August 6, 2024 • 18 mins
A conversation with Adam Voigt, Founder and CEO of Real Schools on the importance of student engagement, how parents can support and advocate for teachers, and why we need to make schools a diverse environment - where all children can come together to learn.
In this episode:
- Teacher stress
- Additional needs
- Supporting teachers
- Schools and parents working together
- Student engagement
- The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt | Penguin Books
- Too much tech in the classroom?
- Mobile phone bans
- Does going to a selective school make you more likely to go to uni, get a job and be satisfied in life? | The Conversation
- Selective schools
- Importance of diversity
- Parental guilt
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's the Happy Families podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's the podcast for the time poor parentho just once
answers now.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
One of the best things about running the Happy Families
podcast is the people I get to talk to. And
today somebody that I just love learning from and listening to.
We're talking school today, and when I think about schools
and education, I think about what's happening in classrooms. The
person that I want to talk to is the founder
and CEO of an organization.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Called Real Schools.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Adam Vott is first and foremost a skilled classroom practitioner
and a highly successful principle. He got his first principalship
earned I shouldn't say god, he earned his first principalship
at the age of thirty five. He's personally led full
school turnarounds and also the design an establishment of a
brand new school as its inaugural principal, and his experience
(00:56):
is peppered with lessons and case studies from a career
spanning more than a quarter of a century in the
classroom and in school leadership. What Adam doesn't know about
making the magic of learning happen in schools is probably
not worth knowing, and he joins me on the Happy
Families podcast right now, Adam, thanks for being here to
talk about schools. Pretty challenging place to be as an educator,
and sometimes we feel like it's a pretty challenging place
(01:16):
to send our kids these days.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, that's right and my experience, And first of all,
thank you so much for having me justin. It's really
love let and that's the very glowing words. I'll try
to live up to it through the podcast. But I agree,
I think it's a challenging landscape at the moment. I
think that in my time when I'm sort of at
our time and recording this. It's now thirty and it's
my thirtieth anniversary of being in government education. I first
(01:42):
began as a preschool and prep teacher on an Aboriginal
community in nineteen ninety four. It's never been harder than
it is right now, but it's also never been more important.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
For parents who are feeling a bit stressed about and
teachers who are wondering what's going to happen here. I
want to just highlight four things that we're going to
talk about today in a very limited timeframe, and g
I wish we could go deep for like an hour
or two, but you're so so pithy with what you
have to say. We're going to talk about just teacher stress,
especially in relation to additional needs. As a parent of
(02:16):
an additional needs child, we've taken our child out of
the school because it just wasn't working for her. But
we know teachers are stress, so we're going to cover
that off briefly. We're going to talk about student engagement,
and I do want to go on a tangent there
and talk about devices phones in schools. And we're also
going to talk about a recent study that was published
looking at how parents are pushing their kids in selective
(02:37):
schools and how selective school attendance relates to life satisfaction
as kids get older. So let's start at the beginning.
Teacher stresses at record levels. We know that more teachers
are indicating a preference to leave the profession in the
next twelve to forty eight months if they can. And
we also know that parents of students, especially those with
(03:00):
additional needs, are feeling increasingly uncomfortable sending their kids to
school because it doesn't feel like a quote unquote safe place.
In fact, a click story on this. I was talking
to a parent just the other day, whose grade one
child with ADHD was locked in a store room, locked
in like a cupboard because the teacher couldn't deal with them. Obviously,
this is not representative of what happens in all schools
with all teachers. Most teachers are doing a great job.
