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

Michael Lawrence is a school teacher of more than 30 years experience teaching Music, English, History and more from Grade Prep to Year 12, in both government and non-government schools. His previous book titles have been the definitive music biographies on Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil.

When Michael visited Finland to take a look at their world-leading education system, he came away in a state of shock:

‘Finnish teachers looked at me like I was insane when I described the NAPLAN tests given to children as young as eight. With shocked expressions, they asked why Australian teachers allowed this to be done to such young children. They then suggested that (of course) the results of these tests would lead to increased funding and assistance for those students and schools that did not do well.

There was no reasonable answer to this. My investigation into what made the Finnish system so successful was quickly becoming an inquiry into why my own system was so unsuccessful.

The next few years would see more time in Finland interacting with Finnish educators at all levels. Dozens of education books were read, dissertations on Finnish education and Finnish teacher education, in addition to countless formal and informal interviews with Australian and Finnish teachers followed. How had Australia found itself in this position? Why?’

Testing 3,2,1 is the story of how Australian education fell behind the world’s best and why Finland came to lead. It is also a guide to how some of Finland’s ideas can be used by teachers and schools to begin to reverse this.

Michael is currently working with Dr. Fabbio D’Agostin on a book provisionally titled Creating Schools Where Teachers and Students Want To Be due for release in February 2025.

Essential reading for all Australian educators.

Michael lives in Geelong where, in addition to bringing change to the Australian education system, he enjoys the surf coast and catching his favourite bands as often as possible.

Dr Fabio D’Agostin

It would not be wrong for me to claim a life-long interest and direct involvement in education. I have been in learning institutions as a student or as an educator for at least 60 years without a break. And for the most part I have enjoyed it, although with age there has come some crankiness, which I hope has been explained in this book. I am thankful to the many teachers who have taught me well, the peers who learned with me, the supervisors who guided me and the colleagues I have taught with. I owe so much to the wisdom, support and role modelling of hundreds, maybe thousands of people.

My first vivid moment in education occurred at a local YMCA kindergarten located down the street from where I grew up. A lady, I guess she was the teacher, picked me up and swung me round and round boisterously singing ‘Fabio is going back to Italy’. I must have spoken some rubbish about where my parents had come from and where we all soon headed. I picked up English at kindergarten as my third language already after Italian and Furlan (a dialect). But it wasn’t true about the travel and I was born in Footscray, Melbourne anyway.  

Corpus Christi, Kingsville, in Melbourne’s west, was my primary school and place of indoctrination into Australian culture. I quickly learned about football and cricket, downball, handball, chasey, brandy, tiggy, twisty sandwiches and any number of other mid-twentieth century schoolyard staples. I even discovered bullying from both sides of that game. We all make mistakes. A fond memory of my early years was when we were allowed to use cuisenaire rods, colour-coded wooden sticks of unit lengths from one (a cube) to ten. I can still remember the colours, the blue four and the brown seven being my favourites. What a great way to do sums.

Once they told us, for the benefit of some visiting strangers, I think they may have been academics, to just build things from the rods. I built my father’s factory, as I proudly told one of the visitors. I distinctly remember the fun I had, constructing walls, benches, rudimentary motors and crane-like things. This was an early experience of a theme that would become my forever travelling companion.

The school was run by an order of nuns and in those days there were still plenty of them around. They put us through all of the Catholic rituals, communion and confirmation chief among them, but they also promoted a general Christian ethos (when they weren’t strapping the back of our calves) that I have always found valuable. A memorable event occurred one day in 1969 when they organised for our class to all go to a teacher’s nearby house and watch Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. 

My next educational stop was St Paul’s College, Nth Altona, a regional Catholic boys’ high school run by Marianists, an American order of brothers. A formative journey, to say the least. A lasting impression was the toughness of the teaching culture. Many teachers were pre-emptive in their disciplinary approaches, expecting the worst behaviours and ensuring that they fired the first shots. I always remember reflecting after the first yelling, sanctioning or strapping in any class that it was not a good way to get boys aboard. Scared students don’t make for good learners.

Some of the most fearsome teachers always wore suits, leading me to the conclusion that formal clothing is a hollow way to gain respect when what you actually do earns contempt. I have resisted wearing suits and been wary of people in suits ever since. Despite these observations I was lucky enough to have several teachers who practiced far more effective ways forward. They showed me what can be achieved through understanding, patience and empathy and their shining examples helped me decide by Year 10 that I too would become a teacher. And I knew what type of teacher I wanted to be.

