We’ve spent decades shrinking the teacher’s role into compliant paperwork, copy-paste comms, and spreadsheet cosplay.

AI isn’t the threat here. It’s an exit ramp. Let’s redirect staff effort away from routine, repeatable admin toward what only expert humans do: deep knowledge, precise pedagogy, and meaningful relationships.

This isn’t “diminishing” teachers. We already did that by burying them in forms. We did that by saying we’d rather measure numbers and ticks in boxes than how they grapple with complex family scenarios. If we aren’t willing to take things off their plate, we need to give them a butler.

AI gives us a chance to elevate the craft: more time for thinking, conferencing, diagnosing misconceptions, designing experiences, and knowing students as learners and humans.

[note: students are absolutely using various AI systems to mimic aspects of TPACK in a highly personalised and highly fragmented way]

Here’s the upgrade: TPACK → TPACK4S.

TPACK4S = Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge in explicit service of Students.

S isn’t an afterthought; it’s the centre, the lens, and the dataset.

T for Technology: automate the repeatable; co-pilot the complex; protect privacy by design.

P for Pedagogy: evidence-informed, feedback-rich, micro-iterated every week.

C for Content: deeper, wider, more interdisciplinary because time comes back.

K for Knowledge: not static. Make higher degree study part of the job, not an after-hours hobby. Imagine every teacher undertaking a Masters or PhD-level inquiry embedded in their timetable.

S for Students: continuous, ethical learner-models to inform judgment, not replace it.

What changes on Monday? (OK OK I’ll give you a week or two…)

1. Move 20 – 40% of admin to AI-enhanced workflows with human oversight. Unlock time.
2. 2. With that time, ring-fence high-attention blocks for student conferencing and adaptive planning.
3. 3. Add value: Reinvest saved hours into domain reading, lesson study, and practitioner research.
4. 4. New KPIs: Reward teachers for human outcomes (belonging, growth, mastery), not checkbox volume.

Schools don’t win by having the most exhausted staff; they win by having the most learning-rich time. Let the machines do the busywork so teachers can do the irreplaceable work.

Remember: students can learn without school, but schools can’t exist without students.

Question: what’s one use case you’ve seen that would fit the TPACK4S model?

The way everyone is talking about AI in schools is, frankly, a magnificent act of costly signalling with all the practical sense of replacing the windows on a submarine while it’s underwater.

The narrative is all wrong. We’re suffering from a classic case of what you might call “Destination-itis”. Everyone is utterly mesmerised by the glorious, sun-drenched destination (AI tutors for every child! Personalised learning paths! The end of educational inequality!) that they’ve completely forgotten the journey. And for the people who actually have to drive the car, the teachers, the journey looks like a pothole-ridden, un-signposted goat track through a swamp, with a backseat driver yelling “Are we there yet?”.

Of course, the logical, engineering-led approach is to aim for the biggest, most audacious goal first. It looks fantastic on a PowerPoint slide. But it ignores the most crucial element in any system: the messy, brilliant, and deeply fatigued humans within it. It’s a massive turn off for hundreds of thousands of people we need to make it all work.

We are approaching this as a technological problem, when it is, and always has been, a problem of psychology.

The Doorman Fallacy in Education

In hotels, the most visible employee is the doorman. If you were a Martian consultant, you might conclude he is the most important person in the entire operation. You would be wrong. The real magic happens in the laundry, in the kitchens, in the booking systems – the boring, invisible stuff that allows the glorious, visible stuff to happen. Rory Sutherland describes this as the Doorman Fallacy.

Right now, big tech’s AI approach for schools is obsessed with hiring a squadron of robot doormen. To put AI right at the classroom door, interacting with students. It’s the most visible, most high-stakes, and therefore most terrifying place to start. We are fiddling with the very heart of a teacher’s professional identity and purpose. Is it any wonder they’re a bit resistant? It feels less like an upgrade and more like a replacement.

The real opportunity, the low-hanging fruit, the equivalent of simply ensuring the hotel has clean sheets and hot water, is in the back office. It’s the plumbing.

It’s not sexy, it’s essential.

