From Cognitive Debt to Purposeful Learning: Reimagining Education with Prof. Martin Westwell S9E8 (128)
🔥 What if our obsession with achievement is actually limiting our students’ potential to become adaptive, purpose-driven learners?
🔥 What would education look like if we genuinely trusted teachers as professionals and designed systems to support their agency rather than constrain it?
🎙️ Episode Summary
In this rich and expansive conversation, Professor Martin Westwell, Chief Executive of the South Australian Department for Education, joins Louka Parry to explore the deep shifts required in education to truly prepare young people for the complexity of today’s world. From the role of dispositions and student agency to the transformational potential of generative AI in classrooms, the dialogue challenges dichotomous thinking and calls for a purpose-driven, flexible, and learning-focused education system. Together, they unpack what it means to shift from achiever to explorer and build a system where students thrive—not just perform.
👤 About Professor Martin Westwell
Martin was appointed Chief Executive of the Department for Education in April 2022, following a successful 4 years as Chief Executive of the SACE Board.
Martin has worked extensively with education systems and other organisations in using evidence to inform policy, practice, innovation and impact in education.
He was a Chief Investigator in the national Australian Research Council (ARC) Science of Learning Research Centre, and has worked with UNESCO using evidence to inform strategic planning of education in the Asia-Pacific region.
In 2018, Martin received the prestigious Australian Council for Educational Leaders’ (ACEL) Gold Medal, awarded for the most outstanding contribution to the study and practice of educational administration and leadership.
In 2007 Martin and his family moved to South Australia where he took the position of inaugural Director of the Flinders Centre for Science Education in the 21st Century and then Strategic Professor in the Science of Learning at Flinders University.
Martin completed his degree and PhD at Cambridge University and was a Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University in biological chemistry.
📘 Takeaways
Childhood is under threat, impacting cognition.
Developing dispositions is crucial for student success.
AI is transforming the educational landscape.
Trust and professional agency are essential in schools.
Education should be purpose-driven, not data-driven.
Equity must connect individuals to their preferred futures.
Adaptable skills are necessary for future success.
Learning should be an act of self-transformation.
Assessment needs to evolve in the age of AI.
We must help each other to think and make good choices.
📘 Chapters
00:00 The Threat to Childhood and Cognition
02:57 Learning and Dispositions in Education
05:45 The Role of AI in Education
08:40 Navigating Dichotomies in Education
11:41 Trust and Professional Agency in Schools
14:50 Purpose-Driven Education
17:46 Equity and Excellence in Learning
20:36 The Future of Learning and Thriving
23:27 The Impact of Generative AI on Education
26:33 Assessment and Learning in the Age of AI
29:25 The Shift from Achievement to Exploration
32:31 The Preferred Future for Education
35:31 Takeaways and Closing Thoughts
🔗 Connect and Resources Mentioned
🔗 Stay Connected with Louka Parry
For the latest learning innovation follow Louka on LinkedIn
Share your thoughts by visiting www.thelearningfuture.com
Tune in to be inspired, challenged, and reminded why love truly is at the heart of learning.
[Transcript Auto-generated]
Louka Parry (00:08)
Hello friends and welcome back to the learning future podcast. It's my absolute delight to have this wonderful guest on for this episode. Our guest today is professor Martin Westwell. He is the chief executive of the department for education in the state of South Australia. And he, as you'll hear, is just a fantastic thinker about the space of learning, the shift of systems. Interestingly, he actually led
the SACE Board, which is our credentialing authority in the state of South Australia here in Oz for four years previous to taking on this role. So he kind of does bring in the idea of what is the emerging future of educational design. He's quite a, say he's an absolutely brilliant mind. He has a PhD from Cambridge University and was a research fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University in biological chemistry. And he spent
I can't remember how many years, Martin, but a number of them at Flinders University as part of the Australian Research Council Science of Learning Research Centre. Martin, thank you so much for joining us for this chat today.
Martin Westwell (01:09)
No, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Louka Parry (01:12)
It's so good. isn't it just such an interesting moment, which is what we're talking about just before we went to hit record. I'd love you to answer this first question, which is what is something that you are learning currently?
Martin Westwell (01:25)
Well, you're always learning something in job like mine. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good. I think, and you know, and then the specific things that we're learning. So one of the things that I've been sharing with my, the kind of network of students, thousands of students in fact, that we engage with in South Australia through the Chief Executives forums with students, where we hear back from students.
I've been sharing my learning journey with my welding. So that's been good to do. And it's been good to share with the kids as well, you know, that this is me learning and, you know, look at the disasters I'm having along the way. so there's certainly been a lot there. think, one of the things that I've kind of really got my eye on at the moment that I'm reading everything I can get hold of, all really
vigilant for the new research. It's very much about how, you know, not just how dispositions, developing student dispositions are for the learning and for the future. And that, you know, you're going to need these in order to be able to thrive in the future, but just how important students, some of those underlying capabilities and dispositions are to support student learning, perhaps in a way that we've not thought about before. So if we give you a quick example.
Tim's data that comparison of four year olds and eight year olds all around the world in maths and science. The gap between male and female students is bigger in Australia than any country in the world. If you look at that go, what's going on? They're all getting the same teaching. They're all getting the same instruction. How are we, what's going on here? And then a massive study that was done in France who happened to be, have the second biggest gap in the world. France and Australia are really close.
It's massive study that just came out a couple of weeks ago and it's really clear that it's not age, it's experience of school. So what they did was they looked at the oldest in one year and the youngest in the next year, they're pretty much the same age. The only thing that's different about them is the years worth of school and the impact with school, wasn't age. So you're kind of now looking going, well, okay, what are we doing at school? And it's clearly about dispositions, about the subtle messages that we send to girls.
about, you know, the dispositions, the, you know, maybe a of a maths anxiety, their self-efficacy, their self-belief. And then, and then what you see is that plays through in hardcore result test results. Yeah. So, you know, so, that's just probably the latest example I've been kind of really thinking quite a lot about, but that's something that I'm kind of really going after now.
