A tale of two stadiums

Earlier this week I heard a friend of mine speaking to a group of people about his experience of change and a lesson he’d learned from attending a game of rugby the week before. My friend is a former rugby player who played at the top level. Like me, he spent years at Lancaster Park – that beloved, slightly battered ground that had been a cornerstone of Canterbury sporting and community life for 130 years, having opened officially in October 1881. Unlike me, he’d even played some of his top level rugby at that venue!

If you’ve ever stood in that crowd, packed among thousands of other Cantabrians, watching local heroes and international giants play out under open skies, you’ll know the feeling. There was something almost tribal about it – the cold, the noise, the shared belonging.

The earthquakes took it from us, of course. Not all at once, but eventually and irreversibly.

My friend described his recent experience at the new stadium, Te Kaha – arriving and immediately noticing how different it felt. The layout wasn’t quite right. The atmosphere seemed off. The seating struck him as strange. He caught himself comparing everything – unfavourably – to the old ground. Despite the fact that the new stadium is fully covered (so you’re no longer sitting in the freezing cold Christchurch Easterly, or being drenched during a Christchurch Southerly!), despite the better sight lines, despite the very real improvements, he found himself mourning Lancaster Park. Wanting it back. Feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

It wasn’t until somewhere around half time, a passage of play lit him up. He was on his feet, yelling. Completely absorbed in the game. And he paused, looked around, and realised: he was having a great time. His sense of disorientation lifted. His comment to me was simple but profound: “The new stadium is different. But the game is still being played. The crowds are still coming. And the old one is gone. I needed to accept that.”

Why This Matters for Schools

I’ve thought about this story a lot in the context of what’s happening in New Zealand education right now. School leaders – particularly principals – are experiencing a cascade of change. Curriculum reforms, assessment directions, structural shifts, and policy announcements that often arrive without adequate explanation, without meaningful consultation, and without time to prepare. A little like an earthquake, you might say: not always predictable, rarely welcome, and leaving people disoriented in the aftermath.

And when people are disoriented, something predictable happens. We reach for the familiar.

Psychologists call this status quo bias – our tendency to prefer the current state of affairs, or to idealise a past one, particularly when we feel we had no say in what changed. The research on this is robust: when change is imposed rather than chosen, people experience it not just as inconvenient but as a kind of loss. Daniel Kahneman’s work on loss aversion tells us that losses loom roughly twice as large as equivalent gains in our psychological experience. We don’t just prefer the old way – we feel the loss of it far more acutely than we feel any benefit from the new.

Added to this is what researchers call nostalgic recollection – our tendency to remember the past through a warmly distorted lens. The old stadium, in my friend’s memory, wasn’t just familiar. It was perfect. The atmosphere was better. Never mind the rain. Never mind the restricted views from certain stands. Never mind the ageing infrastructure. Memory is not a recording; it’s a reconstruction, and we reconstruct the past in ways that serve how we feel in the present. When we’re anxious and off-balance, the past feels safer than it ever actually was.

My friend was experiencing exactly this. He wasn’t really comparing two stadiums. He was comparing a lived present with an idealised memory – and the memory was always going to win that contest.

Looking in the Rear Vision Mirror

The thing that concerns me here is how many school leaders are currently navigating change in Aotearoa New Zealand. Too much energy is being spent looking in the rear vision mirror.

That’s not a criticism – it’s a completely understandable human response to loss and disruption. But when our focus is almost entirely fixed on what we’ve lost, what we used to do, what we believed was working, we lose our capacity to look forward. We lose our ability to read what’s actually in front of us and prepare our communities for it.

The risks of this are real. Schools that are institutionally exhausted by the grief of change find it harder to build the shared understanding their communities need. Leaders who are emotionally occupied by resentment or nostalgia are less available to ask the forward-facing questions: What will our students need in this environment? What opportunities exist here that didn’t before? How do we build the conditions for our people to make sense of this?

There’s a concept in psychological research called cognitive appraisal – the idea that our emotional response to a change is shaped not so much by the change itself as by how we interpret it. The same event, appraised as a threat, produces anxiety and resistance. Appraised as a challenge (or opportunity, even), it produces engagement and problem-solving. We don’t always get to choose what changes. But we have far more agency over how we appraise it than we typically exercise.

My friend’s half-time realisation was, in effect, a reappraisal. Not a denial of what was lost, but a re-engagement with what was actually present and real in front of him.

Sitting with the Discomfort – but Not Stopping There

I want to be careful here, because I’m not suggesting that school leaders should simply accept everything that’s coming down from above, or pretend that the current reform environment in New Zealand is beyond critique (it certainly isn’t!). Some of what is happening is genuinely poorly designed (and I’m trying to be polite here.) The pace is sometimes irresponsible (again, being polite). The consultation has in places been thin (or non-existent!). These are fair and important observations.

But there’s a distinction between holding a view – a considered, evidence-informed, professionally grounded view about what good looks like – and being so captured by what we’ve lost that we can’t function effectively in the present.

The educators I most admire are those who can do both things at once. They can grieve what was good about what existed before. They can advocate, clearly and calmly, for what the evidence supports. And they can still turn up fully for their staff, their students, and their families – not waiting for perfect conditions, but doing the important work in the conditions they actually have. Because the game, as my friend discovered, is still being played.

The children in our schools didn’t get a say in any of this either. They’re sitting in classrooms right now, and they need present, future-focused leaders who are scanning the horizon – not leaders who are lost in grief for a world that isn’t coming back.

A Different Kind of Preparation

My challenge to current school leaders is this: rather than waiting to respond to change as it arrives, what would it look like to prepare – actively, deliberately, collectively – for the change that’s coming?

This means staying close to the evidence about what works for learners, regardless of what’s being mandated from above. It means building the kind of shared professional culture in your school where people can hold uncertainty without it becoming paralysis. It means helping your community understand the broader drivers of change – not so they stop questioning, but so they can make sense of what’s happening and maintain trust in your leadership through it.

It also means scanning the broader environment to be aware of the forces at play that are driving the changes being experienced. This was for me, the motivation for pulling together the 2026 Education Environment Scan – not that we should all seek to become experts in national and international trends and politics. Rather, that by at least having an awareness of what is happening in the world around us, we might be better placed to anticipate and identify some of these shifts and changes before they suddenly impact us. (It also means that we may be better positioned to take pro-active action where appropriate, and to become active in voicing concerns before things become an issue to resolve.)

Put together, this is what I’d describe as a kind of principled adaptability: a clear sense of your values and your evidence base, held firmly, alongside a genuine willingness to engage with what the new landscape actually looks like – rather than endlessly mapping it against the old one.

The new stadium in Christchurch doesn’t carry the weight of 130 years of memory yet. It doesn’t have the worn edges and the shared history. But it has a roof. And it has a game being played inside it. And it has crowds who love rugby (or league, or concerts…) – who, once they let themselves be present, are just as alive and engaged and connected as they ever were at Lancaster Park.

The old stadium mattered. So does what’s here now.

The question is where we choose to put our attention.

Something to ponder…

If this resonates with you, I want to leave you with a few questions – not to answer all at once, but to carry with you into your week, your staff meetings, your quiet moments of reflection.

On your own response to change:

When you think honestly about the changes being asked of you right now, how much of your energy is being spent grieving what was – and how much is genuinely directed toward what could be?
Is there an “old stadium” in your professional life that you keep comparing the present to – and is that comparison helping you lead, or holding you back?
What would it take for you to have your own “half-time moment” – a point where you look around and realise you’re more engaged with the present than you thought?

On your school and community:

Do the people around you – your staff, your board, your whānau – have enough shared understanding of why things are changing to make sense of what they’re experiencing? Or are they navigating disruption without a map?
What’s one conversation you’ve been avoiding that, if you had it, might shift your school culture from reactive to responsive?

On looking forward:

What signals in your environment are you already picking up that suggest further change is coming – and what would it look like to get ahead of those, rather than be caught by them?
What does “principled adaptability” look like in your school, specifically? What are the non-negotiables you’d hold firm, and where is there genuine room to adapt?
If your students could see how you’re responding to the current environment, what would you want them to learn from watching you?

Screens, Learning, and Getting the Balance Right

This week I was asked to speak with the SLT group in a local school who are wrestling with the issues being raised in their community around the use of digital technologies in their school. It seems the conversation about digital technology in schools has taken a sharp turn. What was once driven by enthusiasm is now clouded by anxiety. Neither position fully serves our students – so what does a balanced, evidence-informed approach actually look like?

From Promise to Pushback

For me it doesn’t seem so long ago that digital technology in schools felt like a straightforward win. I was a lecturer in Educational Technology during the 1990s when much of this was happening. The promise was that devices would make learning more engaging, more personalised, more future-focused. Schools invested heavily. Every student would have a laptop. Classrooms would transform.

That enthusiasm has now collided with a harder reality. Concerns about digital distraction, screen time, wellbeing, and underwhelming academic outcomes have shifted the mood dramatically. In some quarters, the pendulum has swung all the way to calls for blanket bans – removing devices altogether and returning to pencil and paper.

The truth, as usual, sits somewhere more nuanced. And for schools trying to make sensible decisions, “somewhere more nuanced” isn’t particularly useful on its own. This post attempts to provide something more practical.

What the Research Actually Says

From my perspective, the honest summary of the international evidence is this: digital technologies are neither the revolution they were promised to be, nor the disaster some now fear. Their effects on learning are conditional, not automatic.

One New Zealand review found that some use of digital technology benefits learning – but that frequent or poorly structured use is associated with reduced outcomes. The context of use matters enormously: what task, for how long, whether teacher-directed or left to student choice. OECD research echoes this, finding that digital tools can meaningfully support learning – particularly when they provide targeted feedback or structured instructional scaffolding – but that benefits are uneven across tools, subjects, and age groups.

The most consistent finding is that technology works best when it extends a teaching strategy rather than replaces it. Adaptive software can help a teacher differentiate practice for students but it is far less effective as a stand-alone solution for developing deep understanding.