Give Them the Gift of Time, Not Another Task

Imagine you’re a teacher. You have 28 students (per class in high school), a mountain of marking, a duty to patrol the playground, a concerned parent’s email to answer, and you need to write a risk assessment for the trip to the local sewage works (why DID we choose that unit again?). Your cognitive load isn’t just full; it’s spilling out onto the floor.

Now, I come to you with two proposals.

Proposal A: “I have a revolutionary AI-powered pedagogical tool that will require you to completely rethink your teaching practice, undergo 40 hours of training, and fundamentally alter your relationship with your students. It might work. We’re not sure.”

Proposal B: “I have a little AI button in your email that will summarise this 14-message chain with a parent and draft a polite, comprehensive reply. I have another button that will take your bullet points about the sewage works trip and generate a perfectly formatted, bureaucratically-sound risk assessment in 12 seconds. This will save you five hours this week.”

Which one do you choose?

It’s not a contest. Proposal B is alchemy. It doesn’t add a task; it removes ten. It doesn’t demand brain space; it creates it. This is the crucial first step. We need to make AI the teacher’s secret, unfair advantage. Their superpower.

Let’s unleash AI on the soul-crushing administrative sludge that clogs up the arteries of every school, a digital stent rather than a new heart:

* The Permission Slip Generator: Takes the event details and spits out a perfect, legally-sound permission form.

* The Parent-Teacher Interview Scheduler: Ingests everyone’s preferences and produces an optimised schedule, ending decades of human misery.

* The Report Comment Synthesiser: Takes a teacher’s raw, honest notes (“Johnny is a lovely lad but finds it impossible to sit still and has the handwriting of a spider that’s fallen in an inkwell”) and translates them into constructive, parent-friendly prose. Instead of “teacher comment” we rephrase to “progress statement”.

* The Policy Whisperer: Answers questions like, “What’s our official policy on inflatable crocodiles for school photos?” without anyone having to read a 90-page PDF.

Once teachers see AI as a magical time-creation machine, a personal assistant that vaporises the worst parts of their job, two things will happen.

First, you will get universal, enthusiastic buy-in. You’re not forcing change; you’re offering relief. You are giving them the greatest gift of all: the time and energy to do the part of the job they actually love: teaching.

Second, and this is the important bit, they will start to get curious. Once the fear is gone, and the value is proven in their own lives, they will be the ones asking, “Hmm, if it can do that for my admin, I wonder if it could help me create a better explanation of photosynthesis for the kids who are struggling?”

They will pull the innovation into the classroom themselves, from a place of confidence and curiosity, not from a place of top-down, anxious obligation.

So let’s flip the perception. Less talking about AI as a revolution in pedagogy. More talking about it as a rebellion against paperwork. Don’t start with the poetry of the classroom. Start with the plumbing of the staffroom.

Fix the leaky taps first. The grand designs can wait. A bit.

Start human. Use AI. Stay Human.

The Next Word Services

AI in July — Agents, Lobsters and Partners

The highlights reel:

• Over 7000 people have heard The Next Word this year! These include individual school workshops and also conferences like EduTech and webinars. Whether it’s virtual presentations to our New Zealand principal colleagues, or live presentations and panels at EduTech, conversations in staff rooms or a quick email back and forth, The Next Word is out and about helping where we can!
• We’ve started our course for school business managers: In partnership with Decisionline and the Association for School Business Administrators (ASBA) to explore AI Governance and Literacy.
• Working on standards with the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) for edtech companies to meet in order to demonstrate their educational value (before schools buy them!)
• Our partnerships and alliances continue to grow, we’ve run fantastic events with The Smith Family, through The Connection. We have signed parntership agreements with eight schools for the rest of this year, and look forward to continuing that relationship into 2026. We are also taking part in policy and high level conversations with different groups and networks to help make AI work better for education in Australia.
• Recognition: It was a true honour to receive an Honorary Fellowship with The Teachers’ Guild of New South Wales. (picture above from the awards evening)
• Changes: they’re constant aren’t they? ChatGPT alone has released both Agent Mode and Study Mode (pictured above). These are already having an impact, even though they’ve been around for just a few days. Google has released Gemini into Google Classroom, which means teachers have access to a range of tools embedded in that environment. Microsoft have also released a bunch of new capabilities that link to their other apps.
• The Next Word (of mouth) — forward this email to a few colleagues who might benefit from a conversation about how I can help them!

