Ep 69. We know more about teaching than ever––so why is change so slow? with Joanna Barbousas
This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Canadian Podcasting Productions.
In this episode, Anna is joined by Professor Joanna Barbousas, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Education, Impact and Innovation, and Dean of the School of Education at La Trobe University in Australia.
Early in her career, Joanna noticed that many capable students struggled to access the curriculum due to gaps in foundational reading and language skills—an insight that has shaped her work ever since.
Now, she is focused on transforming teacher education to better prepare educators using evidence-based practices. Joanna shares how she led major changes at La Trobe University–redesigning programs to align with the science of learning and launching initiatives like the Science of Language and Reading Lab and the Science of Math Education Lab.
Anna and Joanna also explore why change is so difficult in universities and what it takes to lead meaningful reform.
This is a compelling conversation for anyone interested in improving education and translating research into practice.
This episode is also available in video at www.youtube.com/@chalktalk-stokke
SHORT COURSE La Trobe Short Course: Evidence-informed Mathematics Teaching – An Introduction https://shortcourses.latrobe.edu.au/evidence-informed-mathematics-teaching
ResearchED CalgaryResearchED Calgary registration: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/researched-calgary-tickets-1984343272144
TIMESTAMPS
[00:00:22] Introduction
[00:05:19] How Joanna’s early teaching shaped her leadership initiatives
[00:06:51] How Joanna went from classroom teacher to Dean
[00:10:31] The education landscape in Australia
[00:15:38] Unpacking the Rowe report
[00:19:23] The importance of teacher education reviews in Australian [00:24:51] The outcomes of the TEEP review
[00:30:08] Becoming the Dean of Education at La Trobe University
[00:35:25] Reaction from faculty members
[00:43:34] SOLAR Lab – How was it established?
[00:49:17] Explaining the successful Nexus program
[00:53:38] What Joanna learned about retaining teachers in hard-to-staff schools
[00:55:17] Ideas for a national model
[00:57:42] Why change matters: A message to leaders
[01:00:26] Conclusion
[00:00:04] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke a math professor and your host. Welcome back to another episode of Chalk & Talk.
This episode is available in both audio and video. Please give the show a follow on YouTube as well as your favourite podcast platform. In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Joanna Barbousas, Pro Vice Chancellor of Education, Impact and Innovation, and Dean of the School of Education at La Trobe University in Australia.
Very early in her career as a secondary teacher, Joanna noticed something she couldn't ignore. Students who were capable and engaged, but unable to access the curriculum because they lacked foundational reading and language skills. And that observation has shaped everything she's done since.
Now Joanna is on a mission to improve teacher education so that teachers are better prepared to teach academic subjects using evidence-based practices. And she's led major changes in just a short time at her university. In this conversation, we talk about how teacher education has traditionally been structured, often emphasizing theory and broader perspectives, but not consistently focusing on the specific knowledge teachers need to teach effectively.
We discuss how this disconnect has contributed to gaps in practice and ultimately to inequities in student outcomes. Joanna shares how she led a major shift at La Trobe, rewriting teacher education programs to align more closely with the science of learning and evidence-based practice, and launching initiatives like the Science of Language and Reading Lab and the Science of Math Education Lab. And importantly, we talk about leadership.
What does it take to shift an institution? Why is change so difficult, especially in universities? And what can leaders do to make meaningful reforms when it can seem almost impossible? This is an important and inspiring conversation for anyone interested in education and what it takes to translate research into practice. I hope you like it. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that I'll be co-delivering a four-session short course on evidence-based math teaching through La Trobe University's School of Education this April 2026.
The course is open to teachers anywhere in the world. I'll include a link to registration in the show notes. I'll also be speaking at ResearchEd Calgary on May 9th.
Again, I'll include a link to registration in the show notes and I hope to see some of you there. Now, without further ado, let's get started.
I am delighted to be joined today by Professor Joanna Barbousas.
She is Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Education, Impact and Innovation and Dean of the School of Education at La Trobe University in Australia. Her career has spanned 30 years across teaching, teacher education and education policy. She began her career as a secondary art teacher before moving into academia, holding significant leadership roles at Australian Catholic University before joining La Trobe in 2016.
She is the founder of the award-winning Nexus Program, an employment-based teacher education program that places career changers into regional and hard-to-staff schools while they complete their qualifications. She also founded the Solar Lab, that's the science of language and reading lab, which has trained more than 12,000 teachers in evidence-based literacy instruction since its launch in 2020. And she recently launched its sister initiative, the Sum Lab, that's the science of math education lab, which is focused on the science of math education.
