, this is work in Western Australia, predominantly in Perth, and its immediate surroundings. It's actually primary and secondary, and it's Independent, Catholic and States – it’s got the whole group there. It's through a lovely intermediary called Form, who are a cultural organisation who work very closely with the Department, and that's where the funding and the and the drive is coming from.

So they asked me to work with them and co-design a program of embedding creative thinking in kids in their schools. So we did that right through from kindy through to not quite the entire upper secondary, but well into secondary experience. And we realised that there was some core experiences that all schools had to think about. The first is, and Martin and I were having an interesting conversation this morning about it, is that there are certain cultures which afford or are likely to indicate or give a license for certain behaviours. So, if you want kids to become creative, you have to have a culture in your classroom where it's okay to make mistakes. It's okay to have divergent views. It's okay to not know an answer to something. It's okay to want to ask somebody else for their help. All of those kind of things. So there's a respectful, playful inquiry at abroad there. The second thing that we discovered, and these wonderful teachers in Perth made this really clear, is that you've got to pattern match that bit of creativity, so you've gotta have a model for creativity, they were using my model, and you've gotta match that with what you're doing in, if it's a primary lesson, it's much freer because you're a teacher of children, once you get up into secondary, you tend to be a teacher of subjects, so you've gotta be a little bit more careful. But what we are calling this split screen planning, so you’re, as we were discussing, you're trying to mesh those in together and then you've gotta make smart choices about the pedagogies you use. And there are some that we know work really well in this regard and some of the more instructional variety, which are less effective unless it's a moment where you just want to land on a particular concept and make sure that it's secure and embedded before you go onto something else. So, in that group of ultimately about 40 schools, we were able to then stand back and say, what kind of formative assessment processes are you using to get a fix on the progress that your kids are making?

There's a problem with the language of assessment and measuring that it puts off people who are trying at the same time to encourage kids to be more creative because there's a very understandable pushback that goes… hang on, I'm a human being, I don't want to be given a kind of level three B mark for my creativity. So we reframed that journey as, we want our teachers to be better at evidencing the progress of their kids in becoming more creative and we distil that language into child speak for all the kids we were working with, so they were then, the outcome of that is kids know where they are on the journey, so you need some kind of progression document. Young people get more confident as they get older, they're more able to articulate what it is they think they need to do. The system gets more confident about the judgements that teachers are making. Teachers are making judgments never on one piece of data. They're triangulating. So something from the teacher perspective, something from the young person and something of a more authentic kind. And they're bringing that together, most of them into portfolios, and they're using that as the focus for a moderation session, which is of course brilliant professional learning. Again, I'll give you your listeners the link to that document 'cause it's full of real live case studies in a real live set of busy schools. So it's not, oh yeah, we could only do this if we had… this is real busy, ordinary, make creativity, normal land.

Dale Atkinson: That's a good segue to my final question, which is, for those educators out there who are like, wow, that sounds great, but I don't have the time. I don’t know where to start. What's a small shift they can make that would make a surprisingly big difference or how do they work their way into this?

Professor Bill Lucas: So I think whenever a system is trying to change itself, as South Australia is, there are two dangers. One is that it'll only ever be grasped by a small willing group of pioneers. And the other is that everybody else will think they're not good enough.

So I think one of the ways of overcoming that is to start either within state, or within district or within school, with a kind of appreciative inquiry approach. So you're trying to invite colleagues to share the practices that they feel are closest to the desired state that you've laid out for them.

The next step I think is to, not in a recipe kind of way, but in a principled kind of way to distil the core elements of whatever it is you are arguing you need to do. And I'm just gonna summarise what I said in the answer to a couple of questions ago. Get the culture right, embed it in the curriculum, so different kind of curriculum design, select the best pedagogies. And if you've got big abstract concepts, break it down into something that's immediately understandable. Now, you can't go far wrong with that, providing you then add to that; you do not need to do everything at the same time. So I have a kind of rule of A4. So whatever we're talking about in any disposition, it can't take more than a side of A4 to describe what the ‘it’ is. Now your syllabus may have many more pages, but that's inviting teachers to pattern match, to say, I'm gonna do something here and something there, and I'm gonna put it together using my teacher judgment to make it more effective.

And the final part of the answer is there's a massive role obviously, in all of this, in terms of professional development, but there's a significant role in terms of school leadership. So school leaders need to understand enough about what this looks like at the classroom level, and then stand back and think about the kind of core directions of travel that need to be undertaken.

And again, I'll send you something on that because we actually know a lot about how to do this. So we are not starting from scratch. But we also know from a big OECD study I was part of that, there is no one right way of doing it. So for many teachers who value their professional autonomy, their originality, this is a sigh of relief. There's a structure, there's some rigor. But I'm not being invited to cook a recipe dish. And too many teachers have lost the joy of teaching because it has become a recipe and it's not their recipe. They've not gone on a cupboard venture themselves to decide what they’re going to cook for supper. They've inherited it. And that's where I think many teachers feel quite undervalued and belittled, and the end result for kids is not good either.

Dale Atkinson: So we need to send our teachers on a cupboard venture, a guided cupboard venture.

Professor Bill Lucas: Why not? Why not? If they enjoy cooking, not if they don't.

Dale Atkinson: Exactly. That sounds very good. Thank you very much for your time, Professor Bill Lucas. And as we mentioned, we will have a number of links in the show notes for you to engage further with this, with the learnings here. Professor Lucas, thanks for your time.

Professor Bill Lucas: Thank you.

