Tag Archives: schools

Reflecting on 2023 as we move into 2024

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2023 was a year of the increasing impact of generative Artificial Intelligence, devastating international conflicts, a global economic downturn, a King’s coronation, the Barbie movie, climate crises (with 2023 the hottest year on record), the Australian referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the Matilda’s playing in the semi-final of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, and financial pressures for households due to rising interest rates and inflation. Educators engaged with AI, VR, AR, entrepreneurship, micro credentialling, evolving curriculum priorities, personalisation, complex wellbeing issues, youth mental health crises, workload pressures, workforce shortages, cybersecurity, sustainability, and equity. 2023 was the first year since 2020 when everything seemed ‘back’ and ‘on’. Many people I have spoken to have commented that to them the year felt full and fast.

For me, 2023 was a big year of growth and memory making. I moved with my family from Perth to Adelaide. This meant buying a new family home (and then renovating it while living in it), our two children beginning at their new school and in new sporting teams, and our family exploring our new city and state.

I began as Principal at Walford Anglican School for Girls, where this year we launched our 2023-2025 Strategic Plan, a new scholarship, a wellbeing dog program, staff learning communities, and a staff wellbeing committee. We refreshed the school’s values in consultation with students and introduced values awards. We engaged extensively in Reconciliation, service, enterprise learning, a glowing IB PYP evaluation, and designing bespoke senior secondary pathways for students. We undertook significant stakeholder consultation as part of a review and redesign of the uniform. We reviewed the shape of the school day and the café menu, and built new play spaces for our early and junior years. I have learned much about traffic safety and significant trees. We enjoyed community events and incredible showcases of student talent and hard work.

Additionally, this year I was appointed as Adjunct Senior Fellow at the University of Adelaide, and a Member of Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Professional Capital and Community. I completed and graduated from the AICD Company Directors Course. I recorded and released nine episodes of The Edu Salon. I co-authored the book chapter ‘Grappling with Pracademia in Education: Forms, Functions, and Futures’ with Paul Campbell and Trista Hollweck, published in the book Professional Development for Practitioners in Academia. I presented a keynote at the AITSL National Summit for Highly Accomplished and Lead Teachers. With Summer Howarth I presented to school leaders at an ACEL SA ‘Hot Topic’ event, and alongside Kevin Richardson at an AHISA SA event for aspirant principals. It was an honour to be awarded the ACEL Hedley Beare Award for Academic Writing, and to be listed on The Educator’s Most Influential Educator List and Hot List of innovative Australian educators. I travelled to Bali, Kangaroo Island, Rottnest Island, Cairns, Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth, and celebrated 20 years of marriage.

2024 is a new year, filled at this early stage with uncertainty, as well as hope and possibility. I wish all in my network a wonderful year ahead, and one in which you find joy, meaning, peace, and time to nourish, replenish and rejuvenate yourselves amongst the challenges the year will undoubtedly bring.

Education: Does the future look bright?

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Source: @Riki32 pixabay

In education, we often look to the future, while also being told our schools are stuck in the past.

While there are innovative learning spaces in many schools, classrooms may look similar to the onlooker over time—often with a version of desks, chairs, writable and projectable surfaces, and students of the same age learning in the same space—but the learning and teaching that goes on is not the one-size-fits-all chalk-and-talk of old. There is, of course, an important place for teacher knowledge and for explicit instruction. A classroom observer might not see, looking in, what students are doing, and what platforms they are using to learn. They might not see, unless they speak to the students, that the content is being accessed via a ranges of modes and supports such as video instruction, collaborative online spaces, cloud documents, assistive and adaptive technologies, multimodal resources, tiered tasks, student choice, and self-paced learning modules. They are unlikely to see the depth of the teacher’s knowledge of the diverse learning, social and emotional needs of each learner, and the ways in which the teacher is generating a range of data on student learning, and subtly adjusting environment, content, and learning process and product, in order to support the success of each child. They may not observe the layers of student goal-setting, self-reflection, and action on ongoing feedback.

While schools may have moved further in their practice than some commentators would argue, schools exist within the current instability and volatility of the world, along with the rapidly changing nature of work. At a time of systemic exhaustion and tidal uncertainty, it is sometimes challenging to find hope, optimism, and a sense of excitement about the future. The global geopolitical economic outlook is distressing, and plagued by rising inequality, conflict, widening polarisation, pandemics, climate crises, constraints on national resources, and a gender gap predicted to take another 132 years to close.

Organisations around the world are describing future trajectories that blend hazard with opportunity. The CSIRO (Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), for example, recently identified seven megatrends:

  • A volatile changing climate with economic and social costs.
  • An increased focus on cleaner and greener energy sources.
  • A ‘burning platform’ of escalating health challenges including an ageing population and growing burden of chronic and infectious diseases, and psychological distress.
  • Geopolitical tensions and uncertainty.
  • Growing economic digitisation of work and the economy.
  • An explosion in the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
  • A strong consumer and citizen push for the need for public trust in governments and governance.

The World Economic Forum has reported that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities, with gender, socio-economic status, location and ethnicity influencing students’ access to education.

What are educators, schools, and the education system to do, to ensure that students are being prepared for their futures in such times?

The WEF report identifies areas for opportunity in education, including:

  • Alternative and additional ways of assessing and tracking student learning.
  • Learning integrated with employers and industry.
  • Flexible credentialling and development of skills wallets or passports.
  • Harnessing sophisticated technologies for learning such as AI and other computer-assisted-instruction systems.
  • Investment in teachers’ learning and time.

