WEBVTT
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G'day all.
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Today I'm recording in Darkingen Country.
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Before we begin, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to elders past and present and emerging in any land.
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For the last 300 years, Australia has been a country that has been shaped by people arriving and searching for something.
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My ancestor Elizabeth Cole came in the first fleet in 1788, not by choice, but by the decision of a system that had no plan for her.
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Since then, wave after wave of people have come to this country from every corner of the world, carrying their languages, their cultures, their courage, and their hope.
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And together we've built something incredibly extraordinary.
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You see, the diversity of our country is one of our greatest strengths, and it's taught us so much.
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But in the middle of all that arriving and building and becoming the oldest living culture on earth has been here the whole time.
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They've been watching, waiting, holding knowledge all about this land, this country, the way of living together that the rest of us were really only just beginning to understand.
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I think it's time that we started listening, really listening, and not as just a gesture, a genuine act of respect for the wisdom that has been here long before any of us arrived.
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This podcast is about what every person needs to flourish.
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Yeah, you know what?
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I can't think of a more important place than to start right here.
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Welcome to season two of the Grow Your Flow and Glow podcast for teachers.
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Every teacher lights a flame, every moment shapes tomorrow.
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No two journeys are the same.
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Through the questions through the change.
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Finding purpose once again.
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Because H is for high expectations.
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Recently I've been reading this novel.
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I know, groundbreaking stuff for a teacher podcast.
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It's called Before the Coffee Gets Cold, and it's written by a Japanese author, Shikazu Kawaguchi.
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And the premise is this there's a small dark cafe, and if you sit in a particular seat, you can travel back in time.
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The catch, and there are several, is that you can only visit the cafe.
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You can't leave the seat, you can't change anything, and you only have until your coffee gets cold.
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The book is beautiful by the way, and it you go and read it.
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But I'm not here to do a book review.
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I'm here because I read it and immediately started thinking about the classroom, as you do.
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Typical teacher.
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So here's where my imagination's taken me.
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The setting is not a cafe, it's a classroom.
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And the coffee is in a thermal cup because us teachers, we're practical people, and we've all sat through enough meetings to know that a regular cup is nowhere near enough to keep that coffee warm.
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So the question I want to put to you before we get into this episode is this.
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If you could go back and sit in any classroom you've ever taught or sat in, or been a student in for that matter, which one would you choose?
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And what would you do?
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What lesson would you return to?
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What student would you observe differently, knowing what you now know?
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And what conversation would you sit beside and really listen to this time?
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You don't have to answer it out loud, but just hold this question somewhere because I think by the end of this episode you know exactly where you'd go.
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I know where I'd go.
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H's for high expectations with meaning.
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And I want to start with a story about a 10-year-old blues guitarist named Matt.
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Every day, right after recess, we'd move into our maths instructional lesson.
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I'd structured the days deliberately, familiar, predictable, accessible, instruction first, then an independent block work.
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About 40 to 50 minutes for the you do phase of the lesson.
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Every lesson at that moment we moved into independent work.
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Matt would desperately need the bathroom.
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And I've got to say, every single day, with a timing that was, I have to say, genuinely impressive.
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He returned always moments just before the lunch bell.
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Perfect execution.
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40 to 15 minutes, just like clockwork.
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And I heard reports from the classes surrounding the bathroom that there was a student in the bathroom during this window singing their heart out.
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Okay, so that wasn't Matt singing, and it definitely wasn't the blues.
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Yes, that was Asuno AI music.
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But imagine if he was spending that time in the bathrooms creating me an amazing theme tune.
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Anyway, back to the story.
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Last year I taught a student, um, and I'll call her Sonia.
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She had such a low sense of herself as a learner that she barely spoke in class.
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And when she did, her voice was so soft it was hard to catch.
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She was present in the class, but not always quite there.
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When the maths rolled around, she would physically slide down in her seat, face full of dread before the lesson had even started.
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She'd need the bathroom or a drink of water, anything that created a little distance between her and the mathematics lesson that was coming.
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During a lesson I quietly approached and asked her How do you feel about mathematics?
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What can I do to support you?
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How do you feel when lessons like maths come around?
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And she gave me the exact words, not in an angry way, not in a complaining way, just as a statement of fact, the way you'd tell someone the sky was blue.
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I can't do maths about herself, as if the verdict had been handed down by someone with authority, and she had simply just folded away and believed it.
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You see, the bar wasn't the problem, the story was.