Upcoming events and possibilities for:

• Business leaders in schools (Finance, HR, Compliance, etc!): Limited places!! ASBA AI Governancy and Literacy for School Business Administrators (10 week course, new cohort starting Term 4);
• Canberra educators: Radford College and Sentral are kindly hosting me for an evening with AI. Click HERE for more info and to register!
• Sydney educators: save the date for Wed 24th September for an evening with AI.
• Innovators: Teachers’ Guild of NSW: Industry Innovation Forum (Term 4)

Some new thinking — The Lobster Strategy for AI implementation

From the executive summary: This report introduces the Lobster Strategy, a comprehensive theory of AI integration based on the powerful metaphor of a pincer movement. This strategic framework is designed to help educational leaders overcome the systemic challenges of AI adoption by deploying two coordinated, simultaneous lines of attack. The strategy is named for the lobster, an animal with two distinct and functionally specialised claws that work in concert.

If you’d like a copy of the (dynamic and iterative) Lobster Strategy document, let me know!

Building partnerships:

I’m delighted to say that we are partnering up with several schools and systems to advise and support their AI journeys.

We are working on AI Roadmaps to begin 2026 with strength and clarity, we are working on professional learning programs, we are working on student and family engagement. It’s all happening!

At this point, I’m booked up for the rest of 2025, which is amazing! If you would like to discuss your plans for 2026, please do get in touch as a matter of urgency.

Try this: Agent Mode

“Agents” are semi-autonomous versions of AI platforms, which allow you to give instructions for it to go out on to the internet and actually take actions (not just give you instructions on how to do it).

Sign into ChatGPT and try out Agent Mode (select it as an option from the Tools) and ask it to do something that requires it to go onto the internet. Watch what happens. (The image below shows you where to find Tools)

Let me know if you want a quick walkthrough!

Spread the (next) word!

Forward this to someone you know who might need support to take their next steps with AI. A friendly introduction is a much better experience!

Take care and hope to see you soon!

Matt

I am not an advocate for the argument that we should simply replace humans with machines, whether physical or digital, just because it is economically profitable or technologically possible. There have been, and will be, many examples of this. These examples are pulled out of mental pockets and deployed in conversations about the future of work, the future of education, the future in general.

For now, most of us agree that for most young people the best place to learn is school. We pour trillions of dollars a year into schools across the world, many of which are designed upon the same assumptions (despite disparate needs of students or cultural changes), and which are measured in many of the same ways by national or global standards and structures. We pour billions of human hours in creating artificial structures like timetables, curricula, assessment and reporting, teaching standards, because we believe that by having these rules in place the whole thing works better.

As with many of the systems within which we work, learn and exist, education is a system of systems, an ecosystem really (since it is affected by factors outside of that which can be mapped and tracked and connected — we know the effects a windy day can have on students and teachers alike. Education is literally affected by the weather). Humans have created these educational systems based on a combination of what we think we remember from the past, we think we know in the present, and what we think will happen in the future.

Within this ecosystem, learning swims in the heads of our young people like an excitable squid. Sometimes slowly and gracefully, moving with the currents and waves in harmony, and sometimes darting around to react or respond to unusual circumstances, and, yes, sometimes squirting ink when panicked.

Learning only happens in the brains of individuals, but the conditions for that learning to happen exist in the physical and cultural environment in which that human exists. We are affected by the learning of others and the stimulus provided by the world around us but the learning we do is our own. This can get ignored when thinking about generative artificial intelligence and its role in learning.

It is the human or humans involved in using AI in that environment that determine its efficacy. Too quickly do we place a cone of shame around the platform or app that disappoints us without casting a glance in the mirror to evaluate whether we have thought deeply enough, tried a different tack, or paused to make a considered judgement rather than an easy condemnation. There is no shame in being in a state of experimentation, of exploration, but I for one certainly feel the pressure to have answers, to find solutions, to achieve a state of certainty.

There is only so much a human can do, and there is only so much an AI platform can do. But what we will begin to see is that more students are able to leverage these tools to go well beyond what is possible within the structures of school, and perhaps even society, as they begin to construct an environment around themselves. This could work in powerful harmony with their school-based experience, or indeed sharpen any divides that exist between the individual and their school context.