Under her leadership, La Trobe was singled out by a national expert panel in 2023 as the university most closely aligned with where Australian teacher education needs to go. One of the most influential voices in teacher education in Australia, she is leading the development of a national approach to evidence-informed teacher education and practice, working across government, schools and philanthropy to scale impact beyond a single university. Welcome Joanna, welcome to the podcast.
[00:04:50] Joanna Barbousas: Delighted to be here, Anna. Thank you.
[00:04:53] Anna Stokke: I'm so excited to talk to you today about your work. You've done absolutely amazing work in actually a fairly short time and so much to be proud of. So, you started your professional life as a visual artist, then you became an art teacher. So, what grades did you teach as a teacher and what sorts of things did you notice about your students that maybe shaped some of your leadership initiatives today?
[00:05:19] Joanna Barbousas: I taught secondary students, mainly middle years and senior years. And very early on, I noticed something I couldn't ignore.
Often, secondary teachers tend to have a love for their discipline. And I was ready to teach complex ideas and language and comprehension that's so core to the visual arts, along with making. But I had students who were capable, engaged, but they couldn't access the work.
Not because they weren't trying, but because they didn't have the reading ability or the language proficiency needed to engage with increasingly complex ideas. And that is the role of secondary teachers, is to really position complex ideas. But in subjects like visual arts, where students are expected to analyse, interpret, that gap became so visible to me that it almost debilitated me to position myself as an expert teacher when I couldn't access those students who had the reading level of a seven-year-old in senior years.
So, my curiosity began there as a kind of little thing that was sitting on the side. Why are so many young people arriving in secondary schools without the foundational knowledge and language to access higher ordered learning? And that question essentially has shaped everything I've done since.
[00:06:51] Anna Stokke: It's quite shocking, that students could end up in secondary school and not be able to read. Everybody should be taught how to read. I don't even want to ask about the math because if they couldn't read, my guess is that the math didn't go that well either.
So, you're talking about essentially students not being able to access material to the best of their ability because they were missing foundational skills, which is something I talk a lot about because that also applies to math. Somehow you went from classroom teacher to being a dean. So how did this happen? What happened in between there?
[00:07:30] Joanna Barbousas: One thing that I really enjoyed, I stayed in the classroom for about six years and what I loved the most was actually working with pre-service teachers and mentoring and coaching them through their placement allocations.
I was very interested in the way teachers were either not prepared or prepared in a particular way but not really understanding what explicit approaches to teaching and scoping learning actually meant. So, for me, I moved into a PhD. It was predominantly a theoretical PhD, but looked at the links between practice and curriculum over time, which was interesting in shaping the way I thought about teacher education and moving into academia.
So, I did what most Australian academics did. You take up a PhD, you move into a university as a kind of sessional staff and then a fixed term and then move into it at scale. So, for me, moving into academia was to really focus on scale in the teaching profession and the opportunity to shape how graduate teachers are prepared so that every student has access to the knowledge and learning in order for them to thrive.
So, I realized that if we wanted to change what was happening in classrooms, we had to look upstream at how teachers are prepared, which is always a tricky space because moving into a university is in fact a career change and you had to start at the bottom, shall we say. So, I was a junior academic, couldn't really do a lot of change, did change within my patch, but it wasn't until really going into leadership that allowed me to do more systemic change. So over time, I became increasingly focused on how teacher education either equips teachers with the knowledge they need or leaves gaps that play out in classrooms.
And leadership became a way for me to influence that at scale.
[00:09:54] Anna Stokke: So, we're going to get into some of these things that you've done at La Trobe. But first, I thought we'd talk a bit about the education landscape in Australia.
I have a lot of Australian listeners, but I also have people listening around the world who are really interested in the science of learning. And I think your university is leading the way in terms of teacher education in Australia, and Australia is certainly making a lot of changes. Can you paint a picture of teacher education in Australia? What it traditionally looked like?
[00:10:31] Joanna Barbousas: This is a really great question, because if we look traditionally, it's almost over the last 30, 40 years, but particularly the last 30 years, where teacher education has placed a strong emphasis on theory and broader educational perspectives, but less consistently on the specific knowledge teachers need to reach learners and to teach reading, for example, develop students' language and to understand how learning actually occurs. Traditionally, and also scoping how teacher education sits in the university context. So over time, as universities do, structural decisions have been made and most universities almost amalgamated education as a social science with the humanities at a university level.
So, some had departments or discipline areas that were linked to the cognitive sciences, but overall education faculties have often been positioned within the social sciences or aligned to the humanities rather than more close connections to fields of psychology or cognitive sciences. And that has actually shaped the way curriculum in teacher education has been developed. That has influenced the way programs are designed with a stronger focus on social cultural perspectives and less emphasis on the knowledge base underpinning how young people learn, how memory develops, how foundational skills like reading and language are built.