The high school years also showed me I was good at conventional learning. I worked hard at school, did not have to be pushed to do homework and got great marks in all subjects. Learning was easy for me. Teachers told me and showed me what I had to master and I always went away and did it. Most of my friends were not so lucky and I could never understand what was holding them back, a preview of things to come when I eventually started teaching. In the meantime I did a lot of peer tutoring and learned the valuable lesson that talking through what you think you know is an excellent exercise in realising what you really know.

I was a good writer but focussed on mathematics and science, graduating with flying colours and having every university course in the land at my disposal. Of course I chose teaching, never in doubt. Five years at Melbourne University followed, including a year out to co-edit Farrago, the student newspaper. The further into my degree that I travelled, the more aware I became that quality teaching was not necessarily my lecturers’ first priority. Such experiences as much as the content of my studies showed me that teaching is an effortful art that must be practiced and developed if you are going to be any good at it. 

Educational psychology, including bedrock theories from people like Piaget and Maslow, was a central theme in my teaching course although it was not always easy or obvious to relate the standard theories to the classrooms in which I trained. There did not seem to be a single script that I could follow to track the student behaviours I was seeing and dealing with. As with any true science, reality and theory are often difficult to reconcile. The myriad variables in play within the educational context of human development and behaviour are difficult to tame solely through our cognitive and social sciences. It is indeed a jungle out there.

So, I found myself on a well-trodden newly graduated teacher’s path. The real learning was about to begin. One of my first conundrums was what is it that motivates students and how can I capture that. A book I was given gave me my first break. Teacher Effectiveness Training (TET) is a US resource that put me on the road to becoming a competent teacher. It promoted the belief that the student-teacher relationship is a critical doorway through which learning may happen. I found one of my career-long guiding principles.

TET was written by an enlightened psychologist, Dr Thomas Gordon, about 50 years ago. It was a response to parents who wanted their children to be treated the same at school as they were treated at home. Not a bad idea. Assuming that children generally respect their parents, value them and appreciate their guardianship, these are the same student attributes I want to see in my classroom. 

Of course there is much about parenting that a teacher cannot be. I was never going to be a parent to my students but without necessarily knowing it, children instinctively look for parent-like qualities in the teacher who stands before them. Decades later, I encountered a parallel principle in Jared Cooney Horvath’s neuroscience. He argued that in the case of using laptops and tablets in schools, if students only ever knew the devices as game-playing and entertainment platforms at home, why would they not have the same expectation when they were instructed to use the technology in a classroom? 

Likewise, what a child knows and loves about adults is primarily sourced through their caring parents, so why would they not seek out and respond to the same positive qualities in their teachers? If I cultivated a classroom identity that tapped into the positive feelings, comfort, attachment and security that students were used to experiencing with their parents at home, could I get them aboard with my educational agenda? In short, yes, big time.

I developed a mantra, just be nice. In my interactions with students, I projected characteristics including sensitivity, interest, empathy, understanding, patience, availability, respect and friendliness. I stripped back the formality, hardness, authority and even threat that so many of my supervising teachers had encouraged during my training. My relationships with students blossomed. Academically successful students and strugglers, happy students and the troubled, males and females, demographically wealthy and poor – being nice had universal appeal.   

The benefits to my teaching were enormous. Respect and compliance usually did not have to be enforced, imposed, mandated or coerced. Student anxieties, apprehensions, tensions and fears dissolved when they came through my classroom door. They could be their best selves and I could be my best teacher. I could teach in whatever manner, traditionalist or progressive, and students would buy in. I could set challenging tasks or stick to routine work, it didn’t matter. My students were aboard with me, travelling with me, not against me. They wanted to be in my classroom and so did I. 

On a recent tour of the Finnish education system I saw the central TET principle enacted on a national scale. Our host, Mikko Turunen, explained to us, ‘we treat our schools as extensions of students’ homes’. Classrooms were places of respect and trust. Students and teachers commonly remove their shoes before entering. Cooked lunches are provided free for all students, turning the event into a daily kitchen table opportunity for students and staff to interact informally and form strong social bonds beyond the classroom and schoolyard. 

I looked for signs of chronic student behavioural issues, a current major indication of restlessness and unhappiness within our Australian schools, and found none despite my questioning of many teachers, students, principals and administrators. Finnish school corridors and classrooms were noticeably calm and pleasant environments. Students spoke kindly, even warmly, about their teachers, and teachers talked similarly about their students. If they had to sometimes leave their classroom unattended for periods of perhaps 10 minutes or more, Finnish teachers completely trusted students to continue their work. All of this was noted not because we just visited an elite school or the best school, every school in Finland is the same. And I saw no teachers, principals or administrators wearing suits.     