AI platforms, when used to their fullest extent — and to the fullest imagination of the humans grappling with them — will leap over the capability limits we currently face. Simple automations will lead to more dramatic shifts in potential. Workflow efficiencies will soon seem quaint compared to when whole portions of role descriptions no longer apply. Similarly, parts of curricula that we hold dear now may not require human intervention to be learned by young people and learned well.

Young people will always, always need to engage in social and cognitive apprenticeships in order to become the person they wish to be, and what the world needs them to be. But as the months roll on and development doesn’t slow down, we will need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and realise that the main limitation on what’s possible… is us.

If you liked this post, you might like to check out this book by Dr Nick Jackson and me, called The Next Word: AI and Teachers, available from late August.

Do you feel like whenever you open up your devices and see a feed, a newsletter, a post or a message relating to AI that there’s something new, something you’ve missed, a whole new field of research or practice you now have to engage with? Me too.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world of education in unprecedented ways. From personalised learning and intelligent tutoring systems to automated grading and feedback, AI offers new possibilities for enhancing teaching and learning practices, as well as addressing some of the biggest challenges in education today. However, AI also poses significant risks and challenges for educators, who need to keep up with the rapid technological developments and their implications for the future of education.

One way to illustrate this challenge is by using Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. According to this ancient paradox, the swift-footed Achilles can never catch up with the slow-moving tortoise if the tortoise is given a head start. This is because whenever Achilles reaches the position where the tortoise was, the tortoise has moved some further distance ahead. And since Achilles must always reach the position where the tortoise was before he can reach the tortoise, he can never catch up with it.

Watch a 60 second explainer of this paradox

Similarly, one might argue that educators can never catch up with AI, which is constantly advancing and creating new gaps in knowledge and skills. AI can process vast amounts of data, learn from its own mistakes, generate novel solutions, and perform tasks that are beyond human capabilities. As AI becomes more powerful and ubiquitous, educators may find themselves lagging behind and struggling to keep pace with the changing demands and expectations of students, employers, and society.

However, this analogy is not entirely accurate or helpful. Unlike Achilles and the tortoise, who are running on a fixed course with a fixed distance between them, educators and AI are not competing on a level playing field. AI is not a static or monolithic entity, but a diverse and dynamic field that encompasses different types and levels of intelligence, applications, and outcomes. AI is not a substitute or a threat to human educators, but a tool and a partner that can augment and complement their work.

Therefore, instead of trying to catch up with AI, educators should focus on exploring, adapting, and breaking new ground in their own domains. Educators should leverage the potential of AI to enhance their own professional development, pedagogical innovation, and student engagement. Educators should also critically examine the ethical, social, and cultural implications of AI for education, and ensure that its use is guided by the core principles of inclusion, equity, and human rights.

Educators should not see themselves as Achilles chasing the tortoise, but as explorers charting new territories in a changing landscape. Educators should not be intimidated or overwhelmed by AI, but be inspired and empowered by it. Educators should not be passive or reactive to AI, but be active and proactive in shaping its future. By doing so, educators can ensure that they remain relevant and valuable to their students and society in the age of AI.

Take a look at Dr Nick Jackson’s free online starter course AI, chatbots, ChatGPT for teachers (thinkific.com) or Microsoft’s new AI for Education resources to start jogging.

This article was written with assistance from Bing Chat.

Although there will be an almost total focus on operational matters in coming weeks as we navigate the COVID layer of organisational coordination that no school was built to run, and although we will deliver for our school communities on this essential need, I do wonder what the future holds for us.

Consider how many parents will not return to an office every day of the week. That for some organisations they have managed to find not only the flexibility of the on/off home/workplace switch to be quite simple to adopt, but that in fact whole ways of measuring “work” have been upended to focus even more on outcomes and value rather than seat time.

Consider that all of our students have experienced some form of remote learning – in extremely different ways and to varying degrees of success – and now we all (perhaps grudgingly) accept that learning happens everywhere. Not just within school grounds. And that actually the problem isn’t always the location of the learner but the types of experiences we design for and with them in this non-school environment.