(03:22):
But what's your take on this and how do we
support teachers but also help parents to feel like the
kids can go to school.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, so, what we've known for a really long time,
this has been the case for about three decades in Australia,
is that the number one stress of teachers is student behavior. Now,
if we make the class more diverse, if we make
the students that come along more challenging, if we, for instance,
have students with advantages placed in our independent and private schools,
it means that our government schools, where the kids have
(03:51):
the most need, the need gets more prolific and when
we don't support those teachers to kind of handle that need. So,
for instance, this goes conversations around both pre service teacher training,
what sort of support they get, They don't get enough,
they don't get enough of the practicalities. We are too
many teachers who are graduating go and I learned more
in the first four weeks of teaching than I did
(04:12):
in four years at university, and that's not okay. And
then there's the in career support and training that they get,
which is often built around pressure around producing higher levels
of student learning outcomes, which isn't the kind of care
that a lot of people with the sort of kids
that you're talking about who have additional needs, they're not
(04:33):
looking for a nine to nine etar. They're just looking
for a safe environment where their kid can learn to
be a good learner in the company of other people.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
That's all they're looking for.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
But when we have more and more kids who have
additional needs so that the kind of basic skill set
that a teacher has doesn't do it doesn't do the job,
so we have to invest more heavily in them, or
we can expect more of these kind of stories that
sit on the outside of it, stories like cupboards that
we are unacceptable, but we can expect to have more
of those come along because teachers are struggling as this
(05:04):
as the work that's required of them becomes more difficult
and the training that they have doesn't cope with that change.
So really important that we kind of as parents, that
we're advocating for additional support for our teachers so they
can do the job that's required of them better and
that we don't get kind of sucked into justin this
kind of adversarial relationship with the school and saying, well,
(05:25):
you're not doing what I need for my kid. So
I'm going to kick up a stink. I'm going to
go to a department. I'm going to call a current affair.
I'm going to get adversarial with you. It's actually the
time that we need teachers and parents advocating for the
same thing.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
So if a parent wants to do that advocacy, I
mean the easy thing to do is to go and
yell at the teacher or send an angry email to
the principal. How do they do that? I mean, that's
not this kind of thing that most parents are usually
thinking about doing, is seeing how do I support the
teachers at my local primary school or my local high school.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
I think one of the most important things to do
is that whenever we decide that we're going to need
to talk to the school about something, and we should.
If you're concerned, we should talk. But it's one is
to understand that the people that you're talking to are experienced.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Qualified and capable.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
And so the first thing we want parents to do
is to seek to understand. We want them to ring
the school and say, can you explain this to me?
Because our lens for our own kids. And I know
this justin because I've got the call from the school
to tell me that my kid has done the wrong
thing at school now, And I got that call from
a principle when I thought that this principle was ringing
me to talk about principally things, and in my head,
(06:35):
I was ready to go all irrational, you know, all emotional,
because we are emotional about our kids, of course we are,
But we need to understand that when we ring, we've
often got an emotional hat on and we're not receptive
to information that would put our minds at ease. So
if we can ring up, seek to understand what's going on,
and then let's put the problem kind of on the
whiteboard and let's talk about it. Let's see we can
(06:55):
solve it together, be resources for each other rather than
adverse aerials.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
So valuable really appreciate that suggestion. Let's move to a
second idea. There's been some talk in the media recently,
including an article that appeared on the Conversation that some
online platforms are starting to measure student engagement at school.
What do you think about this idea? First of all,
(07:22):
what do they mean by they want to measure student engagement?
And secondly, is this what we need to be doing?
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I think that I'm a really healthy and fierce skeptic
around this stuff. I think that our tech companies have
hijacked the word engagement, and I think that what they're
I'm measuring engagement. Engagement for me is young people who
are listening, speaking, thinking, or doing love it. So every
teacher that and so the enemy of engagement then, by
in a classroom, to be honest, is waiting as teachers
(07:50):
who talk too long, because most of the time kids
are waiting to can I just say something? Can I
do something? Can I hear something? Can I get activated
in my own learning? And we need them because if
they're not activated, they're really hard to teach. So I
think that these platforms, chiefly what they're measuring is is
young people logging in, young people accessing, young people being present.
(08:13):
But you don't learn from being present, you learn from
engaging and so I pushed back against the idea that
they're actually measuring engagement at all. Logging in doesn't mean
I'm engaged. We've all sat through that we weren't engaged with.
