What the Hand Touches, the Brain Remembers — A Conversation with Gavin McCormack

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua Sussex sits down with Gavin McCormack — Montessori Australia Ambassador, founder of nine schools and three teacher training centres in Nepal, and bestselling author of "The Potential in Every Child" — for the show's widest-reach conversation yet.

Gavin shares the moment that changed his career, teaching refugee children in Sydney who'd fled Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria, and the random school inspection that revealed he'd been running a Montessori classroom without even knowing it. 

He and Joshua dig into what parents actually want from a school — safety, intelligence, happiness, in that exact order — and why so many schools, chasing rankings, get the order backwards. Gavin explains the "contagion principle," why children can sense an unprepared teacher before a word is said, and the neuroscience of why your brain deletes almost everything you learn in a day unless it involved emotion, risk, choice, or something you physically touched.

This is a genuinely wide-ranging conversation — covering authenticity, trust, resilience, and what Gavin would throw out first if he built a school from scratch tomorrow.

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The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Sussex — Deputy Head of Secondary and EdD candidate: researching leadership in international schools.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

International education. The classrooms, the staff rooms, the lives built far from home. This is the Common Room. I'm Joshua Sussex. Let's talk.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

So, Gavin, you retrained as a Montessori teacher part way through your career after starting in mainstream primary. What did you see in Montessori classroom that made you willing to start over?

SPEAKER_00 0:31

It wasn't a Montessori classroom that made me start over. In actual fact, I was working in a school in Lakemba in Sydney, which is a Muslim community, and a lot of refugees were coming from Libya, Afghanistan, uh Syria, different places, and I was a teacher there. And those children were coming from a very traumatic background. So they'd seen things that I don't want to repeat on your podcast to ruin everyone's day, but you can imagine the the you know the horrifying things that that they that come to them. And I was supposed to teach some fractions of a different denominator, you know, and that was the least of their worries because of what they've been through. And so one day I just decided, I thought, wouldn't it be great if I just gave them ownership over some of the curriculum? I just made some slots in the timetable. So, you know what? Actually, I have no idea what it's like in Afghanistan. I'd love to hear from you. And I told the kids they're in grade five, uh, and that was a thing. And I expected a couple of them to say, Yeah, I'd like to, I'd like to take one of those slots and tell you about me, but they didn't. There was like so much uh disengagement with that. So I thought it's not working. Maybe I'll start. And I said, look, well, I'll start. I'll tell you about the real Mr. McCormack. And so I told them the real me, which is like, you know, when I was a kid and all of that stuff, and what I, you know, not that I went through anything like what they went through, but we, you know, you still go through things. And then I think they realized, ooh, he's also vulnerable, not a he's not a robot, he's not impenetrable, this guy. He's actually a human being. And so one kid was like, Can I go next? And so he came in with his abeyer on and his little hat and he told us his story. It was very beautiful. Then a floodgates opened, and everybody wanted to tell his story, it was fantastic. And then it turned into them teaching lessons. You know, it turned into them, well, now maybe you can teach us about volcanoes because there's 30 of us in this room who can all be teachers. And then at that moment, the Department of Education turned up for a random inspection and walked into my class. Well, I was sitting in a child's seat, and a kid was teaching a class who was 10 about I can't remember what the lesson was. And I thought, God, I'm in big trouble here. And she walked in, she sat down, um, and um she had a little notepad. And I remember sitting there wanting the world to swallow me up for 45 minutes. And then when it was finished, the lesson was over, it was time for recess. The kids went outside and she stayed behind. She said, I didn't know there was a Montessori teacher working here. And I said, What's Montessori? And she said, Oh God, you don't know, do you? I said, No. She said, You're a Montessori teacher, but you have no idea. You need to go and look at one. And then I went to look at one, and that wasn't my life changed. I thought, oh my, there is, you know, I I already somehow had some of it in my brain. And then I just went into it full steam ahead, and there's no looking back because it's so fantastic when you start using it.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

So it's almost a complete natural kind of you fell into it. It was almost a it kind of your personality, your approach to teaching just naturally fell into that situation.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah. Well, you know, Montessori, she, you know, she was the first woman to graduate from university in Italy. She ran away from Mussolina, who was persecuting her. She went, made friends with Gandhi. Amazing life. Doctor, psychologist, all this stuff. And, you know, there's so many Montessori schools globally now, it's just nuts. I think it's the largest uh uh branch of education on earth from any. I'm not sure about that. Your viewers can question that later. But she had one goal. The goal of her entire life was world peace. And she knew that if we just educate the foundations and we educate them on things that are truly human, like, you know, 86,000 years ago, Indigenous Australians, or in the golden age of India, or you know, as Socrates in in Greece or ancient Rome or any of these times, it was about living amongst the people in your community with trust and with the land and in harmony. It wasn't until 1787 as the revolution where we got rid of all of that and we turned into like some machine that just churns out workers. So she wanted world peace. And she knew that if I get these children to be really good human beings when they're older, then we'll have world peace because they'll make good decisions. And we're we're coming full circle now, I feel. We're starting to want that again, rather than wanting, you know, people who can march and salute and go to work and clock in and clock out. We're looking for innovation. Everyone's talking about resilience and critical thinking, creativity and all this stuff. So that's why probably there's a re-surgence of Montessori uh in the world, because it we no longer need factory workers because machines are running it all. So what are we going to do? We actually go back to what we used to do for 85,000 years of education and do the real education, which is, I think, very cool. I wrote a I wrote an article about this just at the weekend. Anyway, I think it's very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

