190: The Education Revolution - Jeff Davis

Speaker A: Welcome to Learning Uncut, where we talk about real learning solutions with the people who made them work. Here is your host, Michelle Parry Slater.

Speaker B: Welcome to Learning Uncut, um, from the Combermeri country whose land I'm joining you from today. In the spirit of reconciliation, we at Learning Uncut acknowledge the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and, um, community. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present, and we extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples present or listening today. Australian listeners or viewers. Because we are on YouTube, I encourage you perhaps to take a moment to consider the traditional custodians of the lands where you are watching or listening from today. Learning and development is responsible for the way in which people develop at work and organizations work in a system. So if we get recruitment right, we know that L and D have an easier ride. So when we bring in great people, learning is just a matter of culture and the way of thinking rather than something to get through with less than willing participants. So how do we get recruitment right? How do recruitment have a pool of excellent candidates to recruit from? Well, that's what we're going to look at a little bit today. It's where we take a step back into education. Now, many people think that they know what learning is at work because they've been through school. Yet effective learning in work is as much about attitude, mindset as it is about skill set and tool set. Now, many regulars here on the Learning Uncut community will know that I'm married to a teacher, an educator, and over the three decades we've had together, I've seen how education has become more and more about teaching to the exam and, and less and less about setting up the workforce of the future, especially in the age of AI, when human skills such as critical thinking or discernment and social engagement are key. Now, today's guest is an education revolutionary taking a very different approach to learning in schools. And you won't be surprised, that's why we're talking to him today. So I predict that there will be a very likely different outcome for recruiters and L and D teams of the future if today's get guests ideas take off across the country. The decisions that we make in education today shape the workforce 30 years from now. So welcome to Jeff Davis, executive head at ah, Hillcrest Christian College and author of Leading the Learning Revolution, a book he published in 2023. And I want to welcome Jeff by saying thank you for trying to turn education on its head. Geoff, please do tell us a little bit about yourself. And, um, yeah, I'm going to wave your book for everyone to see. It is a really, really interesting read. Welcome to Learning Uncut.

Speaker A: Thanks, Michelle. It's great to be here. You know, it's interesting when you start talking about the changes in education. So I've spent more time as a principal than I spend as a teacher. And, uh, one of the things there is I have this unique perspective in that I've seen a generation of teachers come through and I've watched the landscape change so quickly. And the job I was doing 25, 26 years ago when I started being a principal is totally different to the job I do today. And this is the sorts of things we've got to get our head around about. Things have changed, but what have we actually done in our workforce to actually ensure that we're actually getting our kids ready for what they're going to inherit? And that's a significant shift. And I say, you know, in 2023, I wrote that book, the Front Covers Done by AI which at that stage AIO was just being the foundation of what's going on. What we can do now is 10 times more powerful than that. And my second book, which I'm starting to write, is going to be a lot about how we, uh, can actually think about the workforce of education and actually think about how we need to transition to a completely different framework of teaching our kids. And the skills that they're going to need are going to be far different from the skills that we used to teach 20 years ago. This is going to be a significant shift, and I'm not sure that the education community is actually ready for this.

Speaker B: I hope that they become ready because the workforce has been waiting for this. I've been recruiting into, um, very different jobs all the way through my career and definitely see people who are coming through education who are very good at answering the question, but are they good at reading the room? Are they good at the social interaction? And especially when we think about that Covid generation who had limited social interaction interaction. So I'm curious to see how it's going to play out in your first book. And congratulations on that and your second coming out. Um, can you give us a brief overview? What is your educational philosophy? How is it different?

Speaker A: So the biggest thing is that we keep thinking that an IQ outcome is the most important thing. So if you look from the perspective of he who gets the highest ATAR score wins. And it's a really, uh, an interesting perspective because no longer is that the case with the advent of AI and the way in which we can gain knowledge now it's more about the social skills, it's more about the creative skills, it's more about how we manage people, more about how we get the best out of what we've got rather than having the most knowledge. And so this concept about we, we pound and pound and pound to get an academic outcome, yet what we actually should be doing is looking in the holistic view of a child. So do they know how to look after themselves? Can they respond well in every situation? Emotional intelligence are, um, they able to have a value set that they can actually make decisions by? When we start building individuals who actually have that deeper inner, uh, confidence, we talk about character, if you like, then we can actually see you can begin to add the things that are necessary, the soft skills, the intellectual skills and all those sorts of things. The issue still pertains about he who gets the highest score. It's not what makes the difference if we want to create a society for the future. It's actually about helping kids understand that they've got to learn to help each other, that they can learn a lot from elderly people, but it's okay to give your seat up to somebody on a train or a tram. And these are the things which in community have been lost and we need to go back to some of those foundational strengths of respect so that we can actually build a society we all want to live in.