Where all watched a television show that with our brains.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Somewhere, We've all sat in a zoom meeting that we
weren't engaged in.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
You know, I can drive in my car and listen
to an audible book and all of a sudden, I go,
I've driven from last fifteen and I'd learn one word.
So logging in or play, pressing play, that's not engagement.
And I think we actually, as parents and as educators,
we need to kind of be protective of the word
engagement and say it's ours. Engagement is when you're getting
(08:56):
the thrill of making dangerous, difficult progress in a topic
that particularly is going to be relevant or useful for you.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
A cynical view of Kevin Rudd's education revolution is that
everyone got a laptop and we just moved education onto
screens but kept doing the same thing, maybe even more poorly.
And technology is I mean it's everywhere in schools.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Now.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Is there too much tech in schools?
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Well?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I think there is when we start to see education,
for instance, as a delivery or a distribution model. So
I think that's what was the biggest risk, the biggest
damage that was done by in education across heavily lockdown
communities like where I am in Melbourne, is that it
became a delivery model. Came just here's the content, I'll
try and get it through the screen to you and
(09:40):
then you've got it. Job done. That's not what high
quality education is all about. And what we do know
now is we've got And obviously there are books at
the moment like Jonathan Heights The Anxious Generation Book, an
incredible book that made me think a lot about my
parenting as well as my role as an educator, showing
(10:03):
us that the proliferation of technology, just because it makes
certain parts of educating and growing young people easier, isn't
good for them. It's changing not only the way they behave,
but who they are. And that's something that I love
all our parents, all our educators to get there, to
get their heads around it is that we're are building
(10:25):
young people for the future, not just trying to get
certain things done in their company.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I'm talking abot Adam Voyd from Real Schools. He's the
CEO and director of Real Schools. I guess you'd call
it a consultancy really looking after a couple of hundred
schools around the country and helping educators to help kids
to feel more engaged, to help students feel more engaged
at school. Let's go down this pathway of phones and schools, Adam.
There's been a lot of talk over the last year
(10:54):
or so and governments successively and successfully removing phones from schools.
Kids just don't allowed to have them in most states
and territories now in both primary school and high school
in the public system at least. What's your take on this,
good or bad? And why?
Speaker 3 (11:10):
So? I'm a convert here.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
So I several weeks about five or six years ago,
I wrote an article that was published in published nationally
in some of the biggest newspapers in Australia about how
I think we needed to be more sophisticated about mobile
phones in classrooms and I think we needed to show
kids how to use it for life because it wasn't
going away.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
And I was wrong.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
So I have done the work that I've done more
recently on trying to trying to understand, like I said
about the way that these devices, and particularly the way
that software that's designed for social media platforms that these
kids are accessing way too early, is doing them damage.
The work that I've seen many of our schools that
(11:52):
we work we do around to be frank complying with
mobile phone bands, particularly our secondary schools, is that their
teachers and their school leaders are reporting young people who
were more present in their learning, more to hark back
to a previous conversation, engaged in learning, They're more attentive,
they're more focused, and above any of that, they're happier.
(12:16):
So they're telling us that the young people are actually
enjoying getting a six to seven hour break from having
the Mark Zuckerberger's and Elon Musks of the world tell
them what they should value and who they should hate.
And I think that that's a good thing. So I've
gone from being someone who was against a mobile phone
band effectively to being someone who's in favor. The schools
(12:38):
that have done it best have been the ones who
have engaged the kids in that messaging. I know one
in Sydney who who had no messaging about the mobile
phone band come from grown ups. It was all the
students They got a group of them in who were influential,
not just as student leaders, and said, how are we
going to message this to the community, to us, to
(12:59):
our student commit unity, so that they realize that this
is going to be good for us and we're doing
it together.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
They did a great job.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
I feel like that's what education is about.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
I mean, this is great.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
I'm likewise, I've had the same evolution. I've flip flopped
a little bit, but primarily I've been saying we've just
got to learn how to live with this. I couldn't
agree with you more. Getting them out of the schools
is absolutely fundamental and essential to increased engagement and well being.
