The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders

[00:00:00] Welcome to Transformative Principal and The Authority here on the BE Podcast Network. I'm doing a simulcast because I think that this topic is so important and I'm so grateful to have James Anderson on the show again.

James has been on Transformative principle three times already, and I keep having him come back. Every a hundred episodes or so, because what he's doing is great. So in previous episodes we've talked about the learner agency model, and we've talked about learnership. In this one we're gonna talk a little bit more about.

The teacher diagnostic tool that he has to help you know, whether or not you have a learning culture or a teaching culture, and we'll get into more of that. James is a prominent Australian based international speaker, author, and educator who is deeply committed to enhancing our [00:01:00] capacity for effective learning, which I love because that's what he focuses on while a lot of other people talk about.

Teaching. He talks about learning, which is why he and I get along so well. So James, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

It's absolute pleasure to be here, Jethro, and I'm looking forward to having a conversation about shifting that culture from a teaching culture to a learning culture in our schools and really developing our students as skillful learners that have agency in the world so we can smash out those short term outcomes, but really hit those long-term goals for education as well.

And we're gonna get into some of that, especially part of it as it relates to moral and character development. We're not gonna go super deep, but we are gonna chat about that a little bit and I think that is really important. Perhaps the best thing for me from this episode is. It gave me some perspective on where I'm at right now in my own learning journey, and I hope that it does the same for you and [00:02:00] encourages you to think about where you are at.

So we'll get to my interview here with James in just a moment.

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So James, the thing that I was thinking would be good to start with is this concept of learner agency. It seems like it's a bit of a buzzword and wanna make sure we understand what people are talking about when they talk about learner agency to start. So give us, set the stage with that as our first topic.

Yeah, look, Jethro the idea of agencies an old idea, like we've been talking about agency for centuries, and it boils down to the idea of are we able to influence our future? Do we have free will in the world around us? And perhaps it's easier to understand. Coming from the perspective of what, it's not, someone who lacks agency feels like the world happens to them. They're powerless in the face of challenge and adversity, and they're, they become [00:03:00] the victims of their circumstances. And when I talk to teachers and school leaders around that sort of idea, and you ask, you reckon any of your kids feel like that? Like they're a victim of their circumstances. They're going.

Yeah. Like that's, and that's why we have to talk about resiliency. That's why we talk about , these protective factors and things like that in schools. Someone with agency in the world is the master of their circumstances, not the victim. They're powerful in the face of change and to develop agency in students. You know, we talk about this idea of voice and choice in schools a lot. Which is interesting because someone with agency has voice and choice. But very often in our attempts to nurture agency in students, we simply give them voice and choice. We go into schools and say, oh, kids, what do you wanna learn? How do you want to get assessed? And things like that. And my challenge to leaders has always been. [00:04:00] If the voice is one they already had except that we had gagged them, and if the choice is one they could already have made except for the fact that we hadn't given them permission, the question then becomes are we giving them the power to choose or merely the permission to choose? And this is where it comes down to the key idea here, that agency is an outcome. It's not a pedagogy. And if the student's not changing, not becoming more able to deal with the challenges in the world, then we can't be said to be really giving them agency in the world. And when I talk to leaders about that, they go, like I thought we weren't doing this right. Some of the strategies that we're often employing in schools end up being trivial rather than powerful.

Yeah they really do, and I think it. You, as I mentioned before, James has been on the show numerous times. If you wanna talk more about learner agency, we talk about that in episode 4 55. I'll put the link in the show [00:05:00] notes for that one as well. But I think that having that perspective and I really like what you said there about, what was it?

I that. Power to choose versus permission to choose. And that agency is an outcome, not a pedagogy. And I think that those are powerful statements that we seem to have forgotten we talk about. Teacher or student empowerment, and as though you or I had any authority to empower anybody, right? They're already empowered by virtue of the fact that they're human beings.

And so we don't need to give that power to anyone because they already have it. And I think that's a really powerful underlying piece to this whole discussion We're gonna have.

