In my latest podcast conversation with Dr Sarah Aiono she describes taking a teacher by the arm and asking them to “melt into the wall” of their own classroom, inviting them to “stand back, watch, tell me what you see”. The teacher struggles. So Sarah starts pointing out the curriculum happening in front of her, and the teacher’s face changes. “It’s like I’ve given them my glasses,” she says, “and they can see differently.”
It’s a small anecdote, but it’s really the whole conversation in miniature – the difference between believing in something and having the ability to see it, support it, and defend it under pressure.
Sarah’s spent two decades in that space – training as a primary teacher, working with trauma-impacted kids in South Auckland, and completing doctoral research into play and child-led learning alongside her mother, who left mainstream teaching to found a forest school. So when she pushes back on the current framing of child-centred learning versus direct instruction, it’s not an abstract position. It’s a frustration with how a genuinely complex craft keeps getting flattened into a lazy binary – either you “let them work it out for themselves,” or you drill them in rows.
Instead, Sarah uses the metaphor of a toolbox. Knowing which tool to reach for and use when a moment calls is the actual skill, and it’s a harder, not easier, thing to do well. Teachers choosing the integrated path, she told me, aren’t choosing the soft option – they’re choosing the most demanding one, and most aren’t given the support to sustain it.
That’s the thread I keep coming back to. Because underneath the pedagogy debate is a structural one. Sarah’s doctoral research kept surfacing a “knowledge to practice gap” – teachers who believe in this approach but hit a room of 25 diverse learners and genuinely don’t know how to translate belief into what happens on a Tuesday afternoon. Her answer isn’t simply to hold another PD day, it’s granular and sustained – change built from the ground up, teacher by teacher, not mandated from above.
We touched on AI too, and her framing cut through a lot of the noise for me – her concern isn’t AI replacing the teacher as content-deliverer, it’s whether we’re building children who can interrogate what AI tells them rather than accept it at face value, the way a worksheet answer gets accepted. A thinking partner that gets challenged back, not a tutor that hands over knowledge.
It’s Sarah’s closing image, though, that gives the episode its title. She describes this whole moment in education – here and internationally – as a chrysalis: messy, mucky, full of push and pull, because that’s what real transformation looks like from the inside. Not comfortable. Not resolved. But moving.
Watch the full conversation with Dr Sarah Aiono below:
Check out the other episodes in this podcast series:
