Ep 46. Reclaiming learning time to boost literacy and numeracy with Ross Fox
This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Jazmin Boisclair
You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.
Ep 46. Reclaiming learning time to boost literacy and numeracy with Ross Fox
Timestamps:
[00:00:00] Introduction and announcements
[00:02:33] Introducing Ross Fox
[00:04:14] Understanding the Australian education system
[00:09:56] Challenges in education and the Catalyst program
[00:11:03] The importance of effective teaching and learning
[00:19:22] Implementing the Science of Reading
[00:26:10] Defining and supporting learning
[00:30:45] High impact teaching practices
[00:32:12] Knowledge-rich curriculum
[00:36:17] Implementing effective pedagogy
[00:40:49] Supporting teachers with high-quality instructional materials
[00:44:28] Addressing educational inequities
[00:47:34] The Catalyst program: Goals and implementation
[00:49:10] Assessment and feedback for effective teaching
[01:00:53] Professional learning and teacher support
[01:04:09] Future directions and optimism in education
[00:00:05] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk and Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor, and your host.
Welcome back to another episode of Chalk and Talk. In this episode, I speak with Ross Fox, an education leader in Australia. As Director of Catholic Education for the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, Ross led a transformation in teaching practices that resulted in dramatic improvements in literacy and numeracy. I was eager to learn more about it, so I invited him on the podcast. We discussed the structure of the Australian education system and Ross's implementation of the Catalyst program, which applies the science of learning to improve student outcomes. He explains how a focus on high impact teaching strategies and a knowledge-rich curriculum led to measurable gains in student achievement.
We also explore how these changes helped reduce educational inequities and improve student engagement and behaviour. We end the episode with a discussion about the future of education in Australia, and Ross tells us why he's optimistic about the continued growth of the Science of Learning movement.
This was a fascinating conversation, a testament to the power of effective teaching. I learned a lot, and I hope you do too. Before moving on to the episode, I want to let you know about two important opportunities. Dr. Ben Solomon and I will be giving a webinar titled The Science of Math Instruction, using Evidence-Based Practices in the Classroom on May 8th, 2025 at 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time.
It's free and all are welcome. You may remember Ben from my Red Flags in Education Research episode. You can read a full description of the webinar and register at edweb.net and I'll also put a link in the show notes. I hope to see you there. Second, researchED is back in Toronto, June 6th and 7th, 2025.
I'll be there and they've got an incredible lineup of speakers. I would love to meet you there. I will include a link to the registration page for researchED in the show notes too. Now, without further ado, let's get started.
It is my pleasure to introduce Ross Fox, who is joining me today from Canberra, Australia, where it's 12:30 AM. He holds two degrees, one in Mining Engineering from New South Wales and a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford. Ross has had a varied career starting at McKinsey and Company, advising large organizations on strategic issues.
He has also in a variety of roles in remote Indigenous communities in Western Australia, and served as a policy advisor to federal MPs in New South Wales. Now I'm talking to him today because he has a background in education policy and leadership, and he has been a strong advocate for using the science of learning to improve student outcomes.
He was Director of Catholic Education, Archdiocese of Canberra and Goldburn, a position he held for over eight years until December 2024. In that role, he oversaw 56 Catholic schools and the education of 23,000 K-12 students yearly. And this included students from highly advantaged backgrounds, as well as schools in regional and remote areas of New South Wales with students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Under his leadership, these schools embraced evidence-based teaching methods grounded in the science of learning. leading to remarkable improvements in literacy and numeracy. And today we'll be discussing those results and what educators around the world can learn from his approach. Welcome Ross. I'm excited to talk to you today.
[00:04:11] Ross Fox: It's really great to be with you. Anna. Such a pleasure.
[00:04:14] Anna Stokke: Many of our listeners are from Canada and the US or other places around the world, although I do have quite a large number of listeners in Australia. Could you give a brief overview of aspects of the structure of the Australian education system that might inform our discussion today? So for example, is education federally controlled or state controlled in Australia?
[00:04:38] Ross Fox: As always, Anna, it's a complex story. There are six states and two territories in Australia. When Australia was formed as a nation in 1901, school education to the extent it existed was solely the responsibility of the state and territories. In the last 50 years, as Australia's evolved. The Australian government, the national government has increasingly taken a role in school education.
Really the core elements of the operation of schools is dictated by regulation within a state or territory at that jurisdictional or the equivalent in Canada, the provincial level. School registration, teacher registration, in some important aspects, curriculum is determined at a state or territory level.
