Ep 46. Reclaiming learning time to boost literacy and numeracy with Ross Fox

[00:30:54] Ross Fox: Our second bold goal was that we wanted high impact teaching practice in every classroom. Really the first thing we had to do was say what high-impact teaching practice wasn't, as well as what it was. During our conversations and I don't think there's any single conception of effective teaching, but I think that if you want to know and understand what effective teaching is, you can't go past Rosenstein's principles of instruction as a guide to what effective teaching should look like. 

 

And so we adopted versions of that in our understanding, but some of our context, our other jurisdictions in Australia had high impact teaching documents, and they had things like differentiation included as a definition there. And I would say that is not a great place to start if you haven't got really high quality in classroom instruction, differentiation isn't your issue. 

 

We had to be very careful to focus and limit our definition of high-impact teaching practice. But the idea being that we wanted bell to bell, every lesson, every day, we wanted high cognitive opportunities for every student as a result of the teacher providing really high-quality learning opportunities through high-impact teaching practice.  

 

[00:32:12] Anna Stokke: You talked a bit about knowledge being important. So I wanted to ask about a knowledge-rich curriculum, which I've heard people talk about before, and whether Australia had a knowledge-rich curriculum, whether that's what you were working with. 

 

And if not, what kind of curriculum did you have? 

 

[00:32:29] Ross Fox: A couple of things, probably for non-Australian listeners. If you go and search curriculum Australia, you'll come across a very important body called the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. So one of the things they're responsible for is the Australian curriculum. There is an argument to say in the typology or classification of curricula, or curriculum documents, that actually we don't have an Australian curriculum, we've got an Australian curriculum framework.  

 

And the Australian curriculum is relatively high level, sometimes very vague. I've been taken by work of E.D. Hirsch, he has some really profound observations, particularly about most curricula in the Western world being based on the concept of an expanding horizons curriculum, the idea that a five-year-old learns things about their family, and then a six-year-old about their community, and a seven-year-old about their country, and an eight-year-old about the world. 

 

And so, some of the curricula are based on this idea that students are only ready to encounter a certain social context, which expands as they get older. And I think that E.D. Hirsch makes a very effective critique to say that is dramatically limiting the knowledge exposure for students. And he's got this great essay that I'm a big fan of, which asks the simple question of, “When should children learn about ancient Egypt?” 

 

And it's often the case, if you ask friends, they sort of think, “Oh, when they're 16, when they're 14 years old,” of course E.D. Hirsch's answer is as soon as possible, because generally speaking, children are not learning about ancient Egypt in their home, but they are reading about their family, their community, their country, the world.   

 

Maybe there are some, but there are, it's not a common thing. And of course, if you teach about ancient Egypt as soon as possible, you introduce students to unfamiliar vocabulary, that's very rich, very strong knowledge. So I'd say it's an area that will continue to develop in Australia. I don't think the Australian curriculum is a knowledge-rich curriculum. Some of the jurisdictions have implemented it in a way that is, and particularly New South Wales, great credit to them, have a syllabus interpreting the curriculum that is absolutely knowledge-rich and is, has a commitment to that.  

 

That's only now being implemented, by the way. But in general, the Australian curriculum is nowhere near sufficient, nor does it entail a knowledge-rich experience for students. And my experience was we had very, very low vocabulary aspirations for our primary school students and very, very low knowledge aspirations. And it comes back to the thing I am sure we’ve all heard as educationists or educators, that knowledge isn't relevant anymore because you can just Google everything, you can just type it into AI and find it out. 

 

And, of course, we know that's not true. We know that that means you're hampering and undermining the capability and potential of the human mind, if you don't fill it with knowledge, you denied the possibility of achieving expertise. So that's a profound thing that's influenced everyone is with de-emphasized knowledge with de-emphasized the aspiration for sophisticated vocabulary, and that was certainly something we saw as we approached early literacy interventions. We were reinstating and lifting the aspiration for high quality vocabulary.  

 

[00:36:17] Anna Stokke: You've mentioned reading and literacy quite a lot, but what about math? What were your math scores like? What did the math curriculum look like? And I can usually tell just by asking this question, were students required to memorize their times tables, say?   

 

[00:36:33] Ross Fox: So what I could say is that I actually asked the mathematics advisor in the office. I said, “Oh, can you tell me, do children need to learn their times tables?” And the answer came back, “No, no, not really. There's not much evidence for that.” So that, that was sort of six years ago. I'm a trained engineer, I thought that was totally wrong.  