Speaker B: It's interesting that you talk about this shift because it's a similar shift in learning as well. When we think about running a leadership development program, for example, emotional intelligence is a huge part of that and that's really a lot of what you're talking about. So it's not just, um, the ATAR school. For our international listeners and viewers, just to let you know, ATAR is the result that people get when they come out of high school in Australia, so similar to A levels in the UK as an example, um, but it isn't, um, easy to recruit. When we're trying to recruit people, we need to differentiate between them. We need to know sort of, you know, how good are they at something. And so it's a, it's a lowest common denominator. But it is an easy checklist, isn't it, to compare ATARs, to compare exam results. How do you think that your program prepares people so that they can shine above, um, if everyone's got the same score, what makes the difference when it comes to taking them into a workplace?

Speaker A: Thanks, Michelle. There's a couple of things that are really important to differentiate here. I'm not saying that academic results are important, but if you go take a look at university cutoffs, they're generally a lot lower than what people expect. So if you take a look at University of Queensland Engineering, everybody assumes that the number one engineering course in Queensland would be a high score. If you think of ATAL being a maximum score of 100, most people are thinking it's in the high 90s so that students have to get straight A's to actually get in. In fact it's uh, 85 to get that. It means that you need a combination of uh, a good B's and C's, grades, high C's, mid, mid range B's and you actually get into engineering. In some schools the concept is that we should push children to get to that 97, 98, 99, even though they only need an 85 in looking at that, what you have to do to actually drive that high level of performance, you have to forsake things. And too often what people don't realize in their life is that when you push something in, so if you push in a whole heap of extra work, a whole heap of time focused on that, something has to give. Often that's the development of character. And so what we're trying to do is actually look at kids who can cope in the world beyond them. So when you talk about what do I hope to see in my uh, in my children, I was talking to one of uh, my good friends whose son was doing year 12 last year and he was pushing his son, he's a doctor, he's a very, very accomplished uh, man. And 99.95, so the highest possible score score in his day. And he said, why isn't my son getting that? And when I sat down and said, well what you're doing is you're driving your relationship with your son host so hard that you potentially have got the risk of losing that relationship when your son only needs to get into engineering, which is an 85. So how about we aim at a low 90 and we work towards that. Take the pressure off him and see what happens. I, uh, was just with him on the weekend and he said, you know, he said it's quite amazing because his son got the score he needed to get into engineering, ended up with a scholarship, is now at university, has passed all his first semester. He's ringing his father and they're going out for dinner and they're doing things that he never imagined. What happened was that you've got this concept about we drive the academics, that something has to give a cost. And often it's the relationships, often it's their own personal development. And we often see out of the high performing schools, when the children get to university, there's a bit of a loose end. Sometimes they don't cope, sometimes they struggle with the social interaction where this young man is now set up, the success. He's got a beautiful character. He's succeeding beyond his parents wildest imagination. He's living by himself. He's, he's caring for himself. He's doing things which maybe two to three years ago we never would have expected that, that character development has been what's held him true. I think that's what we need to see in our young people, the development of character so that they can be strong and resilient and stand up in the, in the face of the difficult and changing world that we have. What we have at the moment is a whole heap of students, uh, who are struggling with anxiety and fear and um, they're completely not grounded in whose they are and who they are. And so we've got to actually go back and actually start building some of their character traits so that they can withstand the trends of what's happening in the real world.

