Hi there, teachers. Welcome to the Unteachables Podcast. I'm your host, Claire English, and I am just a fellow teacher, a toddler mama, and a big old behaviour nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behaviour and classroom manage has left us playing crowd control, which is not something I subscribe to because we're not dancers when teachers. So listen in as I walk you through the game-changing strategies, and I mean the things that we can actually do in action in classrooms that'll allow you to lean into your beautiful values as a compassionate educator and feel empowered to run your room with a little more calm and dare I say it, a lot less chaos. I will see you in the episode. Hello, hello, and welcome back again to the Unteachables Podcast. I am still here at EduTech 2026, and at the moment I'm sitting across from the wonderful Andrea Vandenbohl, a deputy principal at Northam Grammar School, where she has spent the last five years leading initiatives that integrate well-being science and character education into every aspect of school life. Andrea's work centers on the belief that educating young people is about far more than academic achievement, which is what I like to hear. Through her leadership of student leadership programs, character education and curriculum innovation, she has helped shape a school culture where well-being, character, and student growth are not treated as separate programs, but as essential parts of the educational experience. Outside of school, Andrea shares honest reflections on leadership through her blog, The Heels Deputy, which I'm really excited to really dig into after this, exploring what everyday experiences can teach us about leading
well. I am so excited for this discussion. And you have so many values that are so central to what I do as well. So welcome to the Unteachables Podcast. Thank you. This is very exciting. Thanks for having me. Excellent. Uh, before we dive into all of the things that you do about leadership and character education and educating the whole child, I'd love to start by giving you the opportunity just to tell all of us a little bit about yourself. What brought you to EduTech this year? What are you most passionate about? Just give us like a rundown of who you are and what you do.
SPEAKER_03Wow. I always find this question the trickiest. Um yeah, my name is Andrea. I'm uh I've been in education now for only 16 years. I came into education as a second career choice. Um before that, I was a professional musical theatre performer. So I performed here in Australia and in London for many, many years, uh, singing, dancing, acting. But uh as usually happens at a particular pinnacle in one's life, a decision needs to be made about whether or not this is sustainable or whether or not we need to choose another path. And in conversations with my husband, uh, we decided that I probably needed to hang up the tapshoes and find another career. And because I'd already done an education degree, it was um it was pretty seamless going back into that space. I actually am grateful that I did have that career journey first because going into education as an experienced performer in uh the area that I was teaching, music and drama, gave me a lot more, I think, gravitas, but also a lot more grounded capacity to teach
from a place of experience rather than from a place of textbook learning. Um so I've really enjoyed my journey through music and teaching. I've been in leadership now for about 13, 14 years. Uh I've got thrown in it from my first job. Baptism number five pretty much is my career label. Uh, every job has been thrown in the deep end and see if you can swim. Um, but I still teach, even now as deputy principal, I'm still a senior music teacher and I'm involved in the school musicals uh and um do I do amateur theatre out on the side just to keep that passion alive. But yeah, I'm I really love teaching the next generation about what's what's happening, especially in that art space as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's awesome. Uh I tell like teachers who are coming into the profession as like a second career, they always really worry about being behind or not, you know. And I always tell them like the amount of experience that you're bringing into the classroom, that kind of like I went straight from university, you know, into the into the classroom and I was a very young teacher and that had its own kind of challenges. Yeah. Um, but to come in when you've already got this wealth of experience, you can't downplay how it's so valuable, how incredible that is for you.