And for me, I think what's been really interesting is those discussions and structural governance conversations at university are not being had the same way. So, I'm hearing things like, oh, maybe university and schools of education or faculties are more aligned with psychology or more aligned with science and maths. And those conversations were never had.
I think also traditionally the kind of research that was coming out of faculties of education as social sciences was really focused on identity research. So, the identity of the teacher and what that means in the context of education, the identity and the social factors that impact young people. But it was very little advocacy research about practice, advocacy research about what works.
So, I think the result of the traditional kind of understandings of teacher education, you kind of need to know the structures and the governance that allowed for that to happen. And the result is a gap where teachers enter classrooms without clear understanding of how to build the knowledge and capabilities to be able to access the curriculum. And that's where we start to see, in my view, inequities emerge.
[00:13:58] Anna Stokke: Yeah, this is interesting because I just got back from a conference in Sweden and I heard a similar description of why we're in this position, that there was just kind of a branching out that psychology and educational psychology, cognitive psychology went one way and education was completely disjoint from that, which is unfortunate because a lot of the quantitative research in education is really done by psychologists, at least right now. That's, I guess, what you're trying to change, where you are.
And so hopefully other universities follow suit.
[00:14:43] Joanna Barbousas: I think universities in Australia have really good pockets of examples. I think as a system, however, I think there have been decisions made and sometimes not from education faculties themselves that align the humanities to education rather than other cognate disciplines, which are so incredibly important.
Education is made up of a whole range of disciplines and psychology and the cognitive sciences are so core.
[00:15:15] Anna Stokke: OK, so let's talk a little bit about reading in Australia.
In 2005, the Australian government commissioned the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, the Rowe Report, as I understand it. So, for listeners who haven't heard of it, can you explain what it was, what it found and why it mattered?
[00:15:38] Joanna Barbousas: This is a very interesting policy time in Australia. And at that time, I was a fairly new academic at the Australian Catholic University.
It was also at a time where we had a conservative government at the federal level and it was actually commissioned. It was chaired by Ken Rowe, but it was actually commissioned by the federal education minister at the time, Brendan Nelson. I actually remember it vividly in terms of how those conversations were being had from within the institution, but also the explosion of the reading really came to surface.
So, it was a major national review of the evidence on how children learn to read. And it was probably the most compelling report. And, you know, it sort of laid dormant for quite a few years.
And it's only now referenced both sides of government to say, actually, there were some things in there that probably needed to be more explicitly implemented. So, what it made clear in the report was that effective reading instruction needs to be systemic and explicit and systematic, particularly in the early stages and early years of learning, and that teachers need a very strong understanding of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. But what was really important, I think, for teacher education was it also focused on teacher preparation, recommending that teacher education programs need to provide explicit evidence-based preparation in these key areas, supported by a supervised practice, which is a piece that I don't think we've done well yet in the teaching of reading assessed against clear standards.
The key message in the report is without that foundation, students will struggle to access the broader curriculum, which is what got me here in the first place, which is where the inequity implications become very real. But what was really interesting about that report, it was in the middle of a political campaign year, I believe. There were some recommendations for teacher education providers to make that explicit, but it wasn't really at the level of accountability at that time.
During that time, there were a lot of conferences and debates. The reading wars were constantly in the media. But I think it was a really important report that, unfortunately, it took almost 20 years before it really was taken up as real policy change.
[00:18:47] Anna Stokke: So, my understanding then is there were some strong recommendations, but there were really no accountability measures in place to make sure that those recommendations were taken. And when you do that, the recommendations may just sit there on the shelf, which it sounds like happened. The report was clear then that systematic, explicit phonics instruction is essential and maybe that whole language approaches weren't working.
And so, it didn't have a lot of impact at that time.
[00:19:23] Joanna Barbousas: So, teacher education reviews have been core to Australia. We've had, I think we're up to 123 reviews over 50 years.
But the review that actually took, in my view, a lot of airspace, but had very little impact in terms of quality. In fact, it wasn't about quality. It was about entry into teacher education, was the teacher education ministerial advisory group.
And this was commissioned in 2014. And what happened there was the focus was not on the quality of the program, but actually the kind of applicants who come into a teaching degree. So, we looked at entry scores.
There was a real focus from government in Australia where it's the ATAR, so the entry score. So, once you finish your high school, you receive an ATAR and that provides you entry into programs, into universities. So, there was this real gusto on increasing ATARs, having disposition tests.
So really the focus was on foregrounding who's coming in. And I remember being part of an external meeting.