 

And then of course, more reading and cognitive load theory, totally wrong, totally specious. In the maths area, we had some of the people who were sort of on the edutainment circuit, big names, really popular, give great lectures, really good TED talks. Have all sorts of attractive metaphors for learning, learning pits and other things cognitive wobbles.  

 

We had a number of mathematics consultants who were sincere and putting in a lot of effort. But our mathematics knowledge was highly variable, our mathematics resources were highly variable, my first observations were that we did things that were relatively superficial, so they wanted to hand out lots of dice so that they could have concrete experiences of number.  

​

And of course that's nowhere near enough. So, that was done and in itself not bad, but nowhere near sufficient. What happened in fact, our numeracy results were probably worse than our literacy results. And other systems thinking about this have said, “Oh, my reading looks okay, I'll do maths, I’ll focus on maths.” My view was that literacy is so foundational, if I can get the pedagogy curriculum and assessment systems right around literacy supplemented by intervention, I'll have enough strength, enough discipline to be able to tackle mathematics. 

 

And in fact, what happened in terms of our NAPLAN results, we saw dramatic improvement in terms of the cohort of underperformers in literacy, but we also saw it in numeracy. We didn't go as hard on numeracy to start with because there's not as many well-resourced programs as there are in the early literacy space. 

 

We changed the pedagogy first. So we said, there is a way brains learn, and it's not just getting through the content, it's not just teaching your program. You actually have to revisit regularly. You have to have the testing effect or retrieval practice. You have to achieve automaticity and fluency. You have to actually get mastery of these concepts. 

 

So that meant that what happened early on was that daily review, a concept of five to 15 minutes, fast paced interaction with knowledge that the students had already all been taught. That became a characteristic of our classrooms in both literacy and numeracy. 

 

And so instead of just our concept of learning being exposure, it was actually exposure, encoding, retrieval practice, application. We had side effects, positive ones on our mathematics approach. I think we started to make really good progress, and this is a work in progress, we realized that it was just totally unattainable for all of our primary teachers to be writing curriculum and lesson plans for all of their subjects. And in Australia, the primary model is it's really one teacher to one class. 

 

They've sort of got release time for between half a day and a day a week, but they're in the class, something like four to four and a half days, and they're expected to do all of the lesson planning for that.  

 

And it's often the case that our primary school teachers have not done maths beyond year 12, or their high school, and potentially not beyond 16. And so we've got a large workforce in primary schools who are not excited about maths and maybe not particularly competent. So, I took the view that the best thing we could do was provide them with the best high quality instructional materials so that they didn't have to write them themselves and that they could then talk to their colleagues about how they were going to teach these materials not what they were going to teach, which was the characteristic of the conversation I think before.  

 

[00:40:49] Anna Stokke: So that sounds like a powerful shift, moving from just exposure to concepts to real mastery through things like daily review and retrieval practice. And it sounds like you saw some early momentum, but with such a wide range of teacher confidence and content knowledge, how did you make sure all teachers could keep up with the change?    

 

[00:41:11] Ross Fox: I think we transformed by giving them, we did a complete set of data sets, mathematics materials with some room for slippage or re-emphasis or re-teaching. But the idea was we've got, which is not mandatory, but “Here's a high-quality instructional material set for your whole mathematics scope for the year, why don't you use that? And by the way, your colleague next door will be using it, so when you're meeting together, you can talk about, instead of working out what each other's doing, you'll be saying, ‘how do we teach this given the students in front of us.’” So, that was where we had great success. 

 

There's a huge controversy at the start. The idea that we would be taking away core work of the teacher work essential to their professional identity, and we said, “No, no, this will save them time. They don't need to do it.” There would seem to be this real belief that teachers could only teach things that they had prepared the lesson plans for, which I just don't think holds in many, many other areas of endeavour.  

 

And so, I didn't believe it and we, we wrote those K 6 lesson materials, and the response from teachers is that we saved them between 5 and 10 hours a week in the lesson preparation and review or writing those lesson materials and then preparing to deliver the lessons. 

 

And that has come through self-identified through quite large surveys of our workforce, it's by no means perfect, but we started with a high-quality really good base of instruction materials for mathematics. And so in, in many cases, by the way, my clear perception and understanding is that the first thing that happens with these high-quality instruction materials is that they're amongst the best professional learning that you can give teachers who might not understand the subject content very well.  