SPEAKER_03And then people the personal maturity, the the person you are at 30, for example, to the person you are at 21, they are vastly different people. And just having that faith in yourself, I think, is the most valuable thing when you're first coming in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, as a teacher at 22, my prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed yet. So I made a lot of mistakes in the classroom with especially teaching students who are three years younger than me. You know? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And I look at our new graduate teachers and I think you've got it hard. And we need to support them as much as we possibly can.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that you're particularly passionate about, which was music to my ears when I read your bio, when I learned a little bit about you, is about educating the whole child. And it is a phrase that we hear quite often, but it can mean kind of different things to different people. And it's a bit of a buzzword that can get thrown around sometimes without a lot of like substance to support it. Um, what does educating the whole child actually look like in schools and classrooms?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it is it is a funny concept, and you're right, a lot of people profess that they are teaching the whole child. I don't think I've ever heard of a school saying we're really committed to teaching half the child. Yeah, of course, we're trying to teach the whole child, but I think what it really means at its heart is that we're not just teaching from the neck up. We're not just teaching for academic uh endeavor, we're teaching to grow a human being to succeed and flourish in a life after year 12, basically. So I think obviously it's extremely important for us to ensure that academic drive goes hand in hand with well-being and pastoral growth and personal growth. You know, how does a child's ability to show resilience, how does a child's ability to um talk about their struggles, to take risk and fail and step back up again, go hand in hand with academic success? And all of all of the data, any of us, anyone in any school would very much be able to say,
even if they didn't know this off the top of their heads, if they were to look at a particular child in their class, the child that is known, the child that feels bel a sense of belonging, the child who knows that they're cared for, that is seen, that child's gonna do better. Yeah. Because they're feeling safe and they're feeling known, heard, and that that safety gives them that sense that I can fail and it's gonna be okay. I'm gonna learn from that and I'm gonna step forward. But the child who's unseen, and this is why I'm so passionate about it, is because I was one of those unseen kids at school. I fell through the cracks. I was one of 250 in a year group. Nobody knew who I was. I was truanting and nobody knew, nobody called home to see how I was. There was just a zero care factor. So, of course, I didn't thrive in high school. I didn't find my mojo in education until I graduated. Note if if if every child is seen and we're building that person, understanding who they are as individuals, then that academic growth is going to go hand in hand with that. And I think schools are a place where children are discovering themselves. That sense of discovery. And it's it's happening in maths classrooms, it's happening on the sporting field, it's happening in in the back of an assembly when they're listening to a speech. You know, we we are preparing kids and giving them marks and certificates so that we can open doors for them. But in order for a child to feel confident to walk through that door, we've also got to grow character. And I think that's why it's so vitally important to me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so many things that you said kind of stuck out because we do say, we do say educating the whole child, but when you said we're not just teaching from the neck up, like I think that's really powerful for teachers to even hear. It's like, oh, hang on a second, yeah, you're so right. And thinking about this like um school as like an ecosystem, I guess. Like they're going to all of these different subjects, they're getting something from every single one. It's not done in isolation, and it really is something that we need to be considering overall. And I had the same experience in school where I wasn't seen, I didn't belong. There was a time where I was sitting at like four o'clock in the afternoon, I didn't want to go home, and they're like, just get you know, like there was no like viewing that child as an entity of themselves.
SPEAKER_03Like back when we were at school, 80s, 90s, early thousands, the words character education did not exist. Yeah, schools were not seen the way that they're seen today. And parents look at schools today as institutions where the child is being raised, yeah, not just being educated. Yeah, um, and so as teachers, we've had to reform what a school actually is and and what are we actually trying to provide?
SPEAKER_01Very rapidly as well. Like you think about like I I was in high school in the early 2000s. Student well-being, like all of these things just weren't a thing. It was just perform academically. If you're not, then like you know, that very like punitive approach to everything, and there must be something wrong with you as a a person or an or an academic, or you know, like there's something wrong with you if you're not able to come into school and you know, just get a job.
SPEAKER_03The school counselor was taboo, yeah. They were hidden in the back corner of a dusty corridor, and if you had to go there, things were bad. Things were grim, yeah. Yeah, and that's not the case these days.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it just it's really interesting because like that means uh teachers have had to really quickly adjust, and teachers are still working in the profession that we're teaching in those days, and they've had to experience so much, you know.
SPEAKER_03Well, my argument as well is that universities aren't teaching our university graduates what it is to be a teacher in 2026. Yes. And I've got graduate teachers having to deal with kids that are coming home from home, and you know, there's alcoholism and there's domestic violence. And you know, a 21-year-old graduate who's learned about curriculum and pedagogical practice and how to write an assessment task is not prepared for that. Yeah. It's hard. Yeah, that's something I'm really passionate about.