All right, last question for you, Adam, as we move
towards a wrap up, and thanks so much for being
so generous with your responses already. There was a study
(13:29):
that was published recently and written about in the Fairfax
Press about selective schools and life satisfaction. Essentially, the article
claimed that parents are pushing their kids into selective schools,
but whether you go to a selective school or not,
and by the way, for those who are not familiar
with selective schools, what that means is there are some
schools that specialize in academics or sports or drama, and
(13:50):
if your child is a high enough achiever, they get
to go to that school rather than the local public
school down the road. Life satisfaction no impact whether you
go to the fancy hoist toyty selective school or you
go to the local public school. That's what the research
has found. What's your take on this?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yeah, Well, I guess one of the things that I
do like is that we're now finally curious about life
satisfaction as being a potential has been something that we're
trying to set our kids up for while they're at school,
and I think it's a good thing to explore that.
And so what we do find when we look beyond
what are the academic results that they produce in a
particular year level, in a particular month of a school year,
(14:29):
and stop kind of making schools accountable for that and
supporting them only to produce that, and actually say, well,
what about way down in life and not just like
right at the end of the journey, not just a
year or two later, but maybe five ten years down.
How satisfied are these young people with their lives because
of the education they got and what we're finding is
that the longer view that we take, the more we
(14:50):
are seeing a return on the investment of time and
of money and of effort that a lot of parents
are going to for getting that kid into a selective
entry school or even an independent or a rive at
school early and in their lives. We mostly are acceeding
in these instances to some parental guilt, and which in
(15:10):
Australia is well marketed. You know, it's really easy to
make a parent feel bad about not giving their kid
every possible opportunity. But what these kinds of studies that
are emerging are telling us is that actually providing our
kids sometimes with a really nice level of productive struggle,
of being able to be with people who are not
exactly like them, even where we've got selective entry justin
(15:32):
where they've gone to, say a music school, because they're
particularly gifted there. The way to grow that gift is
not necessarily to be just around kids who are awesome
at music, but to be around and kids and talk
to them, Talk to kids who are going to be
plumbers and listen to their listen to them about their
their music tastes and what floats their boat. Artistically, but
being with a diverse group of people is really good
(15:54):
for the individual. And there's a lesson here for policymakers
around education as well, and that is that we need
to make our schools diverse as well. They need to
be places where people with all sorts of hopes, streams
and backgrounds come together because the world's going to demand
that you work with different people to you, and so
it's useful this diversity at a scaled level, but it's
(16:17):
also useful at an individual level.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
And I think parents can stop.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Feeling guilty about not finding the perfect school for their
kid because it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
I feel like we've kind of come full circle. Our
very first conversation was about the gap widening between the
private and public system where the haves and have nots,
if I can use that crass term, Essentially, we're not
getting the diversification in our education system, and we've kind
of landed there again. Okay, Adam, I mean, anyone who's
(16:45):
just listening to this conversation can see now why I
would rather have two hours with you than fifteen minutes.
Really really appreciate your time. If people want to know more,
especially educators who are listening to our conversation. If they
want to know more about you and the work that
you do at real schools, where can they find your
what should they expect?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Yeah, they can head to realschools dot com dot au
and I'll find out everything as an educator that we
do with working with schools. And we work with schools
for three years. So some schools ring up and saying
they'd like a PD day train our teachers for a day,
and our answer.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Is no, yeah, that's my job, that's my job.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Well, we're locking in and so we help schools for
the long term and multitude of different ways. They're supported
by an experienced principle. Every school that does it has
an experienced principle allocated to them and we're really proud
our missions to transform education in Australia and to do
what one school at a time.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
So we're busy, good stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Really appreciate your time and thanks for your insights. I'm
sure that everyone really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks Adam, not
at all, Justin, thanks for having me. The Happy Families
podcast is produced by Justin Roland from Bridge Media. If
you'd like more info, check out Adam's website. Realschools dot
com dot au will link to it in the show notes,
and of course, if you want to make your family
happier and figure out how to navigate things just from
(17:59):
a purely in the family perspective, check out my website,
happyfamilies dot com, dot a u
It's the Happy Families podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's the podcast for the time poor parentho just once
answers now.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
One of the best things about running the Happy Families
podcast is the people I get to talk to. And
today somebody that I just love learning from and listening to.