 

And you can then diagnose and you can target with additional support and knowledge those teachers who need more understanding of mathematics, given they might not have a strong mathematics background.  

 

[00:43:15] Anna Stokke: So you gave teachers high quality materials so that they knew what to teach. As well, they were using these techniques from the science of learning, like daily reviews and explicit instruction in math class, which is likely what, you know, had the impact on your scores. Does that sound right? 

 

[00:43:36] Ross Fox: There's just two other things. When I began, our system was a proud inquiry system. And when you pushed on, “Oh, what does that mean?” Everyone was very vague about it. They said, “Oh, it sort of means we have to start with a question from the students. It means that what students discover for themselves is probably more valuable than what we teach them explicitly.” 

 

So a lot of that stopped, a lot of that idea that we just be passive and we let the students discover, a lot of that stopped because we now had explicit expectations for what was going to be taught, we had materials to support that, just replacing and taking away that low impact practice that really ineffective practice no doubt had a result. It's frustratingly difficult to show exactly what the results of the efforts in mathematics have been. 

 

[00:44:28] Anna Stokke: But did you observe any impact? 

 

[00:44:29] Ross Fox: So as director, when I'd visit a school, a primary school in particular, if I went into a classroom, I would ask the students, as a whole class, who here likes maths? And my experience, anecdotal and correlational, was that those schools who were totally on board, who were evidently following the practices that we'd encouraged, about 90% of the hands went up.  

 

Whereas my experience in a school who wasn't particularly on board, wasn't following it, was that you were, you were between a quarter and a half, if you were lucky to get a half of the students saying they like mathematics. And so, for me, it was that demonstration of, there's a big question between motivation and success. What is the relationship? I think the relationship in mathematics is motivation is caused by success and surprise, surprise when our students knew what they were doing in maths, they enjoyed it more and then they're willing to admit that.  

 

Our system has some very disadvantaged schools in New South Wales regional areas. The national body has a, a ranking of schools by socioeconomic background. So, a hundred, a hundredth percentile is the most advantaged and zero is the least advantaged. Our school, which is 400 kilometers, so about five hours drive away from Canberra. Is on the sixth percentile of advantage. Most of the schools in Canberra are between the 65th and 95th percentile of socioeconomic background.  

 

And what happened over my time as a result of Catalyst, I believe is that when you, when you put a list of schools up, including both ACT schools, Catholic schools and Catholic schools that we'd operate in New South Wales, what happened was that historically ACT schools had always been well ahead. And those schools who are really getting into the maths programs, the literacy programs, they started to be indistinguishable from the top schools in the ACT, despite the regionality, despite their distance from a major metropolitan area. 

 

And so often in the top 10 schools, you'd have four or five that were in New South Wales. And so, we were seeing, you know, that inequity that is predicted by locality, socioeconomic background, indigeneity, all of these disadvantage factors was being overcome because of high-quality instruction in the classroom. 

 

And, we now move to a situation where we were so obsessed about what was happening in each classroom, and there's about a thousand classrooms, that when the scores came out, we had a very good understanding of what that teacher had been doing, what programs they've been using, whether they're on board with the science of learning, whether they had a good understanding. 

 

And so, we actually were very informed about that, that test result is as a result of. This hard work, this effort, and this application of the science of learning or science of reading, for example.  

 

[00:47:34] Anna Stokke: So, you introduced the Catalyst program, which you've mentioned a bit already, maybe you can explain why you called it that, and just kind of give us a brief overview. 

 

[00:47:45] Ross Fox: So, we thought we should set our goals very high. We'd work to establish an understanding that our results weren't where our students and our families. deserve them to be. And we work really hard to understand what good pedagogy, what good teaching and learning could look like. And that profound understanding that the teacher was the most important learner. 

 

So, the key audience for Catalyst and the reason we called it Catalyst was we were trying to appeal emotively to teachers who, our teachers, overwhelmingly to see students learn. So, we called it Catalyst to engage teachers, we had Catalyst, which was touching that emotion, but drawing it together. And we, we really guarded Catalyst to say, it's about the science of learning, it's about the science of reading. And we broke down the key job, the key role of a teacher into pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. So how we teach, what we teach and how we know the students have learned. 