Louka Parry (03:53)
There's this whole piece on dispositions and you know, Martin, as someone that first came across you, would say probably, gosh, 15 years ago now, and part of your work in Flinders University, and I was a leader in the South Australian system. You know, it's kind of this conversation that we've heard for quite some time, which is this piece around, you know, it's not just content, it's skill and disposition. Where do you see the landscape currently?
because you have these kind of coming out that really are reinforcing how important self-concept is or the expectation effect. And so often I think we miss it early on and then we try to correct it later in some way through engagement programs into tertiary or whatever the case might be. What do you see that kind of the mix of the content, skill, disposition, even metacognition, meta-learning piece?
or the, you know, the motivation science piece, is again, I'm something I'm fascinated by still to this day.
Martin Westwell (04:45)
Yeah. Look, I think, um, like you say, you know, lots of the work that's coming out of the OECD, um, you know, lots of places is showing us that this is important. But I think what, you know, what used to happen, you know, like you say, we've been talking about this for a long time. What used to happen was we'd see it as being an add on, you know, let's get the stuff, the knowledge, ripped curriculum, the specific skills. Let's get that right. And if there's time for this other stuff, great. Um, that's what I used to kind of think.
I think now what we're seeing is like this research that we were just talking about, it's shown us that it's not an either or. There are multiple ways in which you can support kind of hardcore academic success through narrow tests like Tim's. There's a ways you can support that that go beyond just kind of what we might consider to be quality instruction and develop, you know, there are ways of developing kids so that they can be more successful. But I also think that, you know, probably our thinking about, you know,
the future has changed because of AI. So, you know, once you start to feel the impact of AI, you start to really think differently about the future. And so, you know, what was perhaps rhetoric when we were talking five, maybe five years ago about AI and how it was going to change the world feels like reality now. So, and so those words from, you know, Andre Schleicher from the OECD that I often quote about if we, if we carry on doing what we're doing, we will be developing second class robots.
because the robots will be first-class robots and we have to be developing first-class humans if they are going to thrive and prosper in the future. That really kind of resonates strongly. And so these dispositions connected with knowledge and the knowledge, curriculum, become important for the future of our kids. And I do worry that sometimes, you know, we've got this funny thing going on in Australia where we've almost fallen into camps around you're either doing explicit instruction or you're not.
And that explicit instruction at its worst, you know, at its worst, it's kind of doing the past a bit better. You know, let's do this, let's do more of it. Let's do this thing better. But it's what we were doing in the past. It's kind of incremental change. You know, it's faster horses. Yeah. You know, whereas kind of we got a change in the world. It's not faster horses, it's motor cars. It's not what we were doing.
Knowledge is still important, but it's not got the premium that it used to have. Now the dispositions have got premium. what's the, what's this thing going to look like? How do, what's, what's, what's going to be needed? Who knows? But it's, but it's not what we used to do. So we've got to take some steps into the future. And again, it's not that explicit instruction is not important. It's always going to be really important. When I started welding, I needed somebody to just show me what to do. then maybe to have a go at that. Right. We were talking about, you know,
I wasn't discovering all the possible ways of welding.
Louka Parry (07:34)
It's probably not the right thing to do too much lateral discovery with anyway.
Martin Westwell (07:38)
So it's definitely got its place. It's really important. It's not the beginning and the end. And it can't be the end because our students deserve and are going to need more than that.
Louka Parry (07:53)
really curious about the kind of dichotomies that I think are starting to dominate. And then maybe you would say with more experience, they've always dominated in some way. They've just shifted over time, whole language versus synthetic phonic instruction instead of a systematic approach. why, why is it, what's your, what's your provisional theory Martin as to why it is at the moment that, you know, we have on the one hand, cause it seems perplexing to me on the one hand, kind of God like technologies.
in the emerging generative AI space and beyond. And I want you to talk about EdChat later too. And then on the other hand, kind of this, in some ways, what I sometimes hear is like a reduction of the learning sciences into a small package, which is like, well, at least we can control this bit. So we're going to do this bit well. Why do you think we are in this current conversation?
Martin Westwell (08:43)
think it's a funny thing that humans do, right, around this kind of creating dichotomies and false dichotomies. And part of it is, you know, we have a a natural drive away from ambiguity to try and resolve things. You know, it's kind of natural, right?
Louka Parry (08:58)
Dissonance, yeah. Dissonance ain't fun. It's uncomfortable.
Martin Westwell (09:01)
Yeah. And so, some of that neuroscience understanding of kind of the underpinnings of decision making and economics in particular, know, that notion of, you know, you can bet $1,000 on the turn of the card. I've got 20 cards in this pack and there's 10 red and 10 black. $1,000 on the turn of card. it's red, you're going to win. Double your money. If it's a black, you lose.
Or you can choose from this pack. It's got 20 cards in and I'm not going to tell you how many red and how many black Which pack are you going to choose from? 10 red and 10 black or the pack where you don't know? And people often have an emotional drive to the 10 red and 10 black because this is it's uncertain You got a 50-50 chance, but there's no ambiguity Yeah, this pack is ambiguous
I don't quite understand it and I don't know what's really going on. So I'm just going to stay away from that. Thanks very much. Um, and, so, so people have this kind of natural response. Of course we do, but what it does is it pushes us to simple solutions to complex problems. Um, and you gotta be careful about that, I think. And I think that's kind of a driver, totally natural, but it's a kind of driver. You're, you're, you're doing it this way or you're doing it wrong. Uh, this is the answer. This is best practice when I think best practice in education is a.
I think it's a bit of a fallacy really, because, you know, when things are simple, you can have best practice. And there's not much in education that's simple. These little people and sometimes big people are quite complex, know, get a bunch of them together and they're even more complex. And so, you know, so you do need quite a lot of professional judgment in that mix. So,
And then of course, what the worst thing that happens is people then start to attach their identity to a particular approach. So yes, we're at this school or at that school. I'm, I'm at this educator or that kind of educator. And of course, and now you're wrapping your, you're around this thing. All right. And so it's hard to move away from that. and yet, you know, in our work, in our strategy, when I've been talking to leaders,
Louka Parry (10:53)
your whole identity here.