We're talking school today, and when I think about schools
and education, I think about what's happening in classrooms. The
person that I want to talk to is the founder
and CEO of an organization.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Called Real Schools.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Adam Vott is first and foremost a skilled classroom practitioner
and a highly successful principle. He got his first principalship
earned I shouldn't say god, he earned his first principalship
at the age of thirty five. He's personally led full
school turnarounds and also the design an establishment of a
brand new school as its inaugural principal, and his experience
(00:56):
is peppered with lessons and case studies from a career
spanning more than a quarter of a century in the
classroom and in school leadership. What Adam doesn't know about
making the magic of learning happen in schools is probably
not worth knowing, and he joins me on the Happy
Families podcast right now, Adam, thanks for being here to
talk about schools. Pretty challenging place to be as an educator,
and sometimes we feel like it's a pretty challenging place
(01:16):
to send our kids these days.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, that's right and my experience, And first of all,
thank you so much for having me justin. It's really
love let and that's the very glowing words. I'll try
to live up to it through the podcast. But I agree,
I think it's a challenging landscape at the moment. I
think that in my time when I'm sort of at
our time and recording this. It's now thirty and it's
my thirtieth anniversary of being in government education. I first
(01:42):
began as a preschool and prep teacher on an Aboriginal
community in nineteen ninety four. It's never been harder than
it is right now, but it's also never been more important.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
For parents who are feeling a bit stressed about and
teachers who are wondering what's going to happen here. I
want to just highlight four things that we're going to
talk about today in a very limited timeframe, and g
I wish we could go deep for like an hour
or two, but you're so so pithy with what you
have to say. We're going to talk about just teacher stress,
especially in relation to additional needs. As a parent of
(02:16):
an additional needs child, we've taken our child out of
the school because it just wasn't working for her. But
we know teachers are stress, so we're going to cover
that off briefly. We're going to talk about student engagement,
and I do want to go on a tangent there
and talk about devices phones in schools. And we're also
going to talk about a recent study that was published
looking at how parents are pushing their kids in selective
(02:37):
schools and how selective school attendance relates to life satisfaction
as kids get older. So let's start at the beginning.
Teacher stresses at record levels. We know that more teachers
are indicating a preference to leave the profession in the
next twelve to forty eight months if they can. And
we also know that parents of students, especially those with
(03:00):
additional needs, are feeling increasingly uncomfortable sending their kids to
school because it doesn't feel like a quote unquote safe place.
In fact, a click story on this. I was talking
to a parent just the other day, whose grade one
child with ADHD was locked in a store room, locked
in like a cupboard because the teacher couldn't deal with them. Obviously,
this is not representative of what happens in all schools
with all teachers. Most teachers are doing a great job.