The conversation was, oh no, we're not talking about quality. There's nothing wrong with teacher education programs. That was the sort of sentiment. What happened then is that there was a real decrease of people coming into a teaching degree because we kind of made it harder for them to come in. So that had an, really did impact teacher shortages.
But it wasn't until 2022, 21, where there was another review, which was the quality initial teacher education review, the QUITE review, where they did an incredible job in interviewing over 5,000 graduates across the country. And that review really outlined recommendations regarding the quality of a four-year degree, a two-year degree. They're the kind of programs that are offered in a university context in Australia.
Those recommendations were not necessarily placed in standards. So that became then the focus in 2023 through the teacher education expert panel. That was when the government commissioned the panel to put together recommendations for core content and it became an accreditation issue.
What was interesting for me and for us at La Trobe is, and some people say, you know, you were reading the tea leaves and I was, I'm very open to what happens politically because what happens politically actually impacts teacher education, but education more broadly. So I was, particularly when I became Dean in 2020, that was when I really could make some changes. I had already started to think about what are the core content parameters that need to be in our teaching degrees.
There's been a whole range of reviews and sometimes it's specifically around reading, sometimes it's specifically around inequities and access, but the TEAP review was probably the first one that took the recommendations that came out of the quality initial teacher education review to then make it program standard changes for accreditation. So, we're now at a point where most universities have gone through the accreditation process, but there's now another body, which is the Quality Assurance Board, the QOB, who are now going to exercise further accountability of teacher education providers, and this is a watch this space to see what happens. There's been a consistent message.
Teacher education needs to be more coherent, more evidence informed, more closely aligned to classroom practice. But what has been more uneven is accountability and I still think accountability is uneven and it will be interesting to see how the Quality Assurance Board is going to shape that. So, we've had strong reviews, but not always consistent follow through in how those recommendations are implemented across the system.
So, in many ways, I think the current reforms are reinforcing what we've known for some time, but with a much stronger expectation of implementation and accountability.
[00:24:27] Anna Stokke: I talked to Jonas Linderoth recently from Sweden. He talked about the Swedish government requiring that faculties of education embed cognitive science into their classes so that students learn about things like cognitive load theory, cognitive science principles.
So, was there a recommendation like that?
[00:24:51] Joanna Barbousas: Yes. So, the recommendations that have come out of the TEEP review, the Teacher Education Expert Panel, there is four categories, three main categories. One is brain and learning.
So cognitive load theory, memory, how cognition plays a significant role in the learning process. The other was around classroom management and effective practice and then responsive teaching, which looks at social equity and those parameters that impact learning. So, the core content, it's been a very interesting discussion because when it was first released as recommendations, we had a lot of deans across the country that would say things like, and publicly, so I can mention it publicly.
They would say things, oh, we already do this. It's already in there. But what I was paying attention to, and in my own university, because I had my own people who would say, oh yeah, but we do that.
But if you looked under the bonnet, you'd find that it was one week or two weeks in a particular subject. So, the dosage had to be increased, the kind of scope and sequence across not only one subject, but several subjects. And it was the kind of intent of the direction rather than just including content.
So very similar, but I think there's still a lot of work to be done in universities to respond.
[00:26:34] Anna Stokke: Yeah. And it's really hard to get people to change things in universities.
And I'm in favour of academic freedom because it allows me to do things like this podcast, which I've said before, but academic freedom can also be a bad thing in some instances. So, for instance, if teachers aren't learning how to teach kids how to read, that would be a case where I don't think academic freedom should apply. I imagine that was the kind of thing you were running up against.
[00:27:07] Joanna Barbousas: Absolutely. And I think that's where the responsibility of a leader, if you're in a leadership role like a dean and you're deaning, as I like to call it, it's your responsibility to make sure that your stakeholders, including your students, including your partners, including your faculty, understand the issues and also the practices that need to really evolve to make sure that employers wanting your graduates, your graduates haven't spent their money doing a program that doesn't give them clarity in their practice. And that is a responsibility of leaders.
[00:27:53] Anna Stokke: At the end of the day, education is a profession and they're teaching children, teachers are teaching children. You wouldn't send doctors out there who had been taught things that clearly didn't work, you know, that were pseudoscience, that had been shown not to be helpful, that actually could be harmful to their patients.
Right. And I imagine that med schools wouldn't teach things like that. You know, it should be the same in education. They should be teaching the teachers methods that work. And when you have a class and you're doing one week on something that works, and then the rest of the time on things that don't work, that isn't appropriate either.
[00:28:41] Joanna Barbousas: Because the message is not clear. So, you have the inconsistencies which then confuse developing teachers. The other thing that was actually part of my teacher education training, and it wasn't specific to my university, it was across, you would do what you would do in your coursework and then you'd be placed in a school for your placement and your practicum, but you may get a good teacher with good practices or you may get bad practice. And often you would have people say, Oh, don't worry about it.