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 talking about our very smallest learners in a very special way. We're talking about Family Day Care SA and the way in which they've engaged with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives. Important, I think to throw to one of our guests Kauwana Tamaru to welcome us to country.

Uncle Tamaru: Ngaitalya Thanks for the introduction. It's good to be on this place today and I like hearing your language 'cause even though you made a mistake, I still wanna walk with you. A long time ago, the Germans first wrote my Wind Kaurna language, and the K is a G phonetic. So when you say ‘car’ or whatever you said, it's actually Kauwana. But that’s alright.

Dale Atkinson: I had a go. I had a go.

Uncle Tamaru: That's right. And, and this is what Family Day Care is all about, is that they're not paralysed by fear. They want to give it a shot. So even though they may mispronounce it, I still wanna walk side by side with 'em, and move forward together, because you know, white fella says schedule and schedule, either, either, it doesn't matter. It's just you know a learning curve.

As a Kaurna elder, I'd like to open this meeting by doing a Welcome to Country and I'd like to welcome you because of my applicable ancestors, King Rodney and Mary Monarto. Now, fortunately for me, I'm sitting next to a beautiful Family Day Care person that I've walked Country with, I've eaten on Country with, and I've celebrated my birthday with. So if she's in my presence, my language changes. When I look at her as a non-aboriginal woman, I look at her as my, my dearest sister, and I'll address her first by saying [in Kaurna language].

On behalf of my Elders past and present, I proudly welcome you all to my beautiful native title Kaurna Country, and I welcome you today in the spirit of happiness because we're talking about the achievements of what we're doing at Family Day Care, and more importantly, we're gonna talk more about not being paralysed by fear.

Dale Atkinson: Not being paralysed by fear. Sounds good to me. Thank you, Uncle Tamaru. We might start a bit, for those who don't know, Liz, I might throw to Liz Whitbread, who's the Service Manager of Family Day Care programs. For those who don’t know what Family Day is, perhaps you could explain a little bit about how the program works.

Liz Whitbread: Sure. Niina Marni Dale and thank you for inviting us to this podcast today. Family Day Care programs have been around for 50 years. We celebrated our 50th year last year, which was really exciting and there's been many changes across all aspects of early childhood, which a lot of you would already know. The Department for Education is the approved provider for Family Day Care and we provide care for children, predominantly from zero until 13. We can provide care for children over the age of 13 in our respite care program. We provide care in really small settings, in a registered educator's home, so their home is approved to provide care from. And we have a maximum of seven children at any one time, with four children that are no more than under school age. So it's a really individualised program. We, our aim really for Family Day Care is to provide really good quality education and care to children that don't normally fit within the normal structures of a childcare centre or other early childhood settings. And we want our educators to be successful in their small businesses. So that's pretty much just a little bit about us. We have 230 educators within our program. We support and care for…

Uncle Tamaru: awesome educators.

Liz Whitbread: We support and care for 1200 families and look after approximately 1700 children. So that's a really big chunk. We are across all of South Australia as well, so we have educators in Port Lincoln, Wudinna, Roxby, down to Mount Gambier and the Riverland and all in between.

Dale Atkinson: And we're talking today about the Walking Alongside project aspect of the Family Day Care offering. Now the chrysalis of this was, perhaps educators looking for a way in to engaging with Kaurna culture and how that could be embedded within their practice and their teaching. How did it develop? How did this idea come?

Liz Whitbread: So it's part of our approved learning frameworks. It talks about embedding Aboriginal perspectives into the program and it was about educators asking, how do we do this? So we had coordinators that were curious and trying to actually explore how can we do this simply, easily, and confidently. So it was about reaching out and finding out how we can do this.

So we reached out to Gowrie, their inclusion support program and they supported us, introduced us to Uncle and that's where our journey began really. So it started really small with just one coordinator asking some questions, and it's turned into something that's really starting to become more of an embedded part of our program.

Dale Atkinson: So Uncle Tamaru, how did you feel when you were approached in this way? What was your initial reaction?

Uncle Tamaru: Well, I was quite humbled to find out that there's non-Aboriginal people out there wanting to embed our culture within society. At Gowrie SA, I'm the Aboriginal advisor and coordinator of programs there. We run a six-week basic Kaurna language course, which is where one of the Family Day Care leaders came. She loved it. We empower them to give it a go and not be paralysed by fear, and she took it back and gave it to leadership who shared it with others, which now formed into a program where I come and teach Kaurna art and we teach language to people across the board.

And you know what I love about Family Day Care is there are a lot of new Australians delivering these programs from their homes. So we're not only teaching the kids, we're teaching the families and you know, they're giving it a shot. And when you work with new Australians that come from a rich culture, let it be Indian or African, they ‘get’ our culture as well because cultures are very similar, and so it makes 'em feel more comfortable delivering the programs.

Now, specifically what I love about Family Day Care is they want to do it correctly. They don't want to do it half-hearted. They sent their leaders to come and learn how to pronounce it, how to learn language. We call it TRT, truth telling. So same with when you did the opening, you addressed me as Aboriginal, which is what the staff are learning. I'm not Indigenous, I'm not First Nations, I'm Aboriginal. Now part of the TRT exercise is, in South Australia we have the highest Torres Strait Islander man called Awa Eddie Peters. He's instructed the Kaurna Board and the Kaurna community to articulate he is Zenadth Kes. So Torres Strait is an archipelago of islands. Well, the people on the physical island are Zenadth Kes. So why do we not acknowledge the Zenadth Kes people of the Torres Strait? So this is called truth telling. So what I love about Family Day Care is they're open to TRT, to truth telling, and we teach the kids the truth.