SPEAKER_01Like there needs to be a shift in teacher education because things have moved forwards so rapidly. Uh, you've spoken about the idea that school culture, not just curriculum, shapes the people that students become. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? Why do you believe that culture matters so much?
SPEAKER_03Well, culture can make or break an institution. Students they spend so many of their years listening to what we say, but they spend every minute watching what we do. And they're sponges. And so if you're a school that's sprouting values such as kindness, if students are looking at the staff and they're and listening to the way in which staff are talking to each other, which does not emulate kindness, that's what they're learning, not our values phrases up on a poster on a wall. If we're saying we want, we really value courage as one of our values at the school, but when a student fails and tries to come and have a conversation about it, um, and the teacher sort of talks more about the failure than they do about the growth, we're not demonstrating an ability for students to feel courage.
I think yeah, culture has to come from the top down. Yeah, staff have to be, I think more importantly, emulating the culture rather than speaking it. Yeah, it comes through the unspoken action. So culture absolutely has to ensure that we are supporting again the growth of the whole child. You and I would know this. Any teacher or even any adult out there would know that I don't remember what my year nine geography teacher taught me in the classroom, but I absolutely remember how he made me feel in the classroom. And that's what culture is. And that's what we have to make sure that we're we're there for the kids, with the kids, learning with the kids and and emulating what we say we value. Yeah, 24-7.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yeah, kids don't don't do what we say, they they follow what we what they say.
SPEAKER_03They make it 100%. So yeah, I had a we have a quote, um, or at least in in my senior leadership team, um, in the past, we had a quote that says, Curriculum helps students learn, but culture helps students grow. So you have to make sure that the culture is strong.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love that. Character education is a huge part of your work. Which I'm just I was so excited to read this because it's not something that I hear people talking about a lot. What are some of the character traits, dispositions, or habits that you believe that schools should be intentionally and strategically developing in young people?
SPEAKER_03I actually find this an incredibly hard question, and the reason why is that character education has to come from understanding your environment. For example, in my previous context, I spent five years talking about character rigorously, researching it, putting together the language and the vernacular that would surround it, creating a values table, looking at methodologies of how it could be implemented in everyday practice. And at no point did we actually talk to a child and ask for their opinion on what do they feel that they need. And then I moved into my current context, and right on the back of COVID, character education had to become a completely different thing because kids had been in an isolated environment for so long,
they came back into a school context, they were three years regressed in their capacity to form interpersonal relationships, but five years progressed in their capacity to navigate online spaces. So there was this massive dichotomy in what a child needed to help their personal growth. We had year sevens that we're having to raise for as year four students in those interpersonal relationship building skills, but we had them in year 12, first year university level in knowing how to navigate that online space. And so character education had to suit that environment at that time. So whenever someone says to me, What are the values? Um, I think you need to at the very beginning of every year look at every single one of your year groups, look at the dynamic of that cohort and adjust the needs of learning and personal growth for that year group. It has to be bespoke every year. Now that doesn't mean reinventing the wheel, you will have resources and tools at your disposal. But it has, you're not going to teach resilience to a bunch of kids who are probably the most resilient kids in your school.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03You might teach something a little bit different, like um perseverance or respectful relationships, something that they might necessarily be having issues with. But to make sure that I do actually answer your question, I think there are probably five or so that should be non-negotiable. Um, and for me, they are courage. Courage has to be the first thing. The world is changing so fast it's gonna change furiously again in the next 50 years. Jobs are coming that don't even exist yet, and we're trying to educate for a world that they don't even know, that we don't even know is out there yet. So they have to be courageous because they're gonna have to pivot. And that that takes courage. So courage has to be one of them. Perseverance is another one for me, and that's big because in the the world that our young people and even us live in now, instant gratification is a massive part of their life. You know, you can get you you want a meal, it lands at your door, you want a movie, you stream it, it's there in three seconds. Um, they information is accessible like that. Um, so but the things that are actually worthwhile in life, like really strong relationships, or um the capacity to um oh sorry, I've just lost my my train of thought. Things that yeah, so things that are really worthwhile take time. You see your relationships, your um capacity to really understand, not just acquire information. That's where perseverance has to come in. Another big one for me would be empathy. I think um that's in a world where everything is digitized and we are almost told to promote our voice and our opinion as as much as possible in online spaces, we are taking less time as a human race to actually seek to understand. Um, and just making assumptions about people's