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Today I record this podcast on Darking Land.
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I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I am recording, and the many different countries on which you might be listening right now.
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I pay my respects to elders, past and present, and I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and First Nation peoples wherever you are.
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I also want to acknowledge something personal.
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My ancestor, Elizabeth Cole, arrived in Australia on the first fleet in 1788.
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She was a young woman from Devon, England, convicted of stealing a woman's gown and sentenced to seven years' transportation.
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She arrived on country, and that country was not hers.
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A country that already had custodians, already had law, already had a deep and living connection to the land.
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And she arrived with nothing but circumstances the system had assigned her.
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She was by all accounts not particularly quiet about any of these things.
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I think about Elizabeth Cole a lot when I think about what this podcast is trying to say.
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About what it means to arrive somewhere without belonging.
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About what people need, genuinely need, to flourish rather than just survive.
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About the difference between a system that manages people and a system that is designed for them.
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The question this series asks are not new questions, they are old ones.
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And the country we're sitting on has been asking versions of them for a very, very long time.
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One more thing before we begin.
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Everything you hear in this series, every idea, every reflection, every framework and suggestion represents my own personal thinking, built across almost thirty years of working alongside extraordinary educators and students.
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None of it is intended as a criticism of teachers, of the practices they use, or of the systems they work within.
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Every teacher I know is doing their best inside conditions that are genuinely difficult and complex.
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This podcast is not a verdict on any of them.
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It is an honest reflection of what I've observed, what I've learned, and what I've experienced, and of course what I've got wrong and tried to correct.
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And what I believe might point towards something better.
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Nothing more.
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I offer it in the same spirit, I offer anything.
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As a fellow educator, still learning, still asking the questions.
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A lifelong learner.
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Let's begin.
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Every teacher lights a flame.
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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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G'day, welcome back to the Grow Your Flow Teacher Podcast.
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So, series two, here we are.
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I know some of you have been waiting for this.
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Kurt truly appreciates your patience.
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He's been sitting on a lot of this stuff for a while, trying to figure out how to say it best.
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With a full-time assistant principal teaching position and family commitments, things get in the way.
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Without further waiting, let me introduce you to my dad and your host, Kurt Walker.
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Ah, that's me.
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And for those that don't know me, I've been knocking around education for longer than I'd like to admit.
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These days I'm an assistant principal in stage three, which means I'm responsible for over 300 students and a big team of teachers.
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It also means I spend a surprising amount of time in meetings.
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But one thing I refuse to give up on is my kiss and drop duty.
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Every morning I get to stand at the gate, help kids out of their car, and say good morning to students and parents.
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I get to watch those sleepy faces wake up.
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And honestly, there aren't many better ways to start the day than getting a smile from a kid before they even walk through the school gates.
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You know, those little moments.
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So this series is called The Purpose and the Power of the Thrive Framework.
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And there are seven episodes altogether, and this first one is about something I reckon anyone who spent time in schools already knows, even if we've never quite found the words for it.
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It's about the difference between two classrooms.
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Right now, I want to tell you about someone first, and I'm going to call him Tom.
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It's not his real name, but the rest of the story is true.
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Tom and I we met together many years ago while starting an early childhood and primary degree.
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He was one of those educators that got to work alongside, and they just make you better at your job by being nearby.
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He was creative, full of ideas, and the kind of person where you think, yeah, the kids who get you as their teacher, they're going to be okay.
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We first crossed paths, as I said earlier, at university, both of us had a background in graphic design and a real interest in early childhood as a profession.
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We love the psychology, the theory, the creativity, and the excitement of working alongside the kids as they ventured down a path of discovery.
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And then we both ended up somewhere along the line going separate ways.
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We lost touch.
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Life, different schools, you know, all that stuff.
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And then I ran into him at a conference.
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You know, one of those corridor moments where everyone's scrambling for a coffee or to the bathroom in between speakers.
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Anyway, I bumped into him, I had the bad coffee breath, and we were both wearing lanyards.
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Everyone's shuffling between us, trying to get to the next session.
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And deep in their psyche, we know they're all asking, are we giving anything out of this professional learning?
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Which look, sometimes we are, but sometimes we're just thinking about what they're gonna serve for lunch.
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Anyway, we stop, we do the whole catch-up thing.
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How long has it been?
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Where are you now, man?
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Are you still in the classroom?
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And he kind of pauses before he answers that last one.
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Okay, imagine this is your story.
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You graduate, you're very passionate about what you're doing, you're ready, you land a targeted graduate position, which sounds great until you find out it's over an hour and a half drive away from home.
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You get a young family, a partner, little kids who need you there, but you say yes to the job because this is the work you trained for.
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This could be the opportunity to buy a slice of that Australian dream of purchasing your own home.
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So you drive every day, well over an hour, there and back, and the teaching itself, well, that's good.
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You love the classroom, you love the kids, but the commute just grinds it down.
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And the relentless little things just compound.
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You know that, right?
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You feel that on a Friday afternoon in week nine, or sometimes week six, let's be honest.
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It starts showing up at home, in your relationship, and how much of yourself you've got left when you walk through the door at night.
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You apply for a transfer, nothing happens, medical professionals get involved, you wait.
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Eventually, that apartment moves you closer.
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But closer to home is a brand new school, a new team, a new class.
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Man, you're starting from fresh.
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And right in the middle of it all, there's a curriculum overhaul.
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And it's right at that exact moment you're running on nothing.
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The support, it feels minimal.
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The advice from above, oh, take some leave, work it out, come back when you're ready.
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Which, if you've ever been on the receiving end of that advice, you know it's not quite as helpful as it seems.
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Anyway, my friend, he does this.
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He takes the leave.
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He genuinely tries to recover, and then he comes back because he loves this work and can't imagine doing anything else.
