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In this Episode:
In this week’s OutClassed Podcast, Mike and Blake continue on their discussion regarding the school transformation framework and discussed the essential elements of learning design.
Some of the elements of learning design discussed in this episode include:
* The relationship between physical environment and innovative learning design
* How to assess and measure progress (how do you know it is better)
* How to map skills, knowledge and mindset across your school
And more!
To see all the OutClassed episodes go to utb.fyi/outclassed
[buzzsprout episode=’4603184′ player=’true’]
Podcast Episode Highlights:
3:05 In the news: A retired headmaster has been found cheating his way through his career and never had a teaching certificate and how relevant is learning?
11:10 The relationship between physical environment and innovative learning design
17:30 How to balance vision and the community expectation when considering your learning design
24:10 How to assess and measure progress (how do you know it is better)
33:00 How to map skills, knowledge and mindset across your school
39:00 Models that will help your implement your learning design TPAK, Grow Coaching
44:00 The process overview and steps to take
47:45 Wins and fails.
53:30 Can STEM be racist? Thousands of scientists strike in protest
59:00 Go to UsingtechnologyBetter.com for more guidance and support on how to implement the 7 essential elements of school transformation
Resources mentioned:
A former headmaster of Caulfield Grammar has been charged with fraud, Neil Lennie accused of lying through a 50-year career across Melbourne’s most prestigious schools for teaching opportunities. Subscribe: https://bit.ly/2noaGhv
Get more breaking news at:
https://bit.ly/2nobVgF
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3kmeaA1cnU
Fear of Chinese Social Network
Transcript:
Mike Reading 00:05
Welcome back to the outclassed podcast. I’m really glad that you’re here with us again, this week, we’re continuing in with our series on school transformation, where we’re just unpacking the school transformation framework, mainly developed by Google. But we’re also pulling in some ideas from Apple and Microsoft and some of the other big technology partners that are quite prominent in schools. So if you haven’t gone back and listened to the previous episodes might be good for you just hit pause on this one and go back and have a quick check. If you’re looking for the particular episodes that you might want to go back and have a look for. Then if you start back at Episode Number 11, we talked about what is the school Transformation Program and what are they just give you an overview of each of the seven elements that your school needs to have in place. Episode 12 is all about vision and we dig deep into vision and how you can work that one through Episode 13 was all about culture. And then today we’re talking about learning design. So always great to have Blake with us on the call. Hey How you doing Blake?
Blake 01:16
I’m good Mike, how are you? I hear you’ve hurt yourself skiing in all that beautiful powder in New Zealand.
Mike Reading 01:22
Yeah, there was a fair bit of powder around the weekend and pulled my calf muscle. So the physio is saying six to eight weeks out. I’m telling her it’s gonna be one to two.
Blake 01:34
six to eight weeks. That’d be most of the season over, wouldn’t it?
Mike Reading 01:38
Yeah, just over half of it. So yeah,
Blake 01:40
that’s not gonna work.
Mike Reading 01:43
where there’s a will there’s a way as they say so. Yeah, let us know how it got next week. Hopefully I’m recording from up there.
Blake 01:50
Well, that’d be fun. That’d be great.
Mike Reading 01:52
That’s awesome. So I’m really looking forward to getting into this week’s podcast. We’ve had a couple of little chats with a few people on Twitter, and just noticed that someone’s left us another five star review, which is awesome. We always love those reviews that just helps people who are wondering whether or not it’s worth downloading and listening to us to just give us a bit of an idea of what we’ve got. I always appreciate people take the time to do that. So we’ve got SD Hesketh, who’s just said, Mike and Blake provide a very informative podcast that addresses many important issues in the world of educational technology in an easy to listen format, like so that that’s a good one. Hopefully, it is easy to listen to. You will hear some things disagree on others, but hopefully at the end of the day, there’s something for IT people and for those in the teaching position in a school.
Blake 02:39
Yeah, I hope so. I wouldn’t go too long. We’re trying to trying to bring that that down under an hour, but it’s very hard. Sometimes we get carried away on tangents and into the weeds. But that’s, that’s all part of this podcast. So if you’re listening, you’re probably used to us doing that. And that’s probably what we’ll continue to do a little bit I think.
Mike Reading 02:53
Yeah, no, I appreciate you taking time out of whatever you’re doing in your activity, walking the dog or running on the treadmill or driving to work It’s great to occupy some of your space for a little bit. In the news this week, like I noticed that you’re putting out really interesting news article that’s kind of just broken in Australia. We might just play the video piece but you want to maybe do a quick intros on lining it up.
Blake 03:16
Yeah, well, it’s just about a hit monsters been at a lot of different schools. He’s actually not qualified.
Did not I don’t think he had his VIP registration, which is the sort of the teaching certificate in Victoria.
And he’s lied about being chief examiner and a few other things, potentially. And this is all he’s been
charged with it. So he’s not necessarily found guilty yet, but very interesting. I hear this very often and
interested to hear your thoughts on it. Mike, you want to maybe play the video first?
Mike Reading 03:42
Yeah, it’s one minute snippet. So here we go. A former headmaster of Caulfield grammar has been charged with fraud. Neil then he is accused of lying his way through a 50 year career teaching at some of Melbourne’s most prestigious schools, more from Lana Murphy. So if you’ve ever used Serious learning. He uses his profile just for promises of Exam Success, but police say Neil Lennie never passed his own. The 72 year old is accused of cheating his way through a five decade long career. The former headmaster now charged with four counts of fraud very serious up to 10 years in jail. Police allege he used his father’s registration to con his way into the classroom. First at Mount Scopus Memorial college, then at Haileybury, and in 1988,
he scored the top job at Caulfield grammar, his resume listed extensive experience a teacher’s certificate, and bachelor’s in education and Applied Science, the lifelong educator open to the now defunct new generation college in the CBD. While claiming to be victorious chief examiner in physics, among other honors these days Lenny operates the Imperial College of Melbourne, a private tutoring school based in Box Hill. It claims to help students achieve higher ATAR scores under the guidance of experts. Teachers, these people are being put in really high positions of power, and they have massive influence. And if they haven’t got the qualifications, well, they shouldn’t be there in the first place. Lana Murphy, nine news.
Mike Reading 05:11
That’s interesting. Hi, Blake. So someone who’s not a teacher, and has never been, I guess I wanted that certificate ends up being the principal at one of the top performing schools, and then goes on to have a successful career afterwards. So yeah, very interesting, especially when we’re talking about learning design today. About what does it mean to be able to get good results as a as a student as a teacher?
