VASSP & VPA Annual Conference 2010Keynote Speakers - Session Notes

VASSP & VPA Annual Conference 2010Keynote Speakers - Session Notes

Session 1: Opening Address - Bronwyn Pike

•Would like to focus today on the next wave of reform that we must undertake to improve educational outcomes for young people.

•Under the Blueprint, we have seen significant improvements, with resources and support. Our aim is to develop the leadership capacity in schools and enhance the teaching methodologies. Attitudes to school are improving – we already among the highest achievement rates in Australia. We need to make we are getting that for every young person, including the currently disengaged and the ones who are at-risk of becoming disengaged.

•The biggest challenge for us is to keep every young person engaged. There are a whole range of reasons for disengagement. There are complex reasons for leaving school, including their social circumstances. They are at great periods of vulnerability in young lives – lead to huge pressures on young people, especially at 12-15. Year 9 is often the most difficult. Made worse by isolation and disadvantage.

•Some face very difficult personal circumstances. Lead to high risk activity.

•Might also be a lack of opportunity to harness particular interests – difficult in small communities. The at-risk ones can be highly intelligent kids in an un-stimulating environment.

•We must put more effort into these kids. We have to create a government school system that has the flexibility to respond to the differing needs and interests of young people. One-size-fits-all does not work.

•How can we get out of the rigid responses? Kids and life are not rigid.

•We need to:

• Personalise learning.
• Diversify pathways.

•Year 9s are the most vulnerable, especially boys. “The Age” today – article on suspensions. They lose their hunger for learning; they don’t see school as relevant; they are not interested in future benefits.

•We have to try harder with them. The consequences are terrible for them and for society, and we must work more creatively. Kids are still susceptible to positive influences – Richard Teese.

•There are successful programs:

• Galileo program at Uni High.
• Explore Program at Balwyn High.

•We can expand other learning experiences and environments – leadership, camps, etc.

•"I am interested in working with you to explore diverse opportunities."

•At that age, they can be excited and involved. Lots of organisations are interested in helping.

•Disadvantaged kids – more complex problems. We owe them a special sense of responsibility. 80% of the kids in the juvenile justice system were suspended at school.

•There are intensive programs in the community, and there are resources in schools – they are often disconnected and hard to find. We have more resources, and we will be rolling them out in the system soon.

•Schools can’t take responsibility of every problem in young people’s lives, but society can. We have to bring every community/society resource to bear to ensure no young person is left behind.

•Selective / specialist schools have helped with the high ability but low achieving kids.

•Vocational education is growing the fastest of all sectors. Needs to be a seamlessness among all the offerings.

•We have to continue to work together to get the best for everyone.

•"Thank you for your commitment."

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Session 2: "Whatever!" Sythesising The Ever-Changing Reality Of Emerging Technologies With The Needs Of 21st Century Learning - Mark Treadwell

•Focus has now changed from teaching to learning and what learning do kids needed in the 21st century.

•The new Australian Curriculum will not be a concept-based curriculum initially, but will have to go that way in the longer term. It has to do that to be effective and efficient.

•A lot of what we do in schools is pretty, busy work, like PowerPoint.

•He has produced a trilogy of resources:

•Whatever! … School V2.0. The Pedagogy of Learning in the 21st Century. This book provides the framework for teaching and learning in this new learning paradigm being driven by the internet.

•Whatever! Next? (what competencies do we expect of young people). The Global Conceptual Curriculum: This resource provides educators with a conceptual curriculum scaffold that can be adapted to meet the needs of learners within any education system in the world.

•Whatever! Were We Thinking? How the Brain Learns: the story of how the brain learns, and why more intelligent people have a lower ratio of neurons than the less able.

•As a collective, society is losing it in terms of engaging young people.

•Webste resources:

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•Teachers at Work: Internet Tools for Teachers at is another website.

•And School V2.0 with resources is at

•NZ has a 40-page curriculum – mainly pictures, because an 18 page document looked too small.

• – email for a summary of the resources.

•The Upper Limit Hypotheis – start of today. Shift in how we learn. Read more about it, with graphs and diagrams, at

•To understand where we are now, we have to go back to the 14th and 15th centuries. In the 1400s, who ran the planet? Not the church; it was China – read 1421 (Gavin Menzies’ book). At that time, China was the most powerful nation. It had a huge fleet of ships (up to 166 metres long), it had a banking system, it used "flying money" (letters of credit), and Bombay was the main port for them to move goods around world. The Chinese had writing and calligraphy. But China became arrogant; it attacked other countries. China wanted nothing from other places – "we know everything; we don’t need anything from anyone". This attitude led to their downfall. Slowly they were going broke. A new regime killed the Emperor. The new Emperor sank all the ships and walled China off from the rest of the world. And they burnt all the past records. Bombay was the biggest port in the world at that time.