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And his body just reacts.
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Palpitations, sweats, trouble breathing.
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It's not weakness.
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His body just ran out of a runway and started speaking in the only language the system had left.
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He told me all of this standing in a conference corridor, coffee getting cold, and then he said he's taken leave at the end of the term, and he's decided to resign at the end of the year.
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I've been thinking about that conversation ever since, because Tom isn't unusual.
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He's not some outlier.
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Tom is what the numbers look like when they've got a face on them.
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And there are a lot of numbers.
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Permanent teacher resignation in New South Wales doubled in two years.
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929 in 2020, 1,854 in 2022.
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These aren't retirements.
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These are people who chose to leave the career that they trained for.
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One in five permanent New South Wales teachers quit before they've been in the job five years.
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And 2022 had the highest rate of first-year departures ever on record.
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Mate, the first year?
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We're losing people before they've even started.
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A government task audit found 105 administrative duties teachers are expected to manage outside of actual teaching.
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105?
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Alongside, you know, actually teaching the children.
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I read that and I thought, yeah, that tracks.
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That genuinely tracks.
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A survey of nearly 19,000 New South Wales teachers found that fewer than one in 20 felt they had enough time to properly meet their students' learning and support needs.
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Two-thirds of the New South Wales public school teachers say they're burnt out.
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Only 19% feel fairly paid or like they've got enough time.
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And nearly seven in ten describe their workload as completely unmanageable.
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Look, at its worst, New South Wales was short more than 3,000 casual teachers in a single day.
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Up to 10,000 classes getting merged or cancelled.
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Not in some exceptional crisis, just on a regular Tuesday.
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And 92% of Australian teachers cite administrative or bureaucratic load as the main reason they're thinking about leaving.
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I came across a research report that came out in July 2026 from La Trobe University.
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It was Dad Vand and colleagues.
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They ran a social lab of five Victorian principals from hard-to-staff schools.
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And what those principals describe stopped me in my tracks.
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One principal, I'm going to call him Victor, ran a large secondary school in a Victorian border community.
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For three years, his school had operated between 12 and 24 staff vacancies.
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What?
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12 consecutive terms.
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And here's the bit that really landed for me.
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So Victor noted we're at a stage of an inward spiral of lack of staff.
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With a shortage of staff, the culture disappears, which therefore causes more staff to want to leave.
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I love how he's labeled the inward spiral.
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Staff leave, culture erodes, more staff leave because the culture is eroding, which makes it harder to recruit, which erodes the culture further.
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It's not just a metaphor, it's a casual mechanism that's been running for three years in that school.
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There was another principal, let's call her Michelle.
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She ran a specialist school.
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She spent nearly three million dollars on casual relief teachers in a single year just to have someone, anyone, in the classroom.
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Three million dollars in one year in one school.
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And a$9,000 school-funded incentive to attract teachers attracted zero applicants.
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And it's something I haven't been able to shake.
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So he says, talking to a year nine student, you've had five English teachers at year nine because people are agency stuff.
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There may be Irish, some are backpackers who are just moving through the system.
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It is extremely disheartening.
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And now we're seeing three years of that, and that is now being reflected in what's happening in the senior college as well, with regard to attitude and behavior, with regard to aspiration, and with regard to what's the value of education.
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Oh Victor.
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Five English teachers in a single year, and the students can feel the instability even when they can't name it.
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It shows up in attendance, in attitude, and in whether they bother turning up at all.
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So you see, my mate Tom, he didn't leave because he stopped caring.
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He left because caring, when you got nothing left to care with, eventually becomes physically impossible.
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And every Tom walks out and takes with them years of knowledge about specific kids, specific families, specific moments, and the culture takes a huge hit, and the spiral goes another turn.
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So here's what's been sitting with me though.
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All of that, all those numbers, Tom's story, Victor's inward spiral, and the system's response has basically been to keep asking the same question, it's always asked.
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Think about that last PD day you sat through, the last initiative your school rolled out, the last thing leadership asks you to do differently.
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What was the question underneath it?
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Nine times out of ten, it was some version of how do we get students to behave well enough that learning can happen?
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PBL frameworks, classroom management training, and all of this has real value.
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I'm not knocking any of it, but it's all built around managing behavior well enough that learning might occur.
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And if you're in a leadership role, the question is usually how do we retrain stuff, reduce disruption, and keep the data looking reasonable?
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Also, real and necessary, but I keep coming back to this.
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I think it's the wrong first question.
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Earlier this year, I sent a study out through my LinkedIn network, called it the Why Behind Educators Who Thrive.
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Just open questions.
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What does genuine learning feel like?
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What gets in its way and what keeps you in the work?
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No framework, no hints.
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Six people responded.
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I had responders from Montenegro, New Hampshire, the Netherlands, Alabama, Australian Capital Territory, and Germany.
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Twenty to thirty-five years education background each.
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So six people from four continents, none of them knowing about Thrive.
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And what came back really stopped me.
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Because they are all describing the same problem.
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Different systems, different countries, different contexts, same frustration underneath.
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So let's have a look at the field.
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I had a secondary teacher and education consultant from Montenegro with 30 years in education tell me the hardest part is not teaching itself.
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It is knowing that there are children, teachers, and even leaders I cannot fully protect from systems that are not functioning well.
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A teacher and coach and former head of school from the Netherlands with over 35 years experience in education noted that students' well-being is in such a strong focus that we are missing the mark.
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We need to start with teacher well-being and support, not just words, put things into action.
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And then our system leader from the Australian Capital Territory, with over 35 years of experience and overseeing over 14 different schools in an area, they noted that the gap between what we know about how people sustain themselves in high-pressure roles and what we actually do about it structurally, we have the research, we largely ignore it.