Yeah, it is very interesting. Thinking from my perspective or my experience, is it's very difficult to find that balance between focusing on those holistic aspects of the whole child and ensuring that the child feels safe and they feel a sense of belonging and they want to come to school whilst building resilience. I think that's always a difficult balance, whilst ensuring that you have that academic aspect and that success of academia that comes with private or international education and the pressures that parents and teachers themselves put on each other to get those results. How would you overcome that or find that balance, or what do you think people should be working towards to get that balance right?

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Amazing question. Uh, we could spend three hours together on this one. I know we don't have three hours, but you could. I mean, um, so where do we start? Uh there's three pillars to a school. There's the parents, the kids, and the teachers, right? The three pillars when it comes to education. Um, and the decision makers in schools are the parents because they vote with their enrolments. If no one's enrolling in your school, you're closed. And therefore, uh that's just a thing. But if they are enrolling in your school, it means they believe in what you're delivering in the school. And, you know, it's got um it's got some public uh awareness around this is what success looks like if I send little Tommy to to this school. And the problem with parents is that they went to school and they're all right. Well, I went to school and I'm all right. And my teacher used to hit us with a stick. So maybe we should have just hit all the kids because I got hit. There's nothing wrong with a good whack, right? But we uh we know it's not appropriate. Time has moved on. We've got neuroscience, we've got biochemistry, we've got human rights, we've got all these things have changed. And so we've got this thing around, well, I went and I'm okay. And I, you know, I and I that was fine. But what you find is that parents, when you do the research, they really want three things out of school. When they pay their 20 grand and send it to, you know, Pinkerton High or whatever it's going to be, international school, when you do the research, you you realize they want three things in this order. The first thing they want is they want their child to be safe. Now, basic safety for parents is keep them alive. And when I come at three o'clock, better talk, Tommy better be alive. I handed you them alive, keep them alive. Okay, that's we can do that. Number two, I want them to be smarter. So teach them something. I don't know how much, but make sure they know something, you know, I'm not paying 20 grand for nothing. And then number three, which is a tricky one, I want them to be happy. Now, happiness is yin and yang, black and white, up and down. Of course, you can't have uh happiness without sadness, so you can't be happy all the time. But when you look at the research on happiness, you look at a country like Singapore, now you're in Malaysia. Singapore, on the PISA rankings, for the last five years is the most intelligent country on earth. Top. Um, and when you look at the leading cause of death in teenagers, it's suicide because of academic pressure in Singapore. They just jump off of buildings because of the pressure. So they end up not being happy in actual fact in the school. They look successful on paper with scores and points and rankings, and then they get that job and they have a Ferrari and they've got a a house, you know, uh a $20 million house and all that jazz. But they're not happy because when you look at the happiest rankings and you look at the same OECD report on both of these things every single year, Singapore do not sit in the top 30 countries of happiness. The top five are Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and they all have one thing in common that they all have trust, crazy levels of trust in their community. So if you look at somewhere like Iceland, no crime, zero. No jail, no army. People leave their kids sleeping in the garden at night time because the air's cleaner. Because they know nothing will happen to their children. It's true. It's a true fact. All the doors are open. You know, I hired a car there, went there to do this research, and I hired a car. And the guy said, Oh, your car's in the car park. And I said, Well, where are the keys? He said, They're in the car. I said, Well, how do I get them? Doors locked. He goes, Doors open. I said, No one's gonna steal it. He goes, No. I said, Well, what do I do when I drop it off? He goes, just park it in the car park. I said, Where? He goes, anywhere. It doesn't matter, leave the keys and the ignition. So it turns out that if you've got crazy levels of trust and your society got crazy levels of happiness. And so when you think about that, you look at our schools, we want our children to be safe, we want them to be smart, and want them to be happy. That's what parents want, actually. But the last part is tricky when you have a school that's filled with distrust. So the principal says, do this stuff because the government told me to do it, you better say the words on the paper to the kids, test them, give me the scores. But the teacher says, But you know what, it says that I have to teach it like this, but my instinct tells me that I should teach it like that. Or I should bring my personality into this lesson, or I should bring some artifacts from my own life into here, or whatever it is that they feel is right, it's wiped away. It's like, no, no, no, no. Sorry, Barbara, don't do that. Just do what he says and then give me the results because I need to hand him into the department, because we're in a we're all in a ranking system here, and we need to be the top school in the district because parents will come because we're the top school on this chart. And what happens then is because the distrust finds its way down to the teacher. There's a distrust of the child. Child says, Miss, can I, instead of making a poster, do you mind if I build a volcano instead? Because something in me just wants to be an engineer. I don't know what it is, I just want to build something. He says, I'm sorry. If you build something, then it might go wrong. And if it goes wrong, I can't rank it. It doesn't fit in my rubric. I can't give the results back to Mr. Johnson, who can't pass it on to the department, and therefore, I'm sorry we can't do that. So we know that if that trust is missing, the end of the line you have a child who wants to do something and it's taken away from them. It's no one's fault, it's a system error. And it actually comes from maybe from PISA from the very top, where countries are competing, schools are competing. Um, and so I think there's your system error. But at the end of the line, you have a child who doesn't get to choose. And we know that choice and engagement are linked. And if you want academic prowess, as you said before, if you want children who are smarter, you need to give them choice. Because when you choose, then you're more inclined to do the work. You know, no one wants to go to a restaurant and be told what to eat. You want to have a menu that you choose from. And it doesn't have to be wide. You know, you can say you can choose from these three things. We're teaching volcanoes today, guys. You know everything. Now, guys, you've got three choices. You can build a model, you can make a poster, or you can write a report. It's your choice. Now the child has some freedom. And freedom and agency equal engagement, engagement equals academic schools increasing. There's only one component, there's other components too, that we can talk about later. But you can see the problem right away. And I think that shifting mindset from families of like, okay, I do want these three things, but what does happiness actually look like in my child? It looks like a trusting school that allows my child to make mistakes, and therefore, you know, they will become smarter down the track, there's no question about that.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