The areas where benefits are most reliably demonstrated include:

Personalised practice and feedback in literacy and numeracy
Simulations and intelligent tutoring systems that guide students step by step
Teacher-directed use integrated into a clear lesson plan

What has not been realised is the original headline promise: that ICT would automatically make learning more engaging, more effective, and more personalised across the board. The potential was real; it was simply overstated as a general solution when it works better as a carefully chosen instructional resource.

Beyond Tools: Technology as a Learning Environment

The three benefits listed above – personalised feedback, structured simulations, teacher-directed tasks – are real and evidence-backed. But they share a common assumption: that technology is essentially a tool, something a teacher deploys to support a specific learning activity. That framing, while useful, undersells what digital technology can do at its best.

Many schools I’ve worked with over recent years have moved toward something more ambitious: using platforms like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 not as a collection of tools, but as an integrated learning environment – a space where learning happens, is represented, and is curated over time.

Consider what this can look like in practice. A teacher shares the instructions, resources, and context for a topic within Google Classroom – not just once at the start of a lesson, but in a persistent, accessible form that students can return to whenever they need it. Students access curated links and materials as their understanding develops. They contribute resources they’ve discovered themselves, sharing them with peers in a common space. They engage in asynchronous dialogue – with classmates, with their teacher – reflecting on ideas outside the boundaries of a single lesson period.

As the work develops, students build a body of artefacts: notes, drafts, presentations, videos, collaborative documents. These aren’t just products to be handed in – they become a curated portfolio of learning that the student can navigate, reflect on, and add to over time. Against the indicator statements of a progression or rubric, students are encouraged to make ongoing judgements about their own performance, drawing on feedback from teachers, peers, and parents to build an evidence base that justifies an assessment decision.

This is a fundamentally different relationship with both learning and assessment. Rather than receiving instruction and demonstrating understanding at a single fixed point in time, the student becomes an active agent – taking ownership not just of what they learn, but of how they document, evaluate, and communicate their learning.

In SAMR terms, this is firmly in Redefinition territory. It describes learning experiences that are not simply enhanced by technology – they are made possible by it. A student curating evidence of their own growth over a year, engaging in dialogue with their teacher asynchronously, and making self-assessments against shared criteria cannot do that with a pencil and exercise book alone.

This is the version of educational technology worth fighting for. And it is also, arguably, the version that has been least visible in the public debate – which has tended to focus on devices in classrooms rather than on the deeper question of what a well-designed digital learning environment can enable.

Why the Mood Has Shifted

It’s worth pondering some of the reasons this shift in perspective is occurring – particularly for school leaders seeking to lead conversations within staff and community settings. Several forces are driving the change in tone – and it is worth separating them out, because they require different responses.

Distraction during learning time is one of the clearest concerns. OECD data indicates that nearly one in three students is distracted by digital devices in class, and that distraction is associated with weaker performance in mathematics. When devices are available for non-learning purposes during learning time, many students use them that way – and this is especially true when the alternative activity is demanding.

Wellbeing and health concerns extend well beyond the classroom. Questions about sleep disruption, attention span, physical activity, social development, and the design of social media platforms themselves have widened the debate. Paediatric guidance endorsed for New Zealand schools recommends age-sensitive limits and more deliberate, purposeful use. These are legitimate concerns that schools cannot simply set aside.

The quality of implementation has also been a problem. Much of what has happened under the banner of “educational technology” has operated at what educationalists call the substitution level – essentially using a device to do the same thing a textbook or exercise book would have done. Little use has genuinely transformed how students learn. A significant reason for this is that the education workforce has not been adequately prepared to integrate technology in ways that make a meaningful pedagogical difference.

A Framework Worth Knowing: SAMR

For those who want a mental model to evaluate how technology is being used, the SAMR framework (developed by Dr Ruben Puentedura) is a helpful lens. It describes four levels of technology integration:

Substitution – technology replaces a tool with no functional change (typing instead of writing)
Augmentation – technology replaces a tool with some functional improvement (using spell-check, hyperlinking)
Modification – technology allows significant redesign of the task (collaborative online documents, peer feedback tools)
Redefinition – technology enables learning that was previously not possible (global collaboration, real-time data collection, simulations)

The evidence suggests most school technology use sits at the bottom two levels. The higher levels – where technology genuinely changes what’s possible – require deeper pedagogical thinking and stronger teacher capability. The World Economic Forum’s work on the reskilling needed for Education 4.0 is relevant here: the technology has run ahead of the workforce capacity to use it well.

The Developmental Continuum Matters

One of the biggest mistakes in this debate is treating “digital technology in schools” as a single question with a single answer. It is not.

A blanket ban on devices in the early years of schooling, while children are building foundational literacy, numeracy, and social skills, may be entirely appropriate. Young children benefit from embodied, hands-on, relationship-rich learning. The evidence for significant learning gains from screens in this age group is thin, and the concerns about health and developmental impact are more acute.

At the senior secondary level, the picture is different. Students preparing to enter tertiary education, the workforce, and adult civic life in an increasingly digital world need genuine fluency with digital tools – the ability to research critically, evaluate sources, create and communicate digitally, and manage information responsibly. A school that bans devices in Year 12 may be protecting students from distraction while simultaneously leaving them underprepared for the world they are about to enter.

But fluency here means more than knowing how to use specific applications. The modern workplace increasingly operates within integrated digital environments – shared platforms where teams collaborate, communicate asynchronously, manage projects, curate knowledge, and document progress over time. The capability to work effectively within those environments – to manage your own contributions, engage in professional dialogue digitally, and take ownership of how your work is represented and evaluated – is now a baseline expectation in many fields. Students who have spent their senior years developing exactly those habits within a well-designed school learning environment are not just better prepared academically. They are better prepared for work and life.

This is one of the strongest arguments for the kind of integrated digital learning environment described earlier in this post. It is not merely good pedagogy. It is genuine preparation for the world students are about to enter.

Age-appropriate, developmentally informed policy is not a compromise – it is the right answer.

The ‘Whole Child’ Lens

One of the things I feel important to re-iterate here is that schools are not simply academic institutions. They are charged with looking after the whole child – academic progress and wellbeing, social development, physical health, and safety. Any honest approach to digital technology must hold both concerns simultaneously.

This means the health and safety dimensions – screen time, posture, lighting, online safety, cyberbullying, privacy, and the risks associated with social media – are not obstacles to good educational technology practice. They are part of it. Schools in New Zealand are legally obliged to manage these risks as health and safety responsibilities.

Framing this correctly is important. Schools that create clear boundaries around device use are not being anti-technology. They are being responsible stewards of the learning environment and the children in their care.

What Should Schools Actually Do?

The evidence points toward a clear direction, even if the details will differ by school context. Here are some principles I believe should guide decisions.

1. Start from your ‘why’

Any school’s approach to digital technology should be traceable back to its stated values, vision, and graduate profile. If your school says it is developing independent, critical thinkers who can evaluate information and distinguish fact from opinion, then your approach to how students access and use digital information must actually develop those capabilities – not undermine them.

This is the “line of sight” test: can you draw a clear line from the technology decision you are making to the kind of learner you are trying to develop? If not, the decision needs revisiting.

2. Be purposeful rather than expansive

The strongest policy direction from the evidence is not “more screens” or “no screens,” but more selective use. Give priority to tools with a genuine evidence base – structured literacy supports, adaptive practice platforms, simulations, tasks that would be harder to do as well without technology. Be sceptical of any technology that is being used simply because it is convenient or because the school invested in it.

3. Distinguish educational use from personal use

Schools need policies that clearly separate technology used for learning from personal or social device use. These are different activities with different effects, and they warrant different rules. A student using adaptive reading software is not the same as a student checking social media. Policy needs to reflect this distinction.

4. Apply age-appropriate limits

For the early years prioritise human interaction, physical activity, foundational skill development, and relationship-based learning. Technology use should be selective, brief, and directly purposeful. In the middle years introduce more structured, teacher-directed technology tasks while maintaining clear limits on personal device use during learning time. At the senior level develop genuine digital capability – critical evaluation, responsible creation, digital communication – as preparation for life beyond school.

5. Build teacher capability

Technology will only work as well as the educators using it. Schools and the system need to invest in professional learning that helps teachers design effective technology-integrated tasks – not just how to use tools, but when and why. It is important to note here that the professional learning must be ongoing – because of the changing nature of the technologies being used, we can never assume that a single PLD experience will equip teachers for whatever happens into the future. The ambition should be to move use up the SAMR framework toward genuine transformation.

6. Engage whānau and community

The wellbeing concerns about screen time, social media, and online safety extend well beyond school hours. Schools cannot address these concerns alone. Effective approaches involve parents and families in understanding the school’s approach, the reasoning behind it, and the role they play at home. On reflection I think this should be number one on my list – for unless there is a strong connection between what happens at home and at school on this issue, educators are limited in the ways they can address what needs to be done here.

The Question Worth Asking

The debate must move from “Should schools use digital technology?” to a better question: “What kinds of use are educationally justified, and under what safeguards?”

That is the right question. It acknowledges that the technology is here, that some of its applications genuinely support learning, that others genuinely cause harm, and that the difference lies in how thoughtfully schools design and govern its use.

The most defensible position for any school is not “digital or not digital” – it is “digital where it improves learning better than the available alternative, with appropriate safeguards for the whole child.”

That framing will not fit neatly on a policy poster. But it is honest, it is evidence-informed, and it is sustainable.