Speaker B: It's so interesting to hear you talk because these are all the things that we have to do. Learning and development wise with leaders, with teams, trying to get them to interact together. You know how many workshops are run around the world on group dynamics, on how teams work and how people can relate to each other. Communication skills the same. And yet we've had this education system which is teaching to the exam. Now. I'm bought in. I mean, obviously I'm bought in. Um, uh, but I want to know, how do you do this? How do you actually teach character? Do you want to talk to us a little bit about the RISE program and what that is and what changes for a student who goes through that program?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll go back a stage first and I'll explain why RISE is important. So in my first, you know, if you think about person being in a leadership role for over 25 years, a principal role, in my first 10 to 15 years, I probably had 40 people become principals after working with me. And that was a really interesting feat because I watched these, uh, young men and women grow up and become, you know, fantastic character. And all of a sudden they, they were able to go up and take on those additional responsibilities. And I've watched them From a distance now and seen many of them become extraordinary leaders in their own right. Um, one of them was even up for the best principal in Australia this year. Uh, and she's done an amazing job. And I still keep in touch with most of them and I've still communicated with them, and it's great to see that. However, in the last 10 years, I think I've got two. And what's happened is that there's this challenge about the way in which the actual workforce has completely shifted and that the skills that are needed are actually not naturally found within teachers. And so that's a really big thing. So that character you're talking about and the development of that individual now and that ability to stay and be strong and to be stable are really, really critical. So pull that backwards. And that's where the Year 9 program comes in. Looking at a way in which from an early age, we can give students an experience which is different, where they can actually. So what it is, is all Year nine students at Hillcrest spend four out of five days of the week down at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, Coolangatta Beach. And so they do all their curriculum on the beach. They do all their history, uh, their geography, their science, their mathematics. By exploring their natural environment. We've taken on two shop fronts and our kids can actually be inside. But we talk about their actual learning environment. Their learning classroom is not that classroom. It's a suburb of Coolangatta. And so the Rise program is about getting them up to a different level where they can see beyond the walls of the classroom and experience real life. And we see some amazing things down there and some learning experiences we couldn't imagine. We had one. And I talk about this a lot because it happened, um, in the very first year where they get bussed down every day. So the cost is zero to parents. And often a whole year program like that would cost 20, $30,000. If you go to timber top, it's $78,000. This gives all that impact, the same impact as you get there for zero cost, which is why we did. So the first year, they're busting down. So they meet in the morning at Hillcrest, they go down to Coolangatta, which is a 20, 25 minute run, then back again. We have what we call bus pedagogy. Don't lose any time. And so the kids are waiting outside for the bus to pick them up, and two, uh, homeless men decide to have a fight. And of course, you know, uh, we had to make sure Our children were okay. So I get the call that the kids are, uh, watching this fight. And I said, right, just keep them safe, that's fine. Then one of the men pulls his prosthetic leg off and starts hitting the other person. So for children, they think his legs fallen off. And so I'm starting to go in risk mitigation mode and saying, okay, so which. What do I have to tell the parents? How is this going to go on the next day? We get back there together and we said, okay, what are we going to do about this? And one of our friends happens to be an Australian champion, uh, m. MMA fighter, might even be a world champion now. And we rang him and said, can you come down and help? And he's coming to talk to the kids. And the kids are all talking about this fight they saw and how it was really horrific and it was out on the road, it was, you know, a good 20 meters from them, but it's the first time they've really seen two people doing that way. And that conversation that led the. Our MMA fighter, um, was asked what he does when he goes out at night and people challenging to a fight, and he said, run. And they ask him four or five times in four or five different ways about how he takes on people like that. And he just said the one thing he said, I run. He said, I'm in the ring, I know the rules. I know that someone's there to look after me. I know what's happening. He says, but when I'm in public, I don't have those guarantees. I don't know whether they've got weapons, knives, guns, whatever they might have. I don't know what the conditions are. I don't know how many people I'm fighting. So he says, the best thing I can do is run. At the end of the year, when we asked the children what was the most impactful thing, it was that incident. And they said, whenever we are going to be confronted in the rest of our lives in a situation where somebody wants to fight us, we know to run. You don't learn that in the classroom. You don't learn that on a video. You learn that by the experience of being outside. And those children are now in year 12. They're the highest performing group we've ever had come through the school. And one of the challenges there is to recognize that different is okay. The academics are not like. Often people talk about, oh, that's gotta be a magnificent gap year where you are, you know, educational gap year, but it's not because when you start building character and you begin to get these things in their minds that they can see beyond what they would otherwise understand, you'll see that they're actually able to cope with the small things in life. And that's what we're seeing in these amazing group of young people. Like in year 11, one of the boys actually topped the year 12 year in Australia, uh, in Queensland in one of the subjects. And you go and say, okay, so academically, not, not struggling. None of our kids are struggling. They've all got pathways, they're all achieving their pathways. They're all looking to the future of success. And then they know how to live life in a way which is absolutely fantastic. And we can all feel very proud of it.

Speaker B: This character piece alongside academic skills is really the key, it seems to, that you're building, um, through this being out in the community. What, what exactly are people doing out in the community that builds character? I mean, you've talked about doing lessons on the beach and doing lessons in the, in the shop front, but is there anything else that's going on down at Kulanguta?