Amazing. And that that that sort of line of thinking that you have and and that clarity and you kind of name really clearly exactly what the problem is systematically. Where did that line of thinking start for you? I mean, obviously you had that that tra that change at the beginning of your career and you moved into the direction of how you deliver lessons and you found a or a lane where where that works and that kind of fits in well. That level of thinking that you have now, where have you developed that from?

SPEAKER_00 12:26

It's you know, it's an experiment. Life's an experiment for you and for the for everyone. We're all just trying stuff, and does it work and doesn't it work? It came about when I was running my own school in Sydney here, out of school for five years. And uh I'll never forget like being in the interview for to get the job as a principal. I was 35 or whatever, and I was waiting, and out came a lady called Donna Wright. If she's watching this, then hello Donna. Donna is the Australian principal of the year, Australian principal of the year. So I'm waiting to do my interview, and now she walks after it, and I'm like, oh God, like no chance have I got this job. Because Donna Wright's going for it. And then I got the job. Uh, you know, disrespect to Donna, I respect her greatly. But I asked the board, said, Oh, why, you know, do you have any questions at the end of the interview? I said, Yeah, yeah. Why are you choosing me? Donna Wright's just walked out. And the guy, one of the guys on the board said, Because I think you can fill the school up. You can fill it up. And I said, Well, how? And he goes, Well, we love your train of thought. Parents love what you talk about. We've read your books, we've we've looked on your blog and everything. So I said, Okay. So I said, Okay, well, I take the job, but you've got to let me do stuff that I think is right within the rules. So the the first thing I did was I banned, this will be interesting for your uh your audience. I banned exams, points, scores, percentages, grades, and any comparison of child against child. And I rewrote the education policy for the school so that we had a new mechanism of assessment. I said, you know what, we're not gonna do any of those. We know they don't work. We're like the research, we've read in plenty of books and I said, we know they don't work, so why the hell are we doing them? We've got to stop doing them straight away. So now we're gonna do this. And I got the team in, there's teachers, I said, What do you think about this? And they were like, Yes, please, we love it. And so um, you know, we had things like we had observations instead. We'd observe children, so we'd we let them free, you get to choose, off you go. I'm over here, but you don't need me. You know, if it goes wrong, you've got peers. I'll be watching. And what I'm actually looking for is your skills. I'm gonna look for you being resilient, I'm gonna look for you negotiating, I'm gonna look for you having leadership, I'm gonna document that. And I'm gonna report that to the parents. So I still know, like any teacher watching this knows, like if you're teaching a class, you know what they can and can't do without a test. You mark their books, you see, you know who can add fractions and who can't, who can count, who can't. You know that. You don't need a test, actually. Um, so you can still report on the academics, because you know. And now you can report on the hidden curriculum, values, personality traits, skills, all the stuff that's unteachable and untestable. You know, what was it uh Einstein said? Um he said something about yes, he said um, what really counts cannot be counted. Uh you can't count the things that actually really count. Really important, you can't count empathy. You can't give us test. Wow, you know, Joshua, you are 10 out of 10 on empathy. Like, you it you can't you can't care, you can't count that stuff. So we were able to report on that. And then um obviously it made a big splash in Australia and it made the front page of the newspaper. It said, school that does not have any exams. And then the phone just ringing crazy hot. And it was just parents saying, When can I enroll? We haven't been to school yet, we don't care. And the parents realized, I remember how much I hated exams. And if you've got another system, then I'm in. Um, and then I realized that it's possible. And then I ran a school for five years without exams, where kids just were academically fantastic. They could get into any school they wanted. And, you know, it was the first I I'd worked in the school system here for about 20 years. It was the first time where I'd sent off graduates into the world, grade sixes, into the high school world. And what normally happens is the principal of the receiving, uh, the receiving school principal called you and say, Hey, by the way, I've got an application here from, you know, Stephanie. Can you send through her NAPLAN results or our standardized testing results from the government? First time the phone didn't ring from any of the graduates. So I rung one of the principals up and was like, hey, you've got three graduates coming to your school, but you haven't called me. And he said, Oh, I don't need to call you. He said, One of your students came in and told me they've been running their own business. They raised 100 grand for charity or whatever, not 100 grand, but later as long as I'd done all this stuff. He goes, They're the kind of kids that I want in my school. And he said, Your student walked in, shook me by the hand, sat down, started interviewing me about what does my school. And I was like, I said, That's my kids, you know, I'm really proud of that. So, you know, that's the proof was in the pudding, and I was like, this is possible because I've seen it with my own eyes. So then you run with it.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