Consider that teachers have pivoted practice back and forth several times, and sometimes wielding dual modes of practice at the same time, enabling most schools to continue operations despite continual and immense disruptions to the assumptions on which we base ourselves. In our school’s case, we did not close on any day, including school holidays. Our students, staff and parents all had access to our services (albeit remote) every day as they normally did.

Consider that many of us found that we had tools at our disposal that allowed for timed, written examinations to continue. That we could give rich feedback on a hand written response submitted to a drop box via a student’s phone, completed at home. Issues of equity were prevalent and need solutions, but the idea held fast. It is possible to undertake standardised tests in a non-standardised way.

Consider the creative intelligence it took, the mental and physical effort, the logistical and systems-level coordination required to affect even the most simple changes to the way schools are run. And we did it.

As seductive as the familiar may be, we cannot simply cross the same river twice. Too many changes and challenges have happened to too many of our young people and their families.

Now imagine, for a minute, that we put all that immense and intense application of experience, expertise and imagination to something that would actually improve and grow learning communities for the future. That we pour time and money and attention to projects and initiatives that build further value and extend the meaning of school.

Imagine. Just for a minute.

What would you do?

Well. What a fortnight, month, year.

It’s coming to the end of Term 1 in New South Wales, with some schools already having decided to end the term early for students, mostly to allow teachers to regroup and debrief before the Easter long weekend and two weeks of school holidays. Our school remains open to students until Tuesday, though the vast majority of our students have been engaged in our Continuous Learning program (remote/distance) for over a week now.

I thought I would just reflect on a few key elements of what has changed, or at least elements of school that have been challenged, since that time in January and February when we were still predicting that global and immediate change was an option, rather than the option.

Students at the centre

Our approach at OLMC Parramatta was to focus first and foremost on what we consider most important, that being the daily experience of students. All conversations orbited the central concept of what students themselves will experience. The ‘amount’ of work being planned and expected by teaching staff, the types of experiences (i.e. live Zoom sessions or asynchronous learning activities), the balance of wellbeing and learning, the role of technology and non-technologies, even the role of support staff (e.g. what might Student Centre do when students are not on site?). We found that if we kept our rapid design processes anchored in the daily student experience, everything else began to fall into place more easily.

This, paired with our emphasis on remaining true to our school values and mission, means that we hope our model of Continuous Learning addresses our students in a way that retains what we consider to be timeless and ensures we let go of that which is not as important.

Assumptions

There are several assumptions that have been challenged by the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Much of the research into distance/remote education still held assumptions that existed “pre-Covid”, such as that even if a student engaged with some distance education, their parents would still be employed, their movements would not be solely restricted to their home, that within weeks we would see a conservative government adopt radically interventionist economic policy to stave off disaster.

Some assumptions that continue to be challenged or outright rejected within the world of schools include:

• that 100% of staff and 100% of students can to be in the same physical place at the same time for learning to occur, arranged in a normal timetable
• that the way we teach and design curriculum can be simply transposed into an environment experienced mainly through technology and offsite contexts
• that the best experience of learning is that students should sit on a chair for 6+ hours a day under the direct supervision of an adult
• that attendance (merely being present) is sufficient to prove engagement
• that 100% of staff will be available at all times (or the vast majority, knowing that on any given day some staff may be in scheduled meetings, taking leave or undertaking professional learning)
• that the ‘amount’ of ‘work’ being expected of staff and students can be the same in both an on site and off site environment
• that schools can’t change and adapt quickly and extensively

Leadership

Despite being inwardly focussed so often, as we need to be to ensure we address our responsibilities to those in our care, leaders have banded together in new and interesting configurations to meet the changing needs of their schools — the speed and scale of these changes often requiring whole-school decisions to be made in minimal time frames.

As in normal circumstances, leadership does not necessarily come from those with titles. However, those with titles and responsibilities across the board have had to step up in ways for which no masters degree or executive-level professional learning course could ever truly prepare them. It has been invigorating to see the sharing of leadership through social media in the form of ideas, strategies and sometimes highly detailed plans. It has been deeply calming to work with leaders who put people first and policy documents second.

Working closely with two teams at my school — the IT Department and Library Department — have been filled with challenges but never have I been more thankful to work with people who really do strive every day to do the best they can. In this shifting series of scenarios, adaptability and responsiveness are key, both of which my teams and I have had to be to an extent not seen before.