So the truth could be, you know, years ago we called a long wind instrument yidaki, but today you call it didgeridoo. Well, what's the point in us teaching if you're not listening? We say we don't! Alright, so it's called a yidaki. So, you make language and culture learning fun, and the kids go, oh, are we doing Kaurna today, are we doing Kaurna today? Because it's about having fun. And you know, if we're all gonna tell the truth at the end of the day, no matter what language you learn, you always learn naughty language as well, and we teach 'em naughty language. But to a zero to 5-year-old, we say, kud-na-ward-li, kud-na-ward-li, to them that's naughty because it's toilet, toilet. But it's the daily use of language, is what these children are learning. So when a child at Family Day Care sees me and I'm in the room, he puts his hand up, says “Uncle, can I go the kudna wardli?” Well, it's so much better than “Uncle, can I go to toilet?” So, this is part of their learning and they're embracing it and they're actually embedding it. So this is what it's all about.

Dale Atkinson: And what's the process been like of working with Liz and her team, in developing and embedding this? How has that worked?

Uncle Tamaru: We do a lot of professional development, the staff first, and certainly with senior leader. And then we roll out the programs to what they need. So we don't enforce what we think they need. We, we ask them what they need, and that's the way we deliver the program. Once the staff, especially senior leadership, know about what's going on, we can roll out the right programs for the right areas and it, it's working really well.

Liz Whitbread: I'd like to just add on that too. So we started off really slowly and that was just with Uncle meeting one of our educators and working solely with her. And then we started to introduce Uncle coming out onto Country and children and educators coming on excursions and meeting him at parks and places like that. So that was a really great way of learning about plants, about Country, about the things around them, and that is what our educators have taken probably the most. So when they go out on Country to, on their excursions, walks, play sessions, they are respecting the environment a lot differently than what they used to do before. They will reference some plants that they have heard Uncle talk about. So they are learning. It's slow. It's, it's getting them to do it where they are at their level. It's not an expectation, but it's working with them to be, you know, to give them confidence to be able to go out and talk about things, say Niina marni, Marni ai, you know.

Uncle Tamaru: Male trees, female trees, trees, lolly trees, medicine trees, the kids, they embrace it.

Liz Whitbread: Yeah.

Uncle Tamaru: And then most times the staff will take a bush tucker tree and put, grow in their garden. So it's quite powerful.

Liz Whitbread: And children, sorry, children take that home to their families, and then their families are also learning. So, it's, you know, starting with the smallest generation to teach their families, teach their parents, teach their grandparents, you know? Just little things.

Uncle Tamaru: It's the ripple effect.

Dale Atkinson: Oh, incredible knowledge transfer in that, isn't there?

Uncle Tamaru: Well, well, that's right. So, my, you know, my family embedded knowledge to me, and I embedded it to the younger kids today, like, you know. Aboriginal people as a community, we never say we own Country, we're custodians for our kids, so we need to teach these new kids how to look after her. You know, my country's a bit sad at the moment. We've got algal bloom, we've got, you know, bugs in the cane toads, and we've got all sorts of weird stuff going on. We need to look after it, like we did it. So, you know, we, we even share things like cultural burning with the kids, cold burning, we talk about bush tuck and medicine trees. The kids are loving it.

Dale Atkinson: Now apparently Uncle, Family Day Care stole one of your catchphrases to name this this project, the Walking Alongside Project. Can you tell us why the concept of walking alongside is so important in this context?

Uncle Tamaru: Well, they didn't steal it. They borrowed it. That's what happens in Australia. The walking side-by-side is the Family Day Care community and the Kaurna community walk together to share language and culture. And it's been quite powerful over the time where I share my language in baby steps and we move forward. And it was so powerful that Family Day Care South Australia, we took it to a Family Day Care conference in Melbourne, and we had, we were like packed in the whole room, people there listening on how to embed Aboriginal culture within their centres, and you know, it's hard. So, I think, you know, I'm gonna brag and I'm gonna say I think South Australia Family Day Care and ourselves, we’re leaders in this action of how to do it, because they are not paralysed by fear. They give it a go, and they truly really do wanna walk side-by-side. They don't want to offend me, they don't want to upset me, they want to get it right and they wanna get it right for the kids. So, you know, unpacking that sort of statement is, that's what walking side-by-side's all about.

You know, certainly Liz and certainly all the other people within the organisation, they, they, they agree. They don't want to walk in front of me, and they don't want to do it their way. They want to do it our way. And that's what it's about. This is what we call true reconciliation, and that's my catchphrase is side-by-side because I think as a nation, that's what we need to do.

Dale Atkinson: And how important has it been to engage with the kids and the FDC educators outside of the home environment, the care environment, and out in nature, how important has that been?

Uncle Tamaru: Well, I believe it's paramount because the, you know, because everybody; in your culture, you are a visual culture. We can sit in the classroom, talk about it, but you can't visually hand, touch, feel, smell, scrape your knee on the tree, you know, eat dirt like we used to when I was a kid. Now, you know, schools are on AstroTurf and they're inside in the air conditioning, they're on their, you know, on their tablets looking at a gum tree. Well you go out in the bush and look at a gum tree and, and it, it's quite powerful to see and, and really listen to the ripple of the child talking to Mum and Dad; that's a male tree, and explaining why it's a male tree. A lot, a lot of kids don't learn that stuff.

Liz Whitbread: Educators also work in isolation, so they are working within their home, on their own, with their children. By getting out on Country in a play session, meeting up together allows them to talk to other educators and hear how other educators are talking with their children, gives them confidence, it's that mentoring between, that incidental mentoring and learning as well from each other and also from Uncle, from people who know what they're talking about, so the elders in the community.