It's amazing. The word that comes to mind listening to what you're saying and hearing about your experience, even from a 35-year-old principal in that room and having that honest conversation of why'd you not appoint that person? I think the word that comes out to me is being authentic. And I think for from from what I'm hearing and from what you're saying, it feels like to me, it's certainly, and I would guess others, you come across as very authentic. You are who you are, this is what you believe in, this is what we're doing and why we're doing it. And it doesn't change no matter what kind of environment you're in. And I and I would speak here for people that I know personally and many people who would say it's really difficult for a teacher to be authentic all the time. It's really difficult to be yourself in an environment where you have to put a bit of a mask on at times. You have to kind of give this, as you say, gotta tick this box, gotta tick that box, gotta make sure this is done right, and no, you can't quite do that because we have to do this. What would what would be your advice to teachers in international education to still find that balance of being authentic as much as you possibly can? Because again, now speaking for myself, I think being authentic allows you to feel a sense of belonging because you're being you, you're you're you're creating an environment that you believe in authentically. What would be your advice of trying encouraging those to be as authentic as they can be?

SPEAKER_00 17:57

The first thing is that um there is a contagion principle. Now, you'll your teachers will know this. There's a uh misunderstanding around um what happens when a teacher is unprepared for a class. Okay, let's just set this up right. So uh you're unpre you'll know this, you're unprepared, you don't know your topic, you've not got your resources ready, and the kids are coming, and you've got two minutes and you're panicking. You're like, oh God, I don't know how I'm gonna deliver this. This is gonna be a disaster. Now the kids come in, and it is a disaster, right? And the old adage is that they can smell it, right? They can smell it. They're like, this guy, he has no idea. Eat him alive. And the lessons are disaster, and you know this, we've all been there before, and you you learn a valuable lesson like I better be ready. But it's actually not about being ready. What it actually is, is that children trust you. You're in their inner circle, you're a trusted adult in most cases in their lives. And so they have this thing where your nervous systems are almost connected. It's called the contagion principle. It's very well researched, and it's like you have a biological Wi-Fi. It sounds whimsical, but it's actually true. You should look it up, it's very cool. And what happens is you put on a face at the front of the class that you are ready and you're ready to teach, and you're doing this act, okay? And you're really good at it. Teachers are very good at acting, and you sit at the front and you think, I can fool them here, that I know I'm talking about, and I'm that this it's like when you spell a word wrong and a kid says, Miss, you and you say, Oh, well done for spelling it, that was a test. You know, like, but really they know, and they don't know because you're a bad liar, they know because your nervous system is actually telling them that, you know, I'm nervous here. And your nervous system emits and your children latch onto that. It's 100% true. It's really, really cool. And so the reason the lesson's a disaster, in actual fact, is because your nervous system internally is like this is going to go wrong, but your front of house says it's okay, everybody. But the children aren't looking at the front of house, they're actually latching onto your biological Wi-Fi. Uh, and therefore it's a disaster because you're you feel nervous, they all feel nervous, and therefore the lesson is chaotic and there's no learning taking place. And the reason I'm telling you that is it's really important to be authentic all the time because regardless of whether you're putting on a brave face or not or telling another story, it doesn't matter. The authenticity is internal, and the children can detect it very, very quickly. It's that feeling of instinct that you get sometimes where you're like, oh, that person, I don't feel comfortable around that person. It's really their nervous system is telling you that, hey, this is not right for you, this is not matching. So authenticity is really important for multiple reasons. But also, um, children learn from people that they trust. Children will not learn anything for someone they don't trust. That's just a chemical system in our bodies. There's an amazing theory called the theory of mattering. I don't know if you've ever heard it, but your your audience will love this. It's a piece of absolute gold. And it's when a child arrives at school, they come to the door, and you're at the door waiting. Joshua's there. Mr. Sussex is at the door. If you're not at the door, there's a problem straight away. Right? So you should be at the door, first of all, to greet them. They're already nervous coming to school, lots of things can go wrong for them. Maybe there's no one to sit with, they'll get bullied, maybe the air conditioner's too cold, and they don't feel you know confident enough to tell you. There's loads and loads of tiny low-level anxieties that sit in a child's psychological system that tells them, I feel sick, I don't want to go to school tomorrow, mum. And they don't actually, not actually sick. There's just a worry that they can't detect, that you don't know about. And when it mounts up, it tips over. The amygdala switches on and say, I don't want to go to school now, I'm scared. I'm nervous. And they come to school anyway, and you're at the door, and you're a trusted adult, and you shake their hand and you say, Morning, Mr. Sussex here, how are you doing? And they go, Oh, someone, someone is at the door to to greet me and they know me. So, first of all, you shake their hand, and that that biological touch, very simple. Some some circumstances not appropriate, but if you can, a shake of the hand, I'm not talking about sitting on your knee or cuddling, nothing like that. Shake of the hand does something for the internal system which releases oxytocin, makes them feel safe, lowers their heart rate. But the second Thing which is the most important, which is the theory of mattering, is this. I know, for example, you told me earlier on before we started recording you've got two children, right? So I know you've got two children, and I ask you about them, I say, Hey, by the way, how old are your children? Where do they go to school? Now, your brain says, Hey, that human over there who could be thinking about anything in the world is thinking about me. And he's actually actively interested in my life. Therefore, I matter to him. If I matter to him, then he cares about me. And if he cares about me, I should trust him. And if I trust him, then I should learn from him. So authenticity is really important because the body will not trust someone who it deems unauthentic straight away. More authentic you are, more trustworthy you're going to be. And then when trust is up and you let the children know, by the way, you know, I'm interested in your life. How was football at the weekend? How's your grandma? I heard you were sick. I heard you got a new guinea pig. What's the name? Regardless of the response or regardless of the question, the brain says, that person cares about me, therefore I'm going to learn from them. And I'm going to trust them. And when trust is increased, behavior problems diminish in your class, don't go away. But learning it becomes a lot higher in terms of what the children can achieve and how much they'll try. And so authenticity is you can't beat it. I think you've got to you've got to be you. It just makes sense. You can't argue with biochemistry and neuroscience. It's just impossible to argue with that stuff. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 23:28