 

We wanted to be very precise about those three things. So, we wanted to have a really clear idea about what good pedagogy was that best helped learning. We wanted to have a precise understanding of what the curriculum should contain, how it should help students move through their knowledge and skills. We came to the insight about the importance of knowledge, and then on assessment, one of my statements is that “The best data about a student is most likely to come from a whiteboard, not a dashboard.” As, at least from my experience, there's too many conversations in education that expects some magical computer program or magical spreadsheet or magical graph to diagnose the learning needs of a student.  

 

And there was a profound anecdote that I heard, we had some people going into a classroom, observing a teacher, a very, very energetic, very enthusiastic teacher, it was a year 10 science class and she began to listen, and she only checked for understanding at minute 35 of the lesson, and at that stage realized that she'd lost 80% of the class at minute five when she didn't explain the concept clearly. 

 

And so, part of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, part of high impact teaching practice is undoubtedly constantly going through that cycle as a teacher of, I have just taught these students, have you actually learned it? Because I'm a big fan of Siegfried Engelmann's work, and his challenge that if you've taught, but the student hasn't learned, how can that be a logical construct? How can it be true that you've taught if the student hasn't learned?  

 

And so the most important thing for teachers is to, with relatively high frequency, check for understanding. And so we introduce mini whiteboards in our classrooms. They're very ubiquitous now. It's just an amazingly efficient way to answer that question of, I've just taught something to the class, have all the students taken this on? 

 

And if not, do I know which ones aren't? We also did a lot of work thinking about assessment and I'm a big fan of Karin Chenoweth's work. In my view, Schools that Succeed is the best book for a principal to read about what systems in a school are important to learning. 

 

She's got lots of examples about the teaching assessment cycle. And the problem with our national tests in Australia is at the moment, the tests are taken in March and the results are ubiquitously available sometime around June or July. 

 

That is not an effective teaching feedback cycle. You need it very short in order to make a difference to students. Of course, the most important one is the check for understanding with mini whiteboards. That sort of very, very tight cycle of teaching, adapting to student needs. But you need a very high quality assessment program to inform teachers that confirms their judgment in an objective way. 

 

And so we, we adopted quite a comprehensive assessment schedule. We put in the dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills in K-6 and it was optional in 7-8, increasingly being taken up. So that's a battery, it changes, but it's three times a year. So, basically, every 10 to 12 weeks, the teacher has a very objective measure of both the progress of the student, and their position against a well determined, well-constructed benchmark. 

 

We then, we're using, tests devised by the Australian Council for Educational Research, progressive assessment tests for maths and reading, and we're doing them at the beginning and the end of the year in order to give, you know, a starting point for teachers and an end point for teachers so that they really know, for each student, what's the progress on an objective basis. 

 

Every system is trying to accumulate different assessments, but what is needed is those that are most efficient and give the best feedback to teachers in a very timely way. Something closer to the five weeks seems best practice.  

 

[00:53:04] Anna Stokke: And you mentioned that, the Catalyst program actually contributed to reducing educational inequities, right? Particularly between schools in different regions within the archdiocese, right? 

 

[00:53:17] Ross Fox: Our relentless and unashamed focus, despite a lot of opposition, despite lots of arguments, our belief was that we had to focus on in-classroom instruction and make that high quality, reliable, for somewhere approaching 80 to 95 percent of students every lesson. 

 

 That had to be our focus to start with, and once we had that under control, then we could think about other things. In our literacy programs, we certainly had we selected very carefully high-quality intervention programs to ensure that those students who couldn't access the in-classroom instruction had an intervention available to them, but our job was to minimize the number of students needing those interventions, whether it's on maths, literacy, whatever else.  

 

So I think it might be Dylan William who says “You can't tier two your way out of a tier one problem.” You can't have intervention programs that will save you from poor in-class instruction low-quality instruction. So we wanted to obsess about that. It's things like pace. So, it turned out that many of our teachers, not for any fault of their own, had very, very low expectations for the pace at which students could consume knowledge.  

 

Speeding up the classes, speeding up interactions increasing the number of cognitive opportunities per minute, the number of call and responses, had beautiful spin-offs because those students who had inclinations to disruptive behaviour the suggestion was they were just too busy learning now because they were too engaged, interacting with the teacher, responding to the to the questions, wanting to answer proactively, you know, we adopted that paddle pop stick convention. So the idea you could call on anyone at any time, so you couldn't check out.  