Every aspect of school has been put under question in the past few weeks — not all without the anxiety that comes hand in hand with disruptions of this scale— but having leadership that is shared, supportive, adaptive and focused on people seems to keep the light shining in even when thoughts are crowded with unknown shadows.

Breathing space

As the decision(s) around school “closures” began to take shape in earnest, we realised that there would be little value in attempting to replicate our normal timetable in a digital environment. We developed a Weekly Plan, which indicated when new resources and activities would be available, so that rather than teachers having to be teaching live lessons from the beginning (beyond Year 12 classes), they would instead have some breathing space to be able to plan, design and distribute valuable learning activities appropriate to a Continuous Learning environment. This gave deadlines and rhythm to the week but also acknowledged that such a rapid shift required piloting and prototyping.

Paired with this is a Track My Learning tool developed by Melissa Riley (@archaeoeducator on Twitter) that not only gave structure and accountability but also flexibility and true ownership over time and circumstances. Again linking to assumptions, we did not want to assume families were in a ‘normal’ situation, so we planned accordingly.

These two tools replaced the normal timetable almost overnight, and with all resources being organised through our Learning Management System (LMS) Canvas, it enabled staff to work in teams to address the immediate needs of students as and when required.

It has been a time of extremely hard work for our staff, regardless of whether they had scheduled live lessons with students. As we initiate our next phase — running live Zoom session check ins with all classes just once before the end of term — it’s clear our model was appropriate as we needed time to get some ducks in a row before attempting to scale up our synchronous (live) engagement with students. Even then, our next phase of Continuous Learning will reflect our attempt to redesign based on new assumptions, not an attempt to hold on to assumptions that no longer exist.

Connectedness

I’ve always felt quite connected to my colleagues from many campues. Through social media, TeachMeet, professional networks and other channels, it’s been with deep satisfaction that I have seen the blossoming of professional sharing and support across the world. This has been the case for some time within the pre-COVID world, though the scale and selflessness with which teachers and schools (and other stakeholders) are now sharing — for no reason other than to save their peers the time and effort that are in desperately short supply right now — has reached a new level of activity.

It’s been an interesting time for connectedness: with students, with colleagues, with family and friends, with neighbours and fellow shoppers, with those making deliveries and those suddenly without a work-based structure to life. Every day I am convinced of the underlying goodness of humanity in the face of such adversity. I just hope we can remain so positively intertwined once the pandemic subsides. The world will not revert to normal. We will change to something that is new to us now but will be normal soon enough.

Be well.

I haven’t blogged much this year. As a priority, it slipped down the rankings and only now have I felt the opportunity to really stop and reflect in a way that suits more than a tweet. It’s symptomatic of what has been quite a year.

On the family front, we welcomed a beautiful little girl into the world and that has been an absolute delight. As someone who measures themselves by the time and experiences spent with family, having two kids has added a richness to the world that makes most other things both insignificant and incredible.

Moving schools is a shock for students — the transition can have significant impacts on various areas of their lives and learning, including reading — and can be for teachers and other staff too. In my case, we add to this a new role and that this role is my first leadership role (on the school Leadership Team / executive) and we might begin to see a list of ingredients that might cause some anxiety.

What I soon learned was that I was not required to meddle in the day-to-day operations of the two teams over which I have responsibility. The team leaders and the people in those teams were and are more than capable of managing themselves and that I could fulfil my role as a support person and strategic coach. There is management to be done of course, including discussions and decisions around people, resources, processes and procedures, strategic and operational plans and actions, but overall my role this year was one of learning and discovery of where I am most needed, and where I am not.

My colleagues on the leadership team have given me strong advice and support this year. In amongst the sleep deprivation, the discovery of corporate knowledge, the mapping of my own areas of influence and purpose, the engagement with nearly 1200 new people (and that doesn’t include parents and visitors), the launch and conduct of several projects, it’s been very welcome comfort to know that I just need to knock on a door or pick up a phone and I can access decades of experience and a compassionate ear.