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And the story had been written so early, so thoroughly, that she carried it as fact rather than opinion.
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I know what both of them were carrying, because I carried it too.
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If you listened to earlier series, you'll know about the chill clean, about the maths mentals in primary school, standing with nose to the wall while the lesson carried on behind me.
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And that story has been with me for a long time, but it didn't end in primary school.
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I became the student who was removed from class during high school maths.
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Not occasionally but routinely.
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Almost every lesson at some point, I was somewhere other than the room where the maths was happening.
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The system had found a way to manage my anxiety, that was also a way of confirming it.
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You can't do this, here's the proof, and you're not even in the room, get out.
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And for a long time, maths was, and I want to be precise about this, it was a dark entity floating behind me through every step of my life.
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Something I carried that I couldn't put down because I just didn't know how.
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I was never taught the tools.
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It took me until university.
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It was the foundations of mathematics in the early childhood and primary education degree that I was taking.
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And I'd failed it the first time.
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I'd stacked too many units into my study roster, and I was just overwhelmed in my first year of university.
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And if you know anything about maths anxiety, you'll understand it is both the worst thing that can happen, and strangely, it can be very clarifying.
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Because at some point I made a decision.
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I went to my maths tutor.
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I told them honestly what was happening, where I was getting lost in the lectures, and what wasn't landing.
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He managed his situation was by doing everything he could to derail the learning for everyone around him.
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He'd get in kids' faces, try off-roading the lesson, grabbing as much attention as he could just to create the chaos that he was used to.
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I actually want to sit with this for a second because what looks like behavior that needs managing is almost always communication that needs hearing.
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This kid wasn't acting out because he was a bad kid.
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He was acting out because acting out was the most effective tool he'd found for getting people to pay attention to him in a life where very few people had.
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The lectures were now filmed so students could revisit the content and break it down themselves and understand at their own pace.
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And I realized something I should have known years earlier.
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I just needed to understand the maths.
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I needed to take the time.
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That was it.
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Not ability, not some fundamental limitation wired into who I was.
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It was just time and access.
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The ability to go back and sit with something until it made sense to me.
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The dark entity didn't disappear overnight, but it started to shrink.
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And because I finally had evidence, like real evidence from my own experience, that I could do it, I just needed the right conditions.
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That is what I wanted Matt to know.
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And that girl who slid down in a seat.
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Not that maths was easy, that it was possible.
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And I was going to help them find their way.
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So here's what we did.
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With both students in different years, different contexts, but the same fundamental approach.
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We started with where they actually were, not where the curriculum said they should be, not where their peers were, where they were.
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We looked at the pretest data together.
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We had conversations about what they could already do.
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Because there was always something.
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And I wanted them to identify two skills in maths that they already had.
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Something they felt confident with.
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It was their choice, their goal, their ownership of the learning.
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The last bit matters more than anything else in the approach.
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Because what maths anxiety does fundamentally is make the subject feel like something being done to you.
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Something outside of your control.
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Something judging you.
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And what personal goal setting does is hand some of that control back.
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It makes the learning something that you are doing, not something that is happening to you, that you are forced to be a part of.
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Now with Matt, I also did something I hadn't planned.
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I'd heard about his singing and I thought about it for a while.
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And you know what?
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Once he achieved that first maths goal and was starting to build a bit of confidence, that afternoon I asked him to perform for the class.
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And it wasn't as a transaction, not as a reward for good behavior or a bribe for engagement.
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Just, hey mate, I heard you sing.
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I think the class should hear it too.
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And he did it, and he loved it.
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And it was genuinely pure gold.
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A 10-year-old blues guitarist performing to his class in full voice, the room went quiet in that particular way that the room goes quiet when something real is happening.
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Identity shifts happen in moments, and that was one of them.
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Now I'm not going to tell you he became a math star overnight.
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That's not how this works.
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But what changed was the relationship between Matt and the possibility of being in the room.
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And that's where everything else starts.
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H is for high expectation with meaning.
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And I want to be really clear about that and what it means.
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Because high expectations is one of those phrases that gets used in education in ways that can cause genuine harm when they're not paired with the right second half.
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High expectations on their own, without support, without scaffolding, without genuine understanding of where a student is starting from, are not motivating.
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They are anxiety producing.
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They tell a student who already believes that they can't do something, you need to do it anyway, without any indication, no pathway, no stepping stone, no knowledge on the how.
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That's not a high expectation.
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That's a high bar with no ladder underneath it.