Dale Atkinson: And what feedback have you been receiving from, from families and FDC educators so far?

Liz Whitbread: Yeah, so definitely from educators, they're feeling more empowered. They feel more confident. Like I said before, it's a slow process. So, if it just starts with you know, saying Niina marni to children when they arrive, that's a great start. It's a simple start. It's, it's easy to start by just saying hello, greeting them in language and then introducing other things.

Families, we hear from educators that, you know, children are going home and talking about these things and then they're learning, and that's probably the biggest thing that we get from families.

Dale Atkinson: Uncle what's been the highlight for you so far, and where would you like to see this go?

Uncle Tamaru: I actually don't have a highlight because I get humbled every day. So, you know, I can't teach children hindsight, when my father was dispossessed of his culture and my father wasn't allowed to speak his language, and yet I'll walk into a stranger's house, which is a Family Day Care centre, I get greeted in my own language by an Indian lady, I get to sit in a lounge room with seven kids that are speaking my language. It's very humbling. So it's, to me, that's like reconciliation every day, not once a week in the calendar year.

You know, sometimes it puts guilt on me because I put my hand out to get paid for it. I believe every student, every child in South Australia should learn Kaurna language. But it, it's quite powerful and humbling. And I'm a bit, I sometimes sit there and cry, and the kids say to me, “Uncle, why are you crying?” and I'm like, “These are tears of joy listening to you speak my language because the older generation don't speak my language”, you know, and when these kids say it with authority and with knowledge, it's quite powerful. It's hard to explain it sometimes.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it does sound very powerful. Liz, for those educators listening who might want to weigh in, how do they, how do they approach this? What should they be thinking about?

Liz Whitbread: I think they need to just go slowly and at their own pace. Don't, you know, you don't need to know it all at once, and I think that's what happens sometimes, you gather all your information, you gather all your evidence, and you go, okay, I'm going to do all this. And then one little thing happens, and you lose your confidence because you don't wanna get it wrong. So my advice would be to reach out to Gowrie. They have been fantastic, Gowrie SA. And reach out to your elders, you know, seek advice from your elders because they're the people that know.

Uncle Tamaru: The key word there is elders because elders know their culture, know their knowledge, they're not dispossessed of it, like sometimes the Stolen Generation are, they're trying to retain, you know, retain their culture. But work closely with your elders, whether it be male elder or female elder, not all us males are the knowledge keepers of everything. You acquire 'em. So, there are avenues, whether it be via your council or local government to find out who your local elder is in the area. But, you know, reach out like Family Day Care did to Gowrie. They have a vast amount of elders from across the state, whether it be Torres Strait Islander Zenadth Kes, whether it be Pitjantjatjara, whether it be, you know Peramangk people. We've got a big you know, the Reconciliation Action Working Group is a broad group of Aboriginal people.

Dale Atkinson: And we'll have information about the Gowrie SA contacts and other things in the show notes. Might give the final word to you, Uncle. For those who might be feeling anxiety or some reluctance about leaning into this space for whatever reason, what would your message to them be?

Uncle Tamaru: Well, number one, paramount is don't be paralysed by fear. But I think you know, on reflection, you have the oldest living culture in your own backyard. You have a culture that runs for 65,000 years, the language has been spoken on this country for that long. We made mistakes a long time ago. We're making mistakes now, but you gotta give it a go. Get outta your comfort zone, do a couple of language courses. Gowrie run courses where we do a lot of role play, so when you do role play, it's okay to learn the language, but you've gotta learn how to use the language in context. And it's about having fun. We teach it's okay to make a mistake as long as we move forward. Now what they do, when they do a mistake, they leave it on the wall, but they put the correction next to it, and it shows their journey of understanding. And that's what we need to do more of 'cause we're not doing it. All right. They, they make a mistake, they screw it up, they throw it in the bin. Well, no, how are you gonna learn if you're not got the visual stimulant up there? So we need that sort of action, and that's a really powerful thing that Family Day Care do really well.

Liz Whitbread: On that too, we will acknowledge when we do say things wrong. So, if I say a word wrong, so if I say Ngaitalya which is ‘Thank you’? Goodbye?

Uncle Tamaru:  Ngaitalya is ‘my respect’.

Liz Whitbread: Yes.

Uncle Tamaru: And Nutella is that awesome hazelnut chocolate stuff.

Liz Whitbread: We will say, oh, I've said that wrong, so we're actually acknowledging to whoever we are speaking to that, oh, I recognise that I've said that wrong and I'm going to try again.

Uncle Tamaru: That's right.

Liz Whitbread: And that's really important as well.

Dale Atkinson: Well, in recognising that I have made some errors and trying again, can I just say Kauwana. Thank you very much for your time, and Liz, thank you for your time. And I'll leave the last and final words to you both as a message at the wider community.

Liz Whitbread: Ngaitalya.

Uncle Tamaru: Nakutha

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 joined by people from all over the state, and we're talking about EALD as a discipline and how we support our Aboriginal learners in their education. Firstly, Rose Nyaramba. Welcome.

Rose Nyaramba: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Rose, where are you from? You're an EALD coach. What does that mean?

Rose Nyaramba: Both a coach and a project officer. But as a coach, I work with teachers who teach Aboriginal EALD learners and support them to implement effective EALD strategies.

Dale Atkinson: Now, and two of the people that you support to implement effective EALD strategies are Brooke Webb, who's joining us from Mimili Aṉangu School. Brooke, how are you?