But increasingly there are national policy positions, national institutions that have references to curriculum, references to teacher standards, which aren't determinant of them, but are highly, highly influential. And then we come to funding, predominantly government schools or public schools in Australia are overwhelmingly funded by state and territory governments to the extent of about 75% to 80%.
But non-government schools, of which Australia is a curiosity internationally, we have about 35% to 40% of students in non-government schools in different states and territories and they are predominantly funded by the national government with a contribution around a quarter from the local state or territory government.
[00:06:13] Anna Stokke: Australia administers a standardized test called the NAPLAN. I, think that's how you pronounce it anyway. So, can you tell us what that stands for and tell us a bit about the test? So, what subjects does it cover, what grades and how frequently is it administered?
[00:06:30] Ross Fox: NAPLAN, it stands for the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy. So, like many countries, we've got a national assessment program. NAPLAN is the core assessment, it's whole-cohort, but it's tested across grades three, five, seven, and nine every year in now in March, and it's across five domains of reading, writing, spelling, punctuation and grammar and numeracy. So it's done in four tests. It's done in a reading test, a writing test conventions of language test, and then a numeracy or mathematics test.
[00:07:07] Anna Stokke: Okay, so it sounds like it, tests what I would call core subjects.
[00:07:11] Ross Fox: I think that's a good way to think about it.
[00:07:13] Anna Stokke: Now, you were a director of Catholic education. So, do Catholic schools play a significant role in Australia's education system? So, for example, you know, say, the approximate proportion of Australian students who are educated in Catholic schools?
[00:07:27] Ross Fox: In Australia there's about 9,600 schools, just over that number; 70% of those are government, 18% are Catholic, and 12% are independent or other non-government schools. The Catholic schools, by the way, are largely operated in a systemic context, similar to government schools, so there's a system that manages them, that runs them, that oversees them.
So there's about 4.1 million students in schools in Australia in 2023. Catholic schools had almost 20% of the students, independent schools over 16%, and then the remainder about 64% are in government schools. So, government schools generally educate about three times the amount of Catholic schools, but Catholic schools are very, very significant.
Exceeding about 800,000 students nationally in recent years, so a very, very significant contributor to education in Australia.
[00:08:24] Anna Stokke: Do they include students across the socioeconomic spectrum?
[00:08:28] Ross Fox: Absolutely. However, Australia is a very dispersed population. So, there's many, many regional and rural areas. There's many towns on the smaller side where a government school is the only provider. There's actually a number of towns where a Catholic school is the only provider in a number of circumstances, and similarly, a very, very small number where an independent school is the only school provider.
But so yes, there is diverse socioeconomic representation, but you do have a skewing to advantage probably in the independent sector. The independent sector is inclusive and diverse. However, it does have large, established, very historic schools with now very high fees and obviously there's barriers to many people participating in that education.
Catholic systemic schools have had a commitment for a long time to very low fees and are generally inclusive, but we wouldn't see the same inclusion of the most disadvantaged as government schools given their commitment to universal provision to enroll everyone. So the, the sectors have a lot in common, but you could say there's a cohort of the independent sector, which is highly advantaged. Catholic education has increasingly been middle class, but does have representation of the top and bottom of society.
And then government schools are squarely in the middle, including all uh, with some schools that are facing, you know, high degrees of disadvantage and challenge.
[00:09:56] Anna Stokke: In North America, there is concern about declining math and literacy scores. I always talk about math scores, but literacy is also an issue. So do you face similar challenges in Australia?
[00:10:10] Ross Fox: Yes, absolutely. There's really significant concern on international rankings and international tests that our rankings are either falling, so we're either being, we're either staying still and other countries are working out how to run their education systems better, but on a number of items, a number of measures of reputable reasonable international tests, the way to interpret them is that Australia's academic performance of our schooling system is either static or declining.
And that is despite a huge amount of investment in our teacher workforce, a huge amount of investment in our school networks and despite all of that, the results, the educational outcomes that we see, in general statical declining by comparative world standards, which is very, very concerning.
[00:11:03] Anna Stokke: Okay, so similar story in the U. S. and Canada, lots of money going towards education and students scores declining.
We've set the scene. So, let's get into it now. I'm going to start by quoting some things from an article that I read in the Australian in December 2024, and it was titled “Return to old school teaching methods sends students results through the roof.” That's a common sort of headline by the way. Old school teaching methods are back to basics. They love those kind of headlines. you were featured in that article because schools under your direction posted some of their best results ever.