statements straight up. And that empathy piece is being lost by a lot of our young people. Well, not even developed, I would say, in some of our young people, because they haven't had to develop it, they haven't seen that as something. So teaching our kids how to empathize, how to actually listen, to stop, listen, understand what's being said, and then respond, um, rather than just quick firing back. Um, so that would be another one for me. Humility is always a big one. Uh, you some of the best leaders I've worked for are ridiculously intelligent, have all the knowledge of the world, but are so beautifully humble in this in the way that they give space for others to voice an opinion or to to look at a at something in a different way, and that those leaders then are humble enough to go, you know what? I I can see it can work my way, and it probably would work my way, but let's let's try this. Love that. Yeah, love it. And we want to teach our kids to have that humility. Don't think about yourselves as often. Um, think about another's perspective as well. Yeah, and then I think the other one would be not just for students, but also for schools to take on is responsibility. I want, I really want our kids, and I I say this to my pastoral team as well, to change the narrative from what am I entitled to to what can I contribute.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_03Because so many kids think, well, I I should be getting this. I I've earned this, I deserve this. And instead, you can actually get to those things if you think about how you're going to contribute to the situation first. All right, give and then take. So I would say they're probably the strongest values.
SPEAKER_01I love that. I love that. Um, and one of the areas that I'm particularly fascinated in is how you track that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You've taken something quite um subjective, I guess, in a classroom setting, like you know, very human teacher to student. And you have, you know, managed to kind of think about how that would kind of happen. Because schools are very good at tracking academic progress. Um, but how do we begin measuring things like character and leadership and agency and well-being and all of those things that relate to the whole child rather than just the neck up stuff?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, 100%. Uh, you're absolutely right. We are brilliant at tracking academic data. We we have dashboards for dashboards. Yeah, we are so good at it. And the funny thing is, people have said this to me quite a bit you can't track character, that's so much harder to measure. And I always come back to them with the same question, which is are they harder to measure, or do you simply spend less time defining what success looks like?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03If you have a collection of success criteria, you can measure anything. Yeah, you can absolutely measure anything. So uh what shaped my thinking around this was um McChesney and Covey, the four disciplines of execution, uh, talk a lot about measurement. And it's from a business um model, it's it's not educationally um driven necessarily, but it works. So you've got to have your wildly important. What are you really trying to achieve in character? What do you want for our children uh for our kids? How do
you want them to graduate? What do you want them to become? Yeah, and you create a set of things. I want them to become um confident, I want them to become um uh uh strong in their voice, I want them to become more I have moral courage, all of these sorts of things. And then you have to set yourself what are the benchmarks for success in that area. So for things like, for example, um if leadership is important to us, are the criteria um demonstrating leadership, taking initiative, uh following through on communication, assisting others, uh if they're our criteria and you can scale it, we'll say let's and use something basic like a traffic light system. Red, they're not really achieving very well. Amber, they're they're doing quite okay. Green, they're flying in that section. And and it can moderate and change depending on age bracket, but it just allows you to sort of track where they're going. Now see, imagine if you were sitting in a parent-teacher interview as a teacher, and you you're a maths teacher. I'm not, so I don't know why I've gone with that. But anyway, you're a maths teacher and you're talking about you know, they're getting 80 point something or other in trig and they're getting um 90 something in in algebraic uh equations, you can't you're not then gonna say, and uh, and for empathy, they're getting an 83.7. Of course not. Yeah, but if you've got a dashboard in front of you that sort of shows you a color scheme, hot, medium, and and and cold, where a kid is tracking in the things that you've targeted, then you can say, and in terms of their personal growth, in my class, I can see that in in terms of taking initiative, they're doing they're doing really, really well. But in terms of having the courage to ask questions when they're not when they're failing things, that they're not doing very well. And they've got they can show the parents a a traffic light system on on what's happening in terms of their personal learning attributes in a classroom setting. That is so much more powerful. The second anyone sees something in a scorecard or a dashboard, it becomes tangible. Yeah, if you've got it in data, you can use it. We talk about well-being and we talk about it a lot, and we talk about it well, but it's just talk. Yeah, we don't have anything tangible to go with, oh, look, yeah, in the back of our minds, we know that kid's maybe struggling a little bit, but what does that actually look like? Yeah, they're not struggling in everything, they're struggling in some components. So if you can actually have it documented and teachers and pastoral leaders and what have you are on a weekly or fortnightly, having a little meeting to just check, cross reference where the E7 cohort are at. Oh, this kid's in a red, they were in Amber last week. What's happened? It makes um making sure you know that child and taking care of the child so much more powerful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. When you were saying, like, it's just that we don't spend time doing it, I flashed back to a meeting in the English faculty that I I had years and years and years ago. And I think we spent an hour and a half creat creating a criteria for an like an English assessment just for one particular like strand of the criteria. So we're spending the time creating this stuff. Yeah. But it is all academic stuff. Absolutely. And then the discussions that we have, you know, oh, but like this is what it looks like, or this, you know, this is what an A looks like, this is what, you know. And like the rigor in that discussion. Yeah. But we could be doing it for other people.