Brooke Webb: Yeah. I'm going. Great. Really great. Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: That's great. Tell us a bit about Mimili as a school. What's that like?

Brooke Webb: Yeah. So we're, Mimili Aṉangu School in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, so in the far north of South Australia, we’re 1200 kilometres from Adelaide. And we teach, 100% EALD learners who either speak Aboriginal-English, Yankunytjatjara or Pitjantjatjara as their first languages.

Dale Atkinson: And we're also joined by Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard, who's a teacher at Avenues College. Tell us a bit about Avenues, Kelsey.

Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard: Avenues is a small school in Windsor Gardens. We've got about 400 students all up. We have a large number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and we also have the Wiltja Boarding program. So students from the APY Lands, Coober Pedy, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara some of them.

So quite a diverse group of kids from South Australia. And we’ve got some boarding from the Northern Territory as well.

Dale Atkinson: Fantastic. Thank you, Kelsey. Now Rose, let's start initially on what is an EALD learner. How do we define that?

Rose Nyaramba: So, an EALD learner is a student who speaks other languages and who is learning English as an additional language. These students are not yet proficient in standard Australian English, and so they need extra support so that they can access the curriculum.

Dale Atkinson: And what does research tell us about how we can support these learners best? What is it that we should be doing as an education system, an educator should be doing to support these, these young people?

Rose Nyaramba: So they’re evidence-based strategies and pedagogy that is effective when teaching these, these learners. And so part of what we do with the teachers is to support them with these strategies. So, you know, explicit teaching, using of - using scaffolds, using first languages to develop standard Australian English. And so they it's a whole range of strategies that not just work for these learners but would work for other students as well.

Dale Atkinson: So I guess what you're trying to do within this space is ensure that, you know, the learning experience for young people, their identity is factored into the teaching strategies that we use. Would that be fair to say?

Rose Nyaramba: Yes. So we come from a strength-based model where we feel the students’ culture and languages as assets that they bring to developing standard Australian English. And a lot of the pedagogy is also culturally responsive. So, you know, the educators sort of learn about these students’ languages, their cultures and how to work cross-culturally with their colleagues who are often from Aboriginal cultures.

Dale Atkinson: So Brooke, out in the APY Lands, at Mimili, what does that look like at your school?

Brooke Webb: Yeah. So at Mimili we have a co-teaching model. So there's, an Aṉangu educator or several Aṉangu educators in the classroom working really closely with the teacher, the non- Aṉangu teacher often. So in our classroom, translanguaging is a really essential part of what we do across all learning areas.

So that's working between languages which happens while we're co-teaching. So we do that by explicitly planning together that tier two and three vocabulary for our teaching and learning cycles in both languages. So the students’ first language plays a really big part throughout the teaching and learning cycle, especially when we're building the field of the topic knowledge so that students, as Rose spoke about, can use their full, linguistic funds and backgrounds to enhance communication both in standard Australian English and in their home languages.

Because as we know, students are learning English in English and about English topics. So the cognitive load is massive. So if we can actively support that process through translanguaging, that will lessen the cognitive load. And it also allows students to make prior knowledge connections to their home language. For example, we had this incredible, ‘burrowing frogs’ unit that we did. And we started the unit by looking at some images of frogs and students were using every day, you know, language in English saying things like, “oh, they have big eyes, they have long legs, they live in the water”.

But Marisa and Penny and I, our teaching team, we wanted to bring in the tier two and three language. So we sat down, and we talked about what that looks like in both languages and then provided the multiple exposures to be able to practice that vocabulary orally first as well as written. So we were doing things like barrier games, creating dioramas, diagrams as well.

And learning on country that was led by the Aṉangu educators played a really big part in that process as well. As well as using the mentor and model texts both in standard Australian English and in Pitjantjatjara as well. And so by the end of the unit, students were saying things like “enormous bulging eyes and their strong hind legs”, and that “they live in freshwater habitats”, improving up to two leap levels. So it's yeah, a very, very effective strategy.

Dale Atkinson: And so that sounds like a really, kind of, integrated approach for you. So what does that look like in terms of you working with your two colleagues? What are you doing on a day-to-day basis to kind of design the learning and teaching for the kids?

Brooke Webb: Totally. So on a day-to-day basis where the learning we have, our learning intentions and our success criteria that we go in, but we're also very flexible in responding to what the learners, what the learners need, what they're telling us, and knowledge that Aṉangu educators have as well, that might come up organically in the learning process. So that is evident, especially when we're learning on Country that, yeah, we're flexible when we're adapting to what the students, what the students and the staff are bringing to to the learning environment at the time

Dale Atkinson: And what's the journey been like in terms of trying to integrate the program as a bilingual program? Obviously, that's been, a tremendous amount of work. How's that going?

Brooke Webb: Yeah, it's going it's going really, really well. It's still an evolving program. But I think in my experience over the last four years, Marissa Penney and I, we've yeah, we've been a really strong team working together and building that trusting relationship to be able to explore new things has been probably the main, the main focus.

It’s keeping that relationship really strong so that we have the trust to grow together.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, fantastic, Brooke. It sounds like such an exciting thing to be involved in. Kelsey. It's obviously a different situation and scenario at Avenues College, where you've got a much broader and more diverse group of students. What is the program and the support within the EALD hub gonna look like at Avenues?

Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard: We do encourage teachers to try and incorporate first languages as much as possible, which can be a little bit daunting I think for a lot of teachers. So we work with the EALD hub coach to think of strategies and ways to do that respectfully and effectively.