References used in developing this post:

Cullen; Marsh; Simmons; Duncan (2025) The impact of digital technologies on children and adolescents in Aotearoa New Zealand: A case for the development of best-practice recommendations for schools: Waikato Journal of Education (https://wje.org.nz/index.php/WJE/article/view/1095)
Dept. for Education (UK) (2025) Technology in Schools survey: 2024 to 2025 Research report (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/692834a6ce50d215cae9610e/Technology_in_schools_survey_2024_to_2025_research_report.pdf)
Ministry of Education (2025) Health and safety management of digital device use by staff and students (https://www.education.govt.nz/education-professionals/schools-year-0-13/health-and-safety/health-and-safety-management-digital-device-use-staff-and-students)
OECD (2025) The impact of digital technologies on students’ learning – Results from a literature review (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-impact-of-digital-technologies-on-students-learning_9997e7b3-en.html)
OECD (2025) Can the targeted use of digital devices in education win over the naysayers? (https://oecdedutoday.com/can-the-targeted-use-of-digital-devices-in-education-win-over-the-naysayers)
OECD (2024) Managing screen time – How to protect and equip students against distraction (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/managing-screen-time_7c225af4-en.html)
Paediatric Society of NZ (2025) Protecting Tamariki Online: A Paediatric Perspective on Harm, Responsibility, and Systemic Solutions (https://www.paediatrics.org.nz/knowledge-hub/view-resource?id=153)
Powerschool (2021) SAMR Model: A Practical Guide for K-12 Classroom Technology Integration (https://www.powerschool.com/blog/samr-model-a-practical-guide-for-k-12-classroom-technology-integration/)
Ruijia; Wenling; Zeumei (2025) The impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on learning outcomes in early childhood and primary education: a meta-analysis of moderating factors (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1540169/full)
World Economic Forum (2025) Reskilling Revolution | Ep 2 | The Role of AI in Education 4.0 (https://www.weforum.org/videos/reskilling-revolution-ai-education-4-0/)

Why Good Ideas Don’t Stick

A question from a conference participant led me to think more about how schools approach change.

At the Whakaoriori Kahui Ako conference this week in Masterton I spoke about the notion of ‘split screen’ assessment – term I was introduced to by Bill Lucas in a recent webinar I facilitated. Essentially, split screen assessment involves practices that hold in view both the development of foundational skills and knowledge and the cultivation of broader competencies, capabilities, and dispositions. It’s an approach grounded in strong evidence and, in my experience, one that resonates strongly with teachers when they encounter it.

After the session, a participant approached me with a question that got me thinking. Simply put, he asked “why is it that new assessment initiatives that have been introduced into schools in recent years don’t ‘stick’?” He specifically pointed to formative assessment – arguably one of the most thoroughly researched and widely promoted pedagogical shifts in recent decades – and said that in his experience, despite the investment in professional learning to support this initiative, whatever gains schools made tended to fade within a couple of years. The professional learning would happen, there’d be genuine enthusiasm, practices would shift. And then, gradually, things would drift back. He wanted to know why.

It’s a question I’ve been asked before – but his question has prompted me to think a little more about the ‘why’ and what we might do to counter this, particularly given the enormous amount of change being introduced in schools at the moment.

The Problem Isn’t Understanding – It’s Sustainability

The first thing to say is that the fade-out he described is real, and it’s not unique to New Zealand. It’s documented across school systems internationally, and it applies to a wide range of innovations – not just formative assessment.

The tempting explanation is that teachers don’t understand the approach well enough, or aren’t committed to it. But the evidence doesn’t support that. Research consistently shows that uptake is rarely the problem – sustainability is. Teachers often engage genuinely with new practices. The difficulty is that those practices fail to become embedded, habitual, or structurally supported over time.

I think a useful reframing of this conclusion might be to say; “the problem with formative assessment is not that teachers don’t understand it; it is that schools (or the system) often under-design the conditions needed for it to last.”

What the Evidence Says

Several recurring findings emerge from the implementation and school reform literature (see links at the end for some references):

Implementation takes years, not months. Many schools never move beyond initial adoption into full implementation and long-term sustainability. The timeline for genuine change in classroom practice is typically measured in years, but most professional learning programmes are funded and structured for months. Change like this rarely moves at the speed of an election cycle (to quote Mark Osborne, another speaker at the conference).
Training alone is rarely enough. Without follow-up coaching, ongoing support structures, and integration into everyday work, teachers are likely to revert to familiar practices – especially when under pressure. One-off workshops, however well-designed, leave too much to individual will and circumstance.
Innovation becomes an add-on rather than a transformation. Reform efforts frequently fail when they’re not well aligned with curriculum, assessment systems, and school routines. Formative assessment, for example, can remain something teachers do in addition to everything else, rather than something that is their practice. That additional cognitive and workload burden makes it one of the first things to go when pressures mount.
Professional identity and school culture matter enormously. Teachers’ enactment of any approach is shaped by who they understand themselves to be as educators, the culture of their team and school, and the signals sent by leadership. The same professional learning initiative can produce very different results across schools – and within the same school over time – because these conditions vary so much.
Fragmentation and shifting priorities are corrosive. Broader school reform research consistently shows that sustainability is achieved through coherence, shared language, and stable routines. What undermines it is the tendency – familiar to anyone who has worked in schools – to move on to the next initiative before the previous one has had time to become routine.

Formative Assessment as a Case Study

Formative assessment is a particularly instructive example because the evidence for its impact on learning is so strong. Meta-analyses and large-scale reviews have repeatedly found significant positive effects. And yet, as my conference participant observed, sustaining it beyond a short initial period remains persistently difficult.

For example, this study from ACER shows that formative assessment is widely advocated, but support is often inadequate, and curriculum reform that does not embed assessment is unlikely to succeed. Or this from School Leadership and Management that provides a broader explanation of why school reforms fail to sustain and what factors help or hinder long-term embedding.

Part of the explanation lies in the nature of the practice itself. Formative assessment is not a technique – it’s a way of seeing teaching and learning. It asks teachers to read what students understand in real time, adjust their practice accordingly, and give feedback that moves learning forward. That’s a complex, cognitively demanding disposition to develop, and it competes with workload pressures, accountability demands, and deeply held beliefs about what assessment is for.

In that light, the two-year fade-out becomes less surprising. New practices often survive only while they are being actively supported. Once formal structures are removed – the facilitator, the scheduled reflection sessions, the peer observation cycles – they depend entirely on individual motivation to sustain. And individual motivation, however genuine, is not a system.

What Actually Helps

If schools want innovations to stick, the implementation literature is reasonably clear about what’s needed. Here are some ideas that spring to mind when I think of that:

Build a multi-year plan, not a one-year rollout. Change in professional practice takes time, and the support structures need to reflect that. A three-year implementation plan with staged goals, regular check-ins, and built-in adaptation is more likely to produce lasting change than an intensive term of professional learning. Of course, the plan should be more of a road-map than a specific set of steps to follow, and should be monitored and reviewed regularly.
Prioritise coaching and peer inquiry over workshop PD. The evidence strongly favours ongoing, embedded professional learning – modelling, classroom observation, collaborative inquiry, and expert coaching – over one-off workshops, however well-designed. In the work I’ve been doing, for example, I may start with an initial workshop or two, but then move to regular coaching check-ins, often online. I also try to set up internal ‘buddy’ approaches or similar to keep the momentum going.
Narrow the focus and keep it stable. Trying to shift everything at once leads to shallow change everywhere. Focusing on a small number of high-leverage practices and sustaining that focus long enough for them to become habitual is more effective than broad coverage that never reaches depth.
Align the initiative with existing systems. Formative assessment practices are far more likely to persist when they’re woven into curriculum planning, moderation processes, and feedback cycles – part of what teachers ordinarily do – rather than sitting alongside ordinary teaching as an extra requirement.
Measure what matters. If schools track attendance at professional learning events but not actual changes in classroom practice, they’re measuring the wrong thing. Genuine implementation requires evidence of practice change, which means someone has to look at what’s happening in classrooms.
Invest in leadership continuity. Many initiatives die not because teachers abandon them but because staff turnover – at both teacher and leadership level – means the shared knowledge, language, and commitment that sustain the practice simply dissipates. Building leadership capacity around the approach, not just teacher capacity, is essential.
Celebrate what works. One of the most underused levers in sustaining change is also one of the simplest: noticing and naming what’s going well. An appreciative approach – one that actively seeks out examples of the new practice taking hold, surfaces them for the wider team, and treats them as evidence of what’s possible – does several things at once. It builds confidence among teachers who might otherwise feel they’re falling short of an ideal. It creates shared reference points and a common language for what good practice looks like in this school, with these students. And it shifts the emotional engagement in professional learning from compliance to genuine curiosity and pride. Those who’ve worked with me in the past will know I’m a fan of an appreciative approach. I’m convinced that schools that make a habit of celebrating small wins tend to sustain change better than those that only measure what isn’t working yet. Momentum, it turns out, is also a resource.

A Broader Point

The question my colleague asked about formative assessment is really a question about educational change more generally. Schools are complex, human organisations with competing demands, shifting priorities, and structural pressures that often work against the deep, slow work of changing practice.

That challenge is especially acute right now for teachers and school leaders in New Zealand. The current reform environment is unusually demanding – changes arriving on multiple fronts simultaneously, often with limited consultation, on timelines that leave little room for the kind of careful, grounded implementation the evidence calls for. Some of those changes come accompanied by questions about the strength of the research underpinning them, and educators who have been doing this work carefully and thoughtfully for years can be forgiven for feeling disoriented, or for wondering whether their professional judgement is still valued.

It’s worth naming that honestly, because it matters. Top-down, fast-moving reform is precisely the kind of context in which good existing practices get swept away – not because they stopped working, but because the noise and disruption of change makes it hard to hold onto anything with both hands.

And yet this is also the moment when it matters most to stay grounded. The research on what helps students learn doesn’t change with each policy cycle. The conditions that allow teachers to teach well – clarity of purpose, strong professional relationships, feedback-rich learning environments – remain what they were. The temptation in a reform-heavy period is to let go of what was working in order to make room for what’s coming. Resisting that temptation is, I’d argue, an act of professional leadership.

So if there’s an encouragement to take from this post, it’s this: the things that have been shown to make a real difference – formative practice, genuine professional inquiry, a shared language about learning – are worth protecting and sustaining, even when the system around them is in flux. Especially then.