I am not sure they actually do have it. I think that we can restrict it, but there are some things in the world that we don't have agency over and we actually have to need to grow and we have to become better learners in order to [00:06:00] develop that agency. And that's the part where I was just saying about the student needs to change. We have to actually raise the bar, make them capable of things they weren't capable of before. And if we are giving them permission over things that are in their comfort and performance zone, things they could already do, then we're not actually changing the student, we're not increasing their agency. What we need to do in the way I talk about it in Learnership, is to talk about how we raise the bar to teach them to be better learners and to make their world a place that they have more control over. Because you know, some things are out of our control right now, but it doesn't stop us becoming the person who can control them, who can be the master of their circumstances.

Yeah. So one of the things that you bring up in Learnership is this idea of having a learning culture versus a teaching culture. Can you define the difference between those two briefly? I.

Yeah, look in the book. We haven't actually mentioned it in my new book, learnership, um, I talk about six [00:07:00] different levels of learnership, six different ways of going about learning. And what I've found is that in many schools, the default way we go about learning the sort of unspoken rules about learning in the school is about learning's about teaching, and it's about performing. For example, I asked teachers, uh, when you sit down to plan a unit of work. What's your first question that comes to mind? In fact, I asked this just recently of a group of about 60 principals in Pakistan, and the common response was that their teachers would ask how to make learning happen, which is really remarkable because if you think about the words of John Holt, he talks about how learning's not the product of teaching learning is the product of the activity of learners, and that. We can be the best teachers in the world. We can , formulate the most skillfully crafted feedback in the world. But if the student chooses not to engage in it, if the [00:08:00] student decides not to take on that challenge, if the student doesn't listen to the feedback, nothing happens. And so what we get in these schools that are focused on teaching and performance is we get the learning happen. Right. We can get there. We know the most effective teaching strategies, and then we can get kids through the curriculum. But what's happening is we're not creating learners. For example, can I tell you a story? Yeah.

That'd be great.

I was working with a teacher recently who was getting some of the best year 12 results for her business management class. Now, even just that statement's kind of odd because she wasn't getting any results at

all.

Her students were getting the results. But in this teaching culture that we've created, all the credit was going to her. You know, she was doing all the work and she was doing all the heavy lifting of learning in the classroom. The kids and John had his words, were coming to [00:09:00] school to watch her work. They would come to school and she would do the teaching, collect the books, give them the feedback, tell them what to do, and as long as the kids did what they were told, they were almost guaranteed. Great results. The learning was happening. But what do you reckon happened to those kids when they got to first year university where there wasn't someone in charge of the learning for them? The kids had become, had been learning, but hadn't become learners, and I think that's where we've sort of missed things a little bit. We've become so obsessed with the skill of teaching and it's important, don't get me wrong.

It's not an either or thing. We need skillful teachers, but I reckon we've got skillful teachers. What we need is skillful learners, and that's where my work focuses.

Yeah. Yeah. So how do we know if we have a teaching culture or a. Learning culture.

Yeah, [00:10:00] I've developed a diagnostic that you can link to from the book that allows teachers, leaders to observe the behaviors. Learners are engaging in their classrooms. And what it ends up showing you is it shows you the level of learnership that's currently in your school, and it'll answer the question, are most of the learning behaviors associated with non learners, the sort of learners that don't participate in learning at all, are they associated with what I call beginning learners? These are the learners who are active, they're engaged, but they're in their comfort zone all the time, and we are trading what they're prepared to do for what they should be doing to grow. It'll tell you. Whether it's all about the performance and you've developed what I call a performance culture, it'll tell you if the level of learnership is at that teacher directed part, where it's the teaching culture or, and this is where we're starting to talk, if we're getting it to the level where it's about learning [00:11:00] and the process of learning, or it's about growth, where the agile learner sits and the focus becomes about growth. And in the story I just told. The dominant culture was clearly a teaching culture. Everything was driven by the teaching, and as I said, you had to trade the for the learners. But when you look at this, the results of this diagnostic, and I've had lots of schools go through it now, it gives you a really clear snapshot of where your learners are at the sort of level of learnership that they're engaging in. And the beauty of it is that by looking at it, it tells you what you need to do to improve the level of learnership in your school where the levers are to say, alright, this is what's driving the unspoken rules about learning in our school, and what do we need to do to shift it?