We've also got a lot of students who are interested in learning, Kaurna, so there’s quite an interesting combination of different Aboriginal languages. I've worked with my coach to create some different activities where we’ve embedded both languages and basically just trying to encourage the students to be the experts in some of those fields and share their knowledge, rather than feeling like they don't know as much as a student who knows standard Australian English.

We've had a couple of really interesting moments where it's been amazing to see students who speak Pitjantjatjara for example, using their understanding of things like mythology to explain to their classmates in language what the connections between gods are, and explaining processes in short stories, in language to their peers, and then the other students who don't speak the language are really interested to learn more and try and learn to work with those.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it sounds really exciting. What has been the change in your teaching practice as a result of working with the coach from the from the hub?

Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard: I think a lot of it is like having that broader perspective and stopping before I put something out, like a scaffold and thinking about, is this actually giving students the information that they need, is it pitched at the right level, have I covered what I need to, and making sure that it's actually giving them the understanding rather than overloading with lots of language, because it's like a multi-layered process that's got to be able to translate what you're saying and also learn about the concept. So taking those smaller steps.

Dale Atkinson: Sounds like it’s a really incredibly useful resource. Rose, what are the supports and help that's available through the through the hub?

Rose Nyaramba: So we've got an online resource that is – they are modules that teachers can walk through independently. And that's, you know, generally about the students, their languages, how people learn an additional language and effective strategies for teaching English – Standard Australian English – as an additional language. And then there's the component that has got the coach.

So the coach then works one-on-one with teachers. And again, it is usually to support them to plan using a teaching and learning cycle and to implement those teaching strategies. And then the last one is teachers form a professional learning community. And so they meet up. You know, it depends on what the school allocates.

And teachers discuss, you know, share their learning from those modules that are in the in the EALD online resource.

Dale Atkinson: So who's at the end of the phone when an educator picks it up and dials into the hub? Who can they expect to speak to?

Rose Nyaramba: They can speak to Vanessa, who is the other project officer. They can speak to myself, and we've got our managers. There's a whole team of people in, you know, our project that they can speak to.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah. Fantastic. Now, Brooke, what advice would you give to any educators out there who are thinking about kind of approaching the education in a different way in this space or perhaps are new to it? What advice would you give them?

Brooke Webb: I would say to keep learning by connecting with others, that we don't have to have all the answers straightaway. I know the first - when I first started working with the EALD hub team, and I heard the words ‘subordinate clause’ I thought, oh my goodness, what am I in for here? So it can seem overwhelming at first, but we are so lucky to be supported by so many amazing resources and people.

So just to keep learning, keep reading and try the new things that you learn as well, which you know, can be challenging, but I've been so lucky to be supported by my amazing coach, Rose, who’s yeah, really pushed me and challenged me to try new things, which have been best for my own practice, but also for the students. So to keep learning, I would say and learning with others.

Dale Atkinson: Thank you very much. I know you've all got to nip back into class times and get back to the core bit of your job. But thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us about the EALD hub. There are some notes within the show notes just to let educators know, where you might be able to access this and who you can speak to Rose or her colleagues. So lovely. So, Rose, Brooke, Kelsey, thank you very much for your time.

Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard: Thank you.

Rose Nyaramba: Thank you.

Brooke Webb: Thank you so much.

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 we're joined again by our Chief Executive Professor Martin Westwell. Martin, welcome.

Martin Westwell: Hi Dale. Is it too late to say Happy New Year? Here we are.

Dale Atkinson: No, we'll take, we'll take that. We'll take that. Because it's happy new school year.

Martin Westwell: Yeah. Right.

Dale Atkinson:  Do chief executives get start of school nerves? Are there any jitters for Chief Executives in the way there are for young children and sometimes teachers?

Martin Westwell: Yeah. I'm not sure it's so much nerves as you know, there's just a kind of refresh, there's a hopefulness, there's a, you know, whether it's a kindy, a primary school, a high school, you've got a new cohort of kids and everybody's there in their kind of oversized shoes and their you know, their new things and you know, it's just such a positive time I think. And what you look, I think from my perspective, what you're looking for is just a great start. Great start for kids, great start for teachers and leaders and yeah, so I think we come at it with kind of, full of hope and opportunity.

Dale Atkinson: What about our new teachers that are stepping in for the first time this year? People have just recently graduated. What's your message to them?

Martin Westwell: Yeah, look, I think it's a fantastic time to be in teaching and of course, I would say in South Australia in particular. I think the way in which we're valuing the profession means that there's just so much opportunity to, to grow and develop. New teachers come with their expertise and often with experience as well, that they can bring to the, to the classroom, to their experience. You know, being part of that new team, getting to know those people, you know, it really is all about kind of leaning in, you know, building those relationships. And I think one of the things that we've got good at is thinking about not turning up as experts; but turning up with our expertise. You know, bringing the expertise that you've got, but coming in as a learner and wanting to learn and you see that in our preschools and schools right across the state with our new educators, I think. And, you know again, full of opportunity, full of, full of promise.

Dale Atkinson: Bring the energy. Now, when we spoke at the end of last year you thanked staff for “stepping in” to the department’s Strategy. What does the next phase look like for us in 2026?

Martin Westwell: I’d really want people to see it as an opportunity. I know it can feel like, you know, the requirement of the department, the department says you have to do this, even if it is a choice that you're making. But I do think it's an opportunity. I do think it's an opportunity for schools and for individual educators to express, you know, what they're about, either as a school or as a professional. You know to kind of be able to bring themselves a bit more perhaps to the work than they might have been able to do in the past. So, if you see it as an opportunity, you know, which parts of that are you going to grab? Which parts of that are you going to really get a hold of this year? And you know, and that's, I think how we’ll move forward, by us all kind of making the most of the opportunities that we've got.