And on that as well, sort of take it a next step. Um, a lot of my uh area of interest, I'm I'm currently studying a a doctorate in in cultural mediated leadership, is what it's called. And I'm fascinated by different cultures and how teachers and leaders, but also parents, manage and lead and teach and parent across different cultures. And I I've kind of gone across from working in Egypt, in Vietnam, in China, in Malaysia, and across all of that time, I've seen so many different cultures and interests and passions and motivations. And I just became obsessed with thinking how do I get the best out of the children that I'm teaching? How do I get the best out of them from a cultural aspect? Because I I agree with what you're saying. You can look however you look and you can say whatever you say, but if you're not genuinely interested, if you're not genuinely having those conversations with children, they're going to switch off and they're not, they don't care about you, regardless of the culture that they're from, is my sort of argument, if you like. You you've kind of trained teachers across Nepal and the Middle East, Europe and Australia. What's one thing you've seen work brilliantly in one culture that completely failed when you tried it somewhere else?

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Well, that's a really interesting one, actually. I mean, uh, if you I've done a lot of work in in India uh over the last years, in actual fact, in my bio, it's not there, but I'm working in a lot of schools in India. What you find in India is that um you some of your biggest schools are there. Ryan Schools, DPS, Podar International. In fact, the biggest school in Lucknow is the biggest school in the world. 62,000 kids, one school, one campus. It's bonkers. Uh and then Ryan School's got quarter of a million. Um, and a lot of the parents there, they enroll because of the the reputation, the prestige of the school, like an international school. And they enroll because they want grade A's or 100%. And it's very interesting. They go to the principal and say, if my little Tommy does not get 100%, then I'm moving to another school. And so suddenly all of your 100% uh uh are null and void straight away. Um, and uh I remember going there and trying to revolutionize uh a school community. The principal said, look, we really need to get rid of this, this um system we've got. Can you help us? And so I was like, Yeah, okay, we we can try and do that. And this is the first point of call, of course, I said before, three pillars is to re-educate the parents of what success looks like. So I've done this in many times before. I've done it in my own school, I've done it around the world. And um, sometimes I think the culture is so entrenched, it's so hard to dissolve what's been there for so long that it's it's almost impossible task. So I remember going to this school in Bangalore and getting the parents, lots of parents, huge school, thousands of them, and saying, okay, we're we're gonna do something different in this school. And everything we've talked about, we're gonna focus on the human side. You know, the the whole point of my conversation was when your little Tommy comes to your house at 35 years of age, the question is, what kind of human is on the other side of the door? What do you want? And my expectation was, after working in so many schools, that I could get them across the line to go, you know what? That's actually what matters. I want a good human in the future. I want to have these things. But actually what they wanted was a doctor or a surgeon on the other side of the door. And it was, and so we did this thing, it was really interesting. I said to the parents, I said, before we do this workshop, we're gonna do a little quiz. On this screen is 20 things that the greatest parents do in the world. This is 20 things that great parents do. And so I put it up and I said, just work with your wife or your husband or your partner and uh just give yourself a ranking out of five for each of these. So number one was I read with my child every day, one to five. Give yourself a score. And off they went and started debating and having this kind of arguments in some senses. One dad was like, I'm a five, and the mum was like, You're never home. You're always on your phone, you're a two, and it's really interesting. Anyway, they give themselves a ranking out of five, and I said, add them up at the end, add them up. And they knew what was going to happen, I think, then. And they added them all up and I said, Okay, so now you've got a total score out of 100. Here's what we're gonna do. If you've got zero to forty, move over here. If you've got 40 to 70, you're in the middle, and 70 to 100, you're on the right, and stand up and move. And they reluctantly moved. And the zero to forty group, I humiliated them. I said, You're the worst parents in the community, you've got a lot of work to do. I'm surprised your kids are even alive. Terrible. And so in the middle, and by the way, one dad wanted to beat me up from that group, that's fine. In the middle group, um, I ignored them. I said, Well, you're just grey, you're not really anything. And in the top group, I said, You're amazing, you're the best. Let's all applaud them. And it was really like, you know, like they were applauding but reluctantly. And then he sat down and I said, I thought, I thought to myself, this is going to make them realize that what really matters. And when we rank our kids and order them and do all this, nobody wins. People at the top, you're feeling sorry for the people at the bottom. People, but you're angry, people in the middle, you don't even I've not even noticed you. But no, it just had no effect. And I spoke to the principal, and you know, like a few months later, still, parents are like, if I don't get 100%, we're moving to another school. So, you know, like there there are some times where even though the biochemistry, the science, the research, everything tells you that it's wrong. There's sometimes a culture uh that will say, I'm sorry, like we're not ready for that yet. And there's nothing you can say that can make our change our mind. So on a system-wide scale, yes. But I think in classrooms, when you're working with individual teachers and they got free right of passage, I think every teacher graduates from university as a teacher, not for cash. Because you know, as you said the other day when we met, you're not going to be rich. You're actually going out there to to feel good about doing good in the world by educating these little kids to be the future. So if you're working with individual teachers, I think there's nothing you can't achieve because teachers have got that entrenched in their training and in their biochemistry of who they are. But system-wide, uh, I think yeah, you've you've there's a lot more to do, there's a lot of history. And there's 90,000 years of education to to contend with, and it's not easy always to change that.