Martin Westwell (11:02)
I keep saying to them, you know, make, want you to make some choices here. This is what we're doing as a system, but there are some choices within this that do what makes more sense for your school. And then, and then congratulate them if they change their minds. Cause what they've done is they've set out, they've gone down a road to this is it. This is going to be the thing that's going to work for our kids. They've got part way down the road and gone, Oh no, you know what? It's not this. It's that we need to do a bit of that first before we can be successful at this. And they shift and every time I say it, I congratulate them.
Because it's a hard thing to do that. It's a really hard thing to do. But if they know, it's not about flitting around cause you can't decide, but if they know that it's not this, it's not about sticking that with that just because you chose it. It's about saying, no, we might come back to that, but I'm going to shift over here. Brilliant. That's fantastic learning. Great. Good on you. You know, so you need that level of tolerance of ambiguity in order to create the opportunity to shift within it.
and have a little bit of flexibility within it.
Louka Parry (12:01)
So fascinating. I think really deeply about the mindset piece to this or the mental models that underpin all the way, all the way up to our behaviors and micro behaviors and practices. And I mean, obviously I've read a lot of Sengi and systems thinking and innovation, or theory you, when we had, you know, Katrin on here on this, on this podcast, actually, who is the managing director of the center, there at MIT. And it just really is this, how do you hold lightly?
It's be, you know, it's the whole passion tightly idea lightly. And you know, just how punished I think we can be when we do change our mind. You know, just think about the headline flip flop, you turn back flip, you know, it's kind of, it's always. Yeah. This is wonderful quote. don't know who said it, but it's a. Well, what do you, what do you do when you, what do you do when you get new information? I was like, well, I don't know. So what I do is I changed my mind. What do you do, It's this beautiful. It's like.
And I don't know if you call it an adaptive piece, but you know, this idea of being a purpose-driven data informed system is something that I've heard you speak to a lot. So I would like you to talk us through the strategy, you know, and give us a bit of context as well about the scale that we're talking about here. You know, you're running a system, tens of thousands of employees, many, many young people. What's this? What are you seeing as the, if that make good choices mantra I think is powerful and an enabler.
Were you hoping to navigate? I guess might be the right verb.
Martin Westwell (13:28)
So, so this, so what we did was we, set out and we said, kind of, you know, what are we doing? Why are we doing this thing? And so we started by talking to the kids, in our system. So thousands of kids, lots of Metro, we went out to country remote out to the AP, where I sat down with the kids out there, and talk to them about, showed them some of the data about the system that wasn't some of the things that were good and some things that weren't so great, you know,
What do you notice? What could we be doing better? What do you want from school? We talk with industry, talk parents, teachers, universities. just kind of, you know, and if the thing was how consistent it was, you know, so we asked our employers, what's the most important thing that education can do, that public education can do to support young people for successful employment? And 30 % of them, just under a third said,
It's foundational skills, literacy and numeracy. And almost exactly the same proportion said it's capabilities and dispositions, it's creativity, it's being a good learner, it's being able to work with others, it's perseverance, it's a bit of resilience. Those are things that we really value. Right? All right. It's not an either or. It's not a dichotomy, right? Valued equally. So
Louka Parry (14:44)
Thank
Martin Westwell (14:51)
So, know, so we started there and so we were really clear that I know I hear people talk in schools and systems talk about being a word data driven. All right. What does that mean? know, we're going to be purpose driven. We're going to be driven by our why. I'm going to use data. It's really important in a system to help you understand where you are, how you're going, you know, if you've been successful or not.
question some of the assumptions you make, all butch things. Data, maybe I'm a data nerd, you know that. yes you Data is really important, but we're not driven by data, we are driven by our purpose. So that was the first kind of choice that we made. And we said that our purpose was to make sure that students are learning and achieving. Not when I'm achieving because we train them to do tests. Nobody cares about that.
Louka Parry (15:24)
You
Martin Westwell (15:43)
I want the achievement that they have to come from them being good learners. Yeah. And making sure that they could thrive and prosper. So thrive in the world. What five year olds to be really five year olds, not proto six year olds. are really, I want them to be really five year olds, but nine year olds to squeeze the most out of being nine and 15 year olds and all the kind of messy stuff and the becoming social animals and all of that stuff. So just be able to do that in a fantastically. Um,
And of course I need to their future as well and that does mean Economic participation it does mean being able to express who you want to be and what you want to do And how you want to be in the world through the way that you do. Um So making sure that they've got that ability and that connection. So that was our purpose and then we said Well, we can do anything now. So if that's what we're doing we could do anything
Um, but can't do everything. We can't ask schools to do everything. So we're to make some choices. Uh, because strategy is a set of integrated choices, set of choices that work together. And, um, uh, and that, yes, you know, let the, definitely want NAPLAN results to be good and safe results. Our year 12 results to be good and Tim's and Pisa and everything. Yeah, we want all that to improve, but that's not our purpose. Our purpose is actually learning. That should follow us doing a brilliant job.
that all that should follow. So data from that will be used. But it's not that's not our driver, because nobody cares if your kids can pass an F plan test if they can't use their literacy and numeracy in their future learning and in the work in the world. so, so we so we chose these four areas ones excellence and equity. And we purposely flipped it over and made it equity and excellence in our system. And that's as one construct.
Well-being, because we know how important well-being is. Our kids said it to us over and over and over again about helping them with their well-being and helping them to take some control over their own well-being and connecting that to learning. Student agency, because we know again it contributes to well-being, it contributes to achievement and we want our students to be agents in the world. I don't want them to be institutionalized by school because that's not going to help them in a complex world.