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and our our rigor, our conversation this year is centered around engagement. What does engagement look like for a child? And that might be attendance for some. It might be involvement in co-curricular activities for others. It may it might be a child that is uh never doing their home learning or not turning up to class with the right equipment. It could be a kid that's never putting their hand up in class to ask questions or to offer an opinion. Yeah. And if you can target and see every kid and what their their deficits are and what their growth areas are, you you're on the route to success there. Because if you can if we can tack into those things and get those things right, then your academics, as I said earlier, that that comes along with it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. That's a huge school initiative, isn't it? Massive. Like it has to be like you have to do a whole school thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Student voice is another area that you're very passionate about. Um, now that I know that your background is in like theatre and all of that stuff. What role should student voice play in shaping school culture? And how do we move beyond tokenistic consultation to genuine student agency? Because I have worked in schools before and seen student voice be, you know, placed in the important basket, but then it's like, okay, well, let's get these three students in and have a chit-chat with them, but we're actually not like it's just really kind of face value tokenistic. We've asked the student body, so like we're all good.
SPEAKER_03Yep, 100%. Yeah. In fact, yesterday my editech presentation was about student voice as the engine of character development. You're absolutely right. We we play pay lip service to student voice. You if you look at almost any school at their strategic plan, student voice is in there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03100%. It's in our frameworks next to well-being and belonging. Uh we talk about
it all the time. But I think we've massively um missed the mark. I think student voice is being confused with student expression. We're giving kids a microphone, but we're not giving them anything to talk into. Same with mathematics, the same with English, the same with history, music. We teach the content and we scaffold and we make sure that we're breaking it down so that kids will understand the process. We're not doing that with voice. So we keep saying to kids, oh, you know, if you see an injustice, you need to speak up. If you see a kid being bullied, don't be a bystander, don't be a bystander, be an upstander. But have we ever actually taught a kid how to do that? Because the courage does from that doesn't come from the big moments. Yeah, it comes from practicing it in a safe, small environment. So a student voice has to actually have an outcome. There has to be something that comes from the end of it. I think it's vitally important in character formation because students need to find the confidence to be able to talk about these things or about anything, to know that their voice has a purpose, even if the outcome is no, we're not going to do that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So, yes, we've got things like SRCs. And I think the reason I'm so passionate about this is because I got it wrong for so many years. I was one of those people going, but we we sent out a survey.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I've asked the kids, surely this is great. So yeah, but what's come of the survey? What actually tangibly has come? And I think most if most of us walked into any school right now and said randomly to a year nine student, what's changed because of something you said, they'd look at us blankly. And it's not a criticism, it's just a diagnosis. We're not doing it right. So what does it look like? It can look like a whole bunch of things. Co-construction might be one of them. But with kids in a classroom, have them set the class norms with you. Not you don't set them for them. That's what are we going to accept as our classroom norm here? And then they've had the voice, and that becomes the benchmark by which we perform. When looking at an assessment, get the kids to set out the criteria for success with you. What are the outcomes going to be? Here's the here's the syllabus, kids. Here's what we've been learning. This is the assessment task we need to do. What's what's going to be our measure of success? You'll actually be surprised at how more rigorous they'd make it than sometimes we do. They set the bar high. So if they do that, and if they then genuinely get marked on the outcomes that they have created, they're seeing that their voice matters. The worst thing we can do is ask for their voice and then ignore it. Because then they realize that their voice is only performative. Yeah. And we don't want that. Some other little things are in your pastoral well-being's uh sessions at schools, you can do things like micro-curry traps, where you give them a relatable situation, um, like, you know, um if there's an injustice happening at the school, what what would how would you stand up to it? And just get them to do it in little groups and practice the narrative, rehearse the narrative, and then give each other feedback. And this you could have said this better. And they just get that courage to be able to just even just speak the words to begin with, because a lot of them don't even wouldn't even know what the first thing is to say to stop an injustice.