 

So young children respond to that very quickly, understand they need to be on task, focused and engaged. I suspect there was a large number of students who previously were bored at the low expectations that were placed on them. And all of a sudden, they were highly engaged. So anecdotally, those schools who are leading the way, they all reported that disruptive behaviour dropped that there was more engagement in the learning because the children were too busy learning. 

 

[00:55:35] Anna Stokke: So, a decline in disruptive behaviour as well. Another good reason to use some of these high-quality instructional materials and high-impact instruction. So how about parents? We talked about them early on, we started talking about parents early on. So how did they respond to the shift?  

 

[00:55:53] Ross Fox: I have to admit, as an educational leader, it's incredibly difficult to pull off change when you've got so many groups all at once wanting to understand what's going on. And to start with, it was with and through the principals to all of our teachers, and it wasn't intended initially that we would explain it to parents, it was intended that that would come once we could get things in line, once we'd get things working.  

 

But what happened was that we started having parents say “My child hasn't been reading, all of a sudden they're reading.” We had parents saying, “When I used to ask my child about what they did at school, they never had anything to say. Now, when they come home, they've learned so much through this daily review thing.” You know, “What are you doing? You seem to have changed dramatically the exposure of my children to knowledge. What's going on?” And so, we had this real enthusiasm and engagement from parents. Of course, this is, you know, I'm repeating anecdotes, but they were powerful and common that the parents said the relationship between my child and school has changed. 

 

And that also went for children who had an inclination, maybe they want to be disruptive, want to be out of class, you know, there was too many things that were interesting going on in class now, and so they were keen to get to school. So, those are absolutely real things that happen once the school gets focused on providing classroom learning that's high expectation and high quality and largely in-class instruction. 

 

Of course, you've achieved educational success when parents notice that something in their children have changed. And so we certainly saw that.   

 

[00:57:43] Anna Stokke: What were the NAPLAN scores like in the beginning and what were they like in November 2024?  

 

[00:57:50] Ross Fox: It was inconvenient, but the National Authority actually changed the basis of the NAPLAN scaling, the NAPLAN test and the NAPLAN reporting at the beginning of 2023. They changed the test from May to March and they implemented a new scale. So, we don't have a good comparable data set of our own schools comparing over time. 

 

What we do have is comparisons of us against other benchmarks, say, other schools in the ACT, other Catholic systems around Australia. The National Authority, Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting Authority, they produce a list of 20 schools in every jurisdiction that they consider adding high value. Catholic schools are about a quarter of the schools in the ACT. On that list, we were two-thirds of the schools identified. 

 

Between 2019 and 2022, which was the last year of the, the old construct of the test, we looked at the 20 Catholic education systems around Australia and there are five domains in year three primary and five domains in year five primary that are reported on. We found that we were in the top four improvers in absolute score in nine out of 10 domains across those five in year three, five in year five. 

 

So, we saw, you know, dramatic improvement in that three-year period. In 2019, we had 41% of our year three students were performing below statistically similar students or schools, and that was, for year three, numeracy and in year five numeracy, it was 65%. By 2022, we'd gotten it down in year three, we reduced it from 41% to 17%. And in year five numeracy, we reduced it from 65% to 35%. So, we, about halved it in both instances.  

 

And meanwhile, other schools in the ACT reported about similar rates. And because we're starting with a jurisdiction that's got a relatively high level of advantage, and the expectation is against the level of advantage, arguably the school expectation is higher, but we saw the number of schools and students performing below the expectation based on their advantage almost halved in terms of numeracy.  

 

In reading, we had 42% of our schools underperforming compared to similar schools and in 2022, only 4% of our Catholic schools and the ACT underperformed, so that went from 42% to 4% in reading. In writing, 71% of Catholic schools were underperforming in 2019, and in 2022, we went to 13%, 71% to 13% on writing, and in spelling, we went from 71% to 21% were underperforming. 

 

[01:00:53] Anna Stokke: So that's a pretty significant drop in underperformance in just a few years, so that's great. So, these changes seem to be showing up in the data. What did the next phase of implementation and measurement look like?   

 

[01:01:09] Ross Fox: I've also got some analysis looking at 2023 and 2024 results. We're still seeing domains and the reporting has now changed to really focus on above proficiency or below proficiency. So, you're looking at the percentage of students who are strong or exceeding that proficiency. 