Speaker A: Yeah, so one of the big things is Future Fridays. And so there's two things we can take a look at. There's the academic side. So one of them's looking at how to build, uh, you know, how to help local businesses do better. So they have to go and research the business, uh, meet with the owners, talk with them about what's good, what's bad, what's different and how they can improve it. Like, you know, some of the kids went to a high rise and said, we want to take a look at how we can improve it. So they got a full tour of this high rise under construction and I had a five star rating and they weren't sure how to get a six star rating. So our kids, which you worked out how they could get a six star rating. And that's real practical. You know, the kids who really want to get into building and construction just love that. And the people who actually took them through actually really appreciated what they came back with. Future Fridays, every Friday our kids go and volunteer in the community. And so that might be the Surf Life Saving Club, the local op shop, down with the homeless. There's so many things. Coolangatta is a vastly different community to where we are, uh, situated only that 20, 25 minutes away. And so they've got plenty of opportunities of how they can actually, um, succeed in helping other people have a better life. We know that the Coolangatta Surf Life Saving Club has just been awarded the number one surf life saving club in Queensland just in the last couple of weeks. And they attribute that mainly to the RICE program because our kids come down and they learn to become surf lifesavers. They go and rescue adults out in the community. You know, one of our boys won in a major award last year because he rescued three, three young lads who got swept out to sea. And you start seeing this difference in who they are because they begin to say, oh, I can give something back to the community and then. But things like anxiety and fear just disappear because it's no longer about the immaterial things such as looks and everything like that. It becomes about, oh, look what I achieved. Everybody is really acknowledging me. Isn't that great? And so what we're seeing is this character built is within the curriculum program, it's within the projects they're learning, but it's also within that Future Fridays of giving and that service element. And we find that students who get involved in service and really commit themselves just actually see themselves in a different light. And that's what we're missing today in the society our kids are growing up in.

Speaker B: As you're speaking, it's making me m think about, um, in the uk, I was a Girl Guide leader. And that element of service, that element of support within the community really does make a difference to people, um, for sure. So thank you for sharing. Um, I'm curious then about other aspects of your school life, of your uh, pedagogy, of your philosophy of education. And I've heard about secret skills. Would you like to share with our audience, um, how they fit in? What is a secret skill?

Speaker A: Yeah, so many years ago, like when I first got into Queensland, so we're talking to me 20 years ago that um, we got involved in the Microsoft program. So we're a Microsoft lighthouse school and showcase school. And that means that, you know, they deem us to be uh, at the top end of their digital program. And so one of the first things we did many years ago was we meant about um, the 21st century skills, which was personalization by pieces, which was done by Dan Buckley, who was at that stage at Cambridge University. And I got to meet with Dan and took a look at it and I said this has got to be the most brilliant piece of work where it's ah, the six skills, um, nine different elements each. Six skills are divided into uh, two intellectual and two emotional skills. It is the most incredible, uh, platform, but it's complex. And when Microsoft introduced it to Us as a group, everybody looked at it and said, we love it, but we don't know what to do with it. Uh, Dan Buckley put it into some schools in England and he found that they didn't take off because it's a complex algorithm that you've actually got to get right. It was probably 20 years ahead of its time because now what we've done is we've, uh, we went over and met with Dan and saw it in action in his school and came back saying, this is absolutely everything we imagined. And so we've been in the last 10 years, evolving that within our school, making sure that our students have these intellectual and emotional skills across the board. And so as we've developed it, we've understood that it's been hard to implement because the software we need to actually drive it is not quite developed enough. But now with AI, we can actually do everything. And so what we're doing at the moment is actually putting that into a new format which will allow our students to personally track where they're heading and to actually put that in the front page of their reports. The aim of that, you know, manage risk, be organized, question assumptions, and teamworker. Ah, uh, and if you actually put those within the context of what you're doing, you will see an amazing growth in each child. What we were able to see is students who focused on this and developed that skill became leaders. The more that you develop these skills, the more of a leader you become. You know, when you're a leader and you go and try and have an interview to get a job, everyone chooses you because they can actually see that the soft skills, the ones which are unspoken, are the ones that they're actually after. Even though it may not be on

Speaker B: the selection criteria, it's such an important part. Like I was saying earlier, how do you differentiate? You know, if everyone's got a, uh, 92 ATAR, how do you differentiate? And these are. Is this why it's secret? These are the differentiators, that framework. Can you just, uh, talk us through what are the secret skills? What do they encompass?