SPEAKER_02 29:18

Absolutely, yeah. I think I sort of takeaway from that I would say is sometimes it's okay to just be honest and say this is what the parent wants, but perhaps this is not the school that we are that the parent wants. In that particular example, we could say, yes, we do care about academics, but we really care about the holistic aspect, we really care about the whole child. And if the parent only wants the academic, then I think it's fair to say, do you know what? Perhaps we're not the right school for you, which takes bravery, I guess, but but at the same time the long term.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

I agree. But what if you've got 90% of your demographic who want that? You can't empty the school out because you've got no school at the end of the day. And I think that's that's always the problem. I mean, I had that when I ran my own school. When I first took over the school, I thought, I wonder if the parents know why they're enrolled in Montessori school. Let's get them in and find out. And some parents unenrolled. They were like, oh, actually, uh, I didn't I didn't know that we were here for that. Um, and so they un-enrolled. And it's fine. You've got to set your stall out. Uh, but sometimes it's very hard if you've got 1,900 kids coming and 90% of them want 100% in their exams, or they're leaving. That's gonna be a tricky, uh, a tricky one to get past the board of directors.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

If a brand new teacher in their first year in a system that's still very traditional and exam-focused, as we mentioned, asked you how to bring even one piece of Montessori thinking into their classroom without getting shut down by their school, what would you tell them?