And so James I want to come back to some other questions about. That aspect, but where does character and self-development fall into [00:12:00] all of this?

Question without notice. Thank you.

That's what I like to do. We don't, just so everybody knows, we do not have all these questions scripted out. You may think we do, but I like to throw curve balls.

You know, it is really interesting because I've just been reading a book by Adam Grant, uh, I dunno if you've come across it

yet. It's called Hidden Potential and it's outstanding. It's a outstanding book and Adam talks about many of the things that I talk about in terms of, I. People becoming learners about the need to become, in his words creatures of discomfort.

You know, creatures that venture into their leading zone because they want to. And the way Adam Grant talks about pretty much what I talk about in terms of learnership is in terms of character and character traits that. An agile learner person, I would describe as an agile learner. Someone who embraces challenge, someone who cultivates the habits of mind, tailors feedback, designs, mistakes, and invest their energy and [00:13:00] growth. He would call those character traits. So I think that and not character traits in a sense that they're fixed, that they're traits that you develop in yourself. And so, I think we're talking about two sides of the same coin. When you talk about character development, um, or learnership, what you're talking about is the development of the person, because, if we go back to where we started this conversation, the agile learner, the highest level of Learnership that I described is the learner who has the most agency in the world. They're the person that's out there being the master of their circumstances. They're the person out there making a difference to the world. And they're doing it because they're leveraging the uncertainty, they're leveraging the volatility in the world to drive their own growth. And so when you ask me, yeah, where does character and what was the other term you used in the question?

Character and

Moral develop or self-development is what I said, but I'm also talking about moral development.

yeah. so Kevin, we talk [00:14:00] about coming back to moral development. We might need a bottle of wine to talk about the moral development.

Hey, it's still early there for you, so probably not today.

yeah. Good. Uh, but the self-development part that's, leadership drives it, you know, if you're stuck, like the story I just told. If you're stuck in a teaching culture, the development that your self-development is being driven by someone externally.

You know, it's the teacher driving it. If you've got a learning culture which is the independent learning level of learnership, then the student's driving it, or the person, the individual's driving it, but it's goal directed. So sometimes you, you reach a goal and you stop learning, and that's a pattern we see a lot in adults that we only develop it when we need to, so we have to be responsive. But an agile learner is proactive. They're out there going, there's challenges all around me, and any of these challenges can help me grow. And so they're embracing the opportunities around them to [00:15:00] prepare themselves for the future. Because we talk a lot these days about , having an unknowable future. And Nicholas to talks about how we can't predict the future. It's not hard, it's impossible. But what we do know about the future is that. You know, change is the only constant and uncertainty is the only certainty that the future is going to be challenging. So, agile learners, what they do is they embrace the challenges of the moment to build the skills, to build the character traits.

As Adam Grant would talk, called them to future-proof themselves against those challenges of the future, the moral aspect of that, I think that's a different conversation we can have. And as I say, it's best had over a glass of wine. Because I often make this distinction when I talk about habits of mind, for example, the habits of mine, and for that matter, the work around learnership can be applied to any means, right?

If you wanna be a really successful criminal, you've gotta be really [00:16:00] smart and you've gotta be an agile learner and do that sort of thing. And I think schools have a role in not simply developing the person as an agile learner. But to direct that learning to a moral end and that discussion is a really rich one that maybe leave for a , I'll come over and we'll share a glass of wine or two and have that discussion.

I.

So I, I think that's, I'm glad that you brought that up because that piece of recognizing. That it's not just enough to educate someone, but you also have to educate them morally as well is key here. And that's a theme that is woven throughout the book That is not said like you must teach morals, but at the same time, like being able to have kids have agency and be powerful we want them to have good morals and to have a good, um.

A good plan for the future. So, Aristotle, for example, said that transforming [00:17:00] habits of what were things that we do early in life creates the foundation for the later development of virtues, which is who they are later in life. And that that note is from marvin Berkowitz's primed book, which talks a lot about character education.

So, so I, these things are important and we can't just separate them completely and say, this is only about academics and and we have to include these things as well.

It's interesting, one of my very first pieces of thought leadership was still in schools and I was working with habits of mind and I came up with a diagram and I said , this is what schools are responsible for. And I said, in the middle, it's a, like a target diagram. In the middle is the content.