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Three people, three different continents, same sentence underneath it all.
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We know what works.
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So the problem is we're just not designing for it.
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So the question this series is trying to answer is a different one.
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Not how do we get students to behave well enough that learning can happen, but how do we design learning and skills that are actually worth showing up for?
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For students and for the toms and for the victor, and for everyone standing in that inward spiral trying to hold the culture together with both hands.
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You can't manage your way to genuine learning, and you can't keep good teachers by asking them to absorb the cost of a system that was never designed to sustain them.
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Alright, let me describe two classrooms.
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You've been in both of them, and I promise you have, because you don't need a checklist to know which one you're walking into.
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You can feel it from the corridor.
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Students are on task, class dojo points mounting up high, assessment data's adequate, nothing to flag.
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Looks like learning.
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But there's something absent.
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The room is functioning, it's just not alive.
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The students are there in body and somewhere else entirely in everything that actually matters.
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And here's what keeps me up at night.
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They've learned to perform engagement convincingly enough that the system doesn't notice the difference.
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And if we're being honest, we've probably all taught that room at some point.
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I know I have, and more times than I'd like to admit.
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There's the second room.
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It's noisier, the good kind of noisy.
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Students leaning forward, actually disagreeing with each other about something in a way that suggests they care about the answer.
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Someone near the window drawing.
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You can tell it belongs to the lesson by the focus on that student's face.
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And the teacher, well, they're just at the edge of it.
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Not running it from the front, not inside it.
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They're watching, adjusting, and asking the occasional question that sends people back into genuine thinking.
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No one in that room is looking at the clock.
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So the system leader from the Australian Capital Territory, he noted this.
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When students forget someone is watching, that's the clearest signal.
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The task has enough substance to hold them, the room feels safe enough to explore, and the teacher has become unnecessary for a moment.
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Same school, same curriculum, same behavior program, same PD days, no shade.
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We've all sat through it.
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So what's different is the design, the specific learnable decisions a teacher makes before the lesson, during it, and about how to create conditions for genuine learning rather than the convincing performance of it.
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They named what breaks the second room, what turns it back into the first one with painful precision, workload, staffing churn, the experience walking out.
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The door every time another Tom calls it quits.
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Michelle's specialist school is trying to build the second room with staff that have never seen it modeled by someone who's been teaching for more than two years.
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And that's not a teacher quality problem.
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That's what the inward spiral does.
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My teeny weenie global network named the same interrupters from a classroom direction.
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Pace, compliance, culture, and administrative load.
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New Hampshire, Australia's capital territory, and Germany.
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None of them comparing notes.
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Which, given they're spread across continents, they definitely weren't.
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This is not a teacher skill problem.
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It's a design problem.
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And design problems have design solutions.
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And a matter of fact, Thrive arrives as something obvious, not something being pitched.
00:22:59.440 --> 00:23:04.160
So the framework this series is built on is called Thrive.
00:23:04.720 --> 00:23:06.880
T-H-R-I-V-E.
00:23:07.759 --> 00:23:22.319
There's six conditions trust and belonging, high expectations and meaning, relevance and purpose, identity and narrative, voice and agency, and engagement through flow.
00:23:23.119 --> 00:23:31.839
One episode per element, and before you groan at another acronym, I get it, education loves an acronym, I know.
00:23:32.240 --> 00:23:34.480
I want to tell you where it comes from.
00:23:34.799 --> 00:23:37.920
Three completely separate research traditions.
00:23:38.240 --> 00:23:48.400
The early years learning framework from here in Australia, Chig sent me Hiley's flow theory, and Deki and Ryan's self-determination theory.
00:23:48.720 --> 00:24:00.880
Arrived at the same conditions from completely different directions, different researches, different decades, different starting points, but boom, the same answer.
00:24:01.279 --> 00:24:14.079
When that happens, when independent traditions land in the same place, you stop calling it a theory and start thinking maybe this is just true about how people actually work.
00:24:14.799 --> 00:24:20.559
And then there were six educators from my teeny weenie network.
00:24:20.799 --> 00:24:23.039
None of them knew about the Thrive.
00:24:23.599 --> 00:24:36.799
I asked open-ended questions and they described trust, relevance, identity, voice, and flow without any of that language being near the question I asked.
00:24:38.160 --> 00:24:55.759
Again, the system leader in the Australian Capital Territory mentioned ask your student in the corridor why they're studying or what they studied this morning, and the honest answer is usually because it's on the curriculum, or there's just dead silence.
00:24:56.240 --> 00:24:59.920
That's not a student problem, it's a design problem.
00:25:00.720 --> 00:25:01.680
I agree.
00:25:50.480 --> 00:25:55.200
There's trust, recognition, and relational presence.
00:25:55.599 --> 00:26:01.519
The T element in Thrive, confirmed from a completely different research direction.
00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:09.119
One principal, Paul, put the urgency of it about as plainly as anyone could.
00:26:16.079 --> 00:26:29.200
So visibility, getting into staff offices, getting into staff classrooms, and getting into the staff room, always talking to staff, but just as importantly, also listening to staff.
00:26:29.519 --> 00:26:31.200
Wise words, Paul.
00:26:32.079 --> 00:26:42.000
Six people from my global network, five Victorian principals, three research traditions, all of them arriving at the same conditions.
00:26:42.720 --> 00:26:47.119
Thrive isn't here to replace what your school already has.
00:26:47.440 --> 00:26:54.559
PBL really matters, and the ATEL AI TSL standards still really matter.
00:26:55.200 --> 00:26:58.799
Think of it this way: PBL creates the room.
00:26:59.119 --> 00:27:01.599
Thrive merely furnishes it.
00:27:02.000 --> 00:27:05.119
ATEL describes the standards.
