Michael Lawrence and Dr. Fabio D'Agostin | Creating Schools…

Pleased to announce I will be continuing my push to bring education in Australia and elsewhere into the 21st century. Ever since I witnessed the world’s best performing education system (as I have a number of times now) I’ve been trying to find out why schools in countries such as Australia are not following the practices that made them successful, particularly as I constantly hear us talk about ‘evidence based learning’ etc.

A huge ‘thank you’ to all those who have been supportive in bringing positive change including those from the Catholic sector, who recognise the importance of equity in our education. The Independent Sector, who understand the need for innovation and creative thinking in our education system and those in the government sector who have participated in the program (with Tampere’s (Finland) University of Applied Sciences, Educational Sciences Faculty) who discovered that they could apply neuroscience based changes to their program to bring about immediate results in student and teacher satisfaction and learning. And lastly the abovementioned university, who have provided a team of experts from Finnish teacher education to join the participating schools in a live interactive broadcast from their television studio, enabling participating Australian schools (the first US schools are coming soon) to have real time conversations with an expert panel to help tailor a plan for their school.

With the recent NSW strikes and the national ‘teacher shortage’ (there are in fact many more non-teaching teachers out there who have walked away from the profession than there are in the classroom) we are seeing government talk of quick fixes such as training child care workers to be teachers, as opposed to looking at what it is that is causing teachers to walk away from the profession- a very rare phenomenon in Finland. More than half of Australian teachers report that they suffer from anxiety and 18 percent report symptoms meeting the criteria for moderate to severe depression. (Stapleton, 2019) Finnish teacher’s were surveyed in 2012 about what it would take to make them reconsider their choice of career. Salary was rarely mentioned and the most popular response was the loss of their professional autonomy.

It is ironic that the changes we need to make to improve the outcomes for our students are also the same changes which will retain, and attract the best teachers in the country.

What does the future hold if we continue on the same trajectory?

In the United States there are schools that teach mathematics via online programs as they cannot find qualified teachers to do so.

 In South Korea – where they have had some success with the more traditional educational program like ours- school starts at 8 am and continues ‘till early evening before students head off to hagwons- private tutoring colleges ‘till 11pm when the law says they must close. South Korea also experiences high incidences of teenage suicide, as does Japan, India, and many others due to the pressures of the education system.

Our children (and to a lesser extent, our teachers) are our greatest resource and following anything less than world’s best practice is simply unjust.

Please feel free to share this post if you know of schools or teachers who can benefit from this (and I cannot think of many in Australia that would not!) One Finnish teacher with experience in Australian schools, estimated that Australia is 30-40 years behind. I believe that we have the basis for a leading system, but there are many elements to the system which are not in the best interests of students and teachers. If the neuroscience and the research do not backup a particular practice we should be questioning it, and our current practice of closing down questioning and innovation is negative in the extreme.