You know, we've gotta teach kids, staff the curriculum, the outcomes that we know are important around that. We need to teach 'em thinking skills. The way to interact with that knowledge. So it's not just a body of knowledge, but you can do stuff with it. And this is where [00:18:00] the habits of mind fitted in, around the outside of those thinking skills were the dispositions to use those strategies to act on the content. And when I put that piece together, I initially thought, that's brilliant. People all love this shows where those dispositions fit. And then I was talking to a teacher in a, a school here in Victoria and she said, James, we love the habits of mind where the kids are really enjoying it and we're using the habits of mind to look at some of the great crimes in history.

Things like the great train robbery and things like that. And looking to see how the criminals use their habits of mind to get away with their crimes. And I went, oh if there's not a better context to do that.

Yeah,

and what we realized is my diagram was missing a level that we need to teach the content. We need to teach the thinking strategies. We need to think, teach the dispositions, but around that are the principles, the ethics, the virtues that guide the [00:19:00] direction to which you apply all of that. And what I often find in schools is that we focus very much on those inner two rings, on the content and the thinking skills we advocate. For the outside too. The , the front page and the prospectus of the school talks all about the virtues and all about the dispositions for what goes on in the classroom is all about the content and the thinking skills. And I think we need to broaden that view. And in part, that's what Learnership does.

It talks about how we develop those dispositions and become skillful learners that are able to go out and have agency in the world.

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That's a good point that if you are using. And the habits of mind to talk about how to get away with a crime. That's not really what we want the habits of mind to be used for. And you know, we should take a step back and be more intentional about the examples that we're bringing in to the classroom.

And I think that this is a big deal that touches all aspects of [00:20:00] education. And we need to be much more thoughtful about those things. We could go on a whole tangent about that but we won't. During this conversation. I've got a lot more. Stuff coming out about character stuff in the next few months.

So, so I think the, I'd like to go back to that that idea of having a learning culture versus a teaching culture. You talked a little bit about the diagnostic and so talk to us a little bit more about the kinds of things that we should be looking for as we are evaluating whether or not we have a learning culture or a teaching culture.

Yeah, so what this diagnostic produces is basically a bar graph that shows you the frequency of behaviors associated with non learners beginning learners, performance learners directed independent and agile learners. And it does two things. One, it gives you a snapshot of the current learning culture, the unspoken rules that are driving the learning in your school. And what's really interesting is that it teachers agree with it [00:21:00] straight away. Like it's their data and you've visualized it. And they go, yep, that's what's going on. And they can see that they've got a really common pattern is to have the middle two bars around directed and performance learning shot up really high, and then a skew to the left, which is all the beginning and non learning behaviors and a real drop off. Very few behaviors around independent and agile learners. And we have to ask the question then, well, why is that? And the short answer is because teachers are doing all the learning, teachers are in charge of everything. And at the same time , in this , we started the conversation about the sort of world that kids are growing up in that's full of challenges and uncertainty and. What's happening is teachers are rushing in and protecting kids from that. They're saving them. Like I said, one primary school I was working with that you know, really big drop off between directed and [00:22:00] independent learners. And the principal had actually asked me to come out and work with them because he thought something wasn't right, but he wasn't quite sure what it was. And he said, read these reports, James, tell me what's going on here. And what I started reading was teachers saying that James works really hard even when things get tough. And I read it and went, what do you mean? Even when like it's when things are tough, you've gotta work hard. And what was happening is that as soon as these kids post covid started to struggle, teachers were rushing in and rescuing them. They're saying, oh, don't worry. You know, we won't make it too hard for you. And to come back to what Adam Grant said, that we need to become creatures of discomfort. No, they were making kids creatures of comfort. They were making kids of, I'll make it easy for you, I'll make it protected. You know, in one of my books I talk about the learning landscape and I use the analogy of climbing a mountain. And I said to these teachers that, you gotta let the kids [00:23:00] climb, make it safe. Give them a harness. But don't hoist them up. And so when we started looking at what's going on in a school like that, and it's really sort of common diagnostic result is two things are happening. One, they're protecting kids from challenge, and two, they're controlling all the learning with the teachers. And I have to talk to 'em and say, look , to achieve growth, to help kids raise the bar, to increase the agency they have in the world to , smash out their short-term outcomes, but also allow them to thrive in the world afterwards. We need skillful teachers, but we also need skillful learners. And at the moment we are robbing them of that opportunity. And I use the example, and I hope you know my example. If I say

Torvill

and Dean, do you know who I'm talking about?