 

We're still seeing in a number of domains across the number of year levels, the number of, the percentage of students above that proficiency go up by 5%. And I'm constantly trying to refer this back to what does it mean for students? 5% is probably about an extra student in every class. If it's, obviously the math says if it’s 20 students, 5% means you've got an extra student in every classroom who is now above proficiency who wasn't before.  

 

And on our DIBELS testing late last year, we thought we were getting close to almost one extra student by the end of the year, compared to the previous year exceeding the benchmark and now being considered proficient. We've had hundreds of people visit the 56 schools, by the way, to come and see what we're doing, they come to see our teachers. Our teachers are amazing, they're remarkable. They are enjoying it because they're in it to see students learn and the students learning is really quite remarkable, and in many instances, going off the charts compared to what we remember in recent years.  

 

We're only just getting the power of the assessments, and the real opportunity, I think, is for us to continue to change curriculum, continue to refine pedagogy with a huge focus on in-classroom coaching to give teachers that feedback. And it's been remiss of me that professional learning model we were committed to meant that we had to have achieved four things for our teachers. Often, the teachers didn't have the knowledge that they needed to have, so we focused on every teacher having access to the theory and the knowledge. Some of them couldn't conceive, or had never seen or experienced the practice that we wanted to see. So, we actually had to demonstrate it for them. 

 

Then we had to give them an opportunity to try it out for themselves, hopefully in front of a class. And then, we needed coaching and feedback to reinforce that practice. So, they needed the knowledge, they needed to actually see the practice for themselves, they needed to try it for themselves, and then they needed coaching and feedback to reinforce it. 

 

And our strong belief is that unless you've got those four things reliably occurring for every teacher, then you're not going to achieve change in practice, change in the classroom, the thing that really matters for student learning.  

 

[01:03:51] Anna Stokke: So, it was a four-part model, just to recap, giving teachers the knowledge about effective teaching, giving them the opportunity to try it out, and then receiving instructional coaching and getting feedback. So, what would some of the next steps be?  

 

[01:04:09] Ross Fox: So it's that commitment to professional learning and some more curriculum initiatives, I'd say, and some more mathematics assessments that can track, there's some writing assessments that were being considered, there's some mathematics assessments, there's some more mathematics programs based on explicit instruction. I think we're just getting started in terms of what's possible.  

 

I think a lot of understanding of pace of learning, of learning over time can be mitigated by so much poor practice, so many diffuse experiences. And I'm hopeful that the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, it's 56 schools, it's a thousand classrooms, it's 3,000 teachers, can be a place where people can come and see consistent good practice that they might not have been able to imagine.  

 

So, I just think we're getting started in terms of those NAPLAN results. We've turned around the underperformance, these tests are taken every two years. What we're seeing now is students coming through, for this year's NAPLAN, who've now had the benefit of Catalyst for about four years, about their whole schooling career. So, they should have a different capability.  

 

So, I'm hopeful that you'll see the cumulative effects, but I'm hopeful that you'll also see the consolidated effects of our support for our teachers having real impact on the results across the schooling profile. 

 

[01:05:30] Anna Stokke: So that leads me into my final question. I read that, it could be claimed that your school system actually the largest implementation of the science of learning in Australia. Looking ahead, do you think other schools in Australia will adapt that approach? What do you think the future of education in Australia is going to look like, or what should it look like? 

 

Are you optimistic? 

 

[01:05:54] Ross Fox: I'm very, very optimistic. Two of the largest jurisdictions in Australia are actively pursuing the science of learning, it's implications endorsing explicit instruction. So, New South Wales public schools have made a really big commitment, and they have a recently proclaimed knowledge-rich syllabus that they're now implementing. 

 

So, I think there's great excitement about that being the default position that explicit instruction has a role. I think eight years ago, I remember being at a principal meeting and simply putting the word explicit on a slide, and there was pandemonium in the room. Explicit instructions had a bad name amongst many educators and to my view, unfairly.  

 

It's not sufficient for a whole pedagogical or teaching learning experience, it's not sufficient to provide learning and teaching that's consistent with our understanding and conclusions from the science of learning, but explicit instruction is absolutely necessary for novice learners to acquire new knowledge.  