I want them to have that agency and of course I want them to be effective learners so we're quite explicit about they've got to be effective learners. We can't get away with achievement like I said before because we've trained them to do it because we've done 20 drafts of the SACE assignment because we've you know because we're just playing the game we're not playing the game we're developing learners and so we work quite explicit about that and again of course
Effective learners, well-being, student agency, excellence and equity, those four things all working together. Could we have chosen some other things? Yep. But again, quite big now. So that's probably more than we could have handled. So there were some other choices you could have made, but we're not making those choices because you can't do everything. So this is what we're going after as a system. And then saying to empowering schools to say, okay, you know, your kids better than I do, you know, your context.
You might have a staff at your school that's really experienced and it's just buzzing at your school. You might have a staff that's newly out and just getting going. Context really matters, you know, as well as the kids and the communities that you serve context will matters. So you want to take your understanding of context. This is what we're going to be tight on as a system, but we're to be flexible on how that's achieved. So you need to make some choices as a school within that. so that's what we went for, you know, purpose driven.
These are things we're to focus on doing some work with the curriculum things to kind of make all of that make sense. Because, you know, take what we've done, these choices that we've made, then look at the Australian curriculum, it doesn't quite do it. But then we said there was some cultural things as well that were really important. So first, you know, world learning system. this notion of, know, we're going to learn. And we and praiseworthy failures are great. Stuffups, not so good. But praiseworthy failures where you've had to go at something and it's
worked out or not worked out, but we've learned from that and even sharing it with colleagues and you know, this notion of changing your mind because you've learned something. Yeah, that's great. Um, we're to be tight and flexible. So some things we're going to be tight on, and this is what we're doing as a system. So there is a systemness to this, but flexible, we understand context. So we're going to have that flexibility. And then this notion of, there's a few of these kinds of cultural markers that we've had, but one of the interesting and important ones has been this notion of trust and verify. Yes.
Starting out with a notion that you can trust teachers and can trust principals. Start with that and change some of the policies, change some of the way that you do things. And yes, we're spending public money, so you have to have a level of accountability. And so we've got these verifications, so you need some verification processes so everybody, you know, it's about the trust, right? So everybody knows, can be confident in what we're doing. But let's start with a notion that you can trust teachers. So even things like, you know, some of the disability funding that we have.
Uh, you know, teachers doing hours and hours doing applications. So for some of the, you know, some kids need a lot of support, so there's more money and some kids need a bit of support. So there's, there's not, so in that, those lower level, um, supports that needed, we just said, if you apply for it, we trust you, we'll give you the money. I'd rather you not spend hours and hours doing these applications. And so we'll, I'm going to trust you. I'm going to give you the money. And then we've got these verification processes. And again, what you're trying to do is drive a culture, you know, within the organization. If you, if we trust each other.
and we're set out to be learners and we're tight on our principles but flexible on how they're achieved. You can start to see how all these things kind of work together for a system that really starts to buzz, a system that really starts to drive itself forward.
Louka Parry (21:23)
It's, it's just, every time I hear you speak about this, Martin, I get quite excited as an educator, you know, I'm just like, cause you just talk to any teacher and the things that most upset them really are the pieces around the lack of trust or the lack of professional agency. Um, but conversely, the lack of direction sometimes, you know, I don't know what, you know, so it's this idea of the time flexible. I've heard you say many times, it's fantastic trust and verify.
I first heard from Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway, who is a fantastic cultural driver and the learning system. And I guess the thing that I'm really curious about, and I want you to take us on this journey a little bit more, is this shift from achiever to explorer or I mean, I'm using Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson's language out of their book here, you know, whatever the shift beyond the achievement piece, because it still seems to kind of be stifling so much of that professional agency in schools. And another quick
story. did the, I did a keynote at the whole summit in Canberra, you know, a couple of months ago and it was, you know, it was a great event. These are our certified national pedagogues, fantastic educators been doing this long time. And one of them came up to me and said, look, thank you so much, but I have to tell you, my heart is breaking because of what I'm being told I must do. And, know, this is a certified leader of a school that's a lead.
teaching, one of Australia's best teachers. so there's just something around the disconnection there between the agency, the understanding expertise that we're missing. take us on a bit of this journey because people still think and parents to go, well, I'm going to choose a school that's about academic achievement. And it's like it is that it's the holding onto the old paradigm, as Keynes would say, that's kind of the issue is not letting go of the old ideas rather than the embracing of the new ones. That's the issue. So can you make the case for that?
Martin Westwell (23:19)
Yeah, look, I think there's a couple of things. I want academic success for my students, right? For all of them, right? So I'm not putting that down. know, as you talked about before, I was really keen enough to do my degree and PhD at Cambridge University and then go on to Oxford. And that changed my life. You know, I went to a primary school where 95 % of the kids were from social housing. You know, it was council estate across the road from the school. Education changed my life, right?
academic achievement changed my life, right? So let's not, I am all for that. But that was 40 years ago, right? The world's changed a bit since then. it's just not, it's no longer sufficient, still important, it's no longer sufficient. So, and the way in which we do it. know, so Ken Robinson famously said,
you know, if you, if you step back and look at the education system objectively, it looks like its purpose is to produce professors and, it worked for me. Thanks very much. But for most people that's, that it's not going to work. At some point you get filtered out. Yeah. Right. It stops working for you. doesn't send you off on another pathway. He's, know, that old model just stops working for you and spits you out at some point. That's kind of that anymore.
But and even for the students who are high academic performers, they need more than just the academic, the academic knowledge and skills to be able to be effective in the world. you know, especially with AI in the world, what we know is you're going to your relationships are going to be really important. You the connection, the way that you influence people. You know, the lawyers are having a panic because you because you might graduate law school.
and high level knowledge of law and understanding of systems and how people connect and how you influence a judge and you know, whatever else, all of that's really important. But the gap between graduating and being able to do that is massive because now all of that work can be done by AI. So there's no pathway for development because all that's going to be taken out. your academic achievement is not going to be enough. And the thing that's going to leapfrog you from here to there are the other skills.
You know, MIT did a study years and years ago about engineers and said to engineers, what do you do every day? So have meetings and I talk to this people and I do this and it's all social skills, collaboration skills, communication skills. Where did you learn that on the job? Right. What do you use not much? you know, my actual engineering skill and this and that. I don't use that very often, but when I do, it's really necessary. Where did you learn that? I learned that at university.