00:27:05.599 --> 00:27:13.359
Thrive explains why the standard works, when it does, and what's going on when it doesn't.
00:27:13.680 --> 00:27:16.799
And here's the thing that connects all of this.
00:27:17.200 --> 00:27:23.680
The conditions that protect student flow are the same as the conditions that protect teacher flow.
00:27:23.920 --> 00:27:34.160
Which means a system that consumes its teachers is it's failing its students right now, today, in every class that got cancelled this week.
00:27:34.640 --> 00:27:45.680
And a school that deliberately designs for belonging for staff and students creates a culture that functions as its own retention mechanism.
00:27:46.160 --> 00:27:49.200
That's not soft, that's structural.
00:27:49.680 --> 00:27:53.440
So that Latrobe report conclusion says it plainly.
00:27:59.119 --> 00:28:08.559
What has been missing is a policy response adequate to the multi-layered nature of the problem and the coordinated commitment to act.
00:28:10.480 --> 00:28:15.119
Now, I've thought about Tom a lot since that conference corridor.
00:28:15.759 --> 00:28:19.519
About what I'd say to him if I had the proper chance.
00:28:19.920 --> 00:28:28.799
Not between sessions, not with a cold coffee, but actually face to face with a sit-down and over some time.
00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:35.119
I think I'd say it wasn't the profession didn't care about you.
00:28:35.519 --> 00:28:39.119
It just never stopped long enough to ask the right question.
00:28:39.759 --> 00:28:42.880
And the weight of that landed on you personally.
00:28:43.519 --> 00:28:46.400
The way it lands on so many good teachers.
00:28:46.720 --> 00:28:48.720
Man, I felt it myself.
00:28:50.799 --> 00:28:53.039
You can only last so long.
00:28:53.519 --> 00:28:56.240
Eventually it just becomes too heavy.
00:28:57.200 --> 00:29:07.519
I think about Victor 2, holding his school together for 12 consecutive terms of shortage, watching the culture erode, watching the spiral turn.
00:29:07.839 --> 00:29:14.400
He's still there, still trying to build belonging inside a system that keeps removing the conditions for it.
00:29:15.920 --> 00:29:25.680
In this series, it's my attempt reflecting on my own schooling experience and my own teaching experience and my own leading experience.
00:29:26.000 --> 00:29:37.279
Then there's those six educators from around the world, five Victorian principles, three research traditions to ask the right question properly.
00:29:38.079 --> 00:29:42.319
How do we design schools that are worth showing up for?
00:29:43.359 --> 00:29:53.119
For the kids in the first room who've learned to look like they're learning, for every Tom, and for every Victor.
00:29:54.079 --> 00:30:07.680
The system leader from the Australian Capital Territory stated this if my teaching practice were fully aligned with my intent, it would look less efficient but more effective.
00:30:09.200 --> 00:30:11.920
Less efficient, more effective.
00:30:12.400 --> 00:30:14.480
I keep coming back to that line.
00:30:14.640 --> 00:30:22.000
In my nearly 30 years in education, I've sat through a lot of initiatives that promised efficiency.
00:30:23.119 --> 00:30:29.440
I'm yet to meet a student who said the most meaningful thing that happened to them at school was the efficiency.
00:30:31.599 --> 00:30:33.759
Look, episode two is next.
00:30:34.079 --> 00:30:35.680
Tears for trust.
00:30:36.000 --> 00:30:41.440
And trust, it turns out, is where everything else starts or doesn't.
00:30:41.680 --> 00:30:45.279
Grow your flow in glow.
00:30:46.640 --> 00:30:49.359
Where great teachers learn.
00:30:51.599 --> 00:30:55.200
Building futures, helping life to try.
00:00:00.400 --> 00:00:03.759
Today I record this podcast on Darking Land.
00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:13.039
I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I am recording, and the many different countries on which you might be listening right now.
00:00:13.359 --> 00:00:25.839
I pay my respects to elders, past and present, and I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and First Nation peoples wherever you are.
00:00:26.640 --> 00:00:29.920
I also want to acknowledge something personal.
00:00:30.480 --> 00:00:37.200
My ancestor, Elizabeth Cole, arrived in Australia on the first fleet in 1788.
00:00:37.600 --> 00:00:46.079
She was a young woman from Devon, England, convicted of stealing a woman's gown and sentenced to seven years' transportation.
00:00:46.640 --> 00:00:51.200
She arrived on country, and that country was not hers.
00:00:51.439 --> 00:00:59.119
A country that already had custodians, already had law, already had a deep and living connection to the land.
00:00:59.520 --> 00:01:04.400
And she arrived with nothing but circumstances the system had assigned her.
00:01:04.799 --> 00:01:09.840
She was by all accounts not particularly quiet about any of these things.
00:01:10.319 --> 00:01:16.560
I think about Elizabeth Cole a lot when I think about what this podcast is trying to say.
00:01:17.200 --> 00:01:20.560
About what it means to arrive somewhere without belonging.
00:01:20.799 --> 00:01:27.280
About what people need, genuinely need, to flourish rather than just survive.
00:01:27.599 --> 00:01:33.680
About the difference between a system that manages people and a system that is designed for them.
00:01:34.159 --> 00:01:39.680
The question this series asks are not new questions, they are old ones.
00:01:39.920 --> 00:01:46.480
And the country we're sitting on has been asking versions of them for a very, very long time.
00:01:48.560 --> 00:01:50.719
One more thing before we begin.
00:01:51.519 --> 00:02:08.879
Everything you hear in this series, every idea, every reflection, every framework and suggestion represents my own personal thinking, built across almost thirty years of working alongside extraordinary educators and students.
00:02:09.520 --> 00:02:18.080
None of it is intended as a criticism of teachers, of the practices they use, or of the systems they work within.