I don't actually.

Ah, man, I'm gonna have to get a better example.

Torvill and

Dean, were two very famous figure skaters in about the 84, maybe 80 I wanna say 84, but it shouldn't have been a winner Olympic year. But they did a very famous dance to [00:24:00] Bolero and anyway, you can picture it, two figure skaters. And I picture the role of the teacher and the role of the learner, like two figure skaters. Both doing different things in partnership and when you see them working together, the expert teacher and the expert learner, it's a thing of beauty. But at the moment in the teaching culture, what we've got is we've got teachers doing the spins, doing the flips, doing the jumps and all the rest of it. And some of the kids are holding onto the edge skating around the outside. A few of them are still sitting in the bleaches doing up their skates.

So when teachers see this the results of this diagnostic, they go, yeah, that's our school. We're doing all the heavy lifting of learning. That's why I'm going home so exhausted. I'm doing all this hard work. And then what I do is I say, just take these results, move it one notch to the right, and everybody in the room goes, oh my God, I would love that.

I would've so [00:25:00] much more time. I would enjoy my job so much more.

The kids would get so much more out of their learning if we could do that.

So let me just make this point briefly. I love the analogy of you have to still allow kids to climb the mountain, but you make it safe for them to climb the mountain. I think that's a really powerful thing, what we did. I. When the pandemic happened was atrocious for our students.

We told them I instantly, everything that we've been telling you is important for the last however many years you've been in school. We are now telling you it doesn't matter 'cause we can cancel it just like that. And the problem is that once we told kids that it's taken a lot of kids, a lot of time to come back and say.

Okay, maybe this does really matter. And the problem is that we didn't really have an answer for why that mattered, and you just articulated it beautifully that we've done too much to to prevent [00:26:00] our kids from experiencing any negative effects. We've done too much. To prevent them from feeling frustration or difficulty or being di uncomfortable or anything like that.

And that really is the challenge. And yet your story right there at the end, so perfectly illustrated, what every teacher wants. They want agile learners in their classroom but they. They don't think that it's possible or they think that the pressure is so high that they have to perform, that they can't waste any time letting kids be agile and they, why is it that it's so hard to see that really is the best way to do things?

James?

Well, I don't know if it's hard to see. It's hard to know what to do. And particularly in a culture where they've been told you are the influence in the classroom, you make all the difference. And with that has come blame. I think teachers if the results aren't there, it is the teacher that gets the blame and that pressure has cranked up on them to [00:27:00] say, well, if I'm gonna get the blame, I have to up my game again. And they up the game, up the pressure, and it sort of chased itself like that. And teachers have felt more and more. Locked into, do you know, I've gotta do the job, I've gotta do the job, I've gotta do the job. And they haven't even recognized that's what's been happening. It's not until they see it, it's not until they recognize that actually , it's not up to me, it's up to the learners as much as it is to me.

I've got a role to play in this classroom, but I'm not the only person in this classroom. They've gotta do something. this is the part that I think I've added in the book. That they didn't know what quite what it was. They could say, oh, you've gotta work harder. Take responsibility for your, like, what does that mean? And when I talk about how we teach them, literally teach students in a way that helps 'em become comfortable with that discomfort of their learning zone Intentionally in your classroom, tell kids that , this is similar to Eduardo's work. I'm sure you're familiar with his [00:28:00] latest book the Performance Paradox, and he talks about how we have to move intentionally in and out of our performance and learning zones. But what we tend to do in classrooms is just tell kids, this is what we're doing today. Now we know that this is a hard task, and they're going into their learning zones. But we need to say today you're gonna be in your learning zone. And your learning zone means that you're gonna feel like you're gonna make struggle, you're gonna struggle, you're gonna make mistakes.