You know, just look at what they're not doing and learn from that. We don't do that with doctors. You don't have people going into surgery and say, “Oh, don't worry if it's not doing it well, you'll learn from bad practice.”
You don't learn from bad practice. And that is very clear. There's good research now in education to say, actually, you need your high-quality coaches and mentors to be developing novice teachers.
You can't just throw them everywhere and anywhere. And that is a challenge, I think, for the system, for schools to come to the table with the core content being regulated in teacher education to also be regulated in the way we understand teacher practice in schools. And that's some work we're doing at La Trobe.
[00:30:08] Anna Stokke: So just backing up a bit, what year did you become the Dean at La Trobe?
[00:30:14] Joanna Barbousas: I became Dean in 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. I was head of department before that. So, I had a lot to do in the shaping of the school, but it really wasn't until I became Dean that I was able to, I suppose, position a vision, a mission, and also really practical approaches of this is what we stand for. And it did challenge people. There were people who decided this isn't for me, I'm moving on.
And we were the first responders to these policy changes that were happening. And I, as Pamela Snow, who is our distinguished professor in the school, said that necessarily gaining friends, we're really positioning ourselves as out of the pack. And I did feel that it was an uncomfortable space for me, particularly with my colleagues across the country who weren't necessarily aligning with what I was publicly saying.
They were probably thinking about it, but not publicly. And that was a difficult space. But now I'm very glad that I was brave enough to push that.
And it's actually worked for the profession and for the university, but also more for graduates.
[00:31:43] Anna Stokke: So, my understanding is that you actually completely rewrote the teaching and pedagogy courses. Is that right?
[00:31:52] Joanna Barbousas: Absolutely. To sort of frame it a little bit, in 2020, we also launched, as you mentioned earlier, the Science of Language and Reading Lab, which was a little bit of a hunch that we had with Professor Pam Snow and Professor Tanya Serry and they came to me and said, I think we might, what if we did some short courses around the science for reading? So, we had a bit of a hunch. Our marketing team at the time, they had a role to play.
They said, oh, it's not really a market. You won't necessarily have big numbers. Our first registration, we had over 800 teachers register.
We were only in the market for a short period of time. The reason why I say that, what we agreed is the short courses became a way to almost modulize what we then wanted to include into our teaching degrees. So, we made, before the teacher education recommendations became public, we said, no, we don't do whole language, we don't do balanced literacy, which was not really in step with the policy at the time.
So, we had the department in Victoria and also in other jurisdictions who still had whole language and balanced literacy resources. So, it was a little bit tricky because we had to work with our pre-service teachers who were getting a structured approach to reading and to literacy, but they were going into schools and they were being asked to take up balanced literacy resources. We were a little bit out of step, but it actually worked to our advantage.
[00:33:42] Anna Stokke: I mean, that's a lot of students signing up for those short courses. Like those are teachers, right?
[00:34:48] Joanna Barbousas: They're teachers, yes.
[00:33:50] Anna Stokke: Well, it tells us two things that they perhaps felt that they hadn't been taught how to teach children to read.
And the other thing it tells us is that there's a hunger for it. That teachers really want this instruction.
[00:34:05] Joanna Barbousas: Yes, absolutely. And the hunger, we published a paper on the responses from students, and it was almost heartbreaking reading some of the testimonials where teachers would say, I feel like I've completely misinformed my students.
I've been teaching these students for 20 years. So, there was a real sadness and anger in why didn't my teaching degree teach me this? And hearing that it was more fuel for me and for my team. So, it wasn't me on my own.
It was really bringing in people who were aligned and who were ready to upskill themselves to say, OK, we need to shift our programs. We need to increase the dosage of the signs of learning, evidence, instruction. And what does that look like for a four or a two year degree?
[00:35:06] Anna Stokke: So, this is a pretty major deal to go into a university faculty and rewrite the teaching pedagogy courses. I just want to put that out there. I know this environment really well. I have to ask, what was the reaction from the faculty when you joined?
[00:35:25] Joanna Barbousas: Great question. When you're, so, you know, I always take the position of leadership. It's always tricky when you're doing implementation. So, you might have a great strategy and some, you know, fabulous ideas, but you have to have the culture behind the intention.
There were individual conversations. There were strategic recruitment that needed to happen as well. Before we did a restructure, so I was part of a very significant restructure in 2018, that actually allowed me to bring in people like Hampstow and Tannuseri and really position the cognitive sciences within education, which we as a university, as a faculty, we didn't have at all.