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What we need to do, well, we don't lower that bar, we we just build the ladder.
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Those are completely different responses to a student who is struggling, and only one of them actually helps.
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The research on this is consistent across traditions.
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Haddy's synthesis of evidence on teacher expectations found that what matters is not whether the teacher holds high expectations, it's whether those expectations are communicated with a genuine investment in the student's growth.
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And of course, expectations without support produce anxiety.
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Expectations with support produce something closer to pride.
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If we look at Decky and Ryan's self-determination theory, it really names competence as one of the three basic psychological needs whose satisfaction allows intrinsic motivation to emerge.
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Competence is not the same as performance.
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It is the experience of genuine effectiveness condition.
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Not because it's the most important, though it might be, but because without it nothing else works.
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You cannot build high expectations with meaning if a student doesn't feel safe enough to attempt saying something difficult or fail in front of others.
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You cannot create a genuine voice if the room doesn't feel safe enough to speak in honestly.
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And you cannot reach engagement if a student is spending their cognitive and emotional energy managing whether they belong here rather than actually learning.
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You see, trust is the ground.
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Everything else is built on it.
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Or it isn't.
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Tation says, I believe you can take this next step right now with the support I'm about to give you.
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For students carrying maths anxiety or any other subject anxiety, the difference between these two expectations is enormous.
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One is a belief about potential, the other is a designed pathway toward it.
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One practical resource I want to name here, and I'm naming it because it's genuinely useful, not because anyone asked me to.
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Teacher effectiveness or teacher endurance?
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Because here's the thing about high expectations at a system level.
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When 68% of teachers describe their workload as completely unmanageable, and 92% cite administrative burden as the primary reason they're considering leaving, the system is holding high expectations of its teachers without providing the conditions that make meeting them sustainable.
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And that's a high bar with no ladder.
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And it produces exactly what high bars without ladders always produce.
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So we think back to my tiny collective of Thrive Framework teachers.
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I'm trying to distinguish between professional excellence and self-exploitation.
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Wow, okay, professional excellence and self-exploitation.
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That distinction is the H element operating at the system level.
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A school that genuinely holds high expectations of its teacher also provides the conditions, the time, the support, and the professional agency that makes excellence sustainable.
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Not just demanding, sustainable.
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You see, Jeff Masters argues in his text, The Children We Leave Behind, that growth-based curriculum assessment, designed around where a student actually is rather than where the calendar says they should be, is the structural reform that Australian education most needs.
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The H element is what makes that argument work in the classroom level.
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Because a growth-based curriculum still requires a teacher who knows how to set an expectation that is genuinely achievable from where this specific student is standing right there today.
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That is a design skill, and it requires the teacher to know the student well enough to set the expectation at the edge of their current capability.
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Not below it, not above it.
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You see, masters explains the structure.
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H explains the human skill inside the structure.
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So before the coffee gets cold, where would I go?
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I think I'd go back to that maths classroom.
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Not to watch the lessons that went brilliantly, to sit beside one of the moments where I slid down in the seat, where I timed my bathroom visit, where I waited for the bell with a particular kind of dread that comes from believing something about yourself that isn't true.
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I'd want to see it clearly, to understand what it felt like from the inside, not from almost 30 years of a distance, but from inside that moment.
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And then I'd want to go back to that university tutorial room, to the moment I walked back in after failing the course and decided to tell the truth about what I needed.
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Because that moment, that small, gutting but necessary act of honesty, is where the dark entity started to shrink.
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I just needed time to understand the maths.
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That's what I wanted for Matt.
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And that's what I wanted for the young girl that slid down in her seat.
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For every student who arrived in my room carrying someone else's story about what they could do and what they couldn't do.
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Not lowered expectations, not pity, not the comfortable lie that some kids just aren't maths people.
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The ladder built deliberately, one step at a time.
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What would you do before the coffee went cold?
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That's it for this episode.
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In episode four, R is for resilience and purpose.
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Because once you've built that ladder, you need students to actually want to climb it.
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And that requires them to be able to see where that ladder leads.
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For more details about this episode, check out the show notes.
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In the show notes, I'll also pop in a link for you to become a part of our global network of teachers.
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A short simple Google survey for you to take, which is anonymous but helps feed the data I need to help present these ideas and hopefully make them fit your setting.
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I'll also pop in a free link for you to access a reflective worksheet just for you to consider a student you may have written off.
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Not intentionally but quietly.
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It's worth sitting with.