A teaching approach built on the theme ‘just be nice’ can of course be problematic. Students unused to respecting their parents or teachers may respond poorly and create issues for themselves or others. Or some school administrations may strongly promote strict behavioural expectations for both their students and their staff, valuing military-style order, strongly authoritative teacher demeanours, uniform codes, rules and procedures. Such policies risk switching the school focus from quality education to compliance control. Academic or behavioural rules and sanctions, every school has them, need to be judiciously applied. The central consideration should always be, how is this policy contributing to quality educational outcomes?

I see sanctions as an admission that my teaching approach has fallen short, they are a backup that allow me further opportunity to find what might work for a student. My policy is minimalist. Frequent use of sanctions sends out negative messages about the teacher and the students, it is lose-lose. The ideal school, a goal that all educators should continuously strive to achieve, would have no need for sanctions regimes because students as much as teachers were happy and fully engaged by their learning and teaching. 

My next teaching breakthrough was the realisation that children, at least as much or more than adults, are energised by the pursuit of pleasure. There are few stronger motivational drivers for a child than wanting to have fun. I suspect that for many students, the times of the school day when they are most highly activated, developing skills, focussed on a goal, most likely to be collaborating, mutually supporting or constructively debating, are recess and lunchtime. Then the bell goes, they pack away their play equipment and enthusiasm and they sleepwalk into another class. 

The question I pondered was, can I create the kind of learning environment where students will enjoy themselves like they do in their breaks? If my teaching could harness the same amounts of exuberance and excitement, learning would likely be elevated to a higher level. I set myself the challenge of melding educational business with pleasure and I targeted the tasks and activities that I implemented in lessons as how I would succeed.

It became obvious as I dug deep into the existing mathematics education resources at the time, mainly hard copy books and worksheets, that any elements of enjoyment or fun could only be found on the fringes. Mainstream mathematics was serious business. This observation reflected a more general and traditional division of the human mind in education. Learning was all about cognition, or perhaps intellectualism. Other dimensions of the mind, particularly the affective realm including emotions, were considered as distractions or side-effects, irrelevant to teaching and learning.

Regardless, my early experimentation with material that I could find and adapt was successful. Students responded very well to work that got them doing mathematics away from the routine lectures and textbooks and into puzzling, trialling, measuring, simulating and problem-solving. My definition of ‘very well’ is that students were engaged, motivated, interested and happy to be performing non-routine tasks. Their energies were directed into learning to an extent that I struggled to achieve through my conventional teacher-focussed teaching. This was well worth discovering.

Having established that the latent motivation residing in many students can be unlocked through flipping the nature of tasks to be less about me and more about them, I needed to deal with the issue of curriculum. The rote and repetition of traditional skills practice, dealt with most efficiently for the teacher, not necessarily the students, through the flagship pedagogy of conventional teaching – explicit instruction – was absent from the new tasks that I was playing with. 

I had inadvertently stumbled into the mathematics teaching war, ongoing tensions that have never gone away. Traditionalists on one side, progressives on the other. Conventional teaching worked for me as a student. I was told and shown what to learn and through repetition, personal application and practice, I learned. When I was on the other side of the equation, I realised that many students did not learn like me. For them it was quite a different story. It would not be unfair to suggest that in terms of coming to learn and love mathematics and feel good about the subject, it was death by direct instruction.

A supreme example of a conventional teaching fail, also frustrating because I was a part of it, occurred in a school where I taught for many years. We used to teach a topic called linear graphing to students in Year 8, then again to the same students in Year 9, and Year 10, Year 11 and Year 12. The same basic skills and concepts were ‘chalked and talked’ for 5 years running and at least 50% or more of students emerged with minimal levels of understanding. Maybe we just needed Years 13 and 14 but probably not. It was Einstein’s madness, when you repeat the same thing over and over with the expectation of different results. 

I don’t think I am unfairly blaming direct instruction. Perhaps a dozen different teachers over those 5 years, working from up to half a dozen standard textbooks, employing the same conventional approach, amounted to a mass of students who were conceptually bereft. Even providing them with competent sets of routine skills, a target we surely could have achieved, was poorly accomplished. When underlying concepts are missing, simple algebraic and numerical procedures can lose their meaning to the point where they are senseless exercises and confusion reigns. I have been aware of similar outcomes and circumstances in many other schools.

The extent of the problem can be explored by comparing typical successful students – experts, and direct instruction does foster some successes, with counterpart failures – strugglers. The linear graphs master can inspect all the elements of an equation, its constants and variables, and conjure its graphical appearance in their mind. They can visualise the steepness of a given gradient value and effortlessly position a line on a graph, through mastery of intercepts. They can seamlessly fit a linear model to a practical context and make predictions of outputs within given parameters, evaluating the quality of their results against intuitive expectations. Experts do all this and much more, appreciating and enjoying the power of this topic.