Speaker A: So what we have is the secret skills are an opportunity for people to actually take a look at, you know, these self manager, effective participator, creator, thinker, reflective learner, an independent inquirer and a team worker. And so what we've put them in, we've got the things such as, okay, if you're a self manager, manager is be organized, go for it, finish it, manage your emotions. So the first two are intellectual, the first two the second two are emotional in terms of being an effective participator. Persuade others, find solutions. They're your intellectual, uh, identify issues and get involved. They're your emotional. And what we're able to do then is divide them up from level one to level nine, increasing in confidence as you move through. And what we've discovered with that is that some of these things seem logical and some don't. I often talk about the fact that, uh, my daughter ended up being a leader here and I was taking my leadership team all the way through this and. And her line of sight came, um, her line of boss, line of accountability came to talk to me and said, we've got a problem. Keely's absolutely like, in terms of it's one to nine. She's an eight or nine in everything, except for one, which was manage risk. And so I went home to my wife and I said, darling, I don't know what we've done, but Keely can't manage risk. And my wife, without, uh, a blink, said, of course, darling, what would you expect? She's a champion Queensland representative gymnast. We never taught her risk. Now, on that sense, you get an understanding that when she was in gymnastics, from a young age, we didn't get her to think of risk. We thought her to think of opportunity. In a later age, she actually needs to think of risk. And so that skill hadn't been developed and we were able to take her on a very quick course to actually strategies and process and systems to build her from, uh, a level three to a level seven very quickly. But it's these sorts of things you actually don't know unless you've actually got something to identify by. And so using the secret skills, we've been able to take kids who are maybe missing in an area. So, uh, some people may not be able to imagine, well, how do we get them to be creative? How do we get them to think about that? That is a critical skill for the future. Another one which students are very bad at is questioning assumptions. I talk about the fact that most children want to talk about the fact that they're always right. They're actually focused on opinions. Perceptive bias, perception bias. What we've got to do is we've got them to get them to question assumptions and actually take a look at what they're saying. Is, are they creating a narrative which suits them, or is it one full of facts and understanding of what they're actually looking at? Uh, one of my colleagues talks about the fact that we're actually building A generation of activists, not a generation of critical thinkers. And so that means that we're taking a look too much at individual things which children are getting activated against without looking at the bigger picture. And so in taking a look at where education needs to go in the future, these skill sets need to really, really focus on how we can do things like get involved and identify issues, rather than just listening to an issue and making that the choice we make. Because there are thousands of issues. We should be asking our children, what's the thing you really want to solve in life when they're young and working them towards that, because that would be a passion point which could take them for luck. Now, they may deviate from that from time to time, but at the moment we're saying we're just going to teach you these skills and we're going to say let you loose in the world. But we haven't actually given you something that you're really passionate and engaged with in the future. That passionate engagement is going to be a critical element of how they work, how they live and how they survive in the world.

Speaker B: It's how they can talk about those things as well and be really cognizant of them. Because when they're in that interview, you know, as an employer receiving hundreds of applications, these are the critical things. But they need to be able to express, uh, them. It's how you fit it all in that's sort of questioning for me. Because you've got your Rise program, you've got service, you've got a real focus on building character. And of course, you've got the academics as well. So how do you make space for the exams and the skills and the character piece?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really good question, Michelle. One of the things we talk about is, at the very start, we're not so innovative. In the middle, we're really innovative. And when we get back to the top, by nature, we become a little bit more structured. Uh, and so the concept of the balloon in the middle is what actually makes a difference. It's hard because I would prefer the balloon to be just continuing. Because what we do is education tends to shut people down to a certain pathway where what we actually should be doing is opening the possibilities. And, um, like, it's a challenge because I don't know that we have the governments in place around the world who are prepared to take the risks that need to be taken in order to evolve education. Um, certainly I've been working a lot with the local governments and the state governments and the Federal governments in seeing things differently because we all know things need to change. But ah, we live in societies now which are very risk adverse and so if it's not a guarantee then we're not going to do it. That's not a great place for innovation to occur. Innovation comes through risk, through trial and error. You know, when we talk about the Model T Ford, not many people realize there's a reason why that's a T. T doesn't mean it was the first one. It meant that there were many, many, many different iterations until they got to the T, which they could create. And this is the nature of the things that we're failing. Like I, I often talk about the very first car where they fill it up at the petrol station. There wasn't any petrol stations. They had to take every bit of fuel with them in order for them to get where they were going and get back. And this is where we've lost in our society, uh, in our thinking. People say prove to me that it works. Well if you aren't prepared to try something new, you can't prove it. And so this is the challenge for us is to actually have um, an entrepreneurial spirit. And so we're going to try some things. Not everything is going to work but we think it's going to have a great outcome for our kids. So the Rise program is an example of that. The new school we're opening which is uh, a dual stream. So 7:30, I'll go there, 7:30 to uh, 12 o' clock and then 11 through to uh, 3:30. So dual stream teachers get paid $200,000. The kids get 35 in a class with a teacher, a teacher ain't and an emerging teacher, everyone getting paid handsomely. If you take a look at that as a concept, people saying it doesn't suit me. Well one of the problems is we assume school's got to be the same for every child. I'm looking to tackle a market which may be less than 5% but there's more than enough in that 5% for this form of schooling to work. And so the more we take a look at it and say, okay, it doesn't have to be a one size fits all. I often talk about we all drive different cars for a purpose. Everybody has a different flavor, everybody has a different need, everybody has a different aspects that they actually like within the comfort of their car doesn't mean we all have to drive the same car. And so these are the things where our society is narrowing these options where what I'M trying to do is say, let's open them, let's create different varieties of the school. So in time, Hillcrest may have five, uh, six, seven different varieties. And as a customer, parent, student, you can choose that different pathway which suits the type of learning that you want to have.