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G'day all.
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Today I'm recording in Darkingen Country.
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Before we begin, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to elders past and present and emerging in any land.
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For the last 300 years, Australia has been a country that has been shaped by people arriving and searching for something.
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My ancestor Elizabeth Cole came in the first fleet in 1788, not by choice, but by the decision of a system that had no plan for her.
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Since then, wave after wave of people have come to this country from every corner of the world, carrying their languages, their cultures, their courage, and their hope.
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And together we've built something incredibly extraordinary.
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You see, the diversity of our country is one of our greatest strengths, and it's taught us so much.
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But in the middle of all that arriving and building and becoming the oldest living culture on earth has been here the whole time.
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They've been watching, waiting, holding knowledge all about this land, this country, the way of living together that the rest of us were really only just beginning to understand.
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I think it's time that we started listening, really listening, and not as just a gesture, a genuine act of respect for the wisdom that has been here long before any of us arrived.
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This podcast is about what every person needs to flourish.
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Yeah, you know what?
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I can't think of a more important place than to start right here.
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Welcome to season two of the Grow Your Flow and Glow podcast for teachers.
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Every teacher lights a flame, every moment shapes tomorrow.
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No two journeys are the same.
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Through the questions through the change.
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Finding purpose once again.
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Because H is for high expectations.
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Recently I've been reading this novel.
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I know, groundbreaking stuff for a teacher podcast.
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It's called Before the Coffee Gets Cold, and it's written by a Japanese author, Shikazu Kawaguchi.
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And the premise is this there's a small dark cafe, and if you sit in a particular seat, you can travel back in time.
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The catch, and there are several, is that you can only visit the cafe.
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You can't leave the seat, you can't change anything, and you only have until your coffee gets cold.
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The book is beautiful by the way, and it you go and read it.
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But I'm not here to do a book review.
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I'm here because I read it and immediately started thinking about the classroom, as you do.
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Typical teacher.
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So here's where my imagination's taken me.
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The setting is not a cafe, it's a classroom.
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And the coffee is in a thermal cup because us teachers, we're practical people, and we've all sat through enough meetings to know that a regular cup is nowhere near enough to keep that coffee warm.
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So the question I want to put to you before we get into this episode is this.
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If you could go back and sit in any classroom you've ever taught or sat in, or been a student in for that matter, which one would you choose?
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And what would you do?
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What lesson would you return to?
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What student would you observe differently, knowing what you now know?
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And what conversation would you sit beside and really listen to this time?
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You don't have to answer it out loud, but just hold this question somewhere because I think by the end of this episode you know exactly where you'd go.
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I know where I'd go.
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H's for high expectations with meaning.
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And I want to start with a story about a 10-year-old blues guitarist named Matt.
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Every day, right after recess, we'd move into our maths instructional lesson.
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I'd structured the days deliberately, familiar, predictable, accessible, instruction first, then an independent block work.
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About 40 to 50 minutes for the you do phase of the lesson.
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Every lesson at that moment we moved into independent work.
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Matt would desperately need the bathroom.
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And I've got to say, every single day, with a timing that was, I have to say, genuinely impressive.
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He returned always moments just before the lunch bell.
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Perfect execution.
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40 to 15 minutes, just like clockwork.
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And I heard reports from the classes surrounding the bathroom that there was a student in the bathroom during this window singing their heart out.
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Okay, so that wasn't Matt singing, and it definitely wasn't the blues.
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Yes, that was Asuno AI music.
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But imagine if he was spending that time in the bathrooms creating me an amazing theme tune.
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Anyway, back to the story.
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Last year I taught a student, um, and I'll call her Sonia.
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She had such a low sense of herself as a learner that she barely spoke in class.
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And when she did, her voice was so soft it was hard to catch.
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She was present in the class, but not always quite there.
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When the maths rolled around, she would physically slide down in her seat, face full of dread before the lesson had even started.
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She'd need the bathroom or a drink of water, anything that created a little distance between her and the mathematics lesson that was coming.
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During a lesson I quietly approached and asked her How do you feel about mathematics?
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What can I do to support you?
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How do you feel when lessons like maths come around?
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And she gave me the exact words, not in an angry way, not in a complaining way, just as a statement of fact, the way you'd tell someone the sky was blue.
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I can't do maths about herself, as if the verdict had been handed down by someone with authority, and she had simply just folded away and believed it.
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You see, the bar wasn't the problem, the story was.