•1450 -1500 – shift from East to West in terms of power. How did that happen?

•A group of traders from western Spain (now Portugal) heard that China had circumnavigated the world in 1437. They decided to go to Bombay and learn from Chinese, Indians, and Arabs. They spent 5 years learning everything they could there, including such "simple" things as stirrups for horses (so they could sit safely on the horses in battle). Also paper production, gunpowder, written records, and banking and accounting.

•Then they went home to Europe and set up a replica of Bombay in Portugal – Europe was just starting to get things together. And the printing press had just been invented, which led to cheaper books. (Portugal was an early-adopter.) That made learning more efficient and effective – it was no longer based on oral language as in the past. The new portability of knowledge led to the first paradigm shift in learning to text-based learning. People had to learn to read and write = "crossing the chasm". Only the elite in most of Europe were allowed to do that. Teachers had very high status. Then there was the beginning of the Renaissance period.

•So China closed down for 500 years. Woke up earlier this year (there were press articles about the fact that producing cheap goods is not the solution) – the Minister of Commerce spoke about where China is going next.

•So Portugal became the dominant force in Europe – they adopted the new technologies and the brains from the rest of Europe. So shifted the power from the East to the West.

•Read Professor KishoreMahbubhani's 2008 book The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, in which he talks about the re-awakening of East Asia as a global economic power.

•Why does it take so long to read and write? 5 years vs 3 months for learning to drive a car. Reading, etc. is by rote learning, whereas driving is learned as a concept. Concepts allow you to handle different situations. You don’t have to learn how to drive to Sydney. If you learned to drive by rote, it would mean an exam for driving to every different place.

•Reports back in 2000-2001 gave new ideas on thinking skills. Schools have assumed that the kids have these when they arrive, and they don’t help kids to acquire them.

•We need to understand how the brain learns. Learning by rote depends on the neurons in the brain, which make up only 7% of the brain - it is not an efficient way of learning. Learning concepts (e.g. driving) is much more efficient. We learn them quickly and can transfer them to other places, and we can apply them to different contexts. This depends on the astrocytes, which make up 76% of the brain - so it is a much better way to learn than rote learning. Creativity is when your brain take the concepts and the rote learnings and then builds new things. Watch the video by Sir Ken Robinson on creativity and schools - click here. And his latest video - Bring on the Learning Revolution - click here.

•We are not much better than monkeys at remembering by rote. Because only had to do that since reading became important.

•We are the only species that can learn new concepts on the fly – using the astrocytes.

•Our brains have 3 learning systems – neurons, astrocytes, brain waves. In schools, we use the one we are worst at – neurons. Need to shift base line of learning away from remembering stuff to developing concepts.

•Why do we send reports out 3 times each year and all on the same day?

•Meetings should be about learning and how to build the best learning environments in the school.

•Your status as a Principal is rooted heavily in text – you can read or write, otherwise you would not have that job.

•Aljazeera website – mostly pictures (so we think it is for emergent readers), but the pictures are an efficient way to learn. Pictures give clues to the reader. As you go through school, pictures in books get smaller and then become diagrams. But no one would read the website if it was all words.

•Most of the learning happens for kids when they are out of school. They power up when they come home from school; they power down when they go to school. We teach the things that we have always taught. And we have been in that place for 500 years. Learning was structured around text – books were mostly text. Text was a sort of filter. Art books had pictures, but Art is not really academic work! Biology was nowhere as a subject until they produced the Web of Life with 500 pages. It’s about status. Like humans – we are passionate and non-rational.

•5 years ago, started a revolution of using pictures in place of text. A picture tells a thousand words. The picture stimulates a collation of the information.

•But we are now not in the text paradigm any longer.

•In the last 500 years, when teaching via text first came out, it was not very efficient because teachers did not know how to teach people to read and write. Gradually they became better at teaching it. In 1960s, teachers were at 98% efficiency – they had got the teaching the teaching of reading and writing down really well - about as far as they could go.