Blake 05:35
Yeah, and like, the interesting thing for me is flaming like, you know, if he’s not qualified, it shouldn’t be that I’m interested to know whether he was any good. I wonder if you work harder. If you worried about being found out every day, you think you have to compensate for that and really, you know, push yourself harder and go that extra mile and it’s kind of ties into some of the stuff we’re talking about today around expectation and growth mindset and these kinds of things, but certainly an interesting character if he’s meant To get away with that much fraud No wonder he’s a good a good later on in the system because he can obviously get in manipulate situations to his benefit. So very strange story. I don’t think in my career in schools, I’ve heard of anything quite that brazen.
Mike Reading 06:15
Yeah, I mean, it does raise a few questions around what makes a good teacher I still remember back in to the university when I was going through, I’d been in the workforce for a little bit worked in hospitals in a pathology lab. And so I had a little bit of experience wasn’t just green out of school and straight into uni. And having said that, I was only 22 or something. But I remember still being young and dumb enough to ask the question when we walked into the class and the lecturer was starting to just do an introduction to the topic, which was behavior management. And I looked at her and she looked like she
was about 117. And I just asked I like innocently, and she said, Oh, how long’s it been since you’ve been in a classroom? I think the answer was like 20 or 30 years or something. That should have been an hour. Academic and I was like, What the hell can you teach me about classroom management? And quite often when we talk to teachers, you know, tell stories sort of like that, you know what? You go through and you get your unique certificate, then you learn how to be a teacher, then, like, how much of that is relevant in terms of certificate versus learning on the job? And obviously, it was doing a great
job.
Blake 07:22
Yeah, all right. We get into those positions you would have had to been there or really well known, mostly well respected schools, I would have thought in Victoria. So you must be doing a decent job to be selected as Headmaster. They’re not easy things. You go through a rigorous process being selected for principals or headmaster position. So it’s amazing. I don’t know how that slipped through. It’s a unbelievable story. But yeah, I mean, I echo your sentiments there, and it’s something with when I hire technical staff, we’re not sort of subject to the same criteria of having to have that VIP certificate or having to have certain qualifications are registered And I actually have stopped looking at university degrees altogether. I mean, I might look at it in the context of, you know, when I’m vetting applicants to begin with, but when they come in and sit across from you, I think you get a, you get definitely get a feel of what they’ve done and what they’ve achieved, because I’m more interested in what problems you’ve solved, what tough issues and challenges have you come up against? And how did you solve them,
because I think that’s very telling to, particularly in a technical role of how they’re going to be in a team, how they’re going to work, when big, big problems come up, you know, that that’;s when you want people to shine and you want to hear they’ve got an issue that they’re the, you know, the through their experiences have demonstrated that not through a test of demonstrated that, you know, through an academic test in which they kind of know what the what the outcomes are going to be. Unfortunately, in the real world, that’s not quite how it works. So we’re fortunate in a way when we hire technical staff, we
didn’t have that, you know, don’t have to worry about the qualifications so much. You know, I often I’ve hired people, I’ve got very good hire. At the moment, who’s a network engineer who’s from Iran, and has never, you know, like that they don’t have access to all the industry certificates, all the Cisco certificates and all that stuff, because they’re not that I have no presence in Iran. So you can’t do those. But ironically, he’s probably one of the most gifted engineers that I’ve seen. Because he’s, you know, he’s worked from the bottom up and tried to learn everything going up, rather than just doing the course and trying to get a pass and get the tick in the box and then go get a job and learn it on the job, I think has a lot to be said for, you know, self learning and actually going out and solving real problems. That’s why I love that idea of sort of folio rather than roll marks.
Mike Reading 09:38
Yeah, and we’ve talked about this a little bit on the podcast about UT entrance and transition to work and what do you actually need to say at the end of a school and what’s the purpose of school and, you know, what are we here for? It’s interesting, because I just sent you been chatting just then I just started to think about some of the international schools we’re working with, around the world and quite often their head of school or their principal. is not a teacher, and doesn’t pretend to be one. So they’ve hired business leaders or they’ve hired x lawyers, and they’re the principal of the school. Then they’ve got their head of teaching and learning and head of curriculum and so on. So yeah, be interesting to see the fallout of this whether or not the fact that this guy wasn’t a registered teacher, even though he was great at what he did, obviously, putting aside the whole fraud part.
Blake 10:23
Yeah, I mean, he’s definitely doing the wrong thing by faking his resume, but would he have got into those positions? If he said, I have? No, I have no teaching degree, you know, even if he had the maybe the registration, but he’s, you know, does the resume matter that much? I don’t even know if that’s the case. I don’t think he gets selected to be a principal or a headmaster without having proven yourself in the field. And that’s obviously how they’ve made these decisions and probably not looked too closely at his certificates or vetted them all wrong around so
Mike Reading 10:52
yeah, I’m sure there’s lots of school boards that would never have thought to have a teaching certificate verified somehow, like I’m sure they’re not contacting the you need to make sure that this guy was on their register or something like that. So, yeah, interesting times, hey, I’m interested in follow that one through. And it does fit really nicely into our topic today, which is one of the seven elements of school transformation that’s around learning design and innovative approaches to learning. And one of the survey questions we asked when we work with a school around these seven elements is, is your learning environment, inhibiting you from being innovative? It’s really interesting because we interview or we serve a school leadership teams and then we survey the teachers separately because we want to see where there’s congruence and where there’s a mismatch in what the leadership team think the teaching team are doing and, and vice versa. And quite often, the leadership team will say the physical environment of their school is it limiting in terms of innovation, and but when we survey the teachers, nine times out of 10, the teachers say that our environment is a little bit limiting. But we’ll make do. And so quite often, if you look back at that whole concept of an innovators mindset and the culture of innovation, it’s more a mindset than it is an action. And so sometimes we’re hiding behind our traditional teaching models, because we’re in a, you know, traditional teaching environments. And in New Zealand here, we’ve seen so many schools, rip down walls and, you know, open up classrooms and create innovative learning environments, which are now called flexible learning environments. And then you
walk into a school six months, 12 months later, and teachers have built artificial walls down between the two classrooms, and they’re essentially teaching a single cells anyway. So quite often, there’s a bit of a mismatch between what you see in the environment, the physical space and what you see happening in terms of teaching or learning and I think it’s really important up front just to define when we’re talking about learning design, we’re talking about the environment but also the pedagogy that
happens inside those environments. And like you’ve I mean, that McKinnon you’ve guys have gone through a bit of a go build recently and expand And would have had discussions around some of those approaches to design and space and so on. Did you learn anything on that journey as part of that process of school expansion?
