The Learning Blueprint and the importance of sleep

Note: isPodcast is produced for listening and is designed to be heard. We encourage you to listen to the audio, as it includes emotion and emphasis that’s not on the page. While every care is taken, our transcripts may contain errors. 

Michael Broadstock: 

Hi, everyone and welcome back to isPodcast ISV Show for schools and the wider community. I'm Mike Broadstock. On today's episode, I talk with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath about how the Learning Blueprint helps students and teachers to get the most from their education by helping them to understand the way they think. But first, Natalie Moutafis talks with psychiatrist, author and comedian Dr. Jo Prendergast about how parents can support their teen's mental health and the importance of getting enough sleep. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

So welcome to isPodcast, Dr. Jo. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Oh, well, lovely to be here. Thank you for having me on. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

Now you have recently released a book called When Life Sucks, which is about parenting your teen through the tough times. So, I think there's quite a few people out there that could use this as a bit of a parenting manual/how-to guide/I'm not alone kind of book. So, tell us a little bit about the reason behind the book. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yes, I was actually commissioned to write the book by Harper Collins who had heard me on the radio and thought the combination of being a parent with lived experience, a psychiatrist and a standup comedian would be a great combination to put all of those experiences into a blender and come up with a light and easy-to-read yet full of information book about teenage mental health.  

I was certainly very aware of the increasing teenage mental health crisis that we are dealing with in Australia and New Zealand and other places in the world and also how stretched resources were and that there are a lot of desperate families out there and no doubt teachers as well who are looking at young people with a lot of concern and not really knowing where to turn and struggling to get access to resources.  

So, it seemed that the book, if I could write it like a first-aid manual for teenage mental health for parents could fill a need in terms of giving parents really practical tips and support of what to do - and also when to reach out for professional help. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

There is a lot of that in the book. So, I've had a nice flick through it, and it's definitely very easy to understand, find what you want to know about. You wouldn't have to read it from cover to cover, you could just flick through it and go, 'That's topical to our family right now'. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. So, I've made the chapters on different topics and different mental health challenges so you can zip to the challenge that your teenager's facing and read that. Although I do suggest people read the chapter on parenting and the basics of well-being because that's really the foundation for anything you do to support your teenager. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

One of those is the importance of sleep with our teenagers, which is why we've got you here today to tell us what you think we can do to help our teens improve their sleep habits and how it impacts them. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yeah, sleep's incredibly important for teenagers and also for parents and teachers. Teenagers need around nine hours sleep, and a lot of teenagers are not getting that. The difficulty with lack of sleep in teenagers is that it significantly increases their risk of anxiety and depression. It causes significant problems with memory. It's almost like the memory centres get waterlogged when we are sleep-deprived and just can't store new information, which is very tricky if you're learning and sitting exams.  

I remember when I was a junior doctor, they talked about sleep deprivation being like being drunk and the huge risk it was placing on patients by having junior doctors working 24-hour shifts.  

So, it causes significant cognitive impairments to be sleep-deprived and an alarming increase in suicidality if young people are sleeping less than five hours a night and even less than eight hours, an increase in depression and anxiety.  

So, it is a very significant part of the problem in terms of mental health and difficulty with learning. It's sometimes quite an easy problem to solve and sometimes quite a challenging problem to solve because it is a little bit of a chicken and egg situation because depression and anxiety and ADHD and stress all affect the ability to sleep. Then the less you sleep, the worse those problems get, so it's a real vicious circle. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

So, would you say that this generation have more to worry about than what we, or what I did personally as a teen? I didn't have screens around when I was younger. Do you think having all this information at your fingertips is impacting our teens when it comes to sleep as well? 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yeah, I think it's a range of things. Certainly, even one hour of being on a screen before bedtime reduces the amount of melatonin we make, and melatonin is the hormone for sleep. So, chatting to friends on Snapchat or even doing some homework on a screen for an hour before bed, your melatonin levels are going to drop and therefore, it will be harder to get to sleep.  

That's not even considering the 50 per cent of kids that report being addicted to their phones and therefore really struggle. So, they're on their phones late at night and can't get off. 

Obviously, a lot of parents try and have no screens, no phones in the bedroom, but that does become quite difficult when teenagers get a bit older, and they've bought their phone, and they start to have quite a lot of pushback on that rule.  