So the formal education is actually given us such a shallow piece of what you actually need to thrive and to prosper. So you've to make some choices now. You've got to shift and think about what we're doing. so, and it's going to be different for different kids. And that's hard for systems. And so one of the things I think that we've got trapped in is almost the kind of economists view of education. You know, it's this kind of unit that you can scale.
and give it to everyone and that's successful, right? It's quite a cheap way of doing things. All we have to do is just strive to do this. And so when people talk about taking the workload of teachers by giving them a lesson to teach, I think like, what? That's their job? Let's take everything else off teachers and make them think about that thing. Cause that's the thing.
That you got to the people skills, you to know your kids, got to know this Monday morning or Friday afternoon, it's going to be different. It's windy outside, so kick it off. You got to bring all of that to birth. The economist view of education doesn't do that. so, so this thing about reducing teach the workload on teacher, reducing the workload on kids, like the thinking on kids. So
Louka Parry (26:51)
Totally.
Martin Westwell (27:04)
You know, think Swell's cognitive law theory is kind of interesting. It's got something to it. I actually think that the research has moved way in the learning sciences, moved way beyond that now, but still, you know, it's got something to offer. But it's got these assumptions built into it around, you know, knowledge being kind of objective and structured. And what that does is it ignores context, meaning making, ignores student perspectives. You know, what's going on in the community right now.
And yet, you know, if you just focusing on, if all you want is for the kids to have knowledge in the heads, but your artists, but I don't think it is that, you know, it, it kind of treats the brain as a, as a computer neglects emotion, motivation, social interaction. It's quite linear. you know, and again, it doesn't recognize that these are social animals, with experiences that they're bringing with worries with.
and things that they really care about. And it kind of over-emphasizes kind of speed and automation. No, do this, do more of it, do quicker. You can get through this stuff quicker. And not so much about the of, you know, the adaptability that people are gonna need with their knowledge, the notion that, you know, you might learn this in this context. And of course, what we're doing in schools is often, if we're not careful, we'll teach a particular idea.
we'll teach it in a context, then we'll give it back to them in a similar context. I used to pull my hair out when I was at the Sakes board, as you can tell. Because a new context in the biology exam was it was in mice last year, and it's in dogs this year. And that's a new context. Well, not really. It's just a veneer, contextual veneer. So actually, it's the characteristics. And so
Louka Parry (28:43)
container.
Martin Westwell (28:46)
If you just want them to have this knowledge in the head structured in a particular way, then, know, cognitive law theory and some of that directing explicit instruction is really important. But actually, if you want them to be able to transfer it into things that we haven't, you know, we've not even experienced yet, you know, through AI and through other changes in the world, through social structures changing, through relationships between people, states, countries, organizations changing. We need to do, we need to do things differently.
because the knowledge on its own just isn't enough.
Louka Parry (29:15)
I remember a chat had with Charlie Fidel on this podcast as well, and center for curriculum redesign. And he really just talked about this shift from the kind of the era of expertise, the era of transfer. And I think this is what we're talking about. You know, the old saying, it was a Tony Wagner. I first heard it from, it's not what you know, it's what you do with what you know. know, right. And I always add another layer to that, which is it's, it's who you are becoming as you do things with what you know. But we always start with what we know.
And it's the first question we ask as teachers. tell me what you know. Show me what you know, Martin, instead of like, what matters to you? Like, who are you becoming? then of course, map backwards from that. Again, this is for Dell and the team's work. Start with that. then of course you get, you get to the like rigorous high quality content because you can't learn anything without content by the way. So the people that obviously the technologists that say,
You don't even know anything at all. Just, you know, just learn skills. You're like, well, what's the context to learn the skills through? It makes me laugh still. They're obviously not teachers or educators. but that piece on transfer I'm really, really interested in. think it's the big challenge for us because our assessment, you know, when you ran the safe sport, our assessment models are very much on show me what you know. It's, you know, how to apply the knowledge that, you know, near and far transfer those contexts, probably language I learned from you, Mark, frankly.
But you know, I think that's the big opportunity for
Martin Westwell (30:37)
It's interesting isn't it that when we you know our big adaptive assessment isn't our plan and it's adaptive for difficulty yeah you know that's okay you know you got 30 question tests and and probably there's only 10 questions the responses to 10 questions that tell you anything about a kid because if you're a high performer first 20 questions don't tell you anything because you just they just smash them out if you're really low performer
Louka Parry (31:00)
through.
Martin Westwell (31:03)
The blast 20 questions don't tell you anything. It's just the first few, you know, where you've actually started to understand where the child is. And so what we could have done was actually made it, we could have made NAPLAN a 10 question test by using the adaptive. We didn't for reasons that we won't go into now. But the assessment could be adaptive for transfer. If you started in the middle, you know, so you got an idea and you start in the middle and student doesn't transfer.
mid transfer, you could come back to near transfer and do it in some way in which was pretty similar to the way in which they learned it and see if they can apply it in that situation. Or you could ask them a mid transfer question if they can get that you can push to a far transfer question and see how far you know how far can they take it before before they flip back and transfer anymore right? You could you could do that. But we don't because exactly as you say what we care about is how much stuff
Louka Parry (31:45)
Extended abstract.
Martin Westwell (31:54)
you know about rather than, you know, Tony Wagner's, know, what you can do with what you know. And even kind of better than that, your point about kind of who you are becoming. One of the things I kind of carry with me is the student in the Northern territory saying at an event, if you're not helping me to develop my identity, I'm checking out.
Louka Parry (32:15)
Holy. That's kind of like, know, kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. You know, it's just that Rita Pearson type. Every child needs a champion. Like it's just so the experience of teachers.
Martin Westwell (32:29)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things that I think we've seen, we've got this well-being and engagement collection in South Australia. The majority of our students do it. It's got a whole host of items in it. But one of them is about having an adult that you're connected to, a trusted adult you're connected to at school. And one of the things that I feel like is kind of real green shoots for the strategy and the work is that that's gone up this year quite a bit.