Blake 13:11
You probably the most fascinating discussions have been around our new campus, which is yet to open. And we’re in the planning phase of that, which is going to support I think, up to 1100 students eventually. So it’s a large space for stories, very kind of tightly compacted into one building as well at the site. not that big. So it’s interesting to look at, okay, well, how are we sharing space here? What’s a what’s a learning space? What’s a commuting space or travel space? those kind of questions. So we’ve had really interesting discussions. We’re very fortunate in that, you know, the government have really worked with us and got a great team on the project. And it’s really exciting project but just looking at you know, when we have a learning space, is it a singular space, it’s going to be used for a particular topic like a robotic space or do we have the more flexible one of those spaces look like? How We design money around that. And it’s a big, big chicken in the egg problem. Like being in these meetings is fascinating. We’ve got people talking about big ideas and then I’m sitting there thinking as the IT guy
hat how on earth am I going to facilitate that? Like you would need people’s skill sets and then like mom going into all that thinking, the sort of the understanding of you know, how it’s going to fit together. But then on the other side, we have the, the infrastructure side, where they actually are physically building this building right now. And they need to know or what’s the curriculum going to look like? And they don’t quite know because they don’t know what the building looks like so often as attention they’re in a chicken in the egg promo, what comes first and I think you do need I mean, if you have no constraints, if you have every option available to you often that’s paralyzing. So I think it’s good to have some constraints to say we have these types of spaces. You know, try and work your curriculum in around that that can create a bit of interest in and momentum in the in the curriculum development and vice versa. If the curriculum or have a particular one thing they want to achieve or two or three things that are really critical to achieve that might be we want to have more public spaces are you want to
have like wet areas in every room or you want to do something different with furniture or something, then that they can take that back to the build? So, yeah, it’s been sort of a step by step isn’t small innovations happening on both sides. And, and obviously, the timelines will have to adhere to and eventually something’s going to be delivered. And we’ll make it work, whatever it is. But it’s, it’s a curious process, that’s for sure.
Mike Reading 15:22
Yeah. And quite often we work with schools, especially in New Zealand, where the Ministry of said there’s a particular type of like, you’re going to get this building, and it’s going to run on this model. And then you’re expected to make the pedagogy to make the environment rather than the other way around. So I think at the same time, when you look at that survey question where teachers will say, Well, our environment is a little bit limiting. But at the same time, you know, we’ll make do because you can teach in a single cell, you can teach in a barn style, you can teach different ways. It doesn’t just because you’ve got like a really flash, building with great lounges and all the kids sitting in beanbags doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re teaching in an innovative way? I guess you need to start at the end and work your way backwards to is in what type of students we’re trying to produce? And what do we believe in? Because I guess there’s a couple of elements of that, right? You’ve got the knowledge, which is what schools are best known for, like how do you transfer knowledge for one, you know, from the teacher to the student, or from students or students and so on. Beyond that, you’ve got not just the knowledge but you got skills and you got mindset and you got aptitude and abilities and things like that as well that you need to plan for
Blake 16:28
just building on that one of the one of the things I often say, you know, when people come and talk about our school, you know, our Google reference school, the first in the country, they want to know how we did it. And they say, you know, it’s really good will often pass up as a real bit of innovation, but things were not innovating on the fringe things you know, we’re not having huge fancy glass whiteboards, that video you at the same time, we don’t have, you know, like you said pods of beanbags, that that stuff you won’t see at the school we have innovative, innovative isn’t invisible stuff. It’s on the lowest common denominators of you know, more productivity in the in the planning process and communication between students and staff, those kind of core fundamentals. That’s where we’ve innovated. And I think that’s given us a big boost in terms of what a school can do. Like it’s like building on the shoulders of giants, right? You get a strong foundation and you can build up and up. But the, you know, the interesting thing about the learning design stuff for me is a question for you. Maybe marking
working with a lot of these schools is what? When you say, okay, there’s got to be a focus, you know, we have a real steam focus at the new campus. But that’s not the only focus, we still have to bear in mind that we’re, we’re, you know, pushing towards an ATAR. And whilst we want kids to have more autonomy and build those 21st century skills, they still need to fit back in, you know, back into the peg hole that is the HR system. How do you balance those and you know, we’re thinking about this, this campus as a as a year, slide slash nine slash 10, somewhere in there, and then coming back to the main campus to sort of regime if you like, normal schooling, how do you sort of balance all of that comes with a vision for, for what a new campus or a new building should be.
Mike Reading 18:05
Yeah, it’s really interesting. Hey, like if you look at a school like High Tech High in, in America, one of the things they say is that they get their students into college and into uni, but it’s not necessarily one of their main goals. So I was just talking with a school last week in New Zealand. And in the particular area they’re in they’re fairly rural, decent sized school. But they’ve figured out that when they look at their statistics, and they’ve surveyed their students and parent expectations and wider community, there’s not a real expectation for a large proportion of those students who go on and do University study. But there’s a massive opportunity for them to work really strongly with their local community to build like bridges into work and into tertiary study, in terms of skills and a trade. So it’s really interesting from that point of view, that once the school understands that their purpose may isn’t just a TA, that they have a little bit of flexibility in terms of the type of teaching and learning environments they set up. And then though equally, there’ll be some other schools that are like the whole purpose is to get a large portion of our students into a university course of their choice. So I think you need to understand what you build a bit about your demographics, your community expectations, and then build from that. So it can be quite hard in a primary school, there’s a bit of flexibility, but then for them to be able to work, you know, as a feeder school into a high school, there may be some expectations that they need to work out in terms of what’s their feeder strategy, and what does the high school need from them in terms of their learning designer and an approach to learning as well?
Blake 19:41
And I think it gets, it gets muddy as well with what is the outcome of schools and again, this is this is the whole underpinning problem when you really dig down and ask why five times I don’t know if you know that concept of asking why five times Macbeth. If you do that, you sort of end up back at the vision back at these very high level kind of big ideas. And, and one of the big ideas in schooling is wider schools exist. And if you if you survey people, not many people actually agree on the purpose of schooling, there’s a large number of definitions of why school exists and you know, everything from, you know, to
teach them academic skills to get them ready for the world or credit, you know, happy person that, you know, there’s a whole bunch of metrics and I think, you know, the business it’s very easy to say, Well, if there’s a profit focus, you know, is it going to help us make profit sooner or later? If not, we’re not doing it. If it’s in a school Well, some things like steam might give a real full bodied experience and, you know, help extend the curriculum and push people’s perspectives and you know, give them a more holistic education in terms of what they’re exposed to that holistic side of things. Versus you know, drill like they do in a lot of the Asian countries where they’re trying to get those good Pisa scores, you know, just sit them down and drill and they go for hours like this school opens at 630 in the morning and closes at 6pm at night, and they don’t have excursions I don’t have camps. They sit there alone. Why would you do that stuff? You know, that’s not, that’s not the prime goal of the school. So, you know, I think part of it is trying to balance this. And I think that’s one thing that, particularly our state systems do well, is they
balance the need for getting a result and getting into uni, which if you look at providing a great opportunity for students, getting them a good score to give them options, is probably one of the best things a school can do. But if on that journey, they don’t learn good ethics, they don’t. They’re not tested, they’re not pushed to their limit to find out who they are, and they don’t build good relationships and networks in their group, you know, groups of friends that can they can leverage as they move on.