That doesn’t mean closing the door to change. It means being clear-eyed about what’s worth holding onto, what genuinely needs to shift, and what the evidence actually supports – and having the confidence to say so.

References

McLure, F. I., & Aldridge, J. M. (2023). Sustaining reform implementation: a systematic literature review. School Leadership & Management, 43(1), 70–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2023.2171012
Polesel, J., Rice, S., & Dulfer, N. (2018). Policy expectations and support for teacher formative assessment in Australia. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 25(6).[ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319661593_Policy_expectations_and_support_for_teacher_formative_assessment_in_Australian_education_reform]
Sortwell, A., Trimble, K., Ferraz, R., Geelan, D., Hine, G., Ramirez-Campillo, R., Carter-Thuiller, B., Gkintoni, E., & Xuan, Q. (2024). A systematic review of meta-analyses on the impact of formative assessment on K-12 students’ learning: Toward sustainable quality education. Sustainability, 16(17).[ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383784113_A_Systematic_Review_of_Meta-Analyses_on_the_Impact_of_Formative_Assessment_on_K-12_Students’_Learning_Towards_Sustainable_Quality_Education]
van der Kleij, F., Cumming, J. J., & Looney, A. (2018). Policy expectations and support for teacher formative assessment in Australian education reform. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 25(6). https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2017.1374924
Wiliam, D., & Leahy, S. (2015). Embedding formative assessment: Practical techniques for K-12 classrooms. Solution Tree Press. [https://www.solutiontree.com/products/books/embedding-formative-assessment.html]

From Taylorism to Cognitive Management

Image source: Derek Wenmoth on SketchWow

Earlier this week I came across an article on Academia by James Michael Walker titled From the Scientific Management (Taylorism) to the Cognitive Management which got me thinking about what we’re experiencing currently in our education milieu. The paper’s central framework tracks three eras of management (Execution Era → Expertise Era → Empathy Era) which I think mirror education’s own evolution almost perfectly.

In a conversation I had recently with a group of principals, we reflected on exactly this – that schools once ran on pure execution logic: standardised curriculum, rigid timetables, measurable outputs, inspection regimes. Then came the expertise era, with evidence-based practice, data-driven decision making, and the rise of instructional leadership. Now, the most effective school leaders are being asked to operate primarily in the empathy era – building relational trust, psychological safety, and genuine community.

The tension many principals feel right now likely comes from being held accountable through execution-era metrics (test scores, attendance data, league tables) while being expected to lead in empathy-era ways.

Taylorism’s Limits in Schools

The article’s critique of Scientific Management applies very much in education. Schools have historically been among the most Taylorist of institutions – breaking learning into standardised units, measuring outputs quantitatively, treating teachers as interchangeable delivery mechanisms. The paper’s point that reductionist thinking “destroys that which it is trying to understand” when applied to complex systems is directly relevant to what we’re experiencing in education. Learning, teaching, and school culture are exactly the kind of complex, relational systems that resist being broken into measurable parts without losing something essential.

The Emotional Intelligence Argument

Goleman’s finding that 70% of change initiatives fail due to people issues, inability to lead, lack of teamwork, and resistance to change is arguably the most directly applicable insight here for school leaders. Professional development programs, curriculum reforms, and structural changes in schools fail at a similarly high rate, and usually for the same reasons. The five emotional intelligence (EI) domains – self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills – are increasingly recognised as the core competencies of effective school leadership, more predictive of school culture and outcomes than technical instructional knowledge alone.

The article’s point that “the more complex the job, the more EI matters” is particularly relevant for principals, who must simultaneously manage upward to system leaders, laterally with community and boards, and downward with staff and students – all with different emotional registers.

The Unconscious Decision-Making Angle

The finding that 95% of consumer decisions happen in the subconscious mind also has a fascinating parallel in schools. International research on school climate, teacher belonging, student engagement, and parent perceptions suggests that people’s felt experience of a school – whether they feel seen, valued, and safe – strongly shapes commitment and behaviour far more than any rational policy or incentive structure. New Zealand research suggests that for Māori learners especially, whether they feel culturally recognised, connected, and safe at school has a powerful influence on engagement, motivation, and success. Principals who understand this lead culture through symbol, story, and relationship, not just through policy documents and data walls. Whenever I’ve visited schools here in NZ and internationally I see the evidence of this very plainly.

Understanding the Taylorist influence in our current system

The current back-to-basics movement in many Western education systems certainly carries strong Taylorist DNA. The logic is strikingly similar – break learning into its smallest measurable components (phonemes, number facts, discrete skills), standardise the delivery method (explicit/direct instruction), sort students by a fixed variable (age), and assess through standardised, comparable outputs (exams). It’s essentially the optimisation mindset applied to learning: find the most efficient method, train teachers to deliver it consistently, and measure outputs uniformly.

The emphasis in structured literacy on fidelity to programme – meaning teachers should deliver the method as designed rather than adapt it – is particularly Taylorist in character. It mirrors Taylor’s principle of replacing rule-of-thumb judgment with scientifically determined best practice, and separating the planning function (curriculum designers and researchers) from the execution function (teachers in classrooms).

The Political Economy Behind It

What makes this more than just a pedagogical debate is that the return to these approaches has been largely policy-driven from above rather than organically emerging from schools and teachers. That top-down imposition is itself a Taylorist move – system leaders determining the one best method and mandating its implementation. The article’s warning about planning making work “inflexible and rigid” and leading to “dissatisfaction” maps directly onto what many teachers report feeling when fidelity-based programmes are mandated with little professional discretion.

There’s also a measurement logic driving it. Governments and system leaders are more comfortable with what can be compared and reported – phonics screening checks, PISA rankings, asTTle data etc. – which creates pressure to prioritise whatever is most measurable, which tends to be the most atomised and standardised aspects of learning.

Where the Nuance Matters

But we need to be careful not to dismiss the substance of this thinking entirely on the basis of its philosophical heritage though. Some of the evidence base for structured literacy and explicit instruction is genuinely strong, particularly for students who lack the cultural capital to acquire foundational literacy incidentally. The Taylorist critique provided by Walker and others isn’t that efficiency is always wrong – it’s that efficiency logic applied to the wrong domain, or applied without regard for human complexity, causes harm.

The real problem may be less about the methods themselves and more about the ideological overreach – the claim that these approaches are sufficient, rather than necessary-but-not-sufficient. Direct instruction in foundational skills and rich, relational, empathy-era learning aren’t mutually exclusive, but the current policy discourse in many systems presents them as if they are, which is where the Taylorist framing does genuine damage.

The Deeper Tension for Principals

This puts school principals in a particularly difficult position that the article’s framework helps name clearly. They are being asked – and in some cases, mandated – to implement execution-era solutions while simultaneously being held responsible for empathy-era outcomes: student wellbeing, belonging, teacher retention, community trust, and genuine love of learning. Those two demands sit in real tension, and no amount of instructional coaching resolves it if the underlying philosophical contradiction isn’t acknowledged.

The most honest framing might be that Taylorist methods can build floors but they can’t build ceilings (a borrowed phrase I must confess, but it works here). Structured literacy can ensure more children crack the code of reading – that’s a genuine and important floor. But the conditions that make a young person a curious, motivated, lifelong reader are irreducibly relational, emotional, and contextual. That’s the empathy era’s territory, and no fidelity-based programme touches it.

Implications for System Leaders

For those leading at the system level, the article’s argument points toward a fundamental tension worth naming honestly. That is, system accountability frameworks are still largely Taylorist in design, while the actual work of improving schools requires cognitive and empathy-era thinking. The most effective system leaders are probably those who can translate between these worlds – satisfying accountability requirements while protecting the relational and creative conditions in which schools actually improve.

The call at the end of Walker’s paper for a “security ecosystem” against misinformation also resonates – school leaders today operate in an information environment where community trust can be rapidly eroded by misleading narratives on social media, which requires its own kind of emotional intelligence to navigate. (I strongly recommend you read Rose Hipkins’ latest book, Lifelong Learning for a Post-Truth World for a more in-depth exploration of this.)

The core takeaway for school leaders is probably this: the tools that built compliant, efficient schools are not the tools that build thriving, adaptive ones. The shift the article describes isn’t just a management theory trend – it’s a description of what effective school leadership has always quietly required, now finally being named and legitimised.

The morning everything converged

[NOTE – this post further illustrates some of the thinking that emerges from the 2026 Education Environment Scan, in particular around the idea of convergence and our response when schools can no longer function for long or short periods of time.]

Imagine a Monday morning. A principal – let’s call her Sarah – arrives at her school earlier than usual. She’s worried about one of her Year 9 students, a boy she’ll call Tama, who hasn’t been in for three weeks.

She knows why. She’s spoken to the family. The school bus that used to stop at the end of their road was cancelled six months ago when the operator couldn’t make the numbers work at current fuel prices. The family has one car. Dad uses it to get to work – a job he can’t afford to lose. Mum doesn’t drive. And the cost of a taxi or rideshare for Tama and his two younger siblings? More than the family spends on food in a day.

So Tama stays home. Not because he doesn’t want to come. Not because his parents don’t value education. But because the economics simply don’t work anymore.

Sarah is thinking about Tama when her phone goes. It’s the facilities manager. There’s water through the ceiling of two classrooms – a weather event overnight has opened up a roof that was already on the maintenance list but hadn’t made the funding cut. She’ll need to relocate three classes.

She starts making calls. Two of those classes are with reliever teachers today – two of her regulars are out, one sick, one dealing with a family situation. Finding reliever teachers in this region has become, as she puts it, “a minor miracle every time.”

By 8:30 she has thirty-seven parents on a group chat asking whether school is open. She doesn’t have a clear answer. She knows that for at least a dozen of those families, the question isn’t just logistical – it’s whether there’s anyone at home to look after kids if school is cancelled. Some of these parents cannot afford not to work today.

By 9:00 she’s on a video call with her board chair, trying to explain why three of the things they identified as priorities in their strategic plan last year are all colliding on this particular morning, in ways none of their planning accounted for.

