2 April 2026
Professor Bill Lucas is internationally recognised for his work on creativity, assessment, and educational leadership. In this week’s episode, Prof. Lucas explores how education has developed over time, emphasising the importance of creativity, critical thinking, and dispositions alongside traditional knowledge. In this insightful conversation, Prof. Lucas clears up common myths about assessment, shows how knowledge and skills fit together, and gives easy tips for teachers to help students become confident, adaptable learners. Whether you're a school leader or classroom teacher, this episode offers valuable advice for embedding creative thinking and holistic assessment into daily practice.
Show Notes
CSE Leading Education Series 2 April 2021 (PDF 3.5MB)
A field guide to assessing creative thinking in schools (Google Drive - PDF 9.5MB)
Journal of Creative Behavior - PISA 2022 Creative Thinking Assessment: A landmark opportunity for school and system leaders to put creativity at the heart of students’ learning. Read online here.
Journal of Thinking Skills and Creativity - The development of a conceptual framework for embedding creativity in schools. Read online here.
Transcript
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.
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