SPEAKER_00 30:34

This is really cool, actually. You're gonna love this. So when you go to bed at nighttime, tonight, when you go to bed, Joshua, and when I go to bed, uh, we'll go to sleep, and in the day, we'll have about 50 to 70,000 things we've learned in the day, in an average day. Now, your brain doesn't know uh, you know, uh how much capacity it has. It could actually take everything and store it in the hippocampus forever and never be filled, but it actually has no idea that that's the deal. It it can store about, I think it's 2.5 petabytes, which is about 300 years of 4K footage continuously. That's a storage capacity, but it has no idea of that capacity, and therefore it wants to be efficient. It doesn't ever want to fill up with information, otherwise you'll die because you can't learn anymore. So every night it makes a decision. It's called synaptic pruning. It goes through all of the things you've learned in a day. Every night this happens to every human, and it decides what shall I keep and what shall I dissolve? It's called and it basically cuts the synapse. Synapses dissolve into the lymphatic system, and in the morning, when you go to the bathroom, you urinate it into the toilet. That's the first thing that comes out is snipped synapses. Right now, if you're a teacher, uh your biggest fear should be synaptic pruning. Because you're teaching a lesson on volcanoes in your class, and you should be always thinking, Oh my God, I I hope that tonight, when little Joshua goes to sleep, his brain doesn't decide that my lesson was irrelevant, prune it, ends up in the sewers. Because I spent a lot of time making that that lesson plan, or whatever it is that you've made. But there are some absolute keys that the brain, when it's deciding, keep or dissolve, that it always keeps. Always. Four things. Four things that the brain always moves to hippocampus. Number one, if there was an emotion. While I was learning this thing with my teacher, did I feel something? Did I feel an emotion? Emotions are very important for survival. Brain always keeps them. Number two, did I touch something that I've never touched before? If you did, that's very important, move it into hippocampus long-term memory. Number three, was there any risk? Could it have gone wrong? I don't mean death. I mean I built a model and it collapsed wrong. And number four, was there any choice? Choices are very important because I need to keep them all so I can refine my decision making later on. So those four things, when the brain goes through the 70,000 things that you've learned in a day, it always moves to hippocampus. In generally speaking, most of the time, always goes in. So Montessori knew this 150 years ago. I don't know how, but she knew it. Um, and she embedded it in her pedagogy. So my advice to mainstream teachers is number one, when you're planning a lesson, think very carefully about okay, does my lesson have any of those four things? And if it has all four, you're in gold standard. If it has none of them, there's a very strong chance that when they go to bed that night, the brain will deem your entire lesson irrelevant and it will end up in the toilet first thing in the morning. And then when you test them on Friday, they'll retain nothing because the information is just not available. It's not there anymore. So I like to summarize it like this. If you were teaching snails in class, right? You could have a textbook, you could have a video, you could have a worksheet, you could mark it, it could go into their report, it could go in their portfolio, either on the wall, take her home their work, and none of that would be deemed relevant to the brain. They say, nah, no feeling, no emotion, no risk, no choice, uh, and I didn't touch anything apart from a piece of paper and a pencil, therefore irrelevant dissolved the lot. But if you just had a snail on the table and you said to the kids, We're learning about snails, the textbook, we're gonna do this work, but you know what? While you're doing your work today, you can come out and you can hold the snail if you want. And you put it on your hand until it comes out. Just by saying that and having the snail now, there's choice. Should I hold the snail? Should I not? I'm a bit scared. I never touched a snail before, and maybe it's gonna bite me. Not sure. So straight away you've got choice and you've got risk immediately. Then if they do decide to hold the snail and it comes out on their hand, well that's just gold. Or the hand touches the brain, remembers. So now all the learnings in. So immediately at that point, just by having that physical tactile thing in the room, like even if you're teaching worms, a worm can be very powerful. You know, people are scared of worms. Oh, it's squiggly and wiggly. And just by having a worm and you're teaching, you know, worms. That every child will go home that day and say, Mum mum mum, today at school I held a worm in my hand. It wasn't as scary as I thought it was going to be. And it, you know, whatever. So that Montessori is one of her golden quotes is what the hand touches, the brain remembers. And that's why all Montessori materials are in the room. That's why you see them all, that's why you touch them all. You know, in a Montessori classroom, you'll have a cube, a one, a one unit cube, but you'd also have a million cube. And the million cube is a million times bigger and heavier than the unit cube. And you can say to the kids, go and get the million cube. And they have four children have to pick it up. It's so massive. And they pick it up and they and they know what a million is, and they've held it and they hadn't felt it. So that's what I would do. I would do that, and I say this all the time. Whenever you're teaching something, you can have the thing in the room: a stick, a piece of marble, some soil, a rabbit. Whatever it is, you get it in the room, bingo. And this goes for anyone uh studying for an exam at 30 years old. You know, touch the thing, and you know it's going to be guaranteed to move to hippocampus. You've got the knowledge when you need it. Fail to do that, and it's probably not going to be there when you want to go and retrieve it.

SPEAKER_02 36:14

Amazing. Amazing, yeah. I mean, and it makes perfect sense. Um just I know we've got running out of time. If you were building a school from nothing tomorrow with no legacy system to work around, no politics, no budget constraints, what's the first thing you'd throw out that every school does today?

SPEAKER_00 36:34

Not allowing the children to choose where they sit in the classroom. I'd have uh I've I've tested this many times, uh, I'd allow the children to choose where they sit every single day. Uh research tells you you've got four types of learners in your class. You've got an isolated learner, you've got a parallel learner, you've got a cooperative learner, and a collaborative learner every single day. And they can interchange depending on the child's emotional state, physical state, you know, they're depending on how they feel. So allowing the children to choose where they sit and having those spaces available for them. On one particular day, you're a child coming to my school, Joshua, on the next day, you've had a bad night's sleep and you're feeling tired. You want to work, but you don't want to work in a partner, you don't want to talk to anyone, but you want to work hard. So I say you can choose where you sit every single day. You will gravitate to that space because it suits you at that time. And you'll work really hard. But if I force you to sit in a partnership and talk to somebody and working parallel because I've I've decided that, you won't work. You won't thrive. And so we research tells you you've got these four types of learners and they're interchangeable every single day. I think the most common one is parallel, and parallel workers are two best friends who are insecure as children and they're scared of getting it wrong. So they do the same thing at the same time. They're like, you get the blue pencil, you've seen this 100%, and they're colouring in the something and they colour it in at the same time, and they're they're very common. Um, but you also have independent workers and isolated workers who want to work on their own. They don't want to talk, but they want to they want to absolutely kill it in the classroom, but you're forcing them to work in a way that doesn't suit them. And then so I would definitely have that, and I would also have mixed-age classrooms, of course. Uh but I think that that tiering system where you've got leaders in the room and younger children, there's so many skills that organically work. I mean, you say in a, you know, if you've got a grade five classroom that we're all teachers, but really they're all new to the concepts that you're teaching. So, really, who's the teacher? In actual fact, well, if you've got a grade five, a grade four, and a grade three in the same class or even exposure to them on a regular basis, grade fives can teach the grade fours a lot of stuff. They learn a lot better from their peers than they do from us. Uh so I would have those two, yes, two things there, but I would definitely have those. It's tricky to manage and you need some training on how to run that, but when you get it, it's pure gold. In fact, you become irrelevant as a teacher. You can just drink tea all day, they don't need you anymore. So it's quite good. Brilliant.