SPEAKER_01It actually reminds me of um like we're obviously mandatory reporters as educators, and we get training on what to do if we see something, how to respond. But we're expecting 12-year-olds to do it with yeah, without without any support to do that. And exactly, you know, we need training to be able to do those things. And it's music to my ears hearing you talk about these things being embedded into the teaching and learning because they are never in isolation. No, everything works together. So even the act of co-constructing a success criteria for a task, yeah. Like, hey, we're gonna write a paragraph today. I'm gonna let's what is a good paragraph? Like, what do we need to do today to like tick that box into it?
SPEAKER_03You're gonna get 10 out of 10 if you do this. Exactly. Created that together. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's wonderful. Your school's not gonna burn down if you do that, they're not gonna ruin the HOC if you do that. No one's gonna die. Like it there does come a little bit of courage with that as adults as start-off. Yeah, we have to have the courage to say, you know what, what can I actually relinquish control over today and hand to the child? And if they start to see that their voice matters, even in micro moments, that starts to build their courage to speak up more frequently.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I have this um resource actually, and I found it really hard to get whole class engagement, like 30 kids in a room, you're like, hey, who knows the answer? You maybe get like the same three hands up. So I created this like um this slide deck, and it was like um ways to I can't remember what it's called now, ways to engage, but I had like um, or say it with, and then I had like eight boxes and it's like through a sticky note slam, through a whiteboard flip. So you can choose a category, and then it takes you to a prompt for every student to like say their answer. No, there you go. And it reminds me of those kinds of strategies where or the whiteboards. Yeah, like write your answer the whiteboard every hold your whiteboard up. Like you're giving, you're gonna giving students options for how they want to express themselves as well, and you know, how they want to engage, and you know, it gives you immediate feedback as the teacher, like, oh, okay, like that's what students think a success criteria is for and it is for a paragraph or that's that's something I need to interact with. Isn't that interesting? Or or that's how they want to engage in the conversation, or it just gives us immediate feedback on our young people too.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, but there's a plethora of strategies that that you can utilize around that, but you have to be active in it, and you actually have to want to hear the voice. Yes, yeah. And another another big thing for me is make um, and I I've done this with the SRC, make the SRC actually a viable entity. Um, and the way that you can do that quite simply is have a student voice tracking board, a visible board somewhere in your school where student initiatives come to the SRC or has come to whoever is looking after that, and the initiative is put up there, and then the outcome is placed next to it. Even if the outcome is no, uh we haven't gone ahead with this, and this is the reason why. So, in the very least, they can see I have been heard, the executive have responded, and they've explained to me why not. And the things that they have that have changed as a result, yeah, we've done this because you said this. If students can physically see what their voice has changed, that gives the gratify the well, not just graph uh gratification, but it gives them the power to know, okay, I can speak up, I'm not going to be ignored.
SPEAKER_01I think that's really powerful as developing students for future employees and employers and modeling like you're allowed to have a voice here, and if you're not if you're not being heard in a workplace, if you know, like if you're just being silenced, or and they'll be able to look out for those things as well. Exactly. Which is pretty powerful. Yeah, it is. Like when we talk about preparing students for the real world, like this stuff is also It's the most important.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Academic endeavor create helps this child create a living, but character and voice helps them create a life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And that's what we want.