How successful are they going to be used? Lindsay fox is a great example over here. He was a prolific entrepreneur built a whole trucking business and you know, he left it you know, but he left a very good school. And he had a lot of friends. And I’d say those friends ended up being very useful down the track. So you know, it’s Sort of about a balance, I think and it is hard when we talk about vision that’s going back to the vision conversation on. And this kind of ties into the learning design as well, when we are trying to build a learning design and look at our vision of what are we trying to achieve, we’ve got to be careful not to have blinkers on and think there’s just one way to do this. I’m interested to hear your thoughts and how this impacts as well and how you do balance all those competing interests.
Mike Reading 22:21
Yep. So it’s, if you look at where education, the pressure for education to go, right now, it’s very much down that line of growth mindset, future ready school skills, and those sorts of things. So not just building for knowledge, but you’ve got so you’ve got the content, but then you’ve also got future, you know, future schools, growth, mindset, opportunities for project based learning and so on. And we’re working with a school in New Zealand. It was a really interesting test case because they had worked
very hard in a high school environment at breaking down the silos. They wanted to do cross curricular, stem based learning. And one of their main goals was University and over a couple year period, as I’ll rolling this out, what they found was that the students who attended that school once they learnt in a particular stem based way, it was very hard for them to go back to a siloed. You’re going to teach science, you’re going to learn science now, rather than looking at a cross curricular kind of a learning approach,
Blake 23:20
infer that it’s better though does that infer that? Like, it’s hard to go from a strict learning environment to a stem based approach as well.
Mike Reading 23:30
Yeah, it is hard. And like, we’ve talked about this in the past where my kids were in a Anglican school very directive learning environment came to New Zealand, where the teacher saying to my kids would, what do you want to learn next? And where do you think you are on your learning journey? And what’s your part to play in this? They’ve never heard of questions like that ever. And so it was quite
Blake 23:50
a school wide.
Mike Reading 23:53
Yeah. And then we put them into an online school and it was a very different
Blake 23:56
speech, but it really did. Yeah,
Mike Reading 23:58
it does. Take a lot of minds. It changed to work on that. But one of the things we’ve noticed when whether it’s a school that wants high university entrance or transition to work or growth mindset, and it’s very different working with primary schools and high schools, because again, they’ve got different measures they need to, to match. One of the interesting things about all of this, is that whole why like, why have you designed your learning approach this way? So right now in New Zealand, there’s a lot of schools that are going down play based learning in kindergarten, year one year two. And that’s, that’s a definitely a trend that’s starting to emerge. But when you talk to the school leadership about why are they going down this path, they can talk about the benefits of play and learn through touch and development of language and all, you know, some of the pedagogical approaches to that. But then when we start to have questions and conversations around Well, how do you actually measure and assess your learning design? Like how do you know that because you’re doing play based learning, you know, what, what do we learn from that and how do we be able to report back to the community on That we start to fall short. So we understand the pedagogical theory of it. But when it comes to embedding the practice and then assessing the practice and saying, are we making a better? Is there an improvement because of it? Sometimes we’ve started to fall short. So it links very much into this
conversation we’ve had around vision, because unless you understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, it’s very hard to know if all this energy and effort is actually making a difference. What
Blake 25:28
the pedagogy is the how isn’t it, that’s how you’re implementing the vision. And that’s what we’re talking about here in terms of the learning model, which learning models it all kind of links back again, because if you look at those frameworks, you know, they’ll usually say things like, you know, reflect on incorporating a student voice or how can technology augment the work that teachers are doing? And, you know, it’s sort of like, tactical a little bit but also bringing you back to the vision like what, what are we trying to achieve with the learning model? And I think that’s, that’s the first question. You’ve got to answer. In terms of the context of the school, but once you answer it what are these learning models look like? Are we talking about a teaching model? Is this a, like an instruction model? Or is this more of a, an approach to learning in the school or as a network? What does it What does that learning model actually look like? Like if you were to build one for school?
Mike Reading 26:17
Yeah, sorry, I guess it comes back to that high level thing. And then if you bring it in, so I’ll give you a recent example. So one of the things that they wanted was their students to be curious. It’s part of their 21st century skills, thinking growth mindset. Start with curiosity, that build is one of the foundations of innovation. So we’re going okay, so you want to have your students being curious, but in a school environment, curiosity isn’t necessarily rewarded. If you think about it. What gets rewarded is that you learn content, you can regurgitate it. So then when you’re looking at your lesson design, one of the questions we asked to see evidence from teachers is show me an example in a lesson some way where you gave space for your students to ask a question. And have that question lead to another question, which leads to another question. And then they start to wonder and they start to dig deeper into that. Now, there’s a whole lot that needs to come before that. Because generally speaking, children are generally again, let’s generalize just for the sake of this conversation, taught in school to not
necessarily be curious, but to get the questions out answered as fast as possible, right? Don’t necessarily go down a rabbit hole, and make more work for yourself. And then you’ve got skills that you need to if I want to be curious and find out some information that leads me to wonder about something else, I need to have some research skills behind me to know how to find that information and not just copy and paste the first result that I see in Google and change some words. Because I’ve been told that’s plagiarism. It comes to a learning design, but it also comes to a skill set and then it comes to a mindset. And you need to have all three of these elements in place to develop a curriculum or a learning approach that actually works. And then you need to reward based on that. So rather than reward On work finished, maybe it would be better for our students only get a quarter of the way through the workload, come across some fantastic learning opportunities and ask them wonderful
questions. So again, it starts to change the approach and the evidence and the way you set your lessons up and what you reward and what you value. Because at the end of the day, what you value gets done, right.
Blake 28:22
So you’re less about answering questions, maybe more about how many good questions you’re asking, what’s the quality of your question? And having a framework for assessing that maybe is the is a pivot you could make?