I know other universities have had in the past and currently do. There were real conversations and being really clear every time I met with the faculty individually, collectively, this is where we're heading, always giving the external view of, you know, we need to be very cognizant of the changes. We need to make sure that it's clear that our graduates want more to be able to feel better prepared.
So, there was a lot of buy-in, small little groups to begin with, and there were people who decided to move on. And that's really healthy in terms of a kind of structure. It's healthy for an organization to have a 5 or 8% attrition, and we're always around that space because it's not a good fit.
But what was really interesting to me is there were some academics who I thought, oh, this is going to be really challenging, but they really came to the table. They were upskilling themselves. They were understanding that maybe she knows what she's talking about.
Maybe this is an important piece because at the end of the day, if you don't have students coming in, then you don't have a workforce in, then you're challenged for your position. So, it became really clear the changes we were doing also increased our student enrollments, and that became more and more reputation building, and people started to pay attention and actually support the strategy more broadly.
[00:38:11] Anna Stokke: And were there things that people got wrong about what you were trying to do?
[00:38:16] Joanna Barbousas: I think initially people sometimes misunderstood that this was about replacing one ideology with another.
And that was really clear to me. I could see people say, “oh, well, you're just advocating for another ideology.” And it was not that at all.
I was very explicit about the kinds of data I was gathering to make those changes. I was having very strong and regular meetings with our school partners, with our own students, really having the data to say, look, this is why we need to make these changes. So that was one, replacing one ideology with another.
And this was my perception, but how I was being summarized by my own colleagues across the country, oh, you're just being an opportunist rather than really doing something that is about sustainability and quality. It was about ensuring that all teachers have access to the knowledge they need to teach effectively. And it wasn't about ideology at all, particularly in areas like reading, where consequences of getting it wrong are so significant.
And I just saw it too often as a teacher, as a secondary teacher, that I just thought, no, I'm not going to gamble with that.
[00:39:43] Anna Stokke: No, and it wasn't just about politics. We're really trying to build a faculty that was actually equipping teachers with the skills they need to teach effectively.
We do run this risk, right, because of people worrying that this is just another fad, another ideology, because that is so pervasive in education, the fads, etc. But the difference is you have to go back to, as you said, the data. You go back to high quality research and that has to lead the way.
And that's exactly what you're doing.
[00:40:20] Joanna Barbousas: Yes, absolutely. And there were certain moments where it was very challenging, particularly when progress felt slower than you'd like. That's always a challenge for me. I like to see things move really quickly.
But in slowing down, what I found is that I moved faster because you were able to bring more people along. You were able to have a much focused area of purpose. And the one thing that leaders, particularly in education, in my view, get wrong is having to do everything all at once.
And you just can't do everything all at once. And we're still at a place at La Trobe where we're still improving. We're now moving into maths education and there's other areas that we really want to focus.
But being clear about that focus purpose is so important to growth and sustainability. And again, ensuring our students who come out and become teachers can then teach students to be able to access learning. And that's a really complicated, complex exchange.
And it really is so strongly linked to quality knowledge and research to give that clarity to keep going.
[00:41:45] Anna Stokke: I mean, you say that it was moving slowly, but you started this in 2020 and in the middle of a pandemic, right? And it's only 2026.
I mean, I would say you're moving rather quickly, especially for a university. It's kind of like moving a mountain, really. People need to understand that.
[00:42:04] Joanna Barbousas: It is. I think that's where also being supported by the university. I did have a lot of support from the executive, from the vice chancellor, from the council.
That makes a massive, massive influence. It does impact the way that you are supported to do the work. It's not necessarily the same for a lot of deans across the country.
But I think in terms of the way I see the slowness, I've been in teacher education for a long time. It makes me a little bit sad that it took me until I became a dean to really make those changes. I tried, but it was like, no, we're not doing that or that's not the focus.
We're doing this. And that's where I think leadership is so important to have that implementation impact.
[00:43:01] Anna Stokke: And so, you started the Solar Lab and you got Pamela Snow, who's amazing.
And I've had her on the podcast and the Solar Lab is kind of unique in the world probably, right? I think so. And it's very popular, obviously. And so, then you decided you wanted to start a science of math education lab, which is how I got to know you because you contacted me to talk about that.
So, let's say a few words about that. So why did you also want to create a program for math and what kind of funding do you have?
[00:43:34] Joanna Barbousas: The Solar Lab was really created to address a clip and we had Professor Pam Snow and Tanya Serry as expert researchers who really, I mean, there was itching to create this lab in the School of Education. When they moved into our faculty, it was the opportunity to really create something quite unique.