00:02:18.400 --> 00:02:24.639
Every teacher I know is doing their best inside conditions that are genuinely difficult and complex.
00:02:25.199 --> 00:02:28.719
This podcast is not a verdict on any of them.
00:02:28.960 --> 00:02:39.039
It is an honest reflection of what I've observed, what I've learned, and what I've experienced, and of course what I've got wrong and tried to correct.
00:02:39.680 --> 00:02:43.120
And what I believe might point towards something better.
00:02:43.520 --> 00:02:44.560
Nothing more.
00:02:45.039 --> 00:02:48.719
I offer it in the same spirit, I offer anything.
00:02:49.039 --> 00:02:53.439
As a fellow educator, still learning, still asking the questions.
00:02:53.680 --> 00:02:55.280
A lifelong learner.
00:02:55.680 --> 00:02:57.039
Let's begin.
00:03:13.280 --> 00:03:15.919
Every teacher lights a flame.
00:03:18.159 --> 00:03:20.960
Every moment shapes tomorrow.
00:03:22.719 --> 00:03:25.680
No two journeys are the same.
00:03:27.599 --> 00:03:30.479
Through the questions through the change.
00:03:32.479 --> 00:03:35.120
Finding purpose once again.
00:03:37.840 --> 00:03:42.159
G'day, welcome back to the Grow Your Flow Teacher Podcast.
00:03:42.479 --> 00:03:45.120
So, series two, here we are.
00:03:45.280 --> 00:03:47.680
I know some of you have been waiting for this.
00:03:48.000 --> 00:03:50.719
Kurt truly appreciates your patience.
00:03:50.879 --> 00:03:56.080
He's been sitting on a lot of this stuff for a while, trying to figure out how to say it best.
00:03:56.240 --> 00:04:02.800
With a full-time assistant principal teaching position and family commitments, things get in the way.
00:04:03.039 --> 00:04:08.800
Without further waiting, let me introduce you to my dad and your host, Kurt Walker.
00:04:09.199 --> 00:04:10.400
Ah, that's me.
00:04:10.800 --> 00:04:16.800
And for those that don't know me, I've been knocking around education for longer than I'd like to admit.
00:04:17.040 --> 00:04:27.199
These days I'm an assistant principal in stage three, which means I'm responsible for over 300 students and a big team of teachers.
00:04:27.519 --> 00:04:31.519
It also means I spend a surprising amount of time in meetings.
00:04:31.839 --> 00:04:36.160
But one thing I refuse to give up on is my kiss and drop duty.
00:04:36.319 --> 00:04:42.560
Every morning I get to stand at the gate, help kids out of their car, and say good morning to students and parents.
00:04:42.720 --> 00:04:45.600
I get to watch those sleepy faces wake up.
00:04:45.759 --> 00:04:53.519
And honestly, there aren't many better ways to start the day than getting a smile from a kid before they even walk through the school gates.
00:04:53.680 --> 00:04:55.519
You know, those little moments.
00:04:56.079 --> 00:05:00.319
So this series is called The Purpose and the Power of the Thrive Framework.
00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:12.560
And there are seven episodes altogether, and this first one is about something I reckon anyone who spent time in schools already knows, even if we've never quite found the words for it.
00:05:12.800 --> 00:05:16.959
It's about the difference between two classrooms.
00:05:25.519 --> 00:05:29.759
Right now, I want to tell you about someone first, and I'm going to call him Tom.
00:05:29.920 --> 00:05:33.199
It's not his real name, but the rest of the story is true.
00:05:33.519 --> 00:05:40.079
Tom and I we met together many years ago while starting an early childhood and primary degree.
00:05:40.560 --> 00:05:47.439
He was one of those educators that got to work alongside, and they just make you better at your job by being nearby.
00:05:47.680 --> 00:05:57.360
He was creative, full of ideas, and the kind of person where you think, yeah, the kids who get you as their teacher, they're going to be okay.
00:05:57.759 --> 00:06:08.399
We first crossed paths, as I said earlier, at university, both of us had a background in graphic design and a real interest in early childhood as a profession.
00:06:08.800 --> 00:06:18.000
We love the psychology, the theory, the creativity, and the excitement of working alongside the kids as they ventured down a path of discovery.
00:06:18.160 --> 00:06:24.319
And then we both ended up somewhere along the line going separate ways.
00:06:24.879 --> 00:06:26.319
We lost touch.
00:06:26.639 --> 00:06:30.160
Life, different schools, you know, all that stuff.
00:06:30.399 --> 00:06:32.720
And then I ran into him at a conference.
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You know, one of those corridor moments where everyone's scrambling for a coffee or to the bathroom in between speakers.
00:06:40.160 --> 00:06:46.319
Anyway, I bumped into him, I had the bad coffee breath, and we were both wearing lanyards.
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Everyone's shuffling between us, trying to get to the next session.
00:06:50.639 --> 00:06:57.040
And deep in their psyche, we know they're all asking, are we giving anything out of this professional learning?
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Which look, sometimes we are, but sometimes we're just thinking about what they're gonna serve for lunch.
00:07:03.680 --> 00:07:07.199
Anyway, we stop, we do the whole catch-up thing.
00:07:07.519 --> 00:07:08.720
How long has it been?
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Where are you now, man?
00:07:10.480 --> 00:07:12.480
Are you still in the classroom?
00:07:12.720 --> 00:07:16.240
And he kind of pauses before he answers that last one.
00:07:17.199 --> 00:07:19.519
Okay, imagine this is your story.
00:07:19.759 --> 00:07:32.000
You graduate, you're very passionate about what you're doing, you're ready, you land a targeted graduate position, which sounds great until you find out it's over an hour and a half drive away from home.