 

And so, the fact that public schools in New South Wales are committed to that, the Archdiocese of Melbourne with a system of about 300 schools is also committed to the science of learning, the science of reading and many similar initiatives, the Victorian public system under the leadership of Deputy Premier Ben Carroll and Education Minister Ben Carroll, it's committed to similar things. So, we're seeing a significant movement and we weren't the first to do it, by the way.  

 

There were people like Pamela Snow, Lorraine Hammond, Michael Roberts, Toni Hatten-Roberts Tim McDonald, TeachWell: Ingrid Sealey. A range of partners we work with in Australia who were probably more at the frontier than we were, but we were the largest and first system implementation, seeing that this mattered for students, it mattered for teachers, and now, so I'm optimistic it is spreading. 

 

I think the challenge is probably the same it always is, though, that there's a real temptation to pursue novelty in school education to reward innovation, absent any clear understanding of what you're actually trying to achieve or any measurable impact.  

 

[01:08:11] Anna Stokke: Right, and sometimes the focus tray so far from the fundamentals that it can seem almost surreal. 

 

[01:08:18] Ross Fox: And there are so many people vying for the attention of teachers and principals, and there are so many books, so many conferences that are essentially not about the core work of schools, not about teaching and learning. I'd say almost flippantly that it would be possible somewhere to find a school in Australia who having looked at their data and found they have terrible maths results, may instead of focusing on the maths knowledge of teachers, the instructional materials, what professional learning support their teachers need, may have brought Brene Brown's Dare to Lead book for all teachers and focussed on that idea of vulnerable leadership.  

 

Now, I don't mean to disparage Brene Brown, I think she's a profound thinker in her field, but I think that too often educational leaders have been inveigled by remote and abstract notions of leadership by things that distract us from the core work of learning. My experience is that there's so much more work to do to enhance our expertise on how we help students learn efficiently, as quickly as possible and as securely as possible to develop vast bodies of knowledge, to be immediately at their disposal to solve problems creatively.  

 

That is the core work of schools and remote and abstract notions of leadership aren't particularly going to help. I think we should all be clear on why in education, but it's the what and the how that will make a difference to the lives of students; that's what's going to transform lives. And so, I think too many education systems have pursued novelty ahead of real learning, and I think that's going to be a danger in the future.  

 

But I'm really encouraged — I just think that once people understand cognitive architecture, the science of learning, cognitive load theory, the science of reading, and I've had it said by my principals that their whole career was based on notions of inquiry learning, and a few years into this program, they realized everything that they'd believed was flawed and wrong.  

 

And so, there's a whole host of people who are well-intentioned, who will need to change their mind yet, and to adapt their practice, but it's absolutely in the best interest of students. There's no way in which the science of learning movement is just another fad. 

 

We're actually going through a revolution, like Semmelweis did with the washing of hands, to acknowledge that there's something different we understand and we must respond to it. I guess as an educational leader, one of my tests constantly was a question of “if I fell under a bus, would all this stop?” What I heard talking to people as I've transitioned out of the role, is, they say, “Do not take this away from us, do not stop this because students are learning and they're learning what we've never seen them learn before.” And every teacher is a teacher, first and foremost, in the vocation to see students learn. 

 

So, I'm confident in Australian education, it's not guaranteed that it will continue to propagate and grow, but with podcasts like yours, Anna, and great people like Pamela Snow, Lorraine Hammond, and many other colleagues with networks around the world, colleagues in England who we've also connected with, I think the science of learning movement will continue to grow and continue to provide great pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment in schools for the betterment of our society and ultimately our civilization. 

 

[01:12:08] Anna Stokke: So, you've done outstanding work, something to be really proud of, you know, you've impacted a lot of teachers and kids. So, congratulations. And thank you so much for coming on my podcast to share your great work with me and my listeners. 

 

[01:12:24] Ross Fox: Thank you very much, Anna. It's been a great pleasure.  

 

[01:12:26] Anna Stokke: If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Chalk and Talk is produced by me, Anna Stokke. Transcript and resource page by Jazmin Boisclair, subscribe on your favourite podcast app to get new episodes delivered as they become available. 

 

You can follow me on X, Blue Sky, or LinkedIn for notifications, or check out my website, annastokke.com for more information. This podcast received funding through a University of Winnipeg Knowledge Mobilization and Community Impact grant funded through the Anthony Swaity Knowledge Impact Fund.