And in fact, right across the board in terms of wellbeing, our year sevens have really improved this year. And I think that's something that's really important for us because we put year seven in high school just a couple of years ago and our year seven has been really struggling. And now having that adult, that connection, it's not just about, you know, having somebody to go to when you're struggling. It's about connection to school and, you know, people like me do things like this, you know, it's a much bigger construct.
Because it is quite a lot about my identity as a learner. have to, do it for someone else rather than kind of doing it for yourself. Yeah.
Louka Parry (33:25)
That big for me, one of the transitions is from the know it all to the learn it all, or maybe the apply learn and apply it. Do you know what mean? And if we, if we still got the ladder, think I'm quoting the ex head of the Singapore system here. You know, if the ladder is against the wall, that's the knowledge wall and well, they're at the top of the ladder and they go, well, we've won. We got to the top of the ladder, but it's against the wrong wall. It's like, how, how are our young people, you know, and how are the children as the African?
saying, you know, greeting goes, what a beautiful construct. How do we, and how are the children, you know, especially in this modern world of so much assault on childhood and on cognition, which I want to pick up Martin in terms of the generative AI conversation, because it, and I mentioned this to you just before, but I was at a conference last week where I was working with a number of independent schools and many of them were saying, I really wish we had access to what South Australian department schools are doing with EdChat.
And so I'd love you to take us on a brief journey of where that is now and where you see that going, because the general AI piece is here, then how it's used socratically, not, not to kind of create cognitive debt and offloading, but actually uses a tutor rather than an assistant is something I'm really curious about.
Martin Westwell (34:45)
Um, you know, so actually back in 2018, 19, we had, race like it was in South Australia and while he was here, we got him to talk from the OCD talk to teachers and that notion of, we'll be developing second class robots rather than first class humans talking to quite a lot about that. And so we've been thinking about kind of since then, um, and trying to make some changes in the space board to kind of set us up for that. And then chat GPT came out and, um, it was weird.
the world went, we're banning it! Classic, you know? Totally. His new thing, we're banning it. And we said, we're not, not, we're gonna learn from it, we're gonna learn how to use it, we're gonna be careful, we're not kind of going crazy. But we're gonna try and learn from it. So we didn't ban it.
And then, and then we worked with Microsoft to create, as you say, ed chat, which is essentially chat GPT, but with a few guardrails in place. So it doesn't learn, my open AI, um, chat GPT doesn't learn from whatever our students put in. Right. And that's important because students put all kinds of things in, um, sort of teachers as well. So, uh, we wanted to protect from that. We thought that was important for our social license to operate.
And then we put some guardrails, some of the responses that you would get in a chat you wouldn't get in chat GPT, just because, you know, we're talking about young people here. So we put some guardrails in place. And with the education department, we don't want to be telling the kids some of the things that chat GPT might, but you know, so making it safe space to be. And then we just put it in the hands of 4,000 students and some teachers and just put it in the plate in the space in between teachers and students in school. So what do think of this? Or we could have gone out with, you know, tighten it.
screw it down, just let a shink of light through and this is where we're operating everyone just in this little space. But we're learning system. That's a client system. It's not a learning system. we, so we said, okay, well, we're to learn from this and it's been fantastic. So we, you know, so students were telling us things like, you know, usual stuff that you're familiar with, but things like, you know, when the teachers come in, when the teachers in class and they get stuck,
I used to say I'd my hand up and have to wait ages for them to come round. Now I just ask Ed Chat, get on with my work. And then when the teacher comes around, I just check in with them. But it enables the momentum of my work in the class to go faster. Students, teachers telling us about, you know, a new arrival, doesn't speak English, autistic kid. And then the teacher asking Ed Chat say, right, so how would I frame this question that with this piece of work that we're doing in class and now translate it into their language?
And this kid's face lights up because now the sense of belonging, the connected, they do what everybody else is doing. They're autistic, but they've got a way in. Yeah. Um, you know, um, what we found is that, you know, 95 % more of the prompts are curriculum based. They're not using it for crazy stuff. And even when they're at home, um, it's quick based though. Yeah. So, so we've done lots of learning, you know, even things like,
Louka Parry (37:46)
Isn't that interesting?
Martin Westwell (37:51)
Student again, new arrival students, um, year 12 female student and she's used ed chat. She's developed an app within ed chat, um, to, uh, help other students, new arrivals to understand whether what they're experiencing at home is domestic violence or not. Cause they don't want to talk about it. They don't want a conversation, but it's a thing it's contained. It's isolated. You can talk to this and
you know, like, just like amazing use cases that we just wouldn't have seen before. So we've just rolled it out to all of our site-based staff. So every single teacher, SSO, anybody working in the school, everybody's got it. And we're working towards rolling it out for all secondary students as well. and just like furiously learning more and more, know, there's so much to learn. there's been absolutely,
just been fantastic for us. And in fact, was at our, you know, the business managers in schools, have a, they have association and the conference when I was at the conference today and the theme of the conference is the use of AI for business managers. You know, and they're stepping in. So we're just learning so much and there have been a few missteps, but not really nothing significant. That is way more positive. Yeah. But, and people using it really
I think really ethically, because you don't know what students and teachers are doing outside of EdChat. You know, they're chat, GPT, Gemini, all kinds of AI tools. Who knows what they're doing with those, but that's kind of the point. Yes. Right. That's great safe space. Yes. Great value within the system, you know. So we've got curriculum chat app where people can help us with planning and thinking, you know, so you can say things like, I've got a year six science lesson. I'm teaching this thing.