And one of the strategies I talk about with my schools is to tell kids in that context, give them a mistakes quota. Not to say we need , mistakes are okay. They're part of learning. 'cause not all mistakes are. But to say you're expected to make between five and 15 mistakes this lesson, and if you don't, you're not working in the right way. And people sort of go, what? What? But then the next lesson to say, all right, kids, today, this lesson's different. We're in our performance zone and in our performance zone, it's about reliability, it's about consistency. It should [00:29:00] be about being really focused on getting it right and minimizing mistakes. And that intentionality. I mean, you think I talk about learning as expertise. You know, the expertise of learning is what Learnership is, and one of the things that experts in any area do is they're very deliberate. They're very intentional, but I think in classrooms. But what students do is they can't learn. You know, and it is just you know what we do sort of thing. And there's very little intentionality, very little deliberateness about it. And part of that is from a lack of understanding of what it should look like,

So James, how do you show them what it looks like?

Yeah, so the learnership matrix in the first instance is what skillful learning looks like. They can tell you, teachers can tell you that , this kid not engaging in the learning process well, but this one's much better at it, but they lack the language to describe it. Yeah. Coming back to this idea of expertise, one of the other things that any [00:30:00] area of expertise has is a rich language to describe the area. So if you think about a master chef and the language they use, or the martial artist that you know, the language they use to describe what they do. And if you look at the language in our schools, we have a rich language of teaching, but we have a very impoverished language of learning. And one of the things I do in Learnership is to describe the language of learning without it, without a way of describing how the learning process happens, we're at a bit of a loss. And whereas going just a second ago, teachers are expert teachers, but that does not make them expert learners. And as one of my principals that I work with, put it, she said that the, I do, we do, you do. Model of teaching and learning when it comes to the learning process is limited by the, I do part that there is a difference in the expertise of teaching and [00:31:00] the expertise of learning. And teachers are expert teachers, but they don't necessarily understand the learning process. And we could talk about that all day,

but when we. Look at the Learnership matrix and we describe what it means to design mistakes and we go what's designing mistake? We talk about what it means to tailor feedback. I Feedback's a great one to talk about briefly in terms of, teachers have been told for years you're gonna give feedback, it's gonna be quality feedback, it's gonna be timely and actionable and da, all that sort of stuff. But it's all in the teacher's hands. An agile learner takes charge of that. And says, Jethro, I'm about to do this podcast. I need you to pay attention during the podcast to tell me if I'm giving the, a clear message and not stumble, blahing over my words and stuff. And if I don't prime you by asking you to collect that information can be lost..

I think the thing that I would like to go back to is that idea that teachers are [00:32:00] excellent teachers and most likely, most teachers in education were probably performance driven learners, and were good at playing the game of school and enjoyed being there, and that's why they became a teacher.

Now, I'm not saying that everybody's like that. But it's really difficult then for them to say, this is what agile learning looks like, because they likely have not really done much to experience that themselves. I'm speaking generally, don't everybody get mad at me, but I am at Jesser Jones. Feel free to reach out if you wanna talk more.

So how do we manage that, James?

Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of things to talk about there. One is that for many teachers in the system, and again, not all of them, the expectation was that they'd be lifers. You know, they'd come in as 22 year olds having finished their degree, and they would stay in school and be a teacher their whole life.

And they lived in a system where we could teach you what you needed to know how to be a teacher, [00:33:00] and you could keep doing that for the rest of your life. And in past generations that was probably true. But increasingly in this world where we've said the change is the only constant uncertainty is the only uncertainty.

With the challenges in front of us, we can't predict and all the rest of it, we need to become ongoing learners and not just ongoing in terms of learning more through our lives, but become better learners. So for some of the teachers coming in, the need to. Continue to grow wasn't something that was predicted. So they've been in that space where they can do it. It's also really common, and we've seen this in the research in nursing and doctors in all sorts of different areas where people become adequate at their job , good enough, and then they stop growing. And when I describe that I talk about it how people get. To a point in their life where they stop getting better and they [00:34:00] start getting busy and they stop growing and they start performing. And that's a really common pattern. And it would be all right if the world was stable.

Yeah.