Speaker B: You have your virtual learning environment as well, don't you? So some already that exists for you at Hillcrest, where some students can join remotely, um, if they need to do that. Is that right?

Speaker A: Uh, the virtual learning community came out of the experimentation through Covid and we discovered that 30% of our students actually learn better online at. To be honest, 30% of my teachers teach better online. Um, it's just an opportunity way in which they can use a whole range of different things. They can use the impetus, they can use always different things that come within an online environment. The challenge was that we went to 2022, 2023 and everything we learned over Covid was thrown out. We've gone back to the classroom and everybody has, oh, we're all back in the classroom. Ideally, I think we need to move to it more of a hybrid, uh, approach. We see in Victoria they've pass legislation that you can work from home. It's a must. I'm not saying that's generally the case, but if we created the option that we talk about dry subjects, so I don't mean dry in character, but dry as in they're not needed to be a school, like English, history, those sorts of subjects could effectively be taught online. We could actually have a three plus two sort of environment where your three subjects would be at school, two might be at home. And what that does do is it creates the opportunity for students to have the best of both life. They can have their sleep ins and they can do those sorts of things which are really, really good when you're teenagers. They can be working from home and they can be still connected, talking to each other but getting the work done, not distracted by others. When they could come to school and do their practical subjects, their physics, chem, biology, pe, uh, technology. And by having the best of both worlds, I think you would find that we could iterate how kids learn much more effectively. Kids at home tend to work more effectively. Kids at school tend to be a little lost in their timing because of the social interaction. Combining the best of both seems to be the way to go.

Speaker B: You will get no argument from me. I mean, in my book I recommend blending learning and that's, you know, in the adult setting of workplaces. And yet we're still struggling a little bit with that. You know, your point about going back to the classroom, moving to Australia, and seeing how much happens in adult workplace learning in the classroom has blown my mind. This is a huge country and yet we're flying. Not even busing people like you're doing, but flying people into classrooms for learning. And that type of injection education, like you say, it doesn't suit everyone. Just because you become an adult, that doesn't change the need to learn in a way that suits, um, and it depends what you're learning as well. You know, if you're learning social skills, then it's good to be in a room. But if you're actually doing deep work, concentrating, being creative, that might look different for different people. So this is the challenge that we have, and I said this at the start, so many people think they know what workplace learning is because they've had an experience of school. And that looks like a classroom, it looks like reading books, it looks like taking a test. And yet what you're describing, Geoff, is really everything that we know works well from an adult learning, neuroscience, uh, perspective. And that particularly isn't a shift, is it? So I really, really do hope that your philosophies permeate and start to change and education stops looking the way it's always looked. Um, it is different for teaching though as well, isn't it? Because, you know, I say my husband, he's a career teacher, he's fantastic teacher, which he teaches teachers because he's so good at teaching. But what it is for him is seeing those penny drop moments, seeing that those light bulbs go on and teaching students. When you're looking at the whole, the holistic, um, perspective is that different than teaching history, English, science is a difference in how you need your teachers to be in your new sort of education philosophy.