Mike Reading 28:33
Yeah, so and that’s a hard pivot to make, right? let’s not pretend that’s an easy because when you’re looking at your teaching program, it’s very much about I need to get this content to the students, I need to be able to learn this content. And then I need to be able to assess their progress along this pathway of learning this content. So then when you start to assess things like how many questions and the quality of the questions that are asked, so what do you do with a student who can’t tell you one thing about the content that’s passed? Have your syllabus, but at the same time is has wonderful advancements in their own curiosity and do it when I was teaching, I was playing around on the edges with this. So one of the things in a high school environment of it’s very hard to, to stray outside the lines a little bit. So one of the assessments that I would change up is instead of saying, here’s the six questions on World War, one that you must answer, what I would do is I’d say to the students find something that you found interesting in the topic, I want you to do some more research, and I want you to present it back to me. And so I’d give them complete autonomy. And we talked about then being Pink’s book drive a lot, where they talk about autonomy, mastery, and purpose being the main motivators. So when I looked at that, I was like, well, let’s give the students as much autonomy around the choices they can make as possible. So that’s where I’d say to them, I would force them to look back through the nights find something that they found interesting, do some more research on it, and present it however you like. write an essay, do a play, write a song, I don’t care. And then kind of open that up and then give some assessment around that. And I’ll tell you what, when you start telling the students, especially in high school, when they’ve gone through years of conditioning around his how to just play the game, get the questions answered, and in assignments, get a mark, move on. It took a lot to get them to take ownership of their learning initially.
Blake 30:20
And you’re asking them to go outside of their comfort zone, which is just sit and listen, absorb and regurgitate. But the interesting that examples, a great example because it does embody autonomy in terms of the choice, you’ve got mastery in terms of becoming an expert in that field. whatever that thing is, you wanted to learn more about, you know, the fashion during Shakespeare’s time or something like that, you might become the expert in that. And then the purpose is, hey, you’ve got a deadline, you’ve got to present the colossal me or someone by a certain point, so it creates like a purpose around it as
well. So that’s really compelling I think in the classroom. The issue of offline is when you look at Australia curriculum or American Common Core standards? How do we balance you know, the want to do this in the classroom versus just looking at those standards and saying, oh, that the Australian Curriculum and saying they need to understand, you know, these types of punctuation, I’m just going to literally say, here’s the punctuation, here’s how to use them, let’s practice it, and then we’ll test it like that, to me would seem to be a much more direct and straightforward approach. And I know, through my work with etcv, where there are interdisciplinary skills, I technology, being one of those that’s meant to be taught, kind of tacitly through every subject, and actually outline what’s where students should be. There’s no subject teaching that right so you’re supposed to understand peripherals connected to a computer, you’re supposed to understand the basic idea of a file system is supposed to understand webcams and computer monitors and, and microphones and those kind of things by a certain grade. But no one’s explicitly teaching you that it’s just supposed to happen inside the curriculum. How on earth do you measure that? This way? things get really complicated. And actually, you need a CV we kind of ran out of steam with it got really complicated and every school had different approaches, there was no kind of unified or best practice way to do it. And to be honest, we kind of put a lid on it and said, we’ll have to come back to it so keen to hear how you kind of balance that and how we can get not just
congruency about, you know, moving these kind of less obvious, less instructional based things into the curriculum, but also how, you know, you can balance between Common Core Australian curriculum, and I’m going to call it and then the need and want to do this inquiry based stuff where we’re, you know, sort of going outside of those lines. And yes, it may come back and hit some of those core standards, but it may not as well and then what do we do if it doesn’t? Do we, you know, are we failing as a teacher?
Mike Reading 32:47
Yeah, so I think this comes to that. So we talk about knowledge or mindset and skills, like they’re the three big three. And so, you know, teachers are really good at transferring knowledge, skills. That’s what you’re talking about someone, right? See, how do you Where do you save documents? So this is where when you start to map this out across your curriculum, say, let’s take a primary school as an example, they would say, Well, what skills do we need you for students to have to be able to tell them to do the activities we want them to do? And that might be share a Google doc or might be insert a table into a dock and it might be create an animation in a Google slide. So then what we say if that’s the skills that you for need, they should be taught in year three. And so that year three teacher that’s their role is to is to, to find a way to embed that that learning inside that subject, if you look at it from our high school curriculum, what we do is we go well, who’s gonna like is it the math department, English department, humanities department? Where does that naturally fit in? You need to have these departments that have time to actually talk about their curriculum and their subject areas and find those areas where they can do skill development and then map it out. So what does it look like it you seven are right on Nine or 10, and then realize that if it’s everyone’s responsibility, then it’s no one’s responsibility. And so basically, you don’t have to be an IT expert, you just need to be the expert in the very few things that you need to make sure that the students at that level that you’re teaching right now need to know. And again, a little bit harder in high school because you’re teaching a range of your levels. So you’ll have a range of different skills that you’ll probably need to transfer across as part of your curriculum. But that’s basically what we do is like we always try and get the time which is the biggest hurdle for teachers to sit and communicate and discuss, and then map out across the, across the school. What would this look like? Where do we think best fits? And then how do I build that into my
teaching practice?
Blake 34:46
Very interesting. Yeah, I guess for me, I just don’t I can’t quite visualize where, what the incentive is for teachers to actually go outside and try interesting inquiry things that may have No impact will might have great impact doesn’t seem like there’s a good incentive built in for them to do that, that seems like it’s more of a like a, we’ll strain them into a direct instruction model because that we know works. And it gives good progress indicators in terms of taking tests. You know, rather than creating a whole new kind of assessment model, which isn’t even in the Australian curriculum, so, you know, we’re
reinventing the wheel in a sense. So I think that’s where I see a lot of tension in schools. Yeah,
Mike Reading 35:28
I’m not saying it’s easy, but at the same time, there’s plenty of teachers that are born out of their brain with a direct instruction model that jumped at the opportunity to teach a little bit differently. And the interesting thing here, too, is that you don’t need to, you don’t need to make whole school changes either. We always advocate for start with a class or start with a subset, test it, assess it, and then start to build it out over time. Because the last thing you want to do is like we’re all going down, play based
learning and then the next thing we’re all going down growth mindset and then the next See, the principal comes in. And they go to another great idea about some other learning approach. And in the end, the teacher is just like, oh, whatever, no, go shut the door. And, you know, they just do what they’ve always done, right? So it comes back 360 that the purpose, the vision, the why this is how we teach. This is how our students learn. This is how we fit together. And part of that is if you build out a model across your school, then all of a sudden, I don’t go into my classroom, and I become an island separate from the rest of the school. Yeah, just shut the door. And so long as the kids aren’t murdering each other, pretty much no one knows what goes on. I now become an essential link in that chain of learning, where if I don’t do my job, I’m letting down the next teacher. And so this is where you start to build in some natural accountability. It’s a natural PD, you know, places discussion elements around
how we do this, why do we do it? What’s the value behind it? And it could be that you find that one teacher is particularly passionate about a particular, you know, developing growth mindset and get right into it. Well, there’s no reason why you can’t cycles, students through that particular class for a week or there’s all it doesn’t have to be a whole school, school wide year wide, we’re flipping everything on its head, there’s always ways to be innovative in how you roll this thing out. Mm hmm.