If you could do the same job next year as you did last year and you did 10 years ago. But it's just not the way it is. And this is why when you were talking about Covid a minute ago, this work is so important and how it links back to agency. That if you're a beginning learner, the sort of learner who loves their comfort zone, or if you're a performance learner that loves doing their best, when Covid came along, you had to duck the cover. You had to go, I don't know how to deal with this. I can't change myself. I'm just stuck this way. And so you became the victim of your circumstances. Further directed learner. When Covid came along, they put their hand up. They said, help me. I don't know how to deal with this. Someone's gonna show me what to do. For the independent learner. They were the ones around April went well, this isn't working out the way we thought. And this is where we heard the word pivot for the first time. Remember [00:35:00] hearing the word pivot like

that? You know, can't do this anymore. Now we've gotta pivot. But the agile learner had one of two responses. The agile learner said either this is a once in a lifetime learning opportunity. What a great way to shake things up and do things differently. Or they turned around and said, oh, Jethro, this is amazing. Remember how two years ago we thought we'd give a some online learning a shot just to see how it pushed our pedagogy

and what we could learn from it. Hasn't this put us in the box seat because they were leveraging the stuff in the environment around them to push their own growth. So when teachers, we talk to teachers and say , the learning part that they don't necessarily always understand the learning part is because many of them haven't had to be really effective learners for a long time. And one of the challenges there is that a huge part of helping students become independent and agile learners. Is for them to [00:36:00] understand their learning zone. Now, I had mentioned before Adam Grant's term, I wish it was my term. I'm gonna steal

it. Let's just put it out there. about becoming creatures of discomfort. Well, many of our teachers have been creatures of comfort for

a

long time, and so they don't really know what that struggle feels like, what it means to be outta your depth and to do all that sort of stuff. And so when they're trying to tell kids, oh, you've gotta go into your learning zone. And the kids go, oh, I don't like this. Their first reaction is to go, oh, okay, well I'll make it a bit easier for you. And so my work shows 'em how to shift that and make those desirable difficulties to teach kids the expectations to be in your learning zone, um, what it feels like, what you're meant to do, and that you're not meant to be there all the time.

And those sort of ideas.

Yeah and how it actually feels really great. To be in your learning zone when you accomplish something and figure something out, and learn something that you didn't know, that you didn't know [00:37:00] before. I intentionally try to put myself in those positions. I. Quite often, and that's something that I have done my whole entire life, and it's come very naturally to me.

I wouldn't say that I'm perfect at it. But I, in my doctoral program that I'm in right now, I did have a professor say that that I need to conform or die, and that if I don't conform to the system, then I'm not gonna be successful. And I appreciate him saying that because I need to stop. You know, push kicking against the pricks and pushing against the things that are there and recognize that I'm part of a bigger system and it's not time for me to be an agile learner.

It's time for me to be a directed learner and it, and I can be okay with that and I can adjust what I'm doing and how I'm doing it so that I can be directed and say, here are the next steps that we need to do. So I appreciate you. Bringing this topic up at this time in my life [00:38:00] personally, and this is the best thing about doing the podcast and why I think everybody should have a podcast, is because I am getting this for myself and I know that it's gonna help somebody else out there.

So people are gonna wanna learn more. We mentioned your book, learnership. How else do you suggest people get in touch with you and learn more from you? James?

Of course you can the book's available as an ebook and as an audiobook as well. So grab those from Amazon or wherever you get your books from. But jump on my website, james anderson.com au. Lots of resources there. Lots of opportunities to connect. I do a lot of online training with schools all over the world and travel a bit these days as well.

So I'm hoping to get over to the States sometime in the next 12 months or so. So perhaps we can do the next podcast live from your studios

Now we're talking. That would be awesome.

over that glass of wine, and we can talk about the moral purpose of education.

Yeah. Well I'll have soda 'cause I don't drink, but you can. You can drink all the wine you want.

I actually don't drink a lot either, but [00:39:00] deserves a soft lights

and comfy seats and you know, that sort of idea.

Okay. Well, James, as always, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here, and thanks for being part of Transformative Principle and the Authority.

Always a pleasure Jethro, thanks very much for having me.