And somewhere across town, Tama is at home. He’s not doing nothing. He’s on his phone, watching YouTube tutorials – genuinely curious about something he saw in a video last week – and wondering, not for the first time, whether school is really where learning happens.

We are no longer dealing with isolated trends

For years, educational planning has treated disruption as something exceptional – a weather closure, a staffing shortage, a pandemic, a transport breakdown. Each addressed as a discrete event requiring a temporary response. Something to manage through, then return to ‘normal’.

But what Sarah is standing in the middle of that morning is not a series of isolated problems. It is what happens when multiple pressures arrive at once and begin to amplify each other. Economic pressure affects transport access. Climate events disrupt infrastructure. Teacher shortages reduce the system’s ability to flex. Digital inequities shape who can continue learning when physical attendance is interrupted. None of these trends is new. But together, in combination, they create conditions that our traditional schooling models were never designed to absorb.

This is what I mean by convergence. Not simply “lots of challenges happening at once,” but something more structural: the collision of trends that individually might be manageable, but together expose the brittleness of systems built on assumptions of stability – a fixed place for learning, fixed times for attendance, fixed staffing structures, fixed pathways for accessing curriculum. These assumptions served an industrial model of education reasonably well. They are increasingly fragile in a world defined by uncertainty.

This is not an argument against schools

I want to be clear that this is not an argument against physical schools, or some kind of techno-optimist pitch for moving learning online. Schools remain essential social institutions – places of belonging, connection, identity formation, pastoral care and community cohesion. The kinds of relational learning that happen when young people gather together in a shared space cannot simply be replicated through a screen. That matters enormously and should not be minimised.

But “schools are essential” is not the same as “school attendance is always possible.” The question that convergence forces us to sit with is a different one. Not whether face-to-face learning matters (of course it does), but what happens when face-to-face learning is temporarily unavailable? And perhaps more confrontingly: why should learning stop simply because the building is inaccessible?

The goal is not to replace schools. It is to make them more resilient – to strengthen the institution by ensuring it can continue to function even when the conditions it was designed for temporarily break down.

What COVID taught us – and what we risk forgetting

During the pandemic, we spoke often about “learning loss.” The term captured genuine concerns about disrupted learning, disengagement, and widening inequity. But I think the more instructive lesson and the one we risk losing in the desire to return to normal is this: most schools were trying to build hybrid learning systems while already in crisis.

Teachers were thrust into creating online environments overnight. Students were forced to learn about unfamiliar platforms in real time. Assessment approaches were being redesigned on the fly. Families were being asked to adapt immediately, with no preparation. And all of this was happening while everyone involved was also managing the emotional weight of a global health emergency.

The problem was not that hybrid learning failed. The problem was that most systems were unprepared for it. We had treated online and blended learning as niche, as supplementary, as something for distance learners or special circumstances – not as an integral component of modern educational design. When disruption came, schools were forced to start from scratch, in public, under pressure. That experience left a lot of people understandably exhausted and sceptical. But I think we drew the wrong lesson. We blamed the modality when we should have questioned the preparation.

What if hybrid capability was simply always there?

Consider a different version of Tama’s story.

He still can’t physically attend school this week. The transport problem hasn’t gone away. But his class already operates within a hybrid ecosystem. The day’s learning sequence is available online. The teacher’s mini-lesson is accessible both live and as a recording. Collaborative tasks are designed for both in-person and remote participation. Check-ins happen through established digital routines that students and teachers already know. Assessment tasks are platform-independent.

Tama remains connected to his class, his teacher, and his learning – not because the school has switched into emergency mode, but because this flexibility is simply built into everyday practice. The systems are already there. The routines are already familiar. No one has to improvise.

That is what genuine hybrid readiness looks like. And it matters to notice that these systems don’t only serve students during crises. They support students managing illness or extended recovery. They support learners in geographically isolated areas, students navigating anxiety or attendance challenges, continuity during severe weather events, and greater learner agency through flexible pacing and access. Hybrid capability, designed thoughtfully, is not a contingency plan. It is an equity strategy, a resilience strategy, and a future-readiness strategy all at once.

What schools can start doing now

Developing hybrid capability doesn’t require abandoning what already works, or launching some vast digital transformation programme. It means building adaptive capacity deliberately, as part of normal educational design rather than as an emergency bolt-on.

The most useful starting question is deceptively simple: if a learner could not attend tomorrow, could learning continue meaningfully? Not perfectly, not identically to the in-person experience – but continue, in a way that keeps the student connected and progressing. For most schools, honestly answering that question surfaces a set of practical priorities.

Learning materials, instructions, and pathways need to be consistently accessible through shared digital platforms, not as an afterthought in planning, but as a default. Hybrid learning consistently fails when digital systems only appear during disruption; students need to already know where to access learning, how to submit work, how to participate remotely, and how to connect with peers and teachers. Routine creates resilience. When the platform is familiar before the crisis, it doesn’t become one more thing to learn during it.

There’s also something worth examining in how we design learning tasks. Hybrid conditions tend to expose an overdependence on teacher-directed instruction – which makes sense in a classroom but becomes a bottleneck when the teacher isn’t physically present. Schools that develop genuine hybrid readiness often find themselves investing in learner agency, self-regulation, and clear progression pathways: capacities that turn out to be valuable in every learning context, not just remote ones.

And underlying all of this is an equity question that requires honest attention. Hybrid capability is only as strong as learners’ ability to participate in it. That means real conversations about device availability, internet access, family circumstances, and which students need additional scaffolding to engage independently. This is not simply a technical issue. It is a justice issue. Building systems that work for Tama, not just for students whose circumstances make flexibility easy, is the actual design challenge.

Preparing for convergence

The future is unlikely to present schools with neat, isolated challenges. The more plausible picture is one of overlapping pressures (economic, environmental, demographic, technological) arriving in combinations that test adaptability, responsiveness, and imagination in ways that strategic planning cycles rarely anticipate.

The schools that navigate this well won’t necessarily be those with the newest buildings or the most polished documents. They’ll be the ones that have built the capacity to flex without fracturing – where the habits, routines, and systems that enable continuity are already woven into everyday practice before they’re urgently needed.

Convergence is not something to fear. It is something to prepare for. And hybrid learning – thoughtfully designed, equity-focused, and embedded in the ordinary rhythms of school life – may be one of the most important ways we do exactly that.

The question for school leaders is a simple one: if everything converged tomorrow, would learning still continue? If the answer feels uncertain, perhaps the work begins now.

A Life Well Spent

My personal tribute to Nick Billowes ONZM

There are moments in life that remind you why some things matter more than the noise of the everyday. This week was one of those moments for me.

My good friend and colleague Nick Billowes was presented with the insignia of Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit – awarded for services to education – by Dame Cindy Kiro, the Governor-General. It was a ceremony that had been a long time coming. Nick had actually been appointed to the ONZM in 2023, but illness had prevented him from attending. So when the day finally arrived, it carried with it something extra – a weight of gratitude, of relief, and of celebration from those present who knew what a journey it had been to get to this point.

I had the honour of speaking at the function held afterwards, attended by around thirty of Nick’s closest friends, family and colleagues. And I have to tell you: it was one of the most moving evenings I’ve experienced in a very long time.

A Man Who Never Sought the Limelight

Many readers of this blog may remember Nick as the ‘face’ of the ULearn conferences held in New Zealand – the largest annual conference for educators in NZ, regularly attracting between 1500 and 2000 delegates from across New Zealand and Australia. It would be easy to assume he enjoyed the limelight like this – but if you know Nick, you’d understand that he angsted for hours ahead of such events. He would be deeply uncomfortable being described as remarkable. That discomfort is itself part of what makes him so.

During the course of the evening event with friends and family after his investiture, several people stood up and tried to put into words what Nick has meant to them. And almost every single one of them circled back to the same thing: he never sought the credit. He spent his career finding the best people he could, believing in them, and then quietly stepping back so they could shine.

That’s not a small thing. That’s actually very hard to do. Most of us, at least a little, want to be seen. Nick genuinely didn’t – or if he did, he never let it get in the way of what mattered more.

Four Decades of Quietly Changing Everything

Nick’s career in education spans more than forty years. He started as a science teacher, then spent a decade as Director of the Nelson Education Centre. From there he became one of the founders and principal architects of what would become Tātai Aho Rau Core Education – an organisation that, under his guidance, went on to touch the professional lives of teachers in schools across the country, and eventually beyond our shores.

He led the Ministry of Education’s national ICT Professional Development programme – a landmark initiative that reached nearly 300 clusters of schools, representing some 80% of all schools in New Zealand. He convened the annual uLearn conferences, which drew international participation and became a cornerstone event on the New Zealand education calendar. He oversaw work in Malaysia and the establishment of an early years centre in India. He championed te reo Māori and bicultural practice at a time when many institutions were still treating it as optional.

The citation at the ceremony called it “services to education.” Those who know him would tell you that’s an understatement.

The Glue

One word from the evening has stayed with me more than any other. A colleague who spent nearly a decade working alongside Nick at Core Education described him, simply, as the glue. I think that’s exactly right. And the thing about glue is that it’s invisible when it’s working. You only notice it when something comes apart.

The culture of care that Core Education became known for – the way it looked after its people, the way it showed up for schools, the way it held relationships across the education sector together through leadership transitions and a global pandemic and the upheaval of Canterbury – that didn’t happen by accident. It was built, patiently and deliberately, by a man who understood that how you treat people is inseparable from the quality of what you create together.

Nick knew everyone’s name. He remembered what mattered to people. He was the one who noticed when someone was struggling and quietly did something about it, without fanfare. He showed up. Again and again and again, over four decades – he showed up.