SPEAKER_02 38:54

Um, and just finally, just to mention uh your your recent book about uh the potential in every child, um, several several children's books uh you've you've completed, I I know, but you one of the key things from looking at what online and looking at your books is the big thing you focus on, I think, is is resilience and and building that resilience and and and believing that resilience makes all the difference for the child as they grow up to become an adult. How would you encourage teachers to build that resilience in the classroom, in the in the sort of break time, lunchtime, whatever, after school, clubs, whatever it may be? Where where do you think both teachers and parents could really actively work towards building resilience for for the children?

SPEAKER_00 39:31

Yeah, I mean it's very simple. You just get out of the way. Don't step in. You know, quite often we want to fix things because we the problem is actually ours. We're like, oh, uh I need to be needed by these children. I need to be needed. You know, Mozart wrote the greatest symphony, I know it's seven. You're not needed. Don't don't overestimate yourself. These children are very powerful, uh and they can do a lot of stuff. Just look at Greta Thunberg if you want an example of what children can actually achieve when they put their mind to it and they've given choice, freedom and agency. So get out of their way. Set them off, set them sail and get out of their way. Let them know you're there. I'm here, by the way. If you do need me, you probably won't need me. Uh but I'm here. And, you know, if it's going wrong in a in a way that they are unsafe, of course you have to step in. Quite often we step in way too soon. We need to let them overcome it themselves. You know, if there's a disagreement in the class, then there's a disagreement in the street. You know, you can have a disagreement at work when you're older. Better that you learn how a disagreement happens in this safe space when you can work it out rather than outside. It's why tigers, cubs fight with each other. They don't fight. They're just learning how to hunt later. They're not going to hurt each other, they're not going to scratch each other's eyes out and kill each other. They're just learning that, oh, I better work it out with someone I trust before I go outside. And there's bison that I don't trust, you know, and I don't know. So uh it's it's about knowing when to step in and when to step back. And usually it's like a 90-10%. Step back 90% of the time, step in 10% of the time, and you watch it play out in front of you, and you know, you can you can see that. But it's all about resilience and and not being not putting yourself on a pedestal of importance that I am required here. You're not required at all. They can work it out themselves. In fact, 70% of everything that you will ever know in your life is in before seven years of age. Of everything you will ever know in your whole life is in before seven. And before seven, you're really just finding your way and bumping into stuff, hurting yourself, cracking your head, you know, all the stuff that kids do, you know, hurting someone, nipping someone, pinching the cat, all the stuff that they do. It's like, how do I learn how to be? How do I learn how to live? And we just have to continue that, you know, as long as possible, letting them continue to find their way. And then, of course, resilience just is one of those things. You can't teach it. It's unteachable. You have to, John Dewey, you know, he's the educationalist who said education is not preparation for life, it's life. So you have to let them live. Um, and if they can live in your house and live in your classroom and you're just there, then let it play out. And don't be fearful of mistakes. That's where real learning takes place. You know, although I don't like these people, or they're not-I'm not big fans of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, they're successful because they've made huge mistakes, you know. Bezos spent a billion on pets.com and it failed. And and Elon Musk obviously has crashed a thousand rockets before he got one to take off. So you you know, you've got to crack a few eggs before you can make an omelet, and the kids need to do the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 42:32

Amazing. Gavin, thank you very much. I I really appreciate it, and I think amazing, even just looking at what the things you've done and the things you talk about, the TED Talks, I was listening to that just last night, and it's amazing, and that really kind of relates to a lot of the things you say. And I think a lot of people will sometimes perhaps in in teaching in teaching, particularly in that private international education environment, are somewhat fearful of of taking that leap and allowing students to make mistakes and encourage the sort of resilience through making mistakes and letting them be. And I think hearing the things you talk about and the things you you promote and encourage, you know, is it really resonates with me, and I think it will with a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

Thank you first, and thanks for having me. But I'll I'll finish by saying this: I am a lecturer at the university, and what I say to the undergraduates is um you're a force to be reckoned with. You're in you're needed now. You know, you're really needed. After COVID, there was a huge resignation of teachers globally. Very hard to find them now. Good ones. And so I say to them, When you go for your first job interview, don't forget what we've been talking about for four years. You sit across from the principal and the principal says, You've got the job. But before you sign, you ask, Are you gonna let me be the teacher I want to be? And he's gonna say or she's gonna say, Well, what do you want to be? And you say, I need freedom, I need to allow the kids to make mistakes, I need to give choice, I need to be able to connect with them, I need to be myself, I need to bring my personality into the learning. And if Mr. Johnson will say this goes, I'm sorry, it's not gonna work here, just get up and walk out the door and go somewhere where they will accept you. Because um it just takes a few teachers to really take the leap of faith and know what it really means to be a teacher. Um, and then you know, everything will change. So, yeah, look, it's an amazing profession, and we're very lucky to work in this field because the future's in our hands in reality. So, all power to those teachers out there. I take my hat off to them. It's not an easy job. You've got a lot of hats to wear. You're a best friend, a psychologist, a teacher, you know, all this stuff's happening at the same time, but it's also a very beautiful job to have as well. Like you have these young children in the palm of your hand, and you can do whatever you need to do to get the world to be where it needs to be. So thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

SPEAKER_02 44:34

Brilliant. Thank you so much, Kevin. Really, really appreciate it. Appreciate your time as well. Thank you. Okay, all good.