Essentially the purpose of the Solar Lab was ensuring that teachers have access to evidence-based knowledge about how students learn to read. The short courses came from that, really strong collaborations with the Australian Education Research Organisation that Pam and Tanya are doing some great research in that space. And in many ways, it's about operationalising what the reports and the reviews of the Rowe Report called for, which is, you know, making that knowledge accessible and practical at scale.
So, we thought we could really do something quite unique. And what was interesting about COVID, it kind of allowed you to really focus. We were quite a small school at that time, both in staff and also, our student applications were increasing, but we didn't have as many staff as we do now.
But what actually was becoming really clear is by introducing the Solar Lab, we were getting a lot of media attention from organisations and also from government. What are you guys doing? What's happening here? I was becoming, both myself and Pam and Tanya, becoming pretty clear about the advocacy piece and what this means. And what was interesting is that we had philanthropic organisations like the Bertalli Foundation, who philanthropists can be very astute and they pay attention.
And we were approached because of the work we were doing and the media attention we were gaining. And it was just wonderful to have the Bertalli Foundation actually fund our first $2.5 million for research projects that were coming out of Solar Lab, but also particularly a research project that I think has real opportunity, which we'll talk a little later about the national reach of impact and change in school through our Momentum School Project. So that $2.5 million was heaven sent, sent by the Bertalli Foundation.
And it really was. My conversations with Neville, he did his due diligence. He went to several universities to look at what would you do? What are you all doing in this space? And we presented a fairly compelling proposal and we were the recipients of it.
And because of the success of Solar and what has been happening out in schools with the reform agenda around structured reading and structured literacy overall, is that our schools were saying to us that we're also seeing changes in maths education, but not because we're targeting explicit approaches, but because of the language focus. So, if that's happening, I think we really need to think about the science of maths education as a separate lab to really position literacy and numeracy maths education as core to the way that we're positioning explicit teaching. And hence why having you join La Trobe and working really closely with our associate professor Chrissie Montalioni is a fantastic opportunity for us.
And that's where Neville Bertalli has seen the success of the Solar Lab. I then approached him for the SUM Lab as a proposal and because of our track record, he's now invested another $2.5 million for the SUM Lab.
I think for the difference between the SUM Lab and the Solar Lab is that we're also having to develop the workforce in the SUM Lab because we have, particularly in Australia, many academics and teachers who have been trained through an inquiry-based model of maths education.
So, it's incredible to have you on board, Anna.
[00:48:40] Anna Stokke: Yes. Well, I'm grateful to be part of it and I think good things are going to come from it.
So, it's exciting. Let's talk about some impact and let's talk about the Nexus program. So, I understand that the OECD has highlighted La Trobe's Nexus program as an internationally leading model for addressing teacher shortages through alternative pathways.
And this was the only one chosen from Australia by the OECD. Can you explain the Nexus model and why employment-based pathways matter for the future workforce?
[00:49:17] Joanna Barbousas: Yes, absolutely. So just to give a bit of background, the Commonwealth government released a tender for high achieving teacher education.
We applied for the HAT tender in 2019 and essentially it was the first time that universities were given the opportunity to have an employment-based pathway funded by the Commonwealth government. The model and the program that was there before and it continues to be is Teach for Australia, which was a standalone employment-based pathway. But Teach for Australia are not teacher education providers.
They had to partner with a university. And this was the first time a university and all universities were able to apply. And we were the only university that won the tender along with Teach for Australia.
But what was really interesting about our application was, so La Trobe is a Victorian university, but we also now have campus in Sydney, but at that time, five campuses in Victoria. And as our university chancellor refers to La Trobe as the only Victorian wide university. We have campuses in Metro Melbourne.
We have campuses in Mildura, in Albury-Wodonga, in Shepparton and in Bendigo. And these are regional hatchments and with very high need of teachers and quality teachers. So, for us, we put together employment-based pathway where participants are placed in schools while they complete their qualifications.
But different to other employment-based pathways, they start as we refer to them in Victoria's education support offices. So, teacher's aides, they start in the first six months embedded in schools. They're doing, but they're also looking at practice, but not in a, as a professional yet.
They're looking at it in terms of as an education support officer. And that was quite a new thing. I was told by many, “Oh, that's not going to work.”
It's not really going to, you know, you really need to get them straight in their teaching. In fact, it was the innovation of the program. And what was really important part of the tender is that most of the nexus teachers had to be placed in regional rural schools and in schools of high need.
And we had the most extraordinary applicants. And these are, I suppose, the importance of career changing programs like Nexus is that you actually get people who have been in other careers, have been successful in other careers. We've had incredible pathway changes.