Blake 37:15
And I know, I think we might have even spoken about this about linking, you know what my view is if we can link one concept like Pythagoras theorem to like a, another issue in se p, where we’re trying to figure out how high or high jump bar is or you know, the pole vault bar is or something and some of the physics around that thing can link to physics and then kinetic energy and, and so you could kind of have these stage linkages where you learn a skill and then you apply that skill and learn a new skill and you apply that skill to learn a new skill, and you kind of build up the ladder, which is theoretically what this continuum is doing in the Australian curriculum, but it’s actually linked at cross curricular I think would be really powerful as well, where you go, Ah, that thing is useful, like who learned any differentiation at school, and thought, so glad to know that I’m going to use that every day. You know, no one. So I think it’d be great if we can actually utilize that across curriculum. But one of the big
challenges is, and this is where you know what you’re talking about. Sounds awesome. But when you talk to researchers, they say, there’s not many models of this happening, because it’s really difficult. It’s really hard to actually do that in a scaled way. And have everyone communicated at the same level without being an enormous administrative burden to make sure you know, because if one link of that chain is gone, like someone’s away in a camp or something, like I miss it, then they’re in trouble. But when we have that problem anyway, but it’s like, my worry, is that like, how can schools do it? in non
the way you’re pitching? It kind of sounds very idealistic. How, how could schools perhaps try a new learning method like this, that they can kind of integrate into the existing system? Like do we have to change the whole system to change our schooling or can we, you know, we have this HR system, we have common core standards in the US we have Australian curriculum, how can we take some of these new ideas, but actually use them in a way to influence them. To improve the current system?
Mike Reading 39:02
Yeah, I think there’s a couple of models that we use quite a bit once the tepeyac model. And we can
link that up in the show notes. So it talks about your technical knowledge, knowledge, your pedagogical knowledge, and so on. And then finding that intersection. So finding those natural places. But again, if you’re a school leader, and you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking, where do I even start? I guess the first place we always start is start small. And you don’t have to achieve everything in a moment. You know, we often overestimate what we can achieve in a short amount of time. And we
underestimate what we could achieve if we just made little consistent changes over time. And so I guess, why don’t we always start is we use a growth grow coaching model where we work with a teacher and we say, what goal Do you want to set for improvement? And that’s them looking at their curriculum, and then looking at all the pressures of God on them the capabilities that they have, you know, where’s the restrictions, so it’s them looking at their teaching practice, based on their capacity,
their knowledge, their skill set, and they get I would like to move the needle in this place, right? And so then we sit down, we talk about what the reality is. So if you look at the grow coaching model, and again, I’ll link this up for you, but j really stands for the goals are talks about what’s your reality. And in that reality is I don’t know how to do this, or I haven’t seen an example of, and then so we can give them some coaching and some guidance and some training around that. And then O stands for
opportunity. So you know, what are you going to do out of all the options that you’ve got, you know, talk to them a little bit about the opportunity where they could change and then at the end, they say, What will I do? So they basically say next time we come and see you, which may be six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks later, we want to see some evidence that they’ve applied themselves in this particular area. So if I wanted to do some task, and this was a classic example where I was telling you about, when we’re saying where’s the opportunity for students to ask a question and then find another question and
then find another question. So this was born out of an exact case like this where we sat with a teacher, we Went through the grow coach model with them. They set goals around wanting the students to be curious. So then we come back and we say, Show me in your teaching, where was the opportunity for those students to do that. So you can pull that in. And then you can also if you wanted to, from a teaching, leadership experience, aspect, you can say, okay, we’re going to build this into the teacher appraisals. So this is, you know, the teacher sets a goals. And then the school leader says, Well, here’s
the goal that you set, and we’ll help hold you accountable. We want to see evidence of it. So it’s not a bureaucratic top down the principal saying everyone’s going to do this. It’s much more a bottom up teacher improvement model with some accountability layers sit on top. So you just do little step little step little step doesn’t need to be set the world on fire, and it certainly doesn’t need to be a whole school approach to change because change is hard, right? There’s no there’s no doubt about it.
Blake 41:50
It sure is. I mean, especially working in technology. And this is something that probably is not thought about a lot but a lot of it guys would sympathize is that With technology, literally your whole job is around change. Whether it’s moving you update or doing a rollout of something you chances are you’re changing the status quo and when you’re doing your work. And so we get quite used to that, that change setting, but I think we’ve got to be empathetic, that there’s teachers who have taught us seven maths the same way for 30 years. Yeah, and you know, a few little changes here and there. But ultimately, they know it inside out, they can mark it with their eyes closed, and they can pull out of the car park at 350 in the afternoon and get home by 330. Because you know, they’ve got it locked away is that nice, efficient way to do their job. And when you sort of shake that up and say, well, hang on, we want you to start thinking about ways to use inquiry and use that math class. That is a huge step for
people. So I think there’s a bit of empathy there and understanding of, you know, people are at different stages. Yeah, and I know we talked about a lot the need for setting high expectations because we want people to rise but you know, it’s got to be within the kind of gross margin if you like, you know, you can’t expect someone to Take a physics exam, a Utah physics exam if I don’t know what maths is, so, you know, we’ve got a, we’ve got to kind of work with the levels and meet people where they’re at a little bit as well.
Mike Reading 43:09
Yeah, I mean, we that’s one of the things we’ll sit down when we’re coaching with a teacher. And they’ll tell us a goal, and we’ll look at it and just go like, really, is that realistic? You’re setting a pretty high standard right now, maybe we want to turn this into a year long project, for instance, rather
Blake 43:24
than and actually, that is the role of leadership. That is the role is to say, are you setting realistic goals?
It’s not about me telling you what your goal is, it’s about you saying, we’ll pick yourself a goal. Am I happy with that goal? Is that not ambitious enough? Or is it too ambitious? Or is it in the wrong direction? Your role as a leader is to actually coach that moment, and say, here’s what I think you should really be aiming for. How do you feel about that if you’re not comfortable with it, we can move it up or down or sideways, but ultimately, you know, your job is as a coach really, to try and get people
the best out of people and get them to a position where they can have success. And they can have some growth baked into their careers.