SPEAKER_01Do you think teachers might be a little bit afraid to start um relinquishing some of that like leadership in front of the classroom because of like behavior? Obviously, it's really behaviour might be.
SPEAKER_03I think there are a lot of a lot of us uh still feel sad, even some of us who are very experienced still feel that we're supposed to be the power the holders of all wisdom. Yes. Um and it takes a a great deal of humility to be able to, in the first instance, just say, you know what, I don't know the answer to that, let's look it up together. That's the I think the first step I'd say to teachers, try that once, even if you do know the answer, just try it. Yeah, you the kids aren't gonna go, oh the teacher's an idiot. The kids are gonna go, oh cool, let's give it a let's see if we can teach something to the teacher. Um, and then the next step from that is and and it can be really small. If if you're too afraid to give away some control in regards to criteria outcome, then do something a little like empower a student to close a discussion. Say, I
I'm gonna choose you today, James. Can you wrap us up? We've just been talking about this. Initiate a conversation for us all to engage for two minutes to discuss what we've just talked about. Even micro little reps like that will a give the teacher confidence to start handing back a little bit, but also make the kids aware of the fact that they are an important part of the classroom. They're not just compliance people.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, again, like just sitting there with the top of their heads open, ready to be the receivers of knowledge because I mean, you can know any, like you get the click of a button, you can ask any question, you can get told by Google AI, like you know.
SPEAKER_03Well, it's like compliance, compliance is what so many schools want. Um, you know, we want kids that are sitting quietly and behaving and listening. Yeah, but compliance is corrosive for character development. And I'm not saying I'm not advocating for chaos.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely not. But chaos, I'm sorry, compliance does not equal um like intrinsic motivation or learning. Absolutely not. You could have a class that still looks compliant on the outside, but they're they're they're learning and they're motivated and they're excited.
SPEAKER_03Because they know they are matter, they matter and their voice matters in that space.
SPEAKER_01But if you're using strategies that are like more power over and more punitive just for the goal of compliance, yeah, you're not going to get the best from your students anyway.
SPEAKER_03Exactly right.
SPEAKER_01Uh we've already spoken about some really tangible things that teachers can do to develop the whole child. But if every teacher listening right now made one small shift tomorrow to better educate the whole child, what kind of shifts would that teacher be able to make?
SPEAKER_03Oh, there are so many here. I think stop asking the question, how is the student performing? Yeah. And start asking the question, who is the student becoming? I think the second we take that performance element out of it, it's and I'm not saying academic endeavor isn't important. Of course it is. But if that's the only thing that we're caring about as a measure of student success, we've got the game wrong. Yeah. Really wrong. So you can still look at successful performance through the lens of who are they becoming? What sort of a person has walked through my classroom door today? What sort of a person has behaved during that room? What are the dispositions they have emulated? What have they shown me? What do I wish they've shown me that they haven't?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And if you you target
the child rather than the the outcome from the brain, you're going to have a much a much better relationship with the child.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And when the child feels they've got a safe relationship, they're gonna want to work their butt off for you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But secondly, you're going to have a much better understanding of what they need to do in order to meet meet that performative success. So change the narrative. Um, and I would also going back to that student voice piece, if every teacher could walk into their classroom at the beginning of next week or just into school, whatever their environment is, and just say, what is one thing I can let go of to this week and give back to the child? What is one thing I don't have to control?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And just let it happen. See what happens. The worst that's gonna happen is it fails. And if it fails, awesome. Let's have a chat about why and what we could do better next time. If they could just do those two things, I think. Yeah, uh, I think they'll feel a a bit of bravery come from that. Um, and a little maybe a little bit more excitement about what's really possible in their classrooms.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love that. And we we it is it does take a bit of vulnerability to do that. I was always somebody that needed to fill every single silence, yeah, because I was so anxious. Like if I'm not feeling this silence and the move the lesson's not going to move forward, and I'm opening up space for disruption, or I felt like I needed to hold so tightly to every single moment in the classroom. And it was only when I started to let go and relinquish a little bit of that, yeah. And you know, it is great to scan it. It's really scary. It took a lot of courage um and a bit of like a lot more experience as well to do that, but it can be so transformative for your practice and the students.