00:07:32.240 --> 00:07:42.079
You get a young family, a partner, little kids who need you there, but you say yes to the job because this is the work you trained for.
00:07:42.879 --> 00:07:49.519
This could be the opportunity to buy a slice of that Australian dream of purchasing your own home.
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So you drive every day, well over an hour, there and back, and the teaching itself, well, that's good.
00:07:58.160 --> 00:08:02.879
You love the classroom, you love the kids, but the commute just grinds it down.
00:08:03.439 --> 00:08:06.879
And the relentless little things just compound.
00:08:07.120 --> 00:08:08.560
You know that, right?
00:08:08.800 --> 00:08:14.399
You feel that on a Friday afternoon in week nine, or sometimes week six, let's be honest.
00:08:14.720 --> 00:08:22.240
It starts showing up at home, in your relationship, and how much of yourself you've got left when you walk through the door at night.
00:08:22.480 --> 00:08:29.360
You apply for a transfer, nothing happens, medical professionals get involved, you wait.
00:08:29.759 --> 00:08:32.799
Eventually, that apartment moves you closer.
00:08:33.039 --> 00:08:38.559
But closer to home is a brand new school, a new team, a new class.
00:08:38.799 --> 00:08:40.879
Man, you're starting from fresh.
00:08:41.120 --> 00:08:44.799
And right in the middle of it all, there's a curriculum overhaul.
00:08:44.960 --> 00:08:48.159
And it's right at that exact moment you're running on nothing.
00:08:48.399 --> 00:08:50.879
The support, it feels minimal.
00:08:51.039 --> 00:08:56.080
The advice from above, oh, take some leave, work it out, come back when you're ready.
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Which, if you've ever been on the receiving end of that advice, you know it's not quite as helpful as it seems.
00:09:03.759 --> 00:09:05.840
Anyway, my friend, he does this.
00:09:06.080 --> 00:09:07.519
He takes the leave.
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He genuinely tries to recover, and then he comes back because he loves this work and can't imagine doing anything else.
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And his body just reacts.
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Palpitations, sweats, trouble breathing.
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It's not weakness.
00:09:25.600 --> 00:09:32.639
His body just ran out of a runway and started speaking in the only language the system had left.
00:09:33.360 --> 00:09:45.679
He told me all of this standing in a conference corridor, coffee getting cold, and then he said he's taken leave at the end of the term, and he's decided to resign at the end of the year.
00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:51.919
I've been thinking about that conversation ever since, because Tom isn't unusual.
00:09:52.240 --> 00:09:54.159
He's not some outlier.
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Tom is what the numbers look like when they've got a face on them.
00:10:00.480 --> 00:10:03.279
And there are a lot of numbers.
00:10:04.879 --> 00:10:09.600
Permanent teacher resignation in New South Wales doubled in two years.
00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:17.440
929 in 2020, 1,854 in 2022.
00:10:17.919 --> 00:10:19.440
These aren't retirements.
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These are people who chose to leave the career that they trained for.
00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:29.759
One in five permanent New South Wales teachers quit before they've been in the job five years.
00:10:30.000 --> 00:10:36.159
And 2022 had the highest rate of first-year departures ever on record.
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Mate, the first year?
00:10:37.919 --> 00:10:41.039
We're losing people before they've even started.
00:10:41.759 --> 00:10:49.519
A government task audit found 105 administrative duties teachers are expected to manage outside of actual teaching.
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105?
00:10:52.639 --> 00:10:56.080
Alongside, you know, actually teaching the children.
00:10:56.399 --> 00:10:59.679
I read that and I thought, yeah, that tracks.
00:10:59.840 --> 00:11:01.840
That genuinely tracks.
00:11:02.480 --> 00:11:14.320
A survey of nearly 19,000 New South Wales teachers found that fewer than one in 20 felt they had enough time to properly meet their students' learning and support needs.
00:11:14.559 --> 00:11:18.799
Two-thirds of the New South Wales public school teachers say they're burnt out.
00:11:19.120 --> 00:11:24.000
Only 19% feel fairly paid or like they've got enough time.
00:11:24.240 --> 00:11:29.440
And nearly seven in ten describe their workload as completely unmanageable.
00:11:30.000 --> 00:11:37.120
Look, at its worst, New South Wales was short more than 3,000 casual teachers in a single day.
00:11:37.360 --> 00:11:41.600
Up to 10,000 classes getting merged or cancelled.
00:11:41.759 --> 00:11:46.159
Not in some exceptional crisis, just on a regular Tuesday.
00:11:46.399 --> 00:11:55.440
And 92% of Australian teachers cite administrative or bureaucratic load as the main reason they're thinking about leaving.
00:11:56.720 --> 00:12:03.840
I came across a research report that came out in July 2026 from La Trobe University.
00:12:04.000 --> 00:12:06.240
It was Dad Vand and colleagues.
00:12:06.399 --> 00:12:11.440
They ran a social lab of five Victorian principals from hard-to-staff schools.
00:12:11.519 --> 00:12:15.600
And what those principals describe stopped me in my tracks.
00:12:15.919 --> 00:12:23.440
One principal, I'm going to call him Victor, ran a large secondary school in a Victorian border community.
00:12:23.759 --> 00:12:30.799
For three years, his school had operated between 12 and 24 staff vacancies.
00:12:31.120 --> 00:12:31.759
What?
00:12:35.840 --> 00:12:38.639
12 consecutive terms.
00:12:39.519 --> 00:12:42.720
And here's the bit that really landed for me.
00:12:42.960 --> 00:12:48.639
So Victor noted we're at a stage of an inward spiral of lack of staff.
00:12:49.120 --> 00:12:55.279
With a shortage of staff, the culture disappears, which therefore causes more staff to want to leave.