(03:22):
But what's your take on this and how do we
support teachers but also help parents to feel like the
kids can go to school.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, so, what we've known for a really long time,
this has been the case for about three decades in Australia,
is that the number one stress of teachers is student behavior. Now,
if we make the class more diverse, if we make
the students that come along more challenging, if we, for instance,
have students with advantages placed in our independent and private schools,
it means that our government schools, where the kids have
(03:51):
the most need, the need gets more prolific and when
we don't support those teachers to kind of handle that need. So,
for instance, this goes conversations around both pre service teacher training,
what sort of support they get, They don't get enough,
they don't get enough of the practicalities. We are too
many teachers who are graduating go and I learned more
in the first four weeks of teaching than I did
(04:12):
in four years at university, and that's not okay. And
then there's the in career support and training that they get,
which is often built around pressure around producing higher levels
of student learning outcomes, which isn't the kind of care
that a lot of people with the sort of kids
that you're talking about who have additional needs, they're not
(04:33):
looking for a nine to nine etar. They're just looking
for a safe environment where their kid can learn to
be a good learner in the company of other people.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
That's all they're looking for.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
But when we have more and more kids who have
additional needs so that the kind of basic skill set
that a teacher has doesn't do it doesn't do the job,
so we have to invest more heavily in them, or
we can expect more of these kind of stories that
sit on the outside of it, stories like cupboards that
we are unacceptable, but we can expect to have more
of those come along because teachers are struggling as this
(05:04):
as the work that's required of them becomes more difficult
and the training that they have doesn't cope with that change.
So really important that we kind of as parents, that
we're advocating for additional support for our teachers so they
can do the job that's required of them better and
that we don't get kind of sucked into justin this
kind of adversarial relationship with the school and saying, well,
(05:25):
you're not doing what I need for my kid. So
I'm going to kick up a stink. I'm going to
go to a department. I'm going to call a current affair.
I'm going to get adversarial with you. It's actually the
time that we need teachers and parents advocating for the
same thing.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
So if a parent wants to do that advocacy, I
mean the easy thing to do is to go and
yell at the teacher or send an angry email to
the principal. How do they do that? I mean, that's
not this kind of thing that most parents are usually
thinking about doing, is seeing how do I support the
teachers at my local primary school or my local high school.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
I think one of the most important things to do
is that whenever we decide that we're going to need
to talk to the school about something, and we should.
If you're concerned, we should talk. But it's one is
to understand that the people that you're talking to are experienced.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Qualified and capable.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
And so the first thing we want parents to do
is to seek to understand. We want them to ring
the school and say, can you explain this to me?
Because our lens for our own kids. And I know
this justin because I've got the call from the school
to tell me that my kid has done the wrong
thing at school now, And I got that call from
a principle when I thought that this principle was ringing
me to talk about principally things, and in my head,
(06:35):
I was ready to go all irrational, you know, all emotional,
because we are emotional about our kids, of course we are,
But we need to understand that when we ring, we've
often got an emotional hat on and we're not receptive
to information that would put our minds at ease. So
if we can ring up, seek to understand what's going on,
and then let's put the problem kind of on the
whiteboard and let's talk about it. Let's see we can
(06:55):
solve it together, be resources for each other rather than
adverse aerials.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
So valuable really appreciate that suggestion. Let's move to a
second idea. There's been some talk in the media recently,
including an article that appeared on the Conversation that some
online platforms are starting to measure student engagement at school.
What do you think about this idea? First of all,
(07:22):
what do they mean by they want to measure student engagement?
And secondly, is this what we need to be doing?
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I think that I'm a really healthy and fierce skeptic
around this stuff. I think that our tech companies have
hijacked the word engagement, and I think that what they're
I'm measuring engagement. Engagement for me is young people who
are listening, speaking, thinking, or doing love it. So every
teacher that and so the enemy of engagement then, by
in a classroom, to be honest, is waiting as teachers
(07:50):
who talk too long, because most of the time kids
are waiting to can I just say something? Can I
do something? Can I hear something? Can I get activated
in my own learning? And we need them because if
they're not activated, they're really hard to teach. So I
think that these platforms, chiefly what they're measuring is is
young people logging in, young people accessing, young people being present.
(08:13):
But you don't learn from being present, you learn from
engaging and so I pushed back against the idea that
they're actually measuring engagement at all. Logging in doesn't mean
I'm engaged. We've all sat through that we weren't engaged with.
Where all watched a television show that with our brains.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Somewhere, We've all sat in a zoom meeting that we
weren't engaged in.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
You know, I can drive in my car and listen
to an audible book and all of a sudden, I go,
I've driven from last fifteen and I'd learn one word.
So logging in or play, pressing play, that's not engagement.