In fact, I read that just a quarter of schools in the Canberra and Goldburn area are Catholic, yet they make up two thirds of schools that outperformed others, and that's with a similar background of parental occupation and education. We're going to talk about what led up to that shortly, but let's just go a little further back to your early years in the director position.
So I've heard you talk about a comment that a parent made to you that made you question how core subjects were being taught in the schools you oversaw. So what was the comment and what was your reaction?
[00:12:24] Ross Fox: I commenced more than eight years ago, now. It's not a massive system, 56 schools across two jurisdictions, 23,000 students. I was not an experienced educational leader. I had a lot of knowledge about education. I'd worked in senior roles in educational bureaucracies but it was a new context for me.
So of course, I spent the first six to nine months, meeting teachers, meeting principals, meeting parents. And I remember very vividly sitting down at a school in Canberra and the parent proudly told me they had two children at the school that were so delighted with the caring environment that it provided, they said that their children really enjoyed it. And this went on and we talked about it and we discussed it. And as I do, I probe to really understand what was behind their comment, and they wrapped up the conversation with, it's just a real pity about the NAPLAN results.
What I believe very strongly now is that despite the best efforts of educational leaders, teachers, and educational administrators, policy makers, et cetera, parents have a simple hierarchy. They want their child to be safe, they want their child to be happy and they want their child to be learning. Safe, happy learning.
And my experience in my early days was that in many, many instances parents were prepared to forgo the learning as long as their children were safe and happy. And I didn't think that was good enough, I didn't think that was us being true to our mission, our vocation, our professional commitment to provide a great learning environment for every student. As well as being safe and happy, I thought that we should have been able to do all three. And what was really clear from parents in a number of conversations is that they were happy to compromise on the learning.
[00:14:18] Anna Stokke: That's interesting because I have observed something similar, particularly in elementary schools. It's sort of about making memories, there's lots of fun stuff going on and, and there's lots of focus on things like making friends and, and belonging and that sort of thing, but then somehow the learning just isn't the big focus. I'm surprised that parents actually are accepting of that.
They're not all. I mean, I was certainly one of the ones that pushed for more and, and there were others as well, but. I mean, why do you think parents don't, push for something better?
[00:14:57] Ross Fox: Sometimes they just don't know what the alternative could be, they think it's unobtainable. Sometimes they just don't feel like they've got any options. So there's a bit of a, I forget what the precise term is, but once you've bought something, you don't want to admit that what you've bought isn't as good as you'd like.
COVID obviously happened during my time. We didn't have long term lockdowns, but we had a couple at least of significant lockdowns. And when our schools reopened, what we found was that we couldn't actually run the schools as we expected because every time a teacher had a sniffle, they weren't available and there were no relief teachers available.
I, in response, one of the things I did was wrote to every parent and said we've got some challenges coming out of COVID. We're going to prioritise learning. This might mean there is less staff available to take your children to sport or to camps or to other things because we're sending obviously the supervision requirements of all these add ons to schools going off to camps can be quite significant, quite onerous and really lower the organizational resilience of the school.
And so, I put out a letter to everybody, we're going to prioritize learning just bear with us, but we're going to prioritize learning until we can return to normal operations. And there was outrage. Outrage that I was taking camps away from children that they look forward to for their whole schooling career, it made the news and the radio that we were prioritising learning.
And there's many good reasons why people would be upset, why students would be looking forward to something that might not be there, but I thought that that's what our schools were there for, and that's what the core mission that we had to meet. And I was a bit surprised at the time that that was the response, but that is the world we're often operating in, in schools, that they're valued for things other than the learning that they provide. In some regards, we don't have very informed consumers and that's, that should squarely lie that responsibility should be with the teacher in the school to address that to make sure that parents understand what's possible for their child.
[00:17:06] Anna Stokke: I mean, I guess I sort of understand parts of this. People want all these experiences for their children, but let's focus on learning as well. And, you know, there should be outrage about the math scores. And probably the reading too, what proportion of time do you think is not actually spent on learning in most schools, by the way?
[00:17:25] Ross Fox: We had some schools investigate this very closely and they came up with. four or five hours a week. So, it's more than half a day a week, sometimes a whole day a week. Our experience was that time was not being used as the precious asset that it is.
A student in school education in Australia has about a million minutes of a school career. Depending on how you understand that, if they're all cumulative, a missed minute you can never get back. It's sort of like aiming a rocket at the moon that if it's off a little bit at the start, it's not very perceptible, but by the time it gets to the moon four days later, it might not be at the moon, it might be somewhere quite different.