00:12:55.440 --> 00:12:58.320
I love how he's labeled the inward spiral.
00:12:58.639 --> 00:13:08.480
Staff leave, culture erodes, more staff leave because the culture is eroding, which makes it harder to recruit, which erodes the culture further.
00:13:08.639 --> 00:13:15.279
It's not just a metaphor, it's a casual mechanism that's been running for three years in that school.
00:13:15.519 --> 00:13:18.399
There was another principal, let's call her Michelle.
00:13:18.799 --> 00:13:20.639
She ran a specialist school.
00:13:20.799 --> 00:13:30.000
She spent nearly three million dollars on casual relief teachers in a single year just to have someone, anyone, in the classroom.
00:13:30.320 --> 00:13:34.480
Three million dollars in one year in one school.
00:13:35.039 --> 00:13:41.519
And a$9,000 school-funded incentive to attract teachers attracted zero applicants.
00:13:48.960 --> 00:13:51.679
And it's something I haven't been able to shake.
00:13:52.159 --> 00:14:01.919
So he says, talking to a year nine student, you've had five English teachers at year nine because people are agency stuff.
00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:06.720
There may be Irish, some are backpackers who are just moving through the system.
00:14:06.879 --> 00:14:08.799
It is extremely disheartening.
00:14:08.960 --> 00:14:24.159
And now we're seeing three years of that, and that is now being reflected in what's happening in the senior college as well, with regard to attitude and behavior, with regard to aspiration, and with regard to what's the value of education.
00:14:24.480 --> 00:14:25.759
Oh Victor.
00:14:26.960 --> 00:14:34.559
Five English teachers in a single year, and the students can feel the instability even when they can't name it.
00:14:34.720 --> 00:14:40.960
It shows up in attendance, in attitude, and in whether they bother turning up at all.
00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:45.919
So you see, my mate Tom, he didn't leave because he stopped caring.
00:14:46.159 --> 00:14:53.519
He left because caring, when you got nothing left to care with, eventually becomes physically impossible.
00:14:53.919 --> 00:15:10.559
And every Tom walks out and takes with them years of knowledge about specific kids, specific families, specific moments, and the culture takes a huge hit, and the spiral goes another turn.
00:15:11.200 --> 00:15:14.240
So here's what's been sitting with me though.
00:15:14.480 --> 00:15:25.519
All of that, all those numbers, Tom's story, Victor's inward spiral, and the system's response has basically been to keep asking the same question, it's always asked.
00:15:26.000 --> 00:15:35.519
Think about that last PD day you sat through, the last initiative your school rolled out, the last thing leadership asks you to do differently.
00:15:35.679 --> 00:15:37.919
What was the question underneath it?
00:15:38.639 --> 00:15:46.879
Nine times out of ten, it was some version of how do we get students to behave well enough that learning can happen?
00:15:47.200 --> 00:15:53.039
PBL frameworks, classroom management training, and all of this has real value.
00:15:53.200 --> 00:16:00.960
I'm not knocking any of it, but it's all built around managing behavior well enough that learning might occur.
00:16:01.200 --> 00:16:10.320
And if you're in a leadership role, the question is usually how do we retrain stuff, reduce disruption, and keep the data looking reasonable?
00:16:10.879 --> 00:16:15.759
Also, real and necessary, but I keep coming back to this.
00:16:15.919 --> 00:16:18.320
I think it's the wrong first question.
00:16:19.120 --> 00:16:26.720
Earlier this year, I sent a study out through my LinkedIn network, called it the Why Behind Educators Who Thrive.
00:16:26.960 --> 00:16:28.559
Just open questions.
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What does genuine learning feel like?
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What gets in its way and what keeps you in the work?
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No framework, no hints.
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Six people responded.
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I had responders from Montenegro, New Hampshire, the Netherlands, Alabama, Australian Capital Territory, and Germany.
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Twenty to thirty-five years education background each.
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So six people from four continents, none of them knowing about Thrive.
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And what came back really stopped me.
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Because they are all describing the same problem.
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Different systems, different countries, different contexts, same frustration underneath.
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So let's have a look at the field.
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I had a secondary teacher and education consultant from Montenegro with 30 years in education tell me the hardest part is not teaching itself.
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It is knowing that there are children, teachers, and even leaders I cannot fully protect from systems that are not functioning well.
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A teacher and coach and former head of school from the Netherlands with over 35 years experience in education noted that students' well-being is in such a strong focus that we are missing the mark.
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We need to start with teacher well-being and support, not just words, put things into action.
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And then our system leader from the Australian Capital Territory, with over 35 years of experience and overseeing over 14 different schools in an area, they noted that the gap between what we know about how people sustain themselves in high-pressure roles and what we actually do about it structurally, we have the research, we largely ignore it.
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Three people, three different continents, same sentence underneath it all.
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We know what works.
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So the problem is we're just not designing for it.
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So the question this series is trying to answer is a different one.
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Not how do we get students to behave well enough that learning can happen, but how do we design learning and skills that are actually worth showing up for?
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For students and for the toms and for the victor, and for everyone standing in that inward spiral trying to hold the culture together with both hands.
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You can't manage your way to genuine learning, and you can't keep good teachers by asking them to absorb the cost of a system that was never designed to sustain them.
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Alright, let me describe two classrooms.
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You've been in both of them, and I promise you have, because you don't need a checklist to know which one you're walking into.
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You can feel it from the corridor.
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Students are on task, class dojo points mounting up high, assessment data's adequate, nothing to flag.
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Looks like learning.
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But there's something absent.
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The room is functioning, it's just not alive.
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The students are there in body and somewhere else entirely in everything that actually matters.
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And here's what keeps me up at night.