•In the 1980s, lots of $ were spent in the USA to improve education. It was also when computers came into education. But they did not work. People blamed the computer instead of looking inwardly for the reason.

•After a few years of doing that in the USA, the government asked Robert Branson to find out why test scores were not improving. Paper – Why Schools Can’t Improve – you can throw any amount of money at it that you like, but you will not get any further improvement because the learning system is running as good as it can (at 98%). So spending more is just a waste of money.

•People started asking: Could the paradigm shift happen again, as it did 500 years.

•Book-based paradigm peaked in about 1963. Targeted funding can help, but not for everyone.

•Second chasm we needed to cross. Move from book-based to internet-based paradigm. It was inevitable. The internet had just got pictures. Modelling showed that the paradigm shift would be driven by the power of the internet. But we had to "cross the chasm", taking oral language and text language.

•What is happening at the moment is that teachers are at the edge of the chasm – what do they see? They see their students on the other side.Marc Prensky writes about the "digital immigrants" v the "digital natives" – but that idea is all wrong. The paradigm shift is about: how good are they at learning in the new world of technology. The teachers are thinking: “They get it.” But they don’t yet. Our status is in what we know. Then someone invented Google, and that killed our status. So teachers don’t want to jump across the chasm. But they have to.

•By 2005, we had broadband and universal access to the internet.

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•This shift will be mature by 2020 – it will not take 500 years, as the last one did.

•Most people alive in the Renaissance period were not actually taking part in the renaissance – most were in the army or were farmers or 24/7 service providers. In this new shift, everyone is involved.

•Google “YouTube, Calculus, Henry” – videos to teach the concepts behind calculus. Book teaching is ineffective and inefficient. Once they get the concepts, they can adapt and predict. Once you get the concepts of history, you can learn from history.

•Rote learning is only for that context.

•Changes have to be made at every level in the system, not just at the junior school, school, etc.

•Curriculum is very crowded – especially at the junior school. Number concept is the only concept that kids can get when they are young and the only thing they really, really need.

•Start at the middle of the diagram to the right and then work backwards and forward. (Click on trhe diagram to view a larger version.) Kids are great at questioning when they are young. We beat it out of them by the time they are teenagers. Once you understand, that is the beginning. To be creative, you need to know how the brain works. Left brain / right brain is not a sensible concept – if you remove one side, the person does not suddenly become linear or … . To be innovative, you need to understand the knowledge.

•What is the purpose of school in the 21st century? Now in second decade. Leaders are critical to the success of the school.

•Need an integrated online environment for everyone. Assessment has to be summative and also formative, reflective and diagnostic.

•To create lifelong learners, we have to teach them how to learn, not just remembering. To become learners, you need to question everything.

•We are passionate, non-rational people. We do not make life decisions (dress, marriage) rationally. Need to understand who we are. Key to what is learning – identifying the concepts then backtracking to the knowledge needed, then being creative and innovative with it.

•Astrocytes respond to hormones produced by the body. Learn to drive really quickly because they are excited and so produce lots of hormones and so the pattern is mapped quickly. Refer to the diagram to the right - click on the diagram to view a larger version of it.

•Now the school system is lifelong. But educators are not that good at learning. If educators do not learn really fast using the new technology, they will be replaced. Kids go to YouTube to learn – it has many lectures and teaching of concepts (which can be applied to new contexts).

•We have to become learners very quickly. The curriculum must be based on concepts. Must be meta-cognitive – can reflect on our own learning.

•You can use a device like the Flip video camera, and it will send the video directly to YouTube. In New Zealand, teachers are using them for assessment. Encourages kids to reflect on their learning and talk about it to the camera. Can see if they really have learnt it themselves. Can thus drip-feed reports out to the students and parents throughout the year – parents get a text message that tells them that their kid’s portfolio has been updated – they can log on and see the report. Teachers don’t write good reports and they hate doing it – they all have to be done in the same week of each year. He now has 300 NZ schools where kids write their own reports. The kids are really honest in their reports.

•The Knowledge Net website.

•Teachers can divest some of the processes that are involved in learning down to the kids. Because the kids have to be involved in evaluating their own learning to fully understand what they have learned. The kids’ writing reports has been the biggest push for teachers changing their practices. Now they are using video reports.

•When mapping the curriculum, can go into the concept curriculum, which is divorced from the context, but we need a number of concepts so that can we can see if transfer and application occurs.

•Australia has a small window to cross the chasm.