And I've got these kinds of kids in my class, you know, what would you suggest? But I'm really focusing on the creativity or the resilience or, whatever. How would I modify the class to kind of do this? And it's not copy and paste, but it is helping people to kind of think about, what they would do. again, trying to reduce that. The just a very heavy load of all the things you've got to think about, but not totally offloading. Yeah. I'm trying to get that.
that balance right. so, you know, we're moving ahead and I think we're seeing so much value in it. But I would say, you know, some people say, well, the kids are using it for cheating. Well, that's an interesting kind of question, you know, but AI exists in the world. Exactly. So, you know, what is cheating? I use AI all the time. but, AI exists in the world.
to what the point even is cheating. know, so clearly this again, there's some knowledge that you want students to have. And I don't want them just kind of regurgitate, you know, using the eyes to copy and paste. But I think we have to think quite differently about, you know, what would start talking about for what we're teaching, what the point of this thing is, what do our kids need? And I think assessment is probably, you know, our current forms of assessment are probably going to be really challenged.
It's not about cheating, it's about asking different questions, about doing assessment differently. We talked about non-Googleable questions for a while. remember that era. that was a good... What does that look like with the non-Google? I mean, what is a non-GPTable question, you know? I think we're going to really need to think about assessment in really quite different ways. And I think that some of the work around the country, Sandra Milgan's work at Melbourne University, New Metrics work,
some other interesting things around assessment. think they're starting to show us that there is a different way of doing this thing.
Louka Parry (41:21)
Yeah. It is so fascinating. This, this moment that we find ourselves in. often, I've reflected for a long time that what we call cheating in schools and universities, we call resourcefulness usually in the, in the world of private enterprise or industry in any sense. It is just so interesting. The kind of, and I think the conflict between those mental models, but it's becoming more obvious. You know, you go into industry, think one of the great, like one of the great strengths of education.
Martin Westwell (41:35)
What?
Louka Parry (41:48)
as the people that work in education are so often passionate about it and they do it with everything they've got. One of the downsides is that often there's little awareness of what's happening outside of the school gate because you're so focused on the young people in front of you. And that tension, I think, you know, some of the conversations you see around industry and the way that they are thinking about workforce development. Your example around, you know, paralegals and entry level legal positions is I think really challenging one for the legal profession right now.
also, right? And many others. What happens when those entry level jobs aren't available? How do you get, you know, this big human capital kind of questions to be answered, I think, on all of that.
Martin Westwell (42:26)
Look, I think that's right. think, you know, even things like, you know, exams and tests have got this kind of mythical stature in education that they just don't have anywhere else. Yes. You know, so nobody gets a job because of a test. Right. Well, almost nobody. You go, get a job because of your reputation, because of your past behaviors, because you've shown that you can do this thing. you know, Guy Claxton talks a lot about, of, has talked about the difference between kind of learning mode and performance mode. I know others have done it as well.
these two modes that you can be in. And in fact, think it's in lots of our different ways of thinking. And exactly as you say, if performance mode, if we're asking people to perform in a test, then cheating in test actually is a valid but not approved way of performing, right? But if you're in learning mode, what's cheating?
What is cheating? Cheating at all. Make any sense at all. yeah, it's just about keeping students in in kind of learning mode. Yeah, you've got to be able to perform, but not in the contrived way, in a real way. Come back to the transfer. Right. You've got to be able to do it in a way that's really meaningful. And we're just doing some work now in terms of, you know, some pedagogy, some assessments and using one.
Louka Parry (43:20)
sense.
process.
Martin Westwell (43:44)
burgers idea about expeditionary learning, so that the output is really meaningful and not just to the for a test or for the teacher or just for the student, but actually meaningful in the world. And it's amazing how transformative it is.
Louka Parry (43:56)
that once when you insert authenticity back into that process, I think it's just, it's like there's a magic to it. There's a real man. In some ways, you know, the schools of places where young people go to watch adults work really hard. I think I've heard that from Dylan William, I'm sure someone said it, you know, like that is really an old paradigm, you know, and it's not, I think often cognitive ceiling with all, it's not, we can do more thinking. It's we need to do things differently. It's not more, it's different.
Martin Westwell (44:20)
Yeah, but I think, but just on that, you talked about before about those kinds of teachers, they were saying, but I'm being told to do this. Yeah. You know, and at worst kind of being given the PowerPoint saying, you know, this is the lesson you're going to deliver. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So now you've not got, you've not even got kind of, you know, kids watching teachers working hard. You've got the board watching the board. Yes. You know that, and we're all turning up, we're doing this thing and nobody really wants to it.
Louka Parry (44:33)
designed for you.
Martin Westwell (44:48)
Oh my god, oh god, you know what it...
Louka Parry (44:52)
It's such a profound, it's a really good perspective to sit with. know, and I often ask this with our educators, we work with, know, if you're, it's a living, what lesson would you love to, would you love to be in your current lesson? And it's quite provocative and kind of sometimes it feels a bit dangerous because you're like, actually, no. And, you know, I've taught some lessons that were pretty boring lessons. sure, know, in my time, I wouldn't want to be part of this at all. So that's, that's the piece, the dynamism of the emergent phenomenon that is learning, that is culture.
That's the exciting piece. And my sense is, especially with Gen.ai and the shifting system view, we can help our young people individuate more so that they can be more unique. And that means they can be more valuable into a marketplace or into a community. There's something about moving beyond the sameness that I think all these pieces, the credential piece, Martin, the different orientation around the pedagogy space, you know, if we think everybody's the same based on this singular brain, you know,
a computer brain as computer rather than brain as forest because we are organic matter. Imagine that the regenerative worldview that I see emerging through the RSA and other international fora, which I think sustainability is also fraying. It's now how do we learn to regenerate in every way that matters?
Martin Westwell (46:07)
Yeah, I think there's so much in that. think, you know, our notions of equity at the moment are still based around, you know, the all kind of the exams and the tests and the things. do we get these kids, this group with this characteristic who are not so good at doing the tests or achieving the test to do better? Right. Low SES kids, Aboriginal kids, you know, whatever it is. And we should still strive to do that. Of course we should. But exactly say it's the kind of, we're putting the ladder up against the same wall over and over and over again.
an equity really should be making sure that we're connecting people to their preferred future. Yes. You know, that we're helping them to be who they want to be. And that we're making, we're making sure that we're making choices as a system, and that there are choices within the system. So for principals, teachers, kids themselves, that can achieve equity in that way. Everybody being successful, but in a broader way of success. You know, even simple things like
You know in South Australia if you do a semester's worth of electric technology, you know the training to be an electrician, if you do a semester's worth of that at year 12 or semester's worth of physics, in the certificate it's worth exactly the same thing, right? These are equally valued, trying to get to that equity. And people say yeah but isn't one easier than the other? Well maybe it is, maybe you could even say it is objectively.