The linear graphs struggler gets stuck on what means what in an equation. The letters and numbers have something to do with straight lines on graphs but it’s hard to know where things called the gradient and intercepts are. Fractions come into finding gradients, that’s a worry. They sometimes get mixed up about what is horizontal and vertical, x or y, and get confused by terms like, ‘satisfy the equation’ and ‘uphill or downhill’. And why do we also have to solve equations if the question is to draw them? Strugglers understandably think and say things like, ‘this mathematics is no fun at all, it’s boring, confusing, difficult and useless and I’m no good at maths anyway’.

By Year 12, those hapless students would have spent about 30 hours of class time on linear graphing, full of teacher examples, instructions and textbook sums, for a pitiable academic return. An unacceptable level of productivity in most industries. This is before even considering the affective fallout from the accumulated experience. Repeat episodes of boredom, frustration and academic failure fuel self-doubt, despondency, resignation, despair and dislike. These are awful, endemic outcomes and too many educational administrators seem perpetually caught like deer in headlights, unable to imagine more effective ways forward. 

The rationale for the madness was that students need to acquire basic skills and master essential concepts before they can develop deeper understanding. Fair enough, although not always correct as suggested in the linear graphing example. If even a portion of those 30 hours had been given over to alternative forms of inquiry, they do exist, the disaffected cohorts’ academic outcomes could only have been improved. Possibly an even more valuable reward would have been the enhanced levels of confidence, morale and positive attitudes towards mathematics that may have arisen.

The acquisition of basic skills as preliminary steps to more complex conceptual development is problematic. The basics often include number magnitude and counting sense, decimals, fractions, directed numbers and much more. All of these topics involve major conceptual understanding. If their establishment is largely based on being told what to know, the process which lies at the heart of direct instruction, it can be a flimsy springboard for a student to develop more complex ideas.     

While I discovered the limitations and dangers of blunt direct instruction, I never lost the idea that the approach can have a place in effective teaching. At its best, direct instruction can be thought provoking, informative, guiding and efficient. In measured doses, perhaps interspersed with accessible questioning, storytelling, summarising, substantial interludes for student doing and thinking and even humour, teacher talk can maintain a worthwhile educational edge. This is far truer for routine skills and processes than for deeper learning and perhaps partly explains the enthusiasm of advocates for direct instruction.

Mathematics, however, is a much richer body of concepts and abilities than the numbers and operations that form its lifeblood. And this is where direct instruction particularly struggles. I have never been able to effectively embed a concept through direct instruction, although I have frequently tried. And I know of no other user of direct instruction who has done much better. My conclusion is that a teacher cannot talk their way into the deepest recesses of the student brain, where a well-established concept will reside.

The advent of digital classroom technology in the early 2000s did not help, despite the enormous hype, promise and cost. Graphics calculators instantly became the most capable brains in the mathematics classroom, coupled with the formidable reach of laptop and tablet computing. Yet the development of student understanding, if anything, was enfeebled by the presence of these gadgets. Teachers like me didn’t know how to improve our teaching with them and probably still don’t. IBM and the other companies who made fortunes out of the computer tidal wave forgot to give us the manual on how to use them educationally. I almost lost my job because I was deemed to not be using computers enough in mathematics classrooms. My lack of conviction then has now been backed by two decades of academic stagnation in relation to computers and classrooms. Maybe what teachers do regardless of computers matters more.     

Given my beliefs, I regard curriculum content in mathematics as a major driver of suitable pedagogies. In Victoria, Australia, the State curriculum is well documented. It details content at each Year level with concise language and separation of skills and processes into discrete components. The content descriptions mainly use low-level command terms like ‘solve’, ‘follow’, ‘count’, ‘define’, ‘perform’, ‘use’ and ‘simplify’ but also a few more challenging actions like, ‘explore’, ‘apply’, ‘create’ and ‘experiment’. The expressed aims promisingly include ‘develop a positive disposition towards mathematics’ and ‘recognise it as an accessible and useful discipline’.

The full flourish of detail that might constitute a complete mathematics education is hidden under a ‘Show more’ icon. This is unfortunate as many of the most valuable possible outcomes are out of first view. I believe that many implementations of the Victorian curriculum do not move much into these richer areas. It is only too possible, and probably tempting for time-pressed teachers, to present all of the up-front content mainly using direct instruction methods. This is my concern, such teaching can easily defeat the two cited aims for many, apart from impairing the quality of their learning.

About mid-career, I was presented with an opportunity to pursue my thinking in the form of a PhD study program. I spliced my preoccupations into one theme, how are student emotional outcomes associated with the types of activities they negotiate in a mathematics classroom? I got to explore both the student academic and affective experiences in relation to different pedagogies. It was a fascinating undertaking and it has been described earlier in this book.