Leadership shifts and sparks and shines — sometimes all at the same time when multiple projects are underway — and requires both firmness of purpose and principle but also flexibility of approach. I hope my colleagues on my teams and on those across the rest of the school know that whilst I do have quite strong views on particular areas, I am highly flexible in the solutions that we find to our problems. Not that the ends justify the means, but that we need not and should not fall in love with a solution before agreeing on what the problem is and what the ideal outcome should be.

There are many areas on which we have worked this year. Some have been to improve the experience of daily operations for students and staff (e.g. a new digital platform to facilitate staff leave applications), through to exploring new types of professional learning (e.g. ongoing professional learning communities, a professional learning conference and hosting teacher professional association workshops), to large scale projects such as leveraging platforms to better know our students (e.g. a data dashboard). We’ve established new bodies at the school to help support effective and valuable use of new technologies and also to better track and manage the facilities that exist on our site. Both are highly representative of both teaching and support staff.

Trying to engage with the wider life of the school has been a challenge at times, considering I am a working dad. I’ve had nothing but support for this and this has encouraged me to take part in a bunch of events and co-curriculars even when it takes time away from home. As a school leader, I know it’s important to be present — but people are very forgiving when and if I have to not turn up because projectile vomit is involved.

Amongst the other things, we started up a small and quiet Media Team to capture and produce short media ‘bites’ about the school and the many activities that occur on campus and beyond. The girls involved are committed and proactive, exemplifying the best that young people bring to any project.

I’ve tried to ensure that we are adding value with each and every project, platform or team. To every problem there are usually a few options (including maintaining the status quo) and it’s important that everyone involved in the decision know their role, know the facts as much as we can, and know the impact of whichever decision is made. One basic requirement is that the decision has to improve the experience of school for those concerned. This may not be in a way that they like or prefer but there must be a compelling case for change.

In my brief experience of leadership so far, if you give colleagues a compelling story and treat them like professionals, they respond in kind. There’s no point running your own race in a school because it’s actually a team sport.

This applies to students too, of course. I’ve been back in the classroom teaching History again to a small but energetic group of Modern History students. My love of that experience is unfathomable. I tell them (probably too often) that learning with them is the best part of my day. It’s true. Amongst all the exciting, challenging, frustrating, goal-kicking moments this year, it’s being with students that connect me most to my purpose. I think sometimes we forget that students can exist without schools but that schools cannot exist without students. The stories we tell about ourselves and our experiences are what can shape our most important relationships.

Although it has been a year of learning on many fronts I feel like I have made a positive impact on my new school and the people in it. None of this has been in isolation or because of some divine inspiration on my part. I am inspired by those around me, by opportunities that arise and can add value to our mission, by the students whose needs are changing more rapidly than previous cohorts, by an environment that lives out its values. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work at several schools where I have felt at home and it has been an absolute privilege to be able to start my leadership journey at a place that has such a rich tradition of making a difference in the lives of young people and that I can make a small contribution to its next chapter.

2020 will be exciting for a range of reasons and I look forward to jumping in, feet first, after a much needed summer break of rest and relaxation.

Education is often spoken about in terms of policies, places, practices, and not the people who make it all happen. It’s as if its an architectural concept drawing with silent, motionless and faceless characters occupying a space filled with suggestions of what will happen rather than who will do and experience the happening. On Twitter at the moment, there seems to be a low wave of push back against those who benefit financially from writing books or running workshops or research but are not in the classroom or in school- or system-based roles that have a direct connection to students.

Every time we step away from a conversation about the people at the absolute core of education — students and those who help them and their learning on a daily basis — we move further away from any sense of genuine accountability for our actions and the impact it has on the people at the core. Without the people at the core, all the rest falls apart. The consultants cannot exist without the people with whom they consult (I should know, I’ve done it). Sometimes we forget that as we hyperspecialise and hyperfocus on our own domains and look around astonished that so few people care about what we do.

So it is about people that this post is to focus, because education is not of concrete or paper it is of human flesh and imagination. We reimagine and reaffirm and redesign what education is on an almost daily basis because we are human. Our ability to choose to maintain or change is a human paradox. Corridors don’t get anxious over whether they are fully supporting the students walking through them.