But if you want to be a physicist, the physics is really important. But if you want to be an electrician, physics is important, but you're to get that through your training. You know, the training is the thing that's important for your preferred future. So, so the value is actually to the individual, unless kind of objectively to the system. So I think there's something in that and, and, and teachers worry that then what we're asking them to do is to create kind of individual lessons. So the differentiation goes down to the individual.
And I don't think it is that. I think the individual can develop and emerge. But what we are asking people to do is to make sure that the learning is being taken personally, that it's meaning. students might make slightly different meaning and put different weight on the learning because of their preferred future. But they've got to take it personally. And that's, think, where some of the dispositions, the well-being, the agency, all comes in. Because students now take this knowledge personally.
Connected to the internal schema of kind of who they are and who they want to be and now this thing is got you know You think about this thing is setting off all kinds of connections in your brain rather than that kind of you know cognitive load theory Where this information is only connected to that? You know the next bit of information the next bit of information the next bit of information so that notion of kind of equity being broader sense of Success and then within that that students are taking their learning personally
Yes. Those are some of the challenges for us as we move forward.
Louka Parry (48:48)
That's beautiful, man. gosh, the, ranking to matching as one of those pieces. but this learning as an act of self transformation, right? To get to put it too broad, massive, but that is, that's what learning should be. it not? the, it's kind of the life force of a human being. I've got two final questions. and the first is, is brief. You've used this wonderful phrase that I love the preferred future. So, you know,
I hope you and I have conversation, we'll have many conversations before then, but in five years, Martin, if we're having a chat and you talk about the preferred future for South Australia, what is the frame that you would, you would kind of offer at this point in time?
Martin Westwell (49:27)
Yeah. So I think there's some things that we could look back on, know, project ourselves 10 years forward and look back and say, you know, so what are some of the things that if we didn't get all of them now, people would say, what, what were you doing? Like, did you not see it coming? Yeah. Climate change, threats to democracy. you know, how AI will transform the world. and I am particularly interested and worried about,
what is currently expressed in itself as increased misogynism and misogynistic behavior in young men. I think that's quite a complex area. And one word we got time to delve into, I do worry about the kind of purposelessness that perhaps lots of young men feel that might be leading to that. So some of those things we would get hold of. We'd have a thriving democracy. We'll have be...
purposefully, intentionally and hopefully doing things around climate change. Our society would be functioning, we would be interacting with people in much more, much healthier ways than perhaps we are at the moment. I'm including that kind of social media as well as... So I think, and those are all fixing things that are not going so well.
If I take this notion of kind of learning and thriving as our purpose in education, kind of prefer future is that, know, people learning and thriving, you know, and I think our relationships are a part of that. You know, think economically we're talking about people who can adapt. You know, we keep doing this thing, you know, we've got steelworks in Waialoa in South Australia and, you know, it's on again, off again, on again, off again, know, back on again.
But what we've done is we kind of track these people with particular skills, so they've not got skills that are adaptable. Clearly, one of the things we need is people who have have adaptable skills. Something happens, something changes and you shift and you're able to make the most of that opportunity. Because we've had generation after generation of we're doing this industry or no, we're not. We've got these new industries and there will be new jobs, but there's not new jobs for those people who are in the old industry. It's for a different set of people.
So you've to make sure that, you know, our economy is for everyone, you know, and everyone is able to make the most of our economy. And so that kind of works both ways. And the same for our society. So, so it very much is kind of learning, thriving, connected to each other. You know, you hope for less racism, more connectedness, and that's not about getting rid of our diversity. That's about improving our inclusion. So
you know, a whole set of things there around. Yeah, learning and thriving for all of us.
Louka Parry (52:02)
Beautiful. Last question, man. Gosh, what a wonderful conversation with you. It always is. What's the take home message for someone that's taken the time, whoever they might be, their work in education, innovation, et cetera, to listen to this conversation.
Martin Westwell (52:27)
Luke I've lost you. That's alright. We're back,
Louka Parry (52:30)
I'll just drop that again and make a note to edit this section.
Okay, we'll try that again. We'll do a little edit here, What's your take home message for someone that's listened to this conversation,
Martin Westwell (52:58)
Well, I think then, you know, the focus for us is what I think has got to be about holding onto purpose. You know, if you lose your purpose, you know, that kind of data dreams, if you lose your purpose, you're lost. You know, you can't connect back to anything else. So I think it is, you know, it's about purpose. It's about the choices that we make then from that purpose.
So whether you're an educator, parent, a student, a member of society in all kinds of different ways, making sure that your choices do reflect your purpose and what you're going after. mean, I have to say that is really important part of what it is to have integrity. Integrity is not being corrupt. Integrity is holding onto your principles, holding onto that purpose. And I accept that in education systems and in systems around the world.
there are things that are pushing people away from that. It's not a trivial thing to say, it can be quite difficult. And I would say, just kind of reflecting on that question of the preferred future, let's all help each other to stop and think. I think that's a future where we're better at that, where we're not pushed around by our emotions, where we're not...
We're not reacting to everything, but we're able to just stop, take stock, think and make good choices. That doesn't just happen, that comes because we help each other to do that, whether as educators with our students, but in our interactions with each other, in our work and in our lives. You know, for me, I try and carry that with me and I think it's, you know, it's helping.
Louka Parry (54:36)
You do carry that with you, Martin. I often say executive function for the win, you know, and it really is. It's the what's this all for? It's to do it together. Thank you so much for being with us, Martin, and for the continued leadership, especially as one of the best learners that I know. You can't run a learning system unless you yourself model what it means to be a learner. And I think you just do that so beautifully. Thank you.
Martin Westwell (55:00)
Thank you very much for having me on.