We've had veterinarians, we've had politicians, we've had medical practitioners who want to take up teaching, but actually make a difference in schools that matter most. So, the regional catchment was a really important part for us, and it has played an incredible role, particularly with schools across our smaller campuses where almost impossible for them to receive high quality teachers in those schools. So, for us, it allowed our career changes to apply what they've learned in real life and through the course into strong supported structures.
So, the Nexus program is really strongly supported with evidence-based approaches to teacher education, but also a strong coaching and mentoring model to allow them to succeed.
[00:53:29] Anna Stokke: So, what did you learn? Like, what have you learned through this about attracting and retaining teachers in hard-to-staff schools?
[00:53:38] Joanna Barbousas: What we learned, I mean, what was interesting in the beginning, we were so focused on our own course.
So, we wanted to make sure that they were getting a high-quality evidence-based teacher education curriculum. But then what we were finding is some of the schools that they were being placed in, which is from the discussions we had earlier, is the schools themselves were not necessarily evidence-based. So, we really had to make some further connections with the school mentors and our Nexus students coming through so that there wasn't a kind of misalignment of the message.
And what we have been able to do is actually receive further funding through the Helen McPherson Smith Foundation to do a Momentum Schools project for Nexus schools. So essentially what we're doing there is actually embedding coaching into schools for the science of learning so that when Nexus students are coming in, our Nexus schools are also well-equipped to understand what high quality coaching and practice in the science of learning looks like. And we're actually gathering some incredible data around the connection between teacher education, coursework, and coaching approaches in schools.
[00:55:18] Anna Stokke: You've hinted at work beyond La Trobe. So, what would a national model or platform look like?
[00:55:17] Joanna Barbousas: I do have some of my close colleagues and friends that always say, well, you never sit still. There's always something else to do.
And for me, I think what I have been able to see, La Trobe was a fairly small, in terms of education, not other parts of our offering, an education, a small provider in the national arena. I think now we're a much larger teacher education program faculty, but also our national reach is really significant. I mean, the opportunity now is for what we have done and have achieved in a short period of time, but also how we've been able to influence and work with stakeholders across the nation is to now think about a national center or a national institute that has its focus being on education impact across the profession.
So, we talk about teacher education, but actually how can a national platform think about the coordination between teacher education, research that is impactful, so that is focused on classroom practice and to really upscale the work that we've been doing. For me, the national model will allow for the wins that we've had to become much more about implementing at scale.
[00:57:13] Anna Stokke: So, you've made massive changes in the school of education at your university.
And then for other leaders listening, they might wonder how you did that. Particularly, you come in and things are a certain way and there might be faculty who would be resistant or other university administrators who would be resistant. For other leaders listening, why does this matter? And how do you shift something that's so far away from where you want it to be?
[00:57:42] Joanna Barbousas: Thanks, Anna. It's a question I get often. How did you do what you did? And you have to be very clear about the problem you're trying to solve. And you actually have to take a very humble approach and be ready to listen to truths that might dissolve you and make you feel very uncomfortable.
I mean, in my initial conversations, even before I became Dean, I was hearing from schools and from our own graduate teachers that this isn't good enough. I'm not getting what I want. You're not producing graduates that well-placed to do the work that needs to be done.
I think the other really important piece that I struggle that other leaders don't do this, is have conversations with people you don't usually talk to. Open your platform and listen to people who create discomfort. Because you have to hear all sorts of approaches and particularly those who have strong evidence to back what they have to say.
So, open your circle, I often say. Stay focused on the students who are most affected. And at the end of the day, it's not only our graduates or our pre-service teachers, it's actually future young people out in schools.
Because what we do in a university where teacher education is really core and important is you're providing the future workforce, which means they will then impact the young people who are out in schools. So, understanding that it's actually about the young kids and the young people out in schools, it's not just about your patch is really important. I think also understanding that meaningful change will always involve challenge, but that's part of the work.
So, it's not easy, but it's also not something that you have to do all at once. Bring your champions close to you. You have to have key advocates, you can't do this alone.
It's a coalition. It's not a captain, so to speak. Yes, there needs to be clear leadership direction, but it really is about linking not only passion, but direction to transform change.
[01:00:26] Anna Stokke: Well, that's a great way to end. You're a true inspiration and thank you so much for what you do and for coming on to talk to me and my listeners about it. I really appreciate it.
[01:00:39] Joanna Barbousas: Thank you, Anna. It's been an absolute pleasure.
[01:00:42] Anna Stokke: Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast app or on YouTube so you never miss an episode.
You can stay connected with me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Blue Sky, or LinkedIn. All links are in the show notes and check out my website, annastokke.com for more information. This podcast is funded by a grant from La Trobe University and from the Trottier Family Foundation through a grant to the University of Winnipeg to fund the Chalk & Talk podcast.