People come and go through education. I’ve met extraordinary people in my educational travels both as a student and as a teacher (and various other roles in and outside of schools).Some have had a significant impact on who I am as a teacher. Some of them so much so that it is their words that my students hear as I explain a particular context or respond to a particular situation. It’s like when you catch yourself using the lines your parents used on you with your own children. Sometimes it’s very significant things like how we deal with a crisis but more often it’s unspoken, unconscious responses that float past with barely a whisper of mental acknowledgement. Or none at all. We embed others into ourselves to become a new version of us.

So when I heard about the passing of a teacher with whom I shared only a relatively short but wonderful professional connection, who had battled cancer and lost, through social media (because, for many social connections now I feel it’s often the only way we keep tabs on each other), my mind became sluggish as it slowed to process the information. We’d shared ideas about grammar (and the disconnect between normal language convention and those deployed during report comment writing), shared laughs and most importantly shared time. We even caught up after he moved interstate to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

This is what you do with people. With other human beings who have strengths and weaknesses and dreams and heartbeats. In our discussions about all the things we have added on to education (many of which will prove to be trends even if right now they seem absolutely critically necessary), we need to remember at the beating heart, the throbbing core, at the moment of learning in its most real and tangible form, are people.

Let’s not confuse likes with intrinsic value, or the text on a screen with a meaningful relationship. These things can be indicators of both but, as my favourite author of all time wrote, “evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” (Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight).

Behind every post is a person. That’s what we should value. And right now, I’ll appreciate the value I’ve kept despite losing the person that gave it to me.

R.I.P Sam.

This term has been the second on my leadership journey. Whilst my role includes supporting the IT and Library departments at my school in a purely organisational sense, my role really encompasses a nebula of possible projects and areas into which a technological or innovative lens can be applied. People who work regularly in schools — especially the students and teachers that form the core of these amazing communities — know that whilst we apply titles and domains to different roles, everything is connected and every aspect of the school affects another. We might often still work in silos but these silos leak (in the nicest possible way).

A key part of my work is to look beyond the present and beyond the box to what’s on the horizon, what’s out there now and what’s possible even if it doesn’t yet exist. One such area where I’m pushing my learning is the technical side of “technology”. I am not a trained “IT guy” so I rely on the patience and professionalism of our IT team to both inform and educate me as I grow in my understanding of his huge and rapidly evolving domain.

Meeting some of our IT services support network in the last few days has been incredibly informative. The devices and infrastructure possibilities that are currently on offer — and those on their way to schools — are stunningly powerful and can help schools support the myriad learning, teaching and other requirements that are now expected in a modern educational context. Schools are one of the most wonderful and difficult places for technology to be, since we do so very much in terms of diversity of need and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible (often with so little compared to organisations of similar size in either the public or private space).

Recently I have also gained a deeper appreciation for the new challenges schools face in terms of cyber security and digital citizenship. Both of these terms are chameleons but let’s for the sake of argument assume that ‘cyber security’ means the act of an organisation in keeping their data/information safe from unauthorised access and that ‘digital citizenship’ means that those within an organisation act in a way that maintains a curious and creative disposition but with a keen awareness of the consequences of their actions.

I’ve learned that one of the most powerful ways we can be a good digital citizen is to establish and maintain a clear communication path with whatever IT support to which you may have access. This is especially important in a landscape where every website, app, service or product wants you to sign up, sign in and stay with them for as long as possible. Being cyber security conscious means that your IT support should (and, really, must) be aware of what services to which you’re thinking of subscribing and test it first. This also might mean actually reading the Terms and Conditions. Being a good digital citizen means protecting yourself, even when it’s a product or service you trust wholeheartedly. I’ve learned (even thought I knew it, it’s now with a good dose of “Why”) that the less active we are as digital citizens of our own lives, the more we expose others in our organisations to unnecessary risk.

So as we come towards a break where some teachers may use that time to sign up, sign in or otherwise trial a bunch of different very legitimate services to use in the classroom, we need to ask ourselves — can we be brave enough to either use an alternative email address (such as simply setting up a new gmail or Outlook account for testing) or, failing that, at least use a different password to the one we use for school and everything else?

Even for your own personal use, it might be worth considering a few simple steps, some of which are outlined on the Australian Government’s eSafety Commissioner website.

I’ve learned that it’s worth the effort.

This post was brought to you by my appreciation for our IT team. We are lucky to have them.