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And the story had been written so early, so thoroughly, that she carried it as fact rather than opinion.
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I know what both of them were carrying, because I carried it too.
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If you listened to earlier series, you'll know about the chill clean, about the maths mentals in primary school, standing with nose to the wall while the lesson carried on behind me.
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And that story has been with me for a long time, but it didn't end in primary school.
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I became the student who was removed from class during high school maths.
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Not occasionally but routinely.
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Almost every lesson at some point, I was somewhere other than the room where the maths was happening.
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The system had found a way to manage my anxiety, that was also a way of confirming it.
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You can't do this, here's the proof, and you're not even in the room, get out.
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And for a long time, maths was, and I want to be precise about this, it was a dark entity floating behind me through every step of my life.
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Something I carried that I couldn't put down because I just didn't know how.
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I was never taught the tools.
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It took me until university.
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It was the foundations of mathematics in the early childhood and primary education degree that I was taking.
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And I'd failed it the first time.
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I'd stacked too many units into my study roster, and I was just overwhelmed in my first year of university.
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And if you know anything about maths anxiety, you'll understand it is both the worst thing that can happen, and strangely, it can be very clarifying.
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Because at some point I made a decision.
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I went to my maths tutor.
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I told them honestly what was happening, where I was getting lost in the lectures, and what wasn't landing.
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He managed his situation was by doing everything he could to derail the learning for everyone around him.
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He'd get in kids' faces, try off-roading the lesson, grabbing as much attention as he could just to create the chaos that he was used to.
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I actually want to sit with this for a second because what looks like behavior that needs managing is almost always communication that needs hearing.
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This kid wasn't acting out because he was a bad kid.
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He was acting out because acting out was the most effective tool he'd found for getting people to pay attention to him in a life where very few people had.
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The lectures were now filmed so students could revisit the content and break it down themselves and understand at their own pace.
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And I realized something I should have known years earlier.
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I just needed to understand the maths.
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I needed to take the time.
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That was it.
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Not ability, not some fundamental limitation wired into who I was.
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It was just time and access.
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The ability to go back and sit with something until it made sense to me.
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The dark entity didn't disappear overnight, but it started to shrink.
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And because I finally had evidence, like real evidence from my own experience, that I could do it, I just needed the right conditions.
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That is what I wanted Matt to know.
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And that girl who slid down in a seat.
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Not that maths was easy, that it was possible.
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And I was going to help them find their way.
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So here's what we did.
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With both students in different years, different contexts, but the same fundamental approach.
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We started with where they actually were, not where the curriculum said they should be, not where their peers were, where they were.
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We looked at the pretest data together.
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We had conversations about what they could already do.
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Because there was always something.
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And I wanted them to identify two skills in maths that they already had.
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Something they felt confident with.
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It was their choice, their goal, their ownership of the learning.
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The last bit matters more than anything else in the approach.
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Because what maths anxiety does fundamentally is make the subject feel like something being done to you.
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Something outside of your control.
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Something judging you.
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And what personal goal setting does is hand some of that control back.
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It makes the learning something that you are doing, not something that is happening to you, that you are forced to be a part of.
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Now with Matt, I also did something I hadn't planned.
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I'd heard about his singing and I thought about it for a while.
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And you know what?
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Once he achieved that first maths goal and was starting to build a bit of confidence, that afternoon I asked him to perform for the class.
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And it wasn't as a transaction, not as a reward for good behavior or a bribe for engagement.
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Just, hey mate, I heard you sing.
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I think the class should hear it too.
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And he did it, and he loved it.
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And it was genuinely pure gold.
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A 10-year-old blues guitarist performing to his class in full voice, the room went quiet in that particular way that the room goes quiet when something real is happening.
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Identity shifts happen in moments, and that was one of them.
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Now I'm not going to tell you he became a math star overnight.
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That's not how this works.
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But what changed was the relationship between Matt and the possibility of being in the room.
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And that's where everything else starts.
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H is for high expectation with meaning.
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And I want to be really clear about that and what it means.
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Because high expectations is one of those phrases that gets used in education in ways that can cause genuine harm when they're not paired with the right second half.
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High expectations on their own, without support, without scaffolding, without genuine understanding of where a student is starting from, are not motivating.
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They are anxiety producing.
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They tell a student who already believes that they can't do something, you need to do it anyway, without any indication, no pathway, no stepping stone, no knowledge on the how.
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That's not a high expectation.
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That's a high bar with no ladder underneath it.