Dale Atkinson: So one of the tools that we've created for helping educators express their, their professionalism, is the curriculum for, the South Australian curriculum for public education. We've taken a lot of feedback through the first iterations of the development of that curriculum. We're about to release that second prototype. What advice do you have for teachers as they sort of delve into it and unpack it?

Martin Westwell:  We've tried to think about the curriculum a bit different from the Australian Curriculum, that’s very syllabus-y really, and a place to start is always, is the knowledge piece, the knowledge and skills that we want students to develop, and that is a place to start. But I think there's an opportunity there to do some thought experiments as well. You know, so what if you came, what if you were to come in through the dispositions? What if you were to say, yeah, I know there's all this, there's the content that I need to teach the students and that's really important and we've expressed it as concepts, so, yep, it's not, lots of bits and pieces of knowledge that you’ve got to fit together and it's got to make sense and we're, how are we helping students to make meaning. But it's also, but it could be, you know, I really want these students to be resilient. I really want these students to be creative. And then thinking about, well, how does the description of the, the content and how it might unfold over the year, how does that bring out and develop that creativity? How does it, again, what are the opportunities that it creates in the classroom when I'm doing my learning design? You know, it'd be great if people could see the curriculum in that sort of way – as a curriculum, as a guide to their own choices rather than kind of the checklist of things to go through.

Dale Atkinson: It's interesting that like a lot of the feedback we had through the development of the strategy and, and indeed research elsewhere has demonstrated that, you know, business leaders are indicating that those dispositions are really strongly favoured in terms of what they want from the education system. Is that part of the reason we're going after this as an approach?

Martin Westwell: School has to, and what students are learning, has to be relevant to them. And what I mean by that is they have to make meaning. It has to be part of kind of how they see themselves as a learner and who they are as a learner. So, I think that's really important.

You know, it's, it's 20 years, almost exactly 20 years since Ken Robinson did his “Do schools kill creativity?” – a TED Talk. The most watched TED Talk ever. You know, and in that he was talking about how, you know, that old industrial model of education, and if an alien came down to earth, they'd think that education, the purpose of education was to develop professors, you know, and as a former professor, it kind of did an okay job for me. But, but that narrowness, being able to shift to a broader definition of success so that students can make meaning. You know, so if you think about, you know, in the work around Aboriginal education, the Kaurna curriculum that we've developed, the bilingual education, now really working on with the Aṉangu schools in the APY Lands, in the SACE being able to recognise cultural knowledge and learning – all of those things broaden what success looks like. And it's not to say that, oh well we're not doing literacy and numeracy, we're not doing foundational knowledge now, we're gonna skip that and move on to these things. It's not that. It's not an either or. It's a broadening of what success can look like. And so, you know the work with the curriculum, the work on the dispositions is trying to do the same thing, is trying to broaden that success, find other ways of making meaning for students. So that's really important in, in its own right, I think.

What we also are seeing is exactly as you said – when we talked with students, educators, teachers, employers, they were all saying; this has to be part of education too. It wasn't a shift away from knowledge. It was a - this has to be part of it too. Because if young people are going to be able to go into the world as children and you know, the transition from school into employment and other things, they're gonna need these dispositions in order to thrive. So can we make that part of the story of education? So that's been part of it. And so all of those things add up to why we can't carry on with a curriculum that's just about knowledge and skills, and we've got to shift. And this is South Australia now taking the first steps towards that.

Dale Atkinson: Now we are welcoming for the first time with the introduction of three-year-old preschool - what's that about? What are we gonna do with these very small humans?

Martin Westwell: We're gonna love them and nurture them - that's the first thing we're gonna do. But um, we're gonna create places where they feel like they belong and that they're connected to other people and they're gonna learn. Right? So, and that's true of preschools and schools as well.

But with the three-year-olds, you know lots of our preschools, lots of our sites have got three year olds anyway – and some got quite a lot of three year-olds, and so for them, you know, it's not, not a huge change. With the, this year probably the focus will be on, for public education will be around regional sites and making sure that there's a provision of preschool for three-year-olds, as well as that provision for four-year-olds, because we know how important that is to communities and we know how important it is for those students.

And so, you know, clearly there's two things going on here with the government's commitment to three-year-old preschool. One is that preschool is available and that people can access that, and there's a bit of a, you know, an economic participation, making sure that there's a place where students, where children are gonna be, are gonna learn and are gonna be cared for. But of course in preschool, the focus is on the, very much on the learning. But it's gotta have an equity impact as well.

We know that if this is gonna make a difference in South Australia, it's gonna make a difference in the communities where; perhaps lower SES communities, communities where children will really benefit from the socialisation with other children, the education that we can provide, the support that we can provide, and that how, just how important that is to set children up for, yeah to be a brilliant three-year-old and to be able to go on through preschool and into school, and be successful because of those aspects of child development that have been, we've been able to kind of grapple with and support the development of, right from being three-years-old.

Dale Atkinson: At the other end of the scale, last year we had our first of our year 12 graduates from Findon Technical College. So the technical college is new approach for us as an education department in terms of the approach that we've got there and those kids are making their way in the workforce. What, what's been your impression of the development of that and, and how that's, that's been working?

Martin Westwell: It's funny isn't it, this time of year you're kinda looking forwards, but there's also that like kinda looking back on where we've been as well.