And I think we actually, as parents and as educators,
we need to kind of be protective of the word
engagement and say it's ours. Engagement is when you're getting
(08:56):
the thrill of making dangerous, difficult progress in a topic
that particularly is going to be relevant or useful for you.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
A cynical view of Kevin Rudd's education revolution is that
everyone got a laptop and we just moved education onto
screens but kept doing the same thing, maybe even more poorly.
And technology is I mean it's everywhere in schools.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Now.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Is there too much tech in schools?
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Well?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I think there is when we start to see education,
for instance, as a delivery or a distribution model. So
I think that's what was the biggest risk, the biggest
damage that was done by in education across heavily lockdown
communities like where I am in Melbourne, is that it
became a delivery model. Came just here's the content, I'll
try and get it through the screen to you and
(09:40):
then you've got it. Job done. That's not what high
quality education is all about. And what we do know
now is we've got And obviously there are books at
the moment like Jonathan Heights The Anxious Generation Book, an
incredible book that made me think a lot about my
parenting as well as my role as an educator, showing
(10:03):
us that the proliferation of technology, just because it makes
certain parts of educating and growing young people easier, isn't
good for them. It's changing not only the way they behave,
but who they are. And that's something that I love
all our parents, all our educators to get there, to
get their heads around it is that we're are building
(10:25):
young people for the future, not just trying to get
certain things done in their company.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I'm talking abot Adam Voyd from Real Schools. He's the
CEO and director of Real Schools. I guess you'd call
it a consultancy really looking after a couple of hundred
schools around the country and helping educators to help kids
to feel more engaged, to help students feel more engaged
at school. Let's go down this pathway of phones and schools, Adam.
There's been a lot of talk over the last year
(10:54):
or so and governments successively and successfully removing phones from schools.
Kids just don't allowed to have them in most states
and territories now in both primary school and high school
in the public system at least. What's your take on this,
good or bad? And why?
Speaker 3 (11:10):
So? I'm a convert here.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
So I several weeks about five or six years ago,
I wrote an article that was published in published nationally
in some of the biggest newspapers in Australia about how
I think we needed to be more sophisticated about mobile
phones in classrooms and I think we needed to show
kids how to use it for life because it wasn't
going away.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
And I was wrong.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
So I have done the work that I've done more
recently on trying to trying to understand, like I said
about the way that these devices, and particularly the way
that software that's designed for social media platforms that these
kids are accessing way too early, is doing them damage.
The work that I've seen many of our schools that
(11:52):
we work we do around to be frank complying with
mobile phone bands, particularly our secondary schools, is that their
teachers and their school leaders are reporting young people who
were more present in their learning, more to hark back
to a previous conversation, engaged in learning, They're more attentive,
they're more focused, and above any of that, they're happier.
(12:16):
So they're telling us that the young people are actually
enjoying getting a six to seven hour break from having
the Mark Zuckerberger's and Elon Musks of the world tell
them what they should value and who they should hate.
And I think that that's a good thing. So I've
gone from being someone who was against a mobile phone
band effectively to being someone who's in favor. The schools
(12:38):
that have done it best have been the ones who
have engaged the kids in that messaging. I know one
in Sydney who who had no messaging about the mobile
phone band come from grown ups. It was all the
students They got a group of them in who were influential,
not just as student leaders, and said, how are we
going to message this to the community, to us, to
(12:59):
our student commit unity, so that they realize that this
is going to be good for us and we're doing
it together.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
They did a great job.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
I feel like that's what education is about.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
I mean, this is great.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
I'm likewise, I've had the same evolution. I've flip flopped
a little bit, but primarily I've been saying we've just
got to learn how to live with this. I couldn't
agree with you more. Getting them out of the schools
is absolutely fundamental and essential to increased engagement and well being.