Schools are experimenting with many of these things, such as alternative ways to record evidence of student learning, and to track, monitor and build portfolios and ‘learner profiles’ of student success. Content is being offered in increasingly innovative and flexible ways, including microcredentialing and courses focused on wellbeing, social justice, service, character, and learner capabilities, as well as traditional knowledges. As an example, this term in some of the Future Ready courses at my school, Year 6s are designing solutions to a health and wellbeing issue based on immersion in United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Year 7s are designing a future school, Year 8s are writing a ‘Close the Gap’ campaign pledge, Year 9s are engaging in a global gamified sustainability challenge, and Year 10s are completing a self-chosen microcredential as well as a choice between earning their Provide First Aid certification or pitching their ‘side hustle’ business idea in an entrepreneurship course.

Student voices, as well as teacher, parent and community voices, are key as we think about shaping education. Schools are trialling approaches that serve the needs of their communities, such as flexible and alternate timetable arrangements, flexible working arrangements for staff, flexible learning options for students, hybrid teaching and learning environments, flexible pathways through and beyond school, and delivery of courses across schools and organisations.

One of the OECD’s ‘four scenarios for future schooling’ envisions schools as learning hubs that strengthen personalised learning pathways as part of an ecosystem of networked education spaces, with strong partnerships with external institutions, such as museums, libraries, residential centres, and technological hubs. As someone who has worked in independent schools for over 20 years, I see our responsibility as to cultivate a collaborative and networked education world, sharing with one another, and with educators more broadly, the work and innovation in which we engage. Platforms like my blog, books and podcast are attempts to share and collaborate with others in the education space. While the marketing firehose and facilities arms race can position schools as competitors, we will build a better education system if we see one another as partners and networked collaborators. We are better together, for the future of our students and the planet. We can enact the kinds of opportunities, relationships, and voice we would like to see in the world for our students, who are the people who will positively influence the future world.

Starting the school year in 2022

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source: unsplash @jrkorpa

Here we go again. Another year. In a pandemic.

In Australia the academic year has just begun. We are in the ‘schools are first to open and last to close’ phase of the pandemic, with teachers considered essential workers (essential to keeping children in school and parents in the workforce, as well as to continuing the learning of and supporting the wellbeing of students). Schools have, of course, never been closed in Australia. There have been lockdowns during which schools remained open to the children of essential workers with teachers providing remote learning. There have been, and will continue to be, times when there are a number of students at school and a number at home. 2022 may well test the notion of being ‘open’, with staff shortages due to ill and furloughed staff a real concern for schools. Nonetheless, as they have throughout the pandemic, schools will continue to apply the government directions and do their absolute best.

A return to school after the summer break—even with masks, regular rapid tests of students and staff, open windows, air purifiers and CO2 monitors (for those schools that have received supplies)—brings with it uncertainty and the need for constant decisional responsiveness to changing circumstance. Yesterday on ABC’s The Drum, NSW school Principal Briony Scott talked about schools responding to the constantly changing government instructions as:

“like driving a huge ship liner and saying: turn left now. I can spin the wheel all I want, but you have to bring people’s hearts and minds with you.”

She described how schools encompass extensive communities that are cared for by the school, with students, parents and staff falling along a continuum of needs. That’s also my experience in a school of 1800 students and 300 staff, and their associated families. A school is a slice of society and so reflects wider issues and social complexities, with each individual in a school community bringing their own vulnerabilities, anxieties, family intricacies and idiosyncrasies of personal context.

One thing we have been discussing at my school is what we could alleviate in terms of teacher workload, as part of our approach to supporting teacher wellbeing. While we cannot control potential future staffing shortages and the effect this will have on workloads, what professional expectations and meetings can be rethought as the year unfolds? How might staff best collaborate or share tasks to increase efficiency in curriculum planning and preparation of resources? A 2016 UK report on effective marking practices, well before the pressures of a pandemic, noted that there are many ways to acknowledge students’ work, to value their efforts and achievement, and to celebrate progress. It added that:

“too much feedback can take away responsibility from the pupil, detract from the challenge of a piece of work, and reduce long term retention and resilience-building. … Accepting work that pupils have not checked sufficiently and then providing extensive feedback detracts from pupils’ responsibility for their own learning.”

We have encouraged our teachers to think deeply about how much assessing and correcting of student work they are doing, and what they might be able to let go of if they consider the purpose of learning activities, feedback, and evidence of learning. I have shared resources by Glen Pearsall on fast, effective feedback; by Kat Howard and Daisy Christodoulou on techniques such as whole-class feedback; and Dylan Wiliam’s work on what makes feedback effective, including ensuring students meaningfully act on feedback. I always ask: Who is doing the thinking? The student should be doing the cognitive work, facilitated by the teacher.

I have asked curriculum leaders to ponder the following questions as they begin work with their teams this year:

  • Is there anything your teachers are doing that they can stop doing?
  • Are there ways to be more efficient yet still effective in planning, marking, feedback and assessment? Are all planned assessments necessary?
  • Are there ways that teacher collaboration and technologies might help streamline teacher workload in your team?
  • Are there ways you can help to energise and sustain your team?

As someone who likes to be prepared well in advance (I like a long runway to change), I am challenging myself to be as prepared as I can while also being ok with uncertainty and accepting of what I cannot control. I am reminding myself that while forward planning, informed decisiveness and communication are key in an ongoing crisis, what’s most important is checking in with the people in our community, looking out for and looking after them as best we can in what are likely to continue to be difficult circumstances.