What the Governor-General Said

At the close of the investiture ceremony, the Governor-General offered a reflection that has been turning over in my mind ever since. She quoted the American philosopher and psychologist William James:

“The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”

I don’t think she could have chosen a more fitting thought for Nick. Because that is exactly what Nick has done. The teachers who changed how they teach because of a programme Nick designed. The leaders who took risks on new ideas because Nick told them it was worth it. The conferences that sparked collaborations that are still running today. The young educators who found their confidence, found their direction, found their voice, because someone believed in them before they believed in themselves.

Nick will tell you he was just doing his job. Don’t believe him.

To Nick

Nick, you spent more than forty years quietly building something that will long outlast any of us. You filled rooms with the best people you could find, and then you believed in them until they believed in themselves. You led without needing to be seen leading. You changed thousands of lives – most of whom will never fully know your name.

The ONZM is the system finally catching up to what the people in that room have always known.

I have known you for more than thirty years. I have watched you work. And I want to say this plainly: you are one of those rare people who makes the world genuinely better by being in it.

Congratulations, Nick. This one was a long time coming – and it was absolutely, completely, deservedly yours.

Engagement types and social cohesion

In this blog post I explore the intersection of Winthrop & Anderson’s engagement framework and the Helen Clark Foundation’s Social Cohesion in New Zealand report.

Imagine this common classroom setting. There’s this one student who sits usually at the front of the class. She completes every task on time. Her hand goes up every time a question is asked. Her parents are at every meeting, asking sharp questions about assessment grades and university pathways. Her teacher would describe her as one of the best in the class.

Then there’s another student sitting near the window. He’s not disruptive, exactly, but he’s somewhere else – present in body, absent in spirit. His parents haven’t responded to the last three messages home. Nobody’s quite sure why.

And then there’s a third student at the back. Capable – everyone can see it – but resistant. Not rude, just… elsewhere. School, for him, seems to be something that is happening at him rather than for him.

We have names for all three of these students in the staffroom. We have strategies, too. But I want to suggest that most of those strategies share a common blind spot. They treat engagement as if it is a property of the individual student, something to be coaxed or coached into being, rather than something that is deeply shaped by the world the student comes home to.

Two recent pieces of research – one from the United States, one from right here in Aotearoa – have helped me see this more clearly. Together, they offer a framework not just for understanding learners, but for understanding why some learners are so hard to reach, and what it would actually take to reach them.

Four Modes of Engagement

In their book The Disengaged Teen, researchers Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson identify four distinct modes of student engagement. Their framework emerges from the intersection of two dimensions: engagement (the extent to which learning holds relevance and meaning – what students think, feel and do) and agency (the degree to which students are empowered to make choices about their learning).

The result is four recognisable types as illustrated below:

The Passenger is behaviourally engaged but cognitively disengaged. They turn up. They comply. They do enough. But they are not really there. School is something to be endured, navigated, or simply survived. Passengers are often invisible – they don’t cause problems, so we don’t look too closely.

The Resister is emotionally engaged but behaviourally disengaged. This sounds paradoxical until you realise that resistance is rarely indifference – it’s usually a response, and often a coherent one. Something about the experience of school has provoked a refusal. Resisters often care deeply; they just don’t care about what school is asking them to care about.

The Achiever is cognitively engaged but emotionally disengaged. These are the students who tick all the boxes, collect the gold stars, and seem to thrive on success. Teachers love them. Parents are proud of them. But beneath the surface, many of these learners are fragile. Driven not by curiosity but by a need to “get it right,” many Achievers avoid risk, shy away from failure, and – as we’ll come to – often experience the worst mental health outcomes of all the groups.

The Explorer is engaged across all three dimensions – cognitively, behaviourally, and emotionally. They are curious, agentic, willing to fail and try again. They find meaning in learning, not just marks. They are the students we are trying to produce, and the mode we are least successful at cultivating at scale.

I find this an enormously useful framework. Walk through any school and you will recognise these students immediately. You may even recognise yourself, in one mode or another, at different points in your own education.

But here’s what the framework doesn’t ask: “what made these students this way?”

Winthrop and Anderson offer insights into how schools might shift students between modes. But I kept finding myself wondering about something that sits upstream of the classroom – the social and economic world students inhabit before they arrive at the school gate.

Three Groups and a Fracturing Society

Last month, the Helen Clark Foundation published its Social Cohesion in New Zealand report – a sobering piece of research that maps the state of belonging, trust, and connection in our society. Its findings are striking, not least because of what they tell us about the conditions in which a significant proportion of New Zealand children are growing up.

The report identifies three distinct groups within the population, distinguished primarily by their sense of connection to others and to institutions:

The Connected (30%) feel a strong sense of belonging and trust – in their communities, in public institutions, in the systems that are supposed to work for them. They tend to be financially stable, socially supported, and institutionally engaged.

The Ambivalent Middle (41%) are comfortable but less connected. They are not in crisis, but they are not deeply rooted either. Their relationship with institutions is transactional rather than trusting. They participate when it suits them, withdraw when it doesn’t.

The Alienated (28%) are disconnected – from communities, from institutions, from any felt sense that the system is fair or that their voice matters. The report is clear that this alienation is not a personality trait or a cultural inevitability. It is driven, heavily, by financial stress. These are people for whom the gap between what society promises and what it delivers has become unbridgeable.

Twenty-eight percent. More than one in four New Zealanders. And their children are in our classrooms.

When Two Frameworks Meet

Here is where the two pieces of research begin to speak to each other in ways I find both illuminating and troubling.

Winthrop and Anderson’s engagement modes describe how students show up. The Social Cohesion report describes what they’re carrying when they do. Put them together and a different picture emerges – one in which the engagement mode a student occupies is not simply a function of pedagogy, curriculum design, or teacher relationships, but is also shaped, profoundly, by the social world outside the school gates.

Consider the Connected student. They come from families where institutions – including schools – are experienced as trustworthy, even empowering. Home is stable enough that risk-taking feels possible. Adults in their lives model purposeful engagement. They have the psychological safety to follow curiosity, to fail without catastrophe, to develop the agency that exploration requires. These students are most likely to arrive at – or recover into – Explorer mode.

Consider the Ambivalent Middle. These students have enough stability to comply, but lack deep investment in why any of it matters. They do the work because that’s what you do – not because it connects to anything urgent or meaningful in their lives. They are well-positioned to become Passengers or Achievers: present in form, but not fully alive in their learning. They’re the students schools tend to overlook, precisely because they’re not presenting as problems.

And consider the Alienated. For these students – and, just as importantly, for their parents – institutions have not been benign. The school may represent a system that has repeatedly failed their family. To engage wholeheartedly with that system can feel, at some level, like a betrayal of everything their experience has taught them. Resistance, in this light, is not obstruction. It is a rational response to an institution whose promises haven’t been kept. The Resister at the back of the room may be the most perceptive person in it.

In creating this alignment I need to be clear – this mapping is speculative, not deterministic. These are tendencies, not destinies. A student from an Alienated household could well be an Achiever – driven by circumstance, family pressure, or sheer force of will to use school as a ladder out. An Explorer can emerge from the most fractured of contexts, sometimes because of it. What the alignment suggests is not that social cohesion predicts engagement mode with any certainty, but that it shapes the probability – and, crucially, the effort required to move between modes.

This reframing changes what we think the work is.

The Achiever Problem – and the Over-Connected Parent

Before moving on, I want to linger on the Achiever mode, because I think it is the one our schools are most poorly equipped to see clearly.

Achievers are the students for whom our system is, in many ways, designed. They respond well to grades, rankings, gold stars, and external validation. They produce the outcomes that feature in league tables and prize-giving speeches. In a school culture that measures success through academic performance, the Achiever is the gold standard.

But look more closely at where many Achievers come from, and something uncomfortable emerges.

The parents of Achievers are often deeply engaged with their child’s schooling – sometimes intensely so. They attend every meeting. They follow up on every grade. They create home environments that are educationally rich and academically ambitious. In the language of the social cohesion framework, they are the most Connected – trusting in the system, invested in its mechanisms, fluent in its language.

But connection, at its extreme, becomes something else. When parental engagement tips into over-protectiveness, when every failure is intercepted before it can be felt, when success becomes the only acceptable outcome, the student learns a particular lesson: that their worth is conditional. Not on who they are, but on what they achieve. The gold stars are no longer a delight. They become a necessity.

This is where Achiever mode, unchecked, tilts into perfectionism – and where perfectionism becomes a mental health crisis waiting to happen. Research consistently shows that high-achieving students report some of the poorest wellbeing outcomes: anxiety, fear of failure, identity fragility, and a deep inability to tolerate uncertainty. These are not the symptoms of students who are thriving. They are the symptoms of students who have learned to perform thriving while quietly drowning.

The cruelest irony is that we celebrate them for it.

The Families We Can’t Reach

Teachers and school leaders across New Zealand will recognise, painfully, a recurring frustration: the families who are hardest to connect with are often the ones whose children need connection most urgently.

The parents of Resisters and disengaged Passengers – those most likely to come from Alienated households – often don’t come to interviews, don’t respond to messages, don’t show up to events. Schools sometimes interpret this as indifference. The social cohesion research suggests something quite different: distrust. Not of the teacher personally, but of the institution. Of a system that has, in their experience, not worked for people like them.

Meanwhile, the parents who fill the front rows at every event, who respond to emails within the hour, who advocate strenuously for their child’s placement, timetable, and grade – these parents can consume enormous amounts of school energy and attention. Their engagement is real and often well-intentioned. But it can crowd out attention for the students whose families are absent, and it can model for their children a relationship with learning that is fundamentally anxious and acquisitive rather than curious and joyful.

This is not an argument that parental engagement is bad. It is an argument that the quality and character of connection matters – for students and their families alike

What This Means for Schools

If the argument holds – that engagement modes are not simply individual characteristics but are shaped by the social contexts students inhabit – then what follows for schools?

A few things seem clear to me.

Individual engagement interventions are necessary but not sufficient. A brilliant teacher can create conditions in which a Resister begins to lean in, or a Passenger begins to find genuine curiosity. But if that student goes home to financial stress, institutional distrust, and a felt sense that the system is not for people like them, the work is incomplete. Schools need to be honest with themselves about what they can and cannot do within their four walls.

