Teach, Tech, Lead

Associate Professor Anita Skandarajah is an internationally recognised breast and endocrine surgeon, researcher, and medical educator. She is Head of Breast and Endocrine Surgery and Deputy Director of General Surgery at The Royal Melbourne Hospital, a Breast and Endocrine Surgeon at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Melbourne. Alongside her clinical leadership roles, Anita is deeply involved in surgical education, mentoring the next generation of surgeons and supervising postgraduate research. Hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation!

Gus and I were thrilled to be able to chat to Professor Danny Liu - who is a molecular biologist by training, programmer by night, researcher and faculty developer by day, and educator at heart. A multiple international and national teaching award winner, he is Professor of Educational Technologies at the University of Sydney where he co-chairs the University's AI in Education working group and leads the Cogniti.ai initiative that puts educators in the driver's seat of AI. Most recently he has been coordinating the development of the Castlereagh Statement (castlereagh.ai), a world leading, trans-sector approach to reframing education in the age of AI. We're sure you will find this conversation both thought provoking and intellectually challenging - hope you enjoy it!! 

Brad Gaynor is a leadership coach, keynote speaker, and published author of two books - From Burnout to Breakthrough: The Leadership Reset and Not One More Teacher Lost: How We Can Save the Profession. Gus and I chatted to him about a variety of topics including, why teachers burn out, his RESET framework, how we can retain teachers, and how organisations can look after the wellbeing of their staff. Hope you enjoy it!

With shoutouts to House of the Dragon, Spiderman and our upcoming live pod at The National Education Summit with Dr Haili Hughes, this episode has it all! In our latest #one-pager, Gus outlines a technique he calls Calling Across the Room, designed to keep students on task in a very visible and authentic way. Hope you enjoy it!

Many teachers use Learning Goals and Learning Intentions (or similar). Many others will be surface parts of study designs and give students lists of Key Knowledge of Key Skills dot points. None of these things are wrong, but in our latest one-pager, Gus and I discuss the ways in which we can help better define and reinforce with students the learning 'nodes' that they should be taking away in each lesson. Hope you enjoy it! One-pager link: https://angushumphries.substack.com/p/pedagogy-one-pager-14-whats-the-takeaway?r=7lhl7i&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
 

Gus and I were joined by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath - a neuroscientist, educator, and researcher whose work explores how the brain learns and what that means for teaching in the real world. He's the author of The Digital Delusion, a thought-provoking book that challenges many of our assumptions about technology in education and asks whether more technology really leads to better learning. The conversation was wide ranging and thought provoking - we hope you enjoy it!

We know that our students have a limited 'cup' of ... for want of a better description... capacity, attention, focus! We have a tendency to fill their cups quickly and once this happens, the additional material we send in their direction, simply overflows their cup and is lost. After a prolonged lesson of chalk and talk, how much has really be retained? Is there a better way? In this one-pager, Gus and I discuss a method of chunking content that allows for students to process and transform the content to demonstrate what they have (or have not) understood. As Gus likes to say "Just do it Ringo!" (you'll have to listen to get the explanation!) Hope you enjoy it!
One-pager: https://angushumphries.substack.com/p/the-in-then-the-out?r=7lhl7i

Milica Savic is the Coordinator of Learning & Teaching at Wesley College's Elsternwick Campus and she joined us in studio for a great conversation about learning design, instructional coaching and building cultures of inquiry. Milica has been part of a team leading a whole-school transformation of professional learning through the development of Wesley's Personalised Professional Learning (PPL) framework, enabling teachers to engage in action research, peer coaching, and collaborative inquiry. Her work focuses on creating the conditions for deep professional thinking, sustained change in practice, and collective efficacy. Hope you enjoy it!

Gus and I recently had a chance to chat to Holly Wedd, the Head Teacher of Maths at Orara High School. Holly has received several teaching and leadership awards, and chatting with her even for this small amount of time, it was clearly evident why! Not only does she have a passion for Maths and education as a whole, her use of high impact teaching strategies in the classroom is both seemless and inspirational! We know you will enjoy this conversation!

The idea that we want (and need) our students to think seems quite uncontroversial right? In this modern age we find ourselves in, students will do their utmost to avoid thinking. Thinking is hard! It was certainly a challenge for us pre-AI but tech is continuing to make this difficult to enact in our classrooms. So what can we do? Well - so glad you asked! The solution isn't necessarily 'easy' but it's certainly much more attainable if we put this idea right out on front street. In this pod, Gus and I discuss his latest one-pager - "Thinking is Compulsory". Hope you enjoy it!