17 May 2023

Professor Geoff Masters, CEO of the Board of the Australian Council for Education Research, says all schools are facing two key challenges: how to better prepare young people to survive and thrive in the future and ensuring every student learns successfully.  He believes that current curricula aren’t going to provide the preparation required and that deep reform is needed.  

Show Notes

Transcript

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

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

Thank you very much for your time, Professor Masters.

Geoff Masters: It's a pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geoff Masters: You're very welcome.