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What we need to do, well, we don't lower that bar, we we just build the ladder.
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Those are completely different responses to a student who is struggling, and only one of them actually helps.
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The research on this is consistent across traditions.
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Haddy's synthesis of evidence on teacher expectations found that what matters is not whether the teacher holds high expectations, it's whether those expectations are communicated with a genuine investment in the student's growth.
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And of course, expectations without support produce anxiety.
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Expectations with support produce something closer to pride.
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If we look at Decky and Ryan's self-determination theory, it really names competence as one of the three basic psychological needs whose satisfaction allows intrinsic motivation to emerge.
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Competence is not the same as performance.
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It is the experience of genuine effectiveness condition.
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Not because it's the most important, though it might be, but because without it nothing else works.
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You cannot build high expectations with meaning if a student doesn't feel safe enough to attempt saying something difficult or fail in front of others.
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You cannot create a genuine voice if the room doesn't feel safe enough to speak in honestly.
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And you cannot reach engagement if a student is spending their cognitive and emotional energy managing whether they belong here rather than actually learning.
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You see, trust is the ground.
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Everything else is built on it.
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Or it isn't.
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Tation says, I believe you can take this next step right now with the support I'm about to give you.
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For students carrying maths anxiety or any other subject anxiety, the difference between these two expectations is enormous.
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One is a belief about potential, the other is a designed pathway toward it.
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One practical resource I want to name here, and I'm naming it because it's genuinely useful, not because anyone asked me to.
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Teacher effectiveness or teacher endurance?
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Because here's the thing about high expectations at a system level.
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When 68% of teachers describe their workload as completely unmanageable, and 92% cite administrative burden as the primary reason they're considering leaving, the system is holding high expectations of its teachers without providing the conditions that make meeting them sustainable.
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And that's a high bar with no ladder.
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And it produces exactly what high bars without ladders always produce.
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So we think back to my tiny collective of Thrive Framework teachers.
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I'm trying to distinguish between professional excellence and self-exploitation.
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Wow, okay, professional excellence and self-exploitation.
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That distinction is the H element operating at the system level.
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A school that genuinely holds high expectations of its teacher also provides the conditions, the time, the support, and the professional agency that makes excellence sustainable.
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Not just demanding, sustainable.
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You see, Jeff Masters argues in his text, The Children We Leave Behind, that growth-based curriculum assessment, designed around where a student actually is rather than where the calendar says they should be, is the structural reform that Australian education most needs.
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The H element is what makes that argument work in the classroom level.
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Because a growth-based curriculum still requires a teacher who knows how to set an expectation that is genuinely achievable from where this specific student is standing right there today.
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That is a design skill, and it requires the teacher to know the student well enough to set the expectation at the edge of their current capability.
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Not below it, not above it.
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You see, masters explains the structure.
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H explains the human skill inside the structure.
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So before the coffee gets cold, where would I go?
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I think I'd go back to that maths classroom.
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Not to watch the lessons that went brilliantly, to sit beside one of the moments where I slid down in the seat, where I timed my bathroom visit, where I waited for the bell with a particular kind of dread that comes from believing something about yourself that isn't true.
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I'd want to see it clearly, to understand what it felt like from the inside, not from almost 30 years of a distance, but from inside that moment.
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And then I'd want to go back to that university tutorial room, to the moment I walked back in after failing the course and decided to tell the truth about what I needed.
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Because that moment, that small, gutting but necessary act of honesty, is where the dark entity started to shrink.
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I just needed time to understand the maths.
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That's what I wanted for Matt.
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And that's what I wanted for the young girl that slid down in her seat.
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For every student who arrived in my room carrying someone else's story about what they could do and what they couldn't do.
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Not lowered expectations, not pity, not the comfortable lie that some kids just aren't maths people.
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The ladder built deliberately, one step at a time.
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What would you do before the coffee went cold?
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That's it for this episode.
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In episode four, R is for resilience and purpose.
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Because once you've built that ladder, you need students to actually want to climb it.
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And that requires them to be able to see where that ladder leads.
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For more details about this episode, check out the show notes.
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In the show notes, I'll also pop in a link for you to become a part of our global network of teachers.
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A short simple Google survey for you to take, which is anonymous but helps feed the data I need to help present these ideas and hopefully make them fit your setting.
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I'll also pop in a free link for you to access a reflective worksheet just for you to consider a student you may have written off.
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Not intentionally but quietly.
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It's worth sitting with.