Speaker A: Totally. The history goes that classrooms, uh, have been the same for 300 plus years because the 75% of all teachers sat in the front row of their own classroom. And so what happens is they sat in the front row of their front, their own classroom and then they go out and create what they love. It's the same in many other industries as well. It's not just education, but this is the specifics of education. And so often we have people who are, uh, taking or becoming teachers because they love the concept of being control, being the one who actually dictates what goes on working with kids. So there's always great things that happen, but they're also not necessarily change agents. And so what we've got to do is try and get uh, some more entrepreneurial style people in who actually look at the world of a digital land and seeing what's actually possible. And you know, this is what I love with the Alpha school and a few of the other schools who are heading down the IT pathway through AI, but are looking at ways in which we can iterate learning into smaller intervals. So kids move along little bit by little bit, but they're moving much faster the iteration of what's going on. And so they're taking a particular pathway and recognizing that the actual curriculum program only takes an hour and a half to two hours a day to get through. And you're using AI and iterating to their point. We're actually getting incredible speed in terms of the rate of learning. And so what we don't get in the classroom is, you know, teacher stands out the front 25 kids ranging in IQ from 80 through to 130 trying to teach exactly the same thing. The only way that's going to work is if we minimize that down. And so the only other thing you can do is actually stream. But everybody says streaming's bad, so we don't do it. And that's a political thing now. And so you end up with these dying dichotomies where you actually can't succeed. So you just go teach average. If the kids all jump to here or average goes to average goes to here, that's okay. But we're not actually, we're not actually addressing the real issues. And that is our kids aren't um, creative, aren't thinking beyond the norm. They're actually just puppeting, if you like. Yeah, I personally believe, I personally believe there's a different way of doing it and getting teachers who are uh, integrating AI so we can get that iterative learning and move that quickly, but the teachers can bring that real life character, personal skills into the forefront and use that as the impetus of where they actually drive our students into development of beautiful, um, beautiful young men and women who can actually make this incredible difference in the world. This is what we need to do. Like there will not be many jobs that AI can't do better than us. The one thing we can do is be human better than AI. Let's teach the intricacies of actually becoming young humans as importantly as it is to become people with a better understanding of what it means to have an intellectual understanding. We've got to teach problem solving, we've got to teach all these things. But recognizing and using AI to facilitate that and taking Some of the time we gain from that to actually building their character so that, you know, when we all retire, we've got a society we actually want to live in.

Speaker B: One of the challenges is that we see a replication of what we already know. And you've described that in teachers that they know what a teacher is. And uh, you know, I see it in leadership as well. So. Leadership. You talked earlier about not being very open to change and being risk averse. And we see leaders of organizations who sort of, you know, went through an apprenticeship type program. It was tough. And they, they, they therefore expect people coming into work to just do the same time. And I just disagree with that 100% because when we offer um, sort of a more equality, uh, remove a bit of the hierarchy, learn from each other, both peer to peer, reverse mentoring and mentoring, everyone's got something to contribute. What you're describing seems to be more like that. It seems to be that, you know, you value what your contribution is from your teaching staff, but you also value your contribution from your pupils as well, your students. Am I making a bit of a leap or is that not quite right?

Speaker A: Absolutely correct. See, one of the things you actually have hit a really important app. Um, the teacher is not often the smartest person in the room. And so the concept that they actually um, are the person who's delivering the knowledge can often be a ceiling. And so the challenge is to recognize that as students in the room have a whole heap of different skills, interests and ideas that should be fleshed out within the classroom so that you have, you know, there's one way of looking at it. You can say we've got one teacher to 25 students or we've got 25 teachers to one student. If we empower, uh, the uh, teachers to actually be part of the students to be actually part of the teaching. And this is this juxtaposition again, where we have to move the concept and the locus of control away from the teacher to the kids and let them see what they can create. When you give the kids license to dream, to explore, to show what their skill sets are, you have this enormous shift in how they actually go about life. And they get, they are empowered. And once they're empowered and they feel like that they've got this voice within what goes on.

Speaker B: The opportunity for your children to shine is immense. My concern is they'll go into work and we work in a system, don't we? We live in a system. And that system isn't designed yet for free thinking, discerning people who know the difference between an opinion and an assumption and can work through that, be creative. So we're not just needing to change the education system here, are we? We're needing to change society. We're needing to change how work is done, how people recruit, how people like me help people within work to learn. Um, it isn't just a singular issue. And that's, of course, in all complexity. That is the, the challenge. How are you working with organizations, if at all, to sort of, you know, make this conversation rise to the fore, make people think about employing differently, um, you know, hiring differently, running their organizations differently? Because you are an organization in and of yourself. Do you recruit differently?