Mike Reading 44:04
Totally, and so on. So yeah, just to sort of recap that a bit, I think there’s the process is you need to
understand what your capacity is and what the vision and the plan is, then you need to create that plan. So how are we going to go about this and set some goals? And then part of that goals probably is looking at incentives, like how are we going to reward for this? Or you know, the carrot or stick? Like,what’s the expectations? everyone’s asking what’s in it for me not just what’s in it for the students and then start to provide that support network and so on and then just measure and assess and then changes you go so it is a big process, but it’s one of those things that quite often people can feel quite overwhelmed or quite daunted by and so because they’re feeling overwhelmed before they even start, they never try so much better to just had to go and have a look at your learning environment. That’s like when the New Zealand government spent goodness knows how much money ripping walls out and creating, you know, big band stores. Teaching environments. And then the pedagogy didn’t change at all, because they tried to make these wholesale changes, where if they had just made small changes to
teacher practice, maybe it would have led to the point where schools were like, yep, we’re ready to rip down walls, and we’re co teaching. You know, we definitely see some advantages in that. But there’s a whole lot of stuff that needs to come in behind that from, you know, even how do you choose to teachers to co teach, like, what’s the leadership behind that? And we’ve had some really interesting discussions with schools around the fact that now that they’re in this co teaching environment, the
teacher who is about to, like you’re about to hire a new teacher, the teacher that that teacher is going to go into the teacher does the hiring, not the principal, because at the end of the day, it’s those two teachers that need to work together. So then you you’re hiring, and you’re firing in your evaluation process starts to change because now you’ve got different expectations. So definitely not a it’s not it’s not an easy change, but in some It’s a simple change. It just comes back to understanding your why
your values and what you want to get after and then just finding those small changes that will get you a long way there.
Blake 46:11
Yeah, that’s the strategic plan, isn’t it? The, you know, the laying out the plan and then taking it one
step at a zone? Yeah. Totally.
Mike Reading 46:21
Excellent. That’s fine. I’m good conversation. It’s one of those ones where you can’t really give too many specifics too, because every school is going to be so different in their approach their community, their values, really is one of those things you need to sit down as a leadership team and just thrash out and have a good discussion around.
Blake 46:37
Like, I can’t give you metrics that are gonna work in one school. You know, the same one that will work in the next school because it’s all informed by that vision. In the investigation that happens after that and understanding inside the classroom of what that vision is gonna look like. Then you can set some metrics and identify some new ventures that you want to have in the classroom and like you said, those small little steps, put them in your IP or your strategic plan and, and studying, writing, yes. Working through it.
Mike Reading 47:06
Yeah. And I think next week we’ll dig into the whole aspect of community engagement. And this is so vital when yoú’re looking at your learning design that you understand community expectations and communicate that well, because we’ve seen some schools with some fantastic ideas around learning design, and that just hasn’t landed in community. It's fallen in a heap. So, again, each one of these seven areas, you really do need to have a consistent focus on each one of the seven as you’re moving forward. Otherwise, your plans can get a little bit derailed. So looking forward to unpacking that one next week.
Blake 47:39
Absolutely. That’s a big passion of mine, that that whole area so I’m very excited about that. And he wins and fails this week mark.
Mike Reading 47:47
I’ve been thinking about whether or not to share this one I’ve been noticing, especially in the last couple of days I’ve been laid up with my leg can’t get out. I’ve never been so still ever had some time to troll through Twitter and watch some YouTube videos and so on. But I’m noticing a real trend. And I don’t know if this is just me not understanding American culture very well obviously, being an Australian, but living in New Zealand. But I’m just noticing a lot of the influences if you want to put that in inverted commas starting to become really political, and making a lot of statements. And I just, I don’t know, I’m just wondering if this is the best approach to take with your you’re following your, with your influence, to be able to pick sides ahead of what some guy put a tweet on the other day and again, maybe I just don’t understand and I’m happy to admit it. But saying, what’s causing a Trump came out and he said, you know, we want all schools to open in the fall. That’s his plan, and I’m like, okay, whatever. And obviously, different people are gonna react in different ways to that. But then I saw some influences. comparing that to Nazi Germany where they put kids on trains and sent them off to concentration camps to die, and all this sort of stuff. And I’m just like, I don’t know when all of this emotion is gone. In months, maybe years, I don’t know, we look back on that and go, that was a real good use of my time. And I’m so I’m just thinking through a real, I guess I’m just thinking through. What is the role of education in all of this? And where does where does this take us if it takes us down a path of being just too political? I don’t know. It’s very early thoughts, but maybe I can do a better job of explaining it later. But I’m just concerned that we’re heading down a pathway of a real fail here in terms of our teaching and learning and our students as well.
Blake 49:29
Yeah, I think there’s a I mean, I fundamentally believe in any world issue that you have can be solved through education, were meant to be solved quickly, because it takes a while to proliferate good education. But I think if there is this kind of divisiveness, this tribalism, this nationalism that’s going on, that’s kind of hurting progress. I think that’s got to be something we can educate people about in the same way we educated kids about drugs and then we found that drug problems went right down. We educated about safe sex. We found STDs went down, you know, we were pretty good at doing this, we’ve got a track record of doing this. But it seems like things are starting to fall apart now. And I think I blame personally, maybe a big loss or when, depending on how you look at it this week is the banning of Tick Tock in India and a few other countries where they have identified that these can’t these companies are operating as many states have feel like they have the resources and the reach of countries, you know, more reach than a lot of countries would have. And the more influence and a lot of countries have in a single corporate company that yes is international and you know, probably care, you know, cares about various issues and has their own agendas and everything else. But ultimately, these companies are taking the data from your citizens and there was a great expose a done on medium and I have to find a link in the show notes about the invasive practices of Tick Tock far beyond on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter or any of these other social media apps where they are tracking almost everything they can get their hands on the phone, putting that into huge big, big data warehousing And starting to make assessments about what sort of people they are, what their views are, you know, not only can they push you ads and things, that was the first thing well, now you’ve got the Chinese government in charge of it. You’ve got nefarious actors in there trying to use that data to launch, you know, political campaigns against, you know, particular candidates in the US or in any, any country where they care about the election. So, I think that for me is a is a big, big threat to our to our freedoms, if you like, and I like that. I think the win there for me is that governments are doing something about this. But you know, they’re familiar like on a personal note, there is an alarm bells ringing. I was talking to my wife about this, a few weeks back and she said, You know, one of the, you know, something’s wrong when educated people you know, she works in a hospital with nurses and doctors, people who’ve done four to 10 years of postgraduate academic work, you know, they’re smart people. And they put they believe in conspiracy theories, they believe in things that you know, scientifically refutable and I think there’s a breakdown going on, there’s some kind of flooding happening. There’s like a exploitation of our, of our, you know, weaknesses in terms of our human condition. And what we’re predisposed to and what we’re good at, you know, falling into traps of social media is just pressing on those buttons constantly, because those are the things that get looks. Those are the things that, you know, they call Facebook, the rage machine. If you can incite rage, you’re going to get clicks. So, you know, I worry about those models as ad supported models, where it’s all about clicks, it’s all about creating rage. That’s where we see our media going. That that’s, you know, that’s a bit of a rant. But I think, you know, I think you’re on you’re on sort of definitely the same track as me in terms of where all this is heading or being overly political and all this sort of stuff. And, and I think, you know, we’ve got to step back a little bit. Yes, we need to have activism we need to have some version of freedom of speech where we can move and progress ideas and have a discussion about things but unfortunately, sort of turned into tribalism and you know, us versus them rather than To people able to discuss things openly.