And so, if we think about that trajectory of the rocket as the kindergarten, the five-year-old child going to year 12 and us spending much more time on assemblies, there's schools that we had that were having three assemblies a day because it was a convenient way to start the day, recommence after a break, and that might be okay, but you've got to be really clear at the trade-off you're making.
How long does it consume? How much learning time is it taking away? And I'd say, before we started this, my strong perception was that the learning time wasn't valued because we weren't particularly using the learning time well.
And when we started to really engage with how we use that learning time well, another minute of it could really make a difference, another five minutes might make an even bigger difference, another hour a week could make a tremendous difference. And what we know is that the cumulative effect of that, week on week, there's about 40 weeks in a school year in Australia, another 40 hours of learning is something very significant.
And that's absolutely within the grasp of most schools to reclaim for more high-quality instructional time in their students’ school lives.
[00:19:22] Anna Stokke: You got the comment from the parent, and that got you thinking about spending more time on learning. So what happened after that? So I understand you came to know about structured literacy or the Science of Reading or Science of Learning principles more generally.
[00:19:39] Ross Fox: The biggest thing I can point to is that during my first year as director, I had, my wife and I had the joy of welcoming our first child. His name's Jedidiah. And I, I remember really vividly being in the, in the hospital room, looking into his eyes on the first day of his life and thinking, “I'm an educational leader and I have not a deep understanding of how this human being is going to learn to read.”
Something I take for granted and I believe is extremely important, obviously. And so that got me curious about, okay, what was our belief as an educational system, of apparently high repute, about how students learn to read and how we would best do that. And there was a few disturbing things when I asked for, okay, give me the core reference texts about how we think about teaching students to read.
Ken Goodman's book came to me. And I forget the exact book, but there was a, I read it faithfully, and there was a quote in it that says, “Do not get the children to read the words on the page.” That's how I remember it being said. So, they were using Ken Goodman's book. There was another instance where there's a, in Canberra, one of the things that's happens in many places, there's a charity book fair, and I like books.
I went along, there's an education section, I leafed through it and I come across the reading strategy for my system, which had been published and somehow ended up at this charity book fair. And I opened it up and what's on page three explaining the three cueing theory is a basic fundamental of how we should approach teaching of reading to children.
That was six or seven years ago, Emily Hanford was just getting going, and I connected with the reading league, I read a lot that people like Pamela Snow had written, and discovered that our assumptions that we were putting into place about how children learn to read were highly problematic.
And then there was two other experiences I visited a school and there was this lovely woman who was in transition to retirement, so she'd been a teacher all her life. And she explained to me how it was really tough helping the struggling readers to read in the early years of primary school and she'd been on the internet searching out a reading program. And that just sort of sent me into a spin that we would exist in a system where the response to someone, a child's need to read was a semi-retired teacher doing an internet search to find a reading program, it didn't strike me at all as right.
And then presenting to my board, which I did regularly, the reading results, the reading assessment that we had at that time, Running Record, was often showing that in many schools we had 50% of our cohort in a reading intervention because of the in classroom instruction, and what Running Record — now, I since have learned, maybe that wasn't a reliable assessment, but you can't exist in a way where you've got these dedicated teachers, highly professional, a whole school system, and the core activity results in 50% failure.
And I was quite influenced by an EAB briefing from the U.S., a district leadership briefing that really said, it was about the science of reading, this was seven or eight years ago, and it just talked about that simple statistic that core instruction should be able to achieve reliably 90% to 95% of students reaching whatever benchmark you target.
I spent a year repeating that because people had accepted that we would have 40, 50, sometimes more percent of our student cohorts in the early years in an intervention situation because our core instruction was not having the impact it needed to.
[00:23:27] Anna Stokke: Did you then decide that it was important for educators to understand the science of learning, that it was important for your teachers to understand the science of learning and memory and that sort of thing?
[00:23:38] Ross Fox: To be honest, at the start, I didn't know what to think because there was a couple of things, a few things going on simultaneously that everybody was really proud of the system that we're in, and they thought we were doing a wonderful job.
And my, I'd say mainly, because of the parent conversations that we've discussed, that the parents were incredibly positive about our leaders, our teachers because they were caring and dedicated, we were not producing the academic results that our students were capable of, and so I, you know, I did a lot of reading, listen to a lot of podcasts, that mantra quite appealed to me that I heard out of the U.S., which is the teacher saying, “When I know better, I do better.”
And so, to start with as a system and individual teachers, individual schools, we had to admit that we weren't as good as we thought we could be. We weren't as good as our students deserved. So, I commissioned some external analysis on our results, on our NAPLAN results.