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They've learned to perform engagement convincingly enough that the system doesn't notice the difference.
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And if we're being honest, we've probably all taught that room at some point.
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I know I have, and more times than I'd like to admit.
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There's the second room.
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It's noisier, the good kind of noisy.
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Students leaning forward, actually disagreeing with each other about something in a way that suggests they care about the answer.
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Someone near the window drawing.
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You can tell it belongs to the lesson by the focus on that student's face.
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And the teacher, well, they're just at the edge of it.
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Not running it from the front, not inside it.
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They're watching, adjusting, and asking the occasional question that sends people back into genuine thinking.
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No one in that room is looking at the clock.
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So the system leader from the Australian Capital Territory, he noted this.
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When students forget someone is watching, that's the clearest signal.
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The task has enough substance to hold them, the room feels safe enough to explore, and the teacher has become unnecessary for a moment.
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Same school, same curriculum, same behavior program, same PD days, no shade.
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We've all sat through it.
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So what's different is the design, the specific learnable decisions a teacher makes before the lesson, during it, and about how to create conditions for genuine learning rather than the convincing performance of it.
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They named what breaks the second room, what turns it back into the first one with painful precision, workload, staffing churn, the experience walking out.
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The door every time another Tom calls it quits.
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Michelle's specialist school is trying to build the second room with staff that have never seen it modeled by someone who's been teaching for more than two years.
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And that's not a teacher quality problem.
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That's what the inward spiral does.
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My teeny weenie global network named the same interrupters from a classroom direction.
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Pace, compliance, culture, and administrative load.
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New Hampshire, Australia's capital territory, and Germany.
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None of them comparing notes.
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Which, given they're spread across continents, they definitely weren't.
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This is not a teacher skill problem.
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It's a design problem.
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And design problems have design solutions.
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And a matter of fact, Thrive arrives as something obvious, not something being pitched.
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So the framework this series is built on is called Thrive.
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T-H-R-I-V-E.
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There's six conditions trust and belonging, high expectations and meaning, relevance and purpose, identity and narrative, voice and agency, and engagement through flow.
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One episode per element, and before you groan at another acronym, I get it, education loves an acronym, I know.
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I want to tell you where it comes from.
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Three completely separate research traditions.
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The early years learning framework from here in Australia, Chig sent me Hiley's flow theory, and Deki and Ryan's self-determination theory.
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Arrived at the same conditions from completely different directions, different researches, different decades, different starting points, but boom, the same answer.
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When that happens, when independent traditions land in the same place, you stop calling it a theory and start thinking maybe this is just true about how people actually work.
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And then there were six educators from my teeny weenie network.
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None of them knew about the Thrive.
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I asked open-ended questions and they described trust, relevance, identity, voice, and flow without any of that language being near the question I asked.
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Again, the system leader in the Australian Capital Territory mentioned ask your student in the corridor why they're studying or what they studied this morning, and the honest answer is usually because it's on the curriculum, or there's just dead silence.
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That's not a student problem, it's a design problem.
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I agree.
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There's trust, recognition, and relational presence.
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The T element in Thrive, confirmed from a completely different research direction.
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One principal, Paul, put the urgency of it about as plainly as anyone could.
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So visibility, getting into staff offices, getting into staff classrooms, and getting into the staff room, always talking to staff, but just as importantly, also listening to staff.
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Wise words, Paul.
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Six people from my global network, five Victorian principals, three research traditions, all of them arriving at the same conditions.
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Thrive isn't here to replace what your school already has.
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PBL really matters, and the ATEL AI TSL standards still really matter.
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Think of it this way: PBL creates the room.
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Thrive merely furnishes it.
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ATEL describes the standards.
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Thrive explains why the standard works, when it does, and what's going on when it doesn't.
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And here's the thing that connects all of this.
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The conditions that protect student flow are the same as the conditions that protect teacher flow.
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Which means a system that consumes its teachers is it's failing its students right now, today, in every class that got cancelled this week.
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And a school that deliberately designs for belonging for staff and students creates a culture that functions as its own retention mechanism.
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That's not soft, that's structural.
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So that Latrobe report conclusion says it plainly.
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What has been missing is a policy response adequate to the multi-layered nature of the problem and the coordinated commitment to act.
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Now, I've thought about Tom a lot since that conference corridor.
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About what I'd say to him if I had the proper chance.
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Not between sessions, not with a cold coffee, but actually face to face with a sit-down and over some time.
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I think I'd say it wasn't the profession didn't care about you.
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It just never stopped long enough to ask the right question.
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And the weight of that landed on you personally.
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The way it lands on so many good teachers.
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Man, I felt it myself.
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You can only last so long.
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Eventually it just becomes too heavy.
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I think about Victor 2, holding his school together for 12 consecutive terms of shortage, watching the culture erode, watching the spiral turn.
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He's still there, still trying to build belonging inside a system that keeps removing the conditions for it.
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In this series, it's my attempt reflecting on my own schooling experience and my own teaching experience and my own leading experience.
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Then there's those six educators from around the world, five Victorian principles, three research traditions to ask the right question properly.
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How do we design schools that are worth showing up for?
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For the kids in the first room who've learned to look like they're learning, for every Tom, and for every Victor.
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The system leader from the Australian Capital Territory stated this if my teaching practice were fully aligned with my intent, it would look less efficient but more effective.
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Less efficient, more effective.
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I keep coming back to that line.
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In my nearly 30 years in education, I've sat through a lot of initiatives that promised efficiency.
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I'm yet to meet a student who said the most meaningful thing that happened to them at school was the efficiency.
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Look, episode two is next.
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Tears for trust.
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And trust, it turns out, is where everything else starts or doesn't.
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Grow your flow in glow.
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Where great teachers learn.
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Building futures, helping life to try.