Mike Reading 53:03
If there’s any way where you should be able to have discussion, it should be an education. Right? Like that’s, like I guess that’s what I was trying to articulate. Like I’m sat there thinking, for heaven’s sake for the sake of your students just stop it. Like they’re looking to you as our mentors and influence. Let you think a little bit beyond the emotion of what is happening right now and, and try and set some leadership I guess is where I’m where I’m heading with this. And, you know, you see articles I saw an article and I’ll link it up in the show notes around on CNBC that just said like thousands of scientists went out on strike about racism in STEM. So they’re calling for the for the banning of STEM now, because stem is racist in science and technology. And it just like I don’t understand, and again, I’m saying this openly. I don’t maybe it’s a aspect of culture. I just I get but when I get when it gets to extremes, I just get a little bit concerned about who’s jumping on board. wagons and what’s the long term effect of this?
Blake 54:02
Well, the you know, the loudest voices get amplified. And that’s the problem. You don’t you don’t hear there’s no loud centrists, there’s no loud, people are in the middle. So I think it’s, you know, it’s a it’s a problem we’re going to have to deal with, it’s a problem that I think education is gonna have to deal with. And if you think about social media problem, that the good news is that this cohort of students right now that are living through this be, I guess, rethinking of social media in our society, that is, you know, is it good for us? Should we use it a bit less? Should we be careful about and learn how to vet information better? You know, that discussion is happening right now. And it’s happening across almost every school and university in the world. So that’s a good thing, because the same discussion was happening around drug abuse, the same discussion was happening around, you know, STDs and all these other issues that have happened in the past. And my hope is that this generation will be more prepared than way out we’ll probably cope with this better than we do in terms of their readiness understanding of it. You know, they’ll have you The use of compact ways and practices in terms of addressing, you know, the way they use social media and how they should be, you know, more respectful and take some leadership, like you said, on these platforms. So, my hope is that we are going to solve the problem through this generation, or parts of the problems, but also part of it, you know, we need to have some regulation, we need to have companies stepping up and saying, you know, we were, we were going to stop just exploiting all the bugs in the human condition and then actually, you know, start doing moral and ethical business practices instead of basically doing everything for the shareholders. bottom dollar.
Mike Reading 55:36
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, I was talking to one person and just about you know, parenting in a social media age. And she was like, It’s exactly like it was when I was a parent and TV came out for the first time like we couldn’t look to our parents to for guidance on how do you parent with a TV in your in your living room now? It’s the same as our generation My kids are 15 and 17. I can’t look to my parents to get some clues as to how to how to parent this next generation that’s coming through. So, in one sense, you know, we’re, we’re sort of make parenting in a vacuum of knowledge. We haven’t exactly been able to see the long term effects of some of these things. And this parent was saying to me, we probably let our kids watch far too much TV, but we just didn’t know.
Blake 56:23
But what happened? I you know, I watched too much TV. I think humans are very resilient. I think they’re more resilient than people give them credit for. Yeah. And certainly they’re, you know, adversely affected, adversely affected, you know, people and if you have certain personality traits is going to be better or worse for you. But ultimately, you know, we I think we will turn that archive to TV generation and if I think about putting it like, a lot of us had TVs in our bedrooms, you know, we had PlayStations in our bedrooms and computers in our bedrooms and you know, now most people would agree like putting a TV kids veterans not ideal. Yeah, whether we do it or not, we probably agree. It’s not ideal. And we see the same with computers, you know, the best practice is to leave them in the in the public spaces. And we’ll have a dedicated space where you can kind of see what kids are doing those kind of things. And maybe that’s something we can explore on the podcast, that topic but, but I think it’s a, it’s a good thing. In terms of we’ve got some historical reference that, you know, these, US figuring it out, it does eventually work, it just might take a bit longer than maybe longer than we have. Certainly these big companies like tictoc and Instagrams when you’ve got teenagers whose whole life revolves around fitting in and being socially accepted. These platforms can take a lot of advantage of that for good and for bad
Mike Reading 57:39
influence. Hey, interesting. I saw an article this week that Amazon is going to ban tik tok on all their employees fines as well. So I think we’re not haven’t seen the end of this one.
Blake 57:50
I know it’s gonna be big. It’s gonna be big and I think the US making noises trying to ban I don’t think they can ban it, but Tick Tock is saying oh, no, we’re you know, we’ve got an American car. You know, investors from all other countries? And of course, they would say that, but they need to, I think I think, you know, part of it is a technical challenge as well is to make that more overt, like, Hey, your data is being shared right now back to a data center? And has it been stored and all this these kind of questions. So I think there are technical solutions for a lot of listeners, I think there’s going to need to be a technical solution for data privacy in terms of less data being stored in data centers, more data being, you know, maybe peer to peer that model. So it’s never actually kept in a central place where, you know, a government or a company can just go and open it and have a look through your, your patterns and your history. So I think there will be technical solutions that can help with it. But you know, most of these big issues, they get solved by some kind of government intervention, some kind of compliance or regulation.
Mike Reading 58:50
Yeah, great. Very interesting. I didn’t realize that some countries were moving to bandit, so there you go.
Blake 58:56
Yeah. Crazy. I mean, it’s good. Good news, I think because it’s drawing a lot too. To some of these issues,
Mike Reading 59:01
that’s great. Well, it’s always a pleasure, like hanging out. Hopefully, for those of you that have been listening all the way to the end, you’ve got something that has been valuable to spark some conversations in your school and, and to help you think as always like, and I’m more than happy to help if we can around some consulting. Just to give you some ideas, more than happy for me to jump on a call with you as well. With the UTV team. We’ve got a bit more time than Blake has, but we always take his advice on board and bring him in on some conversation. So if we can help just let us know, but I will catch you next week where we dig right into community engagement and how we can bridge that gap between school and home and do it in a really, really integrate way.
Blake 59:42
Great looking forward to it. Thanks, Chuck. Say my
59:47
thanks for listening. For more episodes and show notes visit utb.fyi/outclassed