Speaker A: Oh, very much so. Um, I have a motto which is, it gets me into trouble, but I believe in it and employ wild, manage hard. And it's an interesting way of looking at it because often we, we look at the easiest employment person. So which is going to be the easiest to manage. And often what we get then is what we've always had. Whereas I look and say who's, who's going to bring some value to the organization? Who's going to bring something I haven't got, what they're, what do they bring? Which actually makes us better? And so it's not. That makes us the same. It makes us better. And so often I get some, um, really unique individuals who come in here, but, boy, can they challenge our thinking. And that's the exciting part of being a principal. Over these years, I've seen some of these people come into my organization who have completely iterated how we've thought about things and have completely changed the way our kids have learned. You know, being a principal for so long, I've got thousands and thousands of kids who have actually left under my principal shift and actually been out in the workforce. I can't tell you how many of them been successful. They've actually, since I started working on this particular way of actually building character, they become leaders within their organization. So, yeah, they may be going into organizations that have not iterated yet, but I tell you what, they're the ones who are leading the iteration. And that's what's really exciting for me as I see some of these kids come through and are really, you know, they're reaching their stage of their life. Some of them are in their, uh, early 40s now and are really making differences within their organizations, whether that be in medicine or whether that be in publishing or whether that be in engineering, you name it. And these people are making a difference. And so we See that time and time again in two weeks time. The Rhodes Scholar for Queensland this year came from Hillcrest, and she's one of the most beautiful girls to come out of here. She built her character here. She's, um, a school captain that wasn't an academic genius at the time, but she's gone on to take that character to the point where they've now awarded her the 2026 Rhodes Scholar Award, which is an excitement for the school. And I say that as something that's happened at this moment because she started here, she got involved in everything we've been doing at Hillcrest. She was involved in the drama, the music, the choral. You name it, she was there. She was a Hillcrest girl. And from that she's actually gone on to create some. Most of it become one of the most amazing academic leaders within our youth of that generation, which is just fantastic.

Speaker B: It is great to hear the evidence in this way that, you know, that you are producing, um, students who then go on to be well rounded and successful adults. Um, we're not quite there yet with the RISE program. Is that right? You only started that four years ago. And so this is your first year, is it, that, uh, the students are going to come out, so no pressure on you students, if you're listening to this, I'm sure they won't be.

Speaker A: Uh, look, but we know that we've tracked these, uh, academics, and I know that Peter Finances are. Uh. My director of, uh, pathways came to me after interviewing these students when they came out through the RICE program. And he said, I must talk to staff. I said, why? And he goes. He said, In 35 years of running set programs, which is where we. It's, uh, a course, uh, uh, course advice, uh, program. He said, In 35 years of that, I've never met a more mature, well developed and driven group of students who actually understand where they want to go. And he said he couldn't have any other way of thinking about it except that the RISE program has developed that within them. And so that's something which is exciting. And we've always known they were a special group after they finished rise. But as we look back along the way, so the year 11, year 10s, we look and say, this is absolutely incredible. We're seeing this quantum shift in the quality of the people we're developing. So the RISE program will prove itself over time. It's one of those things that takes a little bit of time to actually get the data through. When people see it, they all want to jump on board and to be fair, we've got lots of schools who are talking to us now about how they can create the same thing.

Speaker B: Well, that's just wonderful. We do need to bring it to a close. The future is rosy, really. Any of the Hillcrest students, uh, is probably outlive you and me, Jeff. We won't really see the products of this work, um, but, um, it potentially is the need that we have within work to shift, because what we've got at the moment isn't really what we need from for the future, that's for sure. Just before we leave, is there anything, Jeff, that you haven't said that you wanted to say? Please do go ahead. You've got the opportunity to add anything final.

Speaker A: Yeah, look, I'll just say, and I'm going to pick up that last point of yours. We can't afford to wait until you and I pass on. We've got to actually make the change and make it quick, because if we keep doing what we've always done, our children are going to become irrelevant in the world that's about to, um, unfold. And that's something which really concerns me, uh, with grandchildren now who actually live with me. And I see what incredible skills they have as, you know, one and three year olds. I don't want that to be lost. I want that to be built upon. And so that by the time they become 18 and 20, that they will have a skill set completely unique and different to the students who came out 20 years ago, because the world they're going to inherit is way different to what we experienced 20 years ago.

Speaker B: Well, if you're listening to this and you're looking at people coming into your organization and you're wondering whether they're really ready for work, consider how your organization can support schools, can encourage education to look at things differently. We've heard already today that when children are in service of others, they grow differently. They become leaders at an early age. And who doesn't want that for their organization? Thank you so much for sharing the RISE program, sharing your education philosophy, and let's see what, uh, other influences you can make with your future book as well. Geoff, I'm looking forward to reading that. But that's all there is for this episode of Learning Uncut. If this has been useful to you or you can think of somebody who might wish to look at education differently, please do share the episode with them. When we get our shares, whether that's on YouTube or any of the platforms, uh, that podcasts are available on, we know that we can share with each other the ideas that are coming out from these case studies. So thank you so much and we'll see you next week. Time.

Speaker A: Goodbye all. Thanks for listening. Head over to LearningUncut Global Podcast to access resources discussed in this episode. If you have a story to share on the podcast, contact Michelle Parry slater on, um, LinkedIn.