And in, was it 2010 – the new SACE? For, in South Australia we said we're gonna value vocational education and training just as much as academic subjects. You do a year of VET or a year of Physics, you get the same number of credits. We're gonna say these two things are equally valued, and whether that's useful or not to you as a student, well, that's your choice, and depending on your pathway and where you want to go, and for some people, and for some people, one thing is gonna be really valuable and the other thing wouldn't be valuable. So of course that's, that, that's important. And so we incorporated that into the SACE.

Sisteen years on, we're still the only state to have done anything really like that. Other states have, are doing some interesting things, but not really kind of reaching right into the certificate and saying, yeah, this is important. And so we're building on strong foundations in South Australia with the technical colleges. And so then being able to say, okay, well these are places, these are gonna be the hubs, the places where that vocational education is gonna be available. Students are still doing their SACE but the vocational education is available and you're gonna be able to experience that in a way that is authentic and in a way that's gonna be hard to achieve anywhere else. Almost anywhere else in the country, let alone in South Australia.

And we've really thought about kind of, what the student experience looks like there as well. And so, each technical college is slightly different, because it's gotta serve that community, slightly different because it's got different industry partners. And you know, that guaranteed job that's available to students is such a big part of it, such an important part of it. But then in places like Port Augusta and the Limestone Coast where we knew that we had to provide some connection to students who were perhaps not from that, that town, Port Augusta or Mount Gambier, but from a bit further afield, we put accommodation in place so they could come and stay and do block training.

And when you talk to some of the students who have started this year at Port Augusta, how important that's been. You know, there's a student from Roxby Downs who was talking about, you know, what they wanted to do and the dreams that they had, and they never thought they were gonna be able to do it. But now because of the technical college, they can do that thing. They already knew what they wanted to do. They already knew that kind of, yeah the job, but the kind of person that they wanted to be, and they couldn't necessarily see a pathway to it. And now they could, because we put a technical college at Port Augusta. I mean, that's, you know, when you talk to the students and you hear the stories and yeah, it's just one story. But that story's replicated over and over and over again. This is, this is how we change the world. This is how we change the experience of so many of our students in South Australia. And the technical colleges is just one big way, but one way in which we're doing that.

Dale Atkinson: Can I talk to you about challenges?

Martin Westwell: Oh yeah.

Dale Atkinson: Alright. What challenges do you anticipate for the coming year and how are we gonna tackle them?

Martin Westwell: There's always challenges in any system I think. When you've got an opportunity, you've got a challenge as well, and the challenge is making the most of the opportunity, right? And so, with the Strategy, there's still gonna be some challenges around, you know, bedding it in, us getting a settlement and understanding of what the Areas of Impact really mean; that grapple and that challenge is a purposeful one, right? Because if we wrote it down and said ‘this is it’, we would narrow the idea so much that it'd stop being meaningful and we'd just be going through the motions. So, we'll continue to grapple with that. I think that is a challenge.

I think, you know, we know some of the challenges that we've got. Whenever you talk to principals, well the challenges, the challenges are staffing, infrastructure, staffing and staffing. Yeah? Yeah. So, so I think we need more work there and I think there's good work to come around working with the universities, working with others to create pathways and, you know, employment-based pathways, other ways of helping people to access the profession. There's low barriers to exit and there's high barriers to coming in sometimes for some people, and so we want to lower some of those barriers, you know. I think we've gotta double down on that work this year, but I am optimistic about it. I think there are some challenges, but I, but I am optimistic.

I think that some of those, those notions around the workforce, I think that there are challenges and, and the way in which we address, one of the ways in which we address them is making sure that there's kind of, that there's more joy in the work, you know, that people are doing. You know, we all have to do things we don't want to do at work. But people are doing the things that kind of feed the soul, you know? It's hard work. Yeah. But you feel like it's, you know, you're really achieving something. And making sure that we're kind of clearing things out of the way that are not connected with that for educators. So, it kind of raises the satisfaction that the profession is getting. So, I think there's something there as well.

You know, we're seeing more young people signing up for education degrees, which I think is a good thing. That's gonna take a while to flow through. I think there's something there about, you know, also some challenges around how are we using our SSOs and do some of those SSOs want to become educators and how do we support them to do that whilst maintaining quality? We're not interested in kind of quick fixes that don't maintain teacher quality.

Dale Atkinson: So an interesting set of challenges there. Let's pivot to a more optimistic… it's not that that's pessimistic, let's, let's, let's be fair – and we can be optimistic about a lot of those things, but, I know you're an optimistic person. What is your optimistic message for educators and staff at the start of 2026?

Martin Westwell: It, it's really hard work being an educator. And in a way, in a way kinda so it should be right. There's so few people that get to kind of reach out and touch the future and educators are doing that all the time. So, you know, and because of the hard work and because of those things, it can kind of make you look down at the, you know, the day-to-day things we're doing. So, like the, the piece about the, the optimism is to kind of look up and just see how brilliant we're being, you know. Yes, with challenges and with some things that are getting in the way. But if we can look up and just see above those from time to time, to see how brilliant we're being, to see what a difference we're making, see the, recognise the change in your students over this coming year in response to your teaching and their learning. So, you know, the message is, is be brilliant. We've seen that brilliance. Carry on being brilliant. Be a learner and continue to kind of reach out. Not only touch the future but shape the future.

Dale Atkinson: Touch the future. Shape the future. Sounds like a nineties dance hit. We'll take that. Thank you very much, Martin. Thanks for your time.

Martin Westwell: Thanks, Dale.