All right, last question for you, Adam, as we move
towards a wrap up, and thanks so much for being
so generous with your responses already. There was a study
(13:29):
that was published recently and written about in the Fairfax
Press about selective schools and life satisfaction. Essentially, the article
claimed that parents are pushing their kids into selective schools,
but whether you go to a selective school or not,
and by the way, for those who are not familiar
with selective schools, what that means is there are some
schools that specialize in academics or sports or drama, and
(13:50):
if your child is a high enough achiever, they get
to go to that school rather than the local public
school down the road. Life satisfaction no impact whether you
go to the fancy hoist toyty selective school or you
go to the local public school. That's what the research
has found. What's your take on this?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yeah, Well, I guess one of the things that I
do like is that we're now finally curious about life
satisfaction as being a potential has been something that we're
trying to set our kids up for while they're at school,
and I think it's a good thing to explore that.
And so what we do find when we look beyond
what are the academic results that they produce in a
particular year level, in a particular month of a school year,
(14:29):
and stop kind of making schools accountable for that and
supporting them only to produce that, and actually say, well,
what about way down in life and not just like
right at the end of the journey, not just a
year or two later, but maybe five ten years down.
How satisfied are these young people with their lives because
of the education they got and what we're finding is
that the longer view that we take, the more we
(14:50):
are seeing a return on the investment of time and
of money and of effort that a lot of parents
are going to for getting that kid into a selective
entry school or even an independent or a rive at
school early and in their lives. We mostly are acceeding
in these instances to some parental guilt, and which in
(15:10):
Australia is well marketed. You know, it's really easy to
make a parent feel bad about not giving their kid
every possible opportunity. But what these kinds of studies that
are emerging are telling us is that actually providing our
kids sometimes with a really nice level of productive struggle,
of being able to be with people who are not
exactly like them, even where we've got selective entry justin
(15:32):
where they've gone to, say a music school, because they're
particularly gifted there. The way to grow that gift is
not necessarily to be just around kids who are awesome
at music, but to be around and kids and talk
to them, Talk to kids who are going to be
plumbers and listen to their listen to them about their
their music tastes and what floats their boat. Artistically, but
being with a diverse group of people is really good
(15:54):
for the individual. And there's a lesson here for policymakers
around education as well, and that is that we need
to make our schools diverse as well. They need to
be places where people with all sorts of hopes, streams
and backgrounds come together because the world's going to demand
that you work with different people to you, and so
it's useful this diversity at a scaled level, but it's
(16:17):
also useful at an individual level.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
And I think parents can stop.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Feeling guilty about not finding the perfect school for their
kid because it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
I feel like we've kind of come full circle. Our
very first conversation was about the gap widening between the
private and public system where the haves and have nots,
if I can use that crass term, Essentially, we're not
getting the diversification in our education system, and we've kind
of landed there again. Okay, Adam, I mean, anyone who's
(16:45):
just listening to this conversation can see now why I
would rather have two hours with you than fifteen minutes.
Really really appreciate your time. If people want to know more,
especially educators who are listening to our conversation. If they
want to know more about you and the work that
you do at real schools, where can they find your
what should they expect?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Yeah, they can head to realschools dot com dot au
and I'll find out everything as an educator that we
do with working with schools. And we work with schools
for three years. So some schools ring up and saying
they'd like a PD day train our teachers for a day,
and our answer.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Is no, yeah, that's my job, that's my job.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Well, we're locking in and so we help schools for
the long term and multitude of different ways. They're supported
by an experienced principle. Every school that does it has
an experienced principle allocated to them and we're really proud
our missions to transform education in Australia and to do
what one school at a time.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
So we're busy, good stuff.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Really appreciate your time and thanks for your insights. I'm
sure that everyone really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks Adam, not
at all, Justin, thanks for having me. The Happy Families
podcast is produced by Justin Roland from Bridge Media. If
you'd like more info, check out Adam's website. Realschools dot
com dot au will link to it in the show notes,
and of course, if you want to make your family
happier and figure out how to navigate things just from
(17:59):
a purely in the family perspective, check out my website,
happyfamilies dot com, dot a u
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