One of the analyses came back and said you have to make all sorts of assumptions, use comparative analysis based on socioeconomic background, but it suggested that in Australia there's about a fifth of schools which are adding value, by some definition, on reading and mathematics. This is in primary schools in Australia, and in our archdiocese there was around 10% of students who attended such a school.
So, we were massively underrepresented in schools who could reliably add value. So, it was getting a recognition that all was not right, and it wasn't about our teachers being bad, our school leaders being bad. What was happening in the classroom was not optimal learning. We didn't even have a clear definition of what learning was to start with, and that's probably where I started because I sat around a number of occasions, a number of forums and said, “what is our definition of learning?”
And it was very imprecise, very unclear, very diffuse, unmeasurable, something that nobody could be held to account for. And what became clear is that there's that great definition that learning's a change in long term memory. That's what we started with, there's criticisms of it, but I'd say it just starts a conversation about what that means. What is long term memory? Of course, then you've got to understand what cognitive load theory is. To what extent is it verifiable, or to what extent is it true, o what extent does it match experience in the classroom? Et cetera.
[00:26:10] Anna Stokke: So, you had a moment of clarity. It wasn't about blaming teachers, but about recognizing that the system needed to better define and support learning. So what did those early steps toward change actually look like once you acknowledged that?
[00:26:26] Ross Fox: I got, about 30 of our leaders from across the systems, principals, assistant principals, teachers, system leaders, we sat in a room for a day and we curated people to come in and talk to us about their different conceptions of learning, different conceptions of curriculum, different conceptions of education. And then we spent three days in schools, in classrooms and that was carefully curated as well to look at what were highly effective schools and classrooms doing, and then we came back together and we spent a day reflecting on what we'd heard.
There was an incident where we went into a school and we saw really explicit instruction. Very highly active, explicit instruction going on, and we came back and as you do, you sit down with your colleagues and you have a drink to debrief and one of my colleagues said “What we saw in that classroom, I could never allow to happen in my school, it just wouldn't feel right.”
That was sort of indicative of the responses. “This is unfamiliar. It doesn't feel right.” It was like someone doing aerobics or calisthenics, it was like a Jane Fonda video of all, that's what it, and it was so alien to the people seeing it so foreign, that they just, it was almost a versed reaction, as it is in many instances where you've got a whole professional career and it gets challenged, you want to reject it. And there was a number of themes that came out.
One, we had no precise understanding of what effective pedagogy was and we had no common understanding of what a teacher should know about cognitive load theory, about the science of learning, about the science of reading. One of the things that came up very strongly for me was that efficiency was totally absent from any conversation about learning, and it just struck me that once you say, “Oh, we want to learn,” well, I want to make the teacher's lives as easy as possible.
So, if we work out a way where they could help the students learn faster, let's help them do that. And, of course, most of these things are not more work for the teacher. If you do them well, if you design it well. And so you want to be as efficient as you can, particularly with the sacred, precious nature of teacher time, let alone student time.
A year or two later, I did read Mary Kennedy's Inside Teaching, which I'd commend to anybody. I found it a thoroughly depressing book because it talked about everything that will go wrong in a classroom, that will be a barrier to achieving the aspirations of the teacher for the learning of students. But Mary's got a very profound point, which is if you're an educational reformer, if you're an educational leader, if you don't solve the problems of the teacher to provide great learning in the student in the classroom, you're not doing anything worthwhile.
The key thing that came out was that actually the teacher was the most important learner in our system. We had to have an absolute commitment to that, an absolute commitment to its implications, and following through on it, because there's that many education strategies where of course you put the student at the centre, and that's right in many instances, but if you put the teacher at the center, my firm belief was that if we took care of the learning needs of the teacher, that being, they’d be entirely capable of taking care of the learning needs of the student.
And then really what we knew we know in Catholic education, all educators know it, that learning is a transformative activity, and so we adopted the tagline for our program That we were transforming lives through learning and we've genuinely seen that. I can talk to many instances where Grade 2 students who haven't been able to read for three years have an intervention program, the learning support assistant who's been tutoring them outside class comes up and thanks me and says, “These children's life trajectory has been changed because we've used an effective intervention program and they can now read and they can now read confidently.”
So we adopted two bold goals. The first goal was that every child would be a competent reader. We wanted competent readers who are progressing through their schooling career, able to read those very complex texts as they left. And the opportunities would open up for them obviously then.
[00:30:45] Anna Stokke: Okay, so your first bold goal was to build strong readers, and you said there were two goals. So, what was your second bold goal?
[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 behavior 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.