SPEAKER_03And I I am one, so it's weird that I say this, but I feel for teachers because we are on show 24 hours, well, not 24 hours a day, but you get my drift. Then the day the second we walk into the school, to the second we leave the school at the end of the day, we're on show. Yeah, we're performing constantly. A, it's exhausting. Yes, it's exhausting to be on that much. Yeah, and and B, it you just you you have a fear because we people don't go into education for the money, they go into education for the love of what we do. And so there's a there's a heart that comes to it, and you don't want to get it wrong. So there it does take a long time for us to sort of go, you know what, sometimes it's okay for me to get it wrong because I'm human, and we also want to teach the kids to be human as well. Yeah, and sometimes being vulnerable with our kids appropriately so also teaches them that that vulnerability is what builds strong relationships and what's builds success in a classroom.
SPEAKER_01I've said to students before, well, that was a flop. Yeah. I've said 100% that didn't work, did it?
SPEAKER_03They're like, yeah, miss. I've walked into a classroom and started teaching year 11 music to year twelves. And they've looked at me and I'm going, oh god, I'm teaching them. Yep, yeah, miss, nice job, mate. I'll be back. Gotta go get my other books.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a deeply human profession by nature. Yeah. Andrew, it has been such a pleasure speaking to you. I want you just to just give your blog a little bit of a plug, please.
SPEAKER_03Okay. So yeah, that well, the healed deputy um comes out of two. It's healed H-E-E-L-E-D, but then I've crossed out the second E in the f in the first half to make it an A. And there's a reason for that. So healed as in, I've healed myself and I wear high heels every single day. Um and the kids at school actually comment on my shoes every day because I have quite an eclectic um.
SPEAKER_00I'm actually really impressed. I bought I never do when I bought these Freditech, and my feet were killing, and I've got my Birkenstocks in the car. God bless you.
SPEAKER_03I do have my walking shoes for the train, but but yeah, so I um I walked the Camino Trail in Spain, sorry, in Italy last year, um by myself. And I had a lot of time to think during that time. And it was funny because I it wasn't intentional, but as I was walking my 161ks, um things would come up in my path, and my mind would immediately, without realizing, would flick
it to a lesson in leadership for myself. Um, and I got to the end of the six days and I went, I'm an idiot if I don't write this stuff down, just for my own thoughts. And on the the second or third day, I actually said to myself, Oh, what if this was a blog? And it all just came to me the title, the image, the rest, everything just came to me on that day. So The Heel Deputy is not a research-based leadership thrust down the throat. It's a light-hearted um, I write a blog every week just on my own personal life experiences that for the most part have nothing to do with the classroom, have nothing to do with school, but just things like conversations I've had with my daughters, or things I've seen on the train, or you know, when I I bumped into about five wild horses on the on the Camino trail last year, and just what those moments taught me about leadership. Um, and so they're lighthearted, but I hope there's some some depth to some of the stories for people to take them away, maybe see a bit of themselves in it. Um so yeah, I've uh I've written about 34 blogs so far. Um, it's uh it's a free sight, it's uh it's a bit of it's a bit of fun. Um take time to laugh at yourself, you've got to in this job. Yeah, um, but for also me uh just to reflect on what I'm learning myself because I'm still learning and I hope I continue to still learn. Yeah, yeah, the joys of leadership.
SPEAKER_01I can't wait to dig into the blog. I'm definitely gonna go and have a bit of a scroll through. 34.
SPEAKER_00That's that's pretty impressive. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm gonna think about one from Editech as well. And also the Cano, that is impressive. It was such a great experience. That's incredible, just as a life-changing moment.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I I think I went through my midlife crisis very early. But but it was wonderful. It was therapeutic. I'll add that to my midlife crisis list. Do it, do it. Uh I'm gonna find, I'm gonna, I want to do the Spain Camino, which is a five-week endeavor, but I might have to wait until more service leave comes up for that.
SPEAKER_01Uh, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'll pop all of the details for the healed deputy in the show notes for everybody to follow along. And thank you so much, Andrea.
SPEAKER_03Thank you, it's been an absolute pleasure.