Schools (and our system) have a particular responsibility to the Alienated. Not because these students are more deserving than others, but because schools are one of the few institutions with both the mandate and the regular contact to build something different. A school that is genuinely responsive, trustworthy, and culturally connected can be – for some students – a counterweight to the disconnection they experience everywhere else. But this requires intentional design, not goodwill alone.

The Achiever mode deserves more critical scrutiny. Schools that primarily celebrate academic performance as the marker of success are, in effect, optimising for a mode that is emotionally fragile and narrowly motivated. The shift from Achiever to Explorer is not just pedagogically desirable – it is a wellbeing imperative. This means creating cultures where curiosity is valued above correctness, where failure is a feature rather than a flaw, and where the measure of a good student is not compliance with expectations but authentic engagement with ideas.

Connection is the common thread running through both frameworks. The social cohesion research is, at its heart, about belonging – about the felt sense that you matter to the people and institutions around you. This is also, ultimately, what the best engagement research points toward. Students who explore are students who feel safe enough to try, connected enough to care, and trusted enough to lead. You cannot engineer that from a curriculum document. You build it through relationships – sustained, honest, and genuinely mutual ones.

A Closing Thought

The student at the front of the class, the one near the window, and the one at the back – they are not three different problems to be solved with three different interventions. They are three expressions of the same underlying question: does this place – this school, this system, this society – have a place for me?

For the Explorer, the answer is yes, and the evidence surrounds them. For the Achiever, the answer is yes, but only conditionally. For the Passenger, the answer is uncertain – and uncertainty is easier to survive by going through the motions. For the Resister, the answer has, too often, been no – and resistance is the most honest response available.

Our work, if we take it seriously, is not just to improve our teaching strategies or redesign our learning spaces. It is to become the kind of institution that answers that question – for every student, from every background – with an unambiguous, well-evidenced, and deeply felt yes.

That is a bigger project than any one classroom. But it begins there, every day, in every interaction between a teacher and a child who is asking, in their own way, whether they belong.

This post draws on Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson’s The Disengaged Teen (2024) and the Helen Clark Foundation’s Social Cohesion in New Zealand report (2025). The frameworks are theirs; the synthesis and any errors in interpretation are my own.

Check out some of my other blog posts that deal with similar themes:

We need a new plan – Rebecca Winthrop exploring how we deal with kids in the age of AI
The rising tide of perfectionism – more thoughts on how Achiever mode can tip into perfectionism
Student agency and engagement – exploring why decline in student engagement is such an issue
AI, education and the futures we choose – what does the rise of generative AI mean for our young people?
Connectedness, hope and the role of schools in a fractured world – explores the challenge of disconnection

Rethinking assessment through a split-screen lens

Yesterday I had the privilege of hosting a webinar with Bill Lucas, Professor of Learning and Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning in the UK. Bill is also a co-founder of Rethinking Assessment, a movement advocating for significant reform of England’s assessment system. (NB this webinar was organised by the Stonefields Collaborative Trust – more details may be found on their website).

Over the two days before hosting this webinar, I was in a primary school in the North Island working alongside teachers as they implemented the structured literacy, mathematics, and writing initiatives currently being promoted through the New Zealand Ministry of Education.

What struck me most wasn’t simply the teaching approaches being used, but the assessment capability I observed being demonstrated by the students themselves. As I moved between classrooms, I saw learners confidently referring to progression statements, explaining where they believed they were on the learning pathway, and pointing to examples of their work as evidence. There was a shared language about progress that many educators have been striving for over many years.

It was impressive to see. But as I reflected on those experiences on the flight home, another thought began to surface. What I had seen felt necessary – but not sufficient. The progressions helped make learning visible in important ways. But I struggled to see the same level of intentional focus on the capabilities and dispositions that shape how learners apply their knowledge – things like curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and the confidence to tackle unfamiliar problems.

Then today’s conversation with Bill Lucas provided an interesting lens for thinking about this. Bill often talks about the importance of looking at education through a “split screen.”

On one screen sits the development of knowledge and foundational skills – the kinds of things curriculum progressions and structured approaches are designed to strengthen.

On the other screen sits the development of capabilities and dispositions – the habits of mind and ways of engaging with the world that influence how knowledge is used.

Both matter. But if our assessment systems focus primarily on one screen, the other can easily fade into the background.

From “assessment” to “evidencing progress”

The conversation with Bill ranged widely – from the purpose of education to the practical realities of assessment in schools – but one idea kept resurfacing: we need to shift from assessing learning to evidencing progress. This was certainly consistent with what I had observed in the school in the days prior.

Bill began by reflecting on how deeply embedded the language of assessment is in our education systems. Much of it was designed in an era when the dominant priorities were efficiency, standardisation, and comparability. Those priorities produced the familiar architecture of grades, tests, and examinations – tools that are useful for accountability, but often struggle to capture the full richness of learning.

Instead, Bill suggests reframing assessment as “evidencing progress.” The difference may sound subtle, but it represents a profound shift in emphasis. Rather than asking What grade did a student achieve?, the question becomes What evidence shows how this learner is developing over time? That shift moves assessment closer to the learning process itself – something that informs learners, motivates them, and helps teachers adapt their practice.

Reconnecting curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment

Another theme Bill returned to repeatedly was the interdependence of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Too often these elements are treated as separate policy levers. A curriculum is written. Pedagogies are promoted. And assessment systems are designed afterwards. But in reality they form a single ecosystem.

If a curriculum values creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking – but assessment measures only what can be easily graded in a test – then it is the assessment system that ultimately shapes classroom practice.

This is certainly the ‘tail wagging the dog’ scenario that I feel we’ve seen a lot of in our education system here in NZ – particularly in our secondary schools. Bill’s argument is that each of these elements (curriculum, pedagogy, assessment) must be given space to exist alongside each other – in the way all of the elements in a forest ecosystem co-exist, and so often support and complement each other.

The capabilities question

A large part of Bill’s work focuses on what he calls dispositions – the habits of mind that influence how people use their knowledge. He prefers this term to “competencies” because it emphasises the tendency to behave in certain ways, not simply the ability to perform a task once. Curiosity, perseverance, collaboration, creativity – these are the qualities that shape how learners approach unfamiliar challenges.

This perspective aligns closely with thinking emerging from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which emphasises that effective education systems develop not only knowledge and skills, but also the attitudes and values that enable learners to apply them in complex situations.

Yet as Bill pointed out, these broader capabilities often appear prominently in curriculum aspirations while remaining largely invisible in assessment systems. And what isn’t assessed rarely receives sustained attention.

What the evidence suggests

Bill also shared insights from his involvement in the development of the PISA Creative Thinking Assessment. One common concern raised by critics is that emphasising creativity or broader capabilities might undermine performance in core academic subjects such as mathematics. But the evidence suggests something different. Students who perform strongly in creative thinking often perform just as well in mathematics and other academic domains – and sometimes better.

One factor appears to be self-efficacy: the belief that you are capable of tackling unfamiliar problems. In other words, developing creativity and confidence doesn’t dilute academic learning. It can actually strengthen it.

A useful moment for New Zealand

Listening to Bill during the webinar, I couldn’t help reflecting on how these ideas sit alongside the reforms currently underway in New Zealand.

On one screen, there is a strong policy focus on strengthening foundational learning. The refresh of the New Zealand Curriculum, the introduction of structured approaches to literacy and mathematics, and changes to the achievement standards within the National Certificate of Educational Achievement all reflect a clear intention to bring greater clarity and consistency to how learning is taught and assessed. These initiatives respond to legitimate concerns about equity and achievement. Ensuring that every learner develops strong foundations in reading, writing, and mathematics is essential.

But on the other screen sits something equally important. For decades, the New Zealand curriculum vision has emphasised developing confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners – young people who are creative, curious, collaborative, and able to apply their knowledge in new situations. Those capabilities remain central to how many educators think about the purpose of education. Which raises an interesting question. How do we ensure our systems of assessment recognise both?

Holding the split screen

If assessment focuses primarily on what is easiest to measure, it may strengthen attention to foundational knowledge – but risk narrowing the broader capabilities we say we value. But if assessment expands to recognise richer forms of learning, it must still remain credible, equitable, and manageable for teachers and schools.

This is not a simple either-or choice. It’s more like learning to hold two truths at the same time. Strong foundations matter. So do the dispositions and capabilities that determine how those foundations are used.

A question worth sitting with

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Bill Lucas’s work is not that it provides a neat solution to the assessment challenge. Instead, it invites us to look more closely at the systems we have built – and to ask what they make possible. Assessment systems shape what teachers prioritise, how students understand success, and ultimately what kinds of learning flourish in classrooms.

So here’s the question I’ve been left with after today’s conversation:

If our assessment systems continue to evolve around what is easiest to measure, will they still recognise the kinds of learning young people will need most in the future?

Or put another way:

How might we design assessment systems that strengthen foundational knowledge while also making visible the curiosity, creativity, resilience, and collaboration that define capable learners?

For educators in New Zealand right now, that may be a useful split-screen question to keep in view. Because the future of learning will almost certainly require us to pay attention to both.

Everything sounds worthwhile – that’s the problem

A conversation with Scottish educator and NoTosh founder Ewan McIntosh

Here’s a provocation to open with: the most important thing we can teach young people right now has nothing to do with AI, nothing to do with digital literacy, and nothing to do with the jobs of tomorrow. It’s an ancient skill. And most schools aren’t teaching it deliberately at all. What might that be?

That’s just one of the threads that emerged when I connected recently with my good friend and colleague, Ewan McIntosh – founder of NoTosh (Scots for “no nonsense”). Ewan is an educator, design thinker, and one of the sharper minds I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for nearly two decades. Ewan works with schools and governments across more than 70 countries, and right now he’s deep in a project trying to change how government itself operates in Scotland – not just education, but health, justice, children and families. The education lens, it turns out, is a lens for everything.

“School Is Child-Minding for the Intellectual”

Ewan’s central argument is one that policy-makers routinely sidestep: the most challenged learners in our systems aren’t struggling because of an education problem. They’re struggling because of a life problem – and we keep trying to fix it with curriculum.

The student who’s late to school? Mum left at 5am for her cleaning shift. The one who hasn’t done their homework? They were feeding their younger siblings the night before because dad was on his second job. School, Ewan points out bluntly, is designed for families who work nine to five. For everyone else, it compounds the disadvantage. “The most challenged learners end up doubly challenged and doubly penalised,” Ewan says. “They’re acting as pseudo-parents, essentially, for siblings – as well as trying to do school.”

The solution isn’t more literacy intervention. It might be universal income. It might be affordable childcare. It’s almost certainly something that crosses the artificial boundaries between government departments. And that’s the whole point: when you start with the human, the problem rarely respects the budget lines we’ve drawn around it.

The Real Barrier to Learner Agency Isn’t Students – It’s Teacher Confidence

One of the most honest things Ewan said in our conversation was; “the greatest barrier to giving students more ownership of their learning is often the teacher’s own uncertainty about whether students can handle it.“

This isn’t a criticism. It’s a diagnosis. When we talk about learner agency, educators often hear “individualise 180 lessons a week” – which is both exhausting and missing the point entirely. Agency isn’t about personalisation at that scale. It’s about students understanding why they’re learning, having some say in how, and being trusted with genuine responsibility for their own thinking.

The schools Ewan sees doing this well – many of them IB schools – have built a skills framework into the bedrock of daily practice. In Scotland, a framework of 12 “Metaskills” offers an evergreen framework across three domains: self-management, social intelligence, and innovation. Skills like focusing, adapting, showing integrity, curiosity, sense-making, creativity.

“These skills don’t go down with changes in the world around us,” Ewan says. “They need to be amplified.” The uncomfortable truth is that most curriculum frameworks already have these skills baked in somewhere. New Zealand’s key competencies have been there for two decades. The problem isn’t the framework. It’s that we never made the practice routine.

Why Your School Improvement Plan Is Probably Just a Catalogue

Ewan draws a sharp distinction between a catalogue of good intentions and an actual strategy. Most school plans, he argues, are the former: lists of activities, all of which feel worthwhile, none of which are fully resourced, and few of which ever become genuine institutional habit. Strategy, by contrast, requires choice. It requires saying: not this, not now.

“You’re not usually choosing between a good idea and a bad idea,” he says. “You’re choosing between lots of pretty good, all right ideas that can’t really all be done well at once.” His advice to school leaders navigating top-down mandates. Ewan advocates that you start by asking which of your current practices are actually embedded as habit, not just priority. Because a priority is something you’re still figuring out. A habit is something that happens whether or not the deputy principal is watching.

Most schools, he suggests, are overloaded with level-two thinking – ambitious new practices that require disproportionate effort – and underinvested in getting level-one right: the things that just are the way we do things here. The good news is that clarity doesn’t shrink creativity. It enables it.

AI Won’t Deskill Teachers.

Ewan is refreshingly un-anxious about AI in education – but he’s precise about why. The value of AI in curriculum planning, he argues, isn’t that it replaces teacher expertise. It’s that no one’s memory is good enough to hold all of what we know makes good teaching, and bring it to bear in the moment, every time. AI can be the thing that reminds you of the strategy you got bored with three years ago – the one that would be perfect for this class, who’ve never seen it.

He’s particularly interested in tools like Toddle, which allow schools to upload their learning frameworks – their values, their meta-skills, their pedagogical commitments – so that every lesson plan generated is quietly shaped by the school’s actual priorities, not just generic best practice. “Instead of a deputy head going around doing lesson observations and giving comments, the technology is doing that leading by reminding for you,” he says. “That’s a very good return on investment.”

But the warning is there too: if you take what the AI gives you without thinking, “it’ll feel flat.” The tool amplifies what the teacher brings. It can’t replace the bringing.

The Skill That Will Matter Most in the Next Five Years

And here’s where Ewan lands – with a word that surprised me by how much weight it carries.

Discernment.

Not digital literacy. Not critical thinking (though that’s in there). Not AI fluency. Discernment: the capacity to work out whether something is worth your attention. To hold something you dislike hearing long enough to ask whether it contains any truth. To filter the flood.

It matters for students navigating social media. It matters for teachers navigating research that masquerades as research. It matters for school leaders choosing between a thousand things that all sound worthwhile. “The biggest trap in schools,” he says, “is that almost everything sounds worthwhile. That’s exactly why focus is so hard.” In a world drowning in signal dressed as noise, and noise dressed as signal, discernment isn’t a soft skill. It’s survival infrastructure.

By the end of our conversation, I’d coined a new job title: Chief Discernment Officer. Ewan liked it. I think every school needs one.

Listen to the full conversation with Ewan McIntosh in this episode of Conversations on the Future of Education. And if you’re in Auckland – Ewan is appearing at a free event on Thursday 30 April at Stonefields School at an event organised by the Stonefields Collaborative Trust – see details here and book to attend

Are we educating our young people to become our peers?

A reflection prompted by Rhonda Broussard and One Good Question

“Are we educating our young people to become our peers?” That was the question I found most intriguing when Rhonda Broussard posed it during her recent talk with us. It’s deceptively simple – but sit with it for a moment and you start to feel its edges. Rhonda is the author of One Good Question: How countries prepare youth to lead, and the book is built around exactly that spirit: not answers, but questions worth asking.

My first instinct was to connect it to something I’ve been writing about for some time: learner agency, and the shift in ownership of learning that great teaching requires. When we talk about agency, we’re really talking about gradually shifting the ownership of learning – moving students from dependence toward independence, from being the recipients of learning to the architects of it. That’s not so different from what Rhonda is pointing at.

But her question goes somewhere deeper than pedagogy. It challenges the fundamental structure of how we think about young people. Our education systems – and if we’re honest, many of our homes too – are built on hierarchy. Adults know. Children learn. Teachers lead. Students follow. These aren’t malicious arrangements; they often serve genuine purposes. But they can quietly train young people in something we don’t intend: that their job is to comply, not to contribute.

When students internalise that lesson well enough, we sometimes mistake it for success.

I want to be careful here, because I suspect some readers will hear “educating students to become peers” and feel a familiar anxiety – the fear that taking this seriously means abdicating responsibility. That classrooms become rudderless. That homes lose structure. That if we treat children as future peers, we somehow stop being the adults in the room.

That’s not what this means. A surgeon mentoring a resident doesn’t stop being the more experienced practitioner. A journalist guiding a cadet doesn’t pretend expertise doesn’t matter. What shifts is the orientation – are we working toward a relationship of mutual respect and eventual equality, or are we simply maintaining hierarchy for its own sake?

In teaching, this changes things in practical ways. It asks us whether we’re building students’ capacity to question, to direct their own inquiry, to own their learning – or whether we’re building their capacity to perform compliance. It asks whether the power we hold in classrooms is being used to prepare students for independence, or to preserve our own authority.

The same question lands differently at home. Parents (and grand-parents!) who hold their role lightly – who can imagine their child as a future adult they’ll admire, argue with, learn from – tend to parent with that destination in mind. The hierarchy doesn’t disappear; it just has somewhere to go.

After all, our students will become our peers. They will sit on councils and boards, write policy, run organisations, raise children of their own. Some of them will one day make decisions that affect us. The only question is whether we prepared them for that – or just for the next assessment.

Rhonda’s book is a gift to anyone willing to ask the question honestly. I’d encourage you to read it, and to sit with the discomfort it stirs. That’s usually where the most important thinking begins.

Why This Matters for Schools

Looking in the Rear Vision Mirror

Sitting with the Discomfort – but Not Stopping There

A Different Kind of Preparation

Something to ponder…

On your own response to change:

On your school and community:

On looking forward:

Further reading

Futuremakers Newsletter

From Promise to Pushback

What the Research Actually Says

Beyond Tools: Technology as a Learning Environment

Why the Mood Has Shifted

A Framework Worth Knowing: SAMR

The Developmental Continuum Matters

The ‘Whole Child’ Lens

What Should Schools Actually Do?

The Question Worth Asking

References used in developing this post:

Futuremakers Newsletter

The Problem Isn’t Understanding – It’s Sustainability

What the Evidence Says

Formative Assessment as a Case Study

What Actually Helps

A Broader Point

References

Related posts

Futuremakers Newsletter

Taylorism’s Limits in Schools

The Emotional Intelligence Argument

The Unconscious Decision-Making Angle

Understanding the Taylorist influence in our current system

The Political Economy Behind It

Where the Nuance Matters

The Deeper Tension for Principals

Implications for System Leaders

Related posts:

Futuremakers Newsletter

We are no longer dealing with isolated trends

This is not an argument against schools

What COVID taught us – and what we risk forgetting

What if hybrid capability was simply always there?

What schools can start doing now

Preparing for convergence

Further Reading

Futuremakers Newsletter

A Man Who Never Sought the Limelight

Four Decades of Quietly Changing Everything

The Glue

What the Governor-General Said

To Nick

Futuremakers Newsletter

Four Modes of Engagement

Three Groups and a Fracturing Society

When Two Frameworks Meet

The Achiever Problem – and the Over-Connected Parent

The Families We Can’t Reach

What This Means for Schools

A Closing Thought

Futuremakers Newsletter

From “assessment” to “evidencing progress”

Reconnecting curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment

The capabilities question

What the evidence suggests

A useful moment for New Zealand

Holding the split screen

A question worth sitting with

Futuremakers Newsletter

“School Is Child-Minding for the Intellectual”

The Real Barrier to Learner Agency Isn’t Students – It’s Teacher Confidence

Why Your School Improvement Plan Is Probably Just a Catalogue

AI Won’t Deskill Teachers.

The Skill That Will Matter Most in the Next Five Years

Futuremakers Newsletter

Futuremakers Newsletter

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