So, it can be much harder to enforce that and to be allowing teenagers to make some of those decisions themselves in terms of putting their phones on silent or leaving them charging in the kitchen rather than in bedrooms. But also, the teenager's body clock isn't set for our modern life. The nine hours that a teenager would like to sleep according to their body clock is usually 1:00 AM to 10:00 AM, and that doesn't work quite so well for school if it's starting at 8:30 or 9:00. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

No. 

Jo Prendergast: 

So that could be an issue in itself. There's a couple of high schools in New Zealand who been quite innovative and are starting at 10:00 AM instead of 8:30 or 9:00 to try and make it work a bit better for our teenagers' body clocks. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

That's interesting. 

Jo Prendergast: 

But also, quite a lot of teenagers will get sleep-deprived during the week and then sleep till midday on the weekends. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

They're trying to bank what they've missed. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yeah, so it is a sleep catch up, but also it's not ideal then for trying to get sleep during the week because it messes up the body clock to have a big sleep in the weekend. So, it's much better to try and have the same going to bed and getting up time each day to keep your body in that same body clock, and especially as teenagers get older and are out at friends' places, an up all night talking to people, it gets much harder to get into that rhythm.  

But there are quite simple things that can help to shift that body clock. Like if teenagers can get outside in the morning and have breakfast outside or walk part of the way to school, trying to get that sunlight into the eyes early helps to reset the body clock and making sure lights in the house are nice and dim in the evening. It really tricks a bodyclock into thinking this is when morning is and this is when night is and can help to shift that teenage body clock to going to bed a bit earlier.  

Often, it's particularly tricky in Australia with a warm climate that the ideal temperature of a bedroom is around 18 degrees, which is a lot cooler than probably most Australian bedrooms. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

Yes, I think so. 

Jo Prendergast: 

But that can be significant like if a teenager is hot and bothered, they're more likely to struggle to get to sleep and wake up because they're too hot and things, so finding ways to cool bedrooms and pulling curtains and having fans and things like that and also things that can help boost melatonin.  

There's some quite interesting research with meditation being able to boost melatonin and deep belly breathing and Mediterranean diet, particularly nuts are all things that can help to naturally boost melatonin.  

So, they're all quite practical things that you can do to try and get your brain and body into a time to go to sleep mode. That can be quite a challenge with teenagers trying to get them to make any changes to things. But I think looking at even 1 per cent changes improvement if they could get to sleep just a little bit earlier each night and just baby steps towards that change. 

But in terms of if parents are just trying to focus on a couple of things to support their teenager, focusing on getting a decent night's sleep is really important, 'cause you're absolutely paddling upstream, If your teenagers had six hours sleep. They're going to be dysregulated and all over the show and not concentrating and not learning and emotionally unstable.  

It really makes things so much more difficult if teenagers are sleep-deprived. If you've got a teenager who is trying everything to help their sleep and they're still not sleeping, then going to see your GP and maybe trying melatonin or seeing a psychologist to get some more ideas like having a worry time earlier in the day to get all the worries out so they're less ruminating on them at night and things like that can really help. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

What should we be looking for? How would you put two and two together and go, 'Hang on, I think this is because they're not getting enough sleep?' 

Jo Prendergast: 

I think sleep is often something that you can directly ask a teenager about, 'What time of you getting to sleep?' And you can pop your head in the door and see if you can hear them sleeping and things like that, so sleep, in some ways, is an easier one.  

There's all sorts of apps with various degrees of scientific evidence for monitoring how much sleep you're getting. But I think educating the teenager often with just a drop-and-run comment, so you say the important message and don't hang around and to be told you're wrong, but just saying, 'Lots of evidence that it's much easier to learn stuff at school if you get nine hours sleep’, and then you leave the room, or, ‘Kids are much less likely to get depressed and anxious if they get nine hours sleep’, or anything that's relevant for the kids.  

Certainly, a strategy that I found very helpful with my kids was statement and disappear, and that seemed to work much better than doing a TED Talk on a subject. 

But if teenagers can understand the significant impact of being sleep-deprived on the things that they are wanting to do or on their mental health that they're struggling with, that can sometimes be enough to get them to have some motivation to make some changes.  

But I think in terms of general what to look out for in terms of kids that are struggling, obviously a safety warning that any mention of 'not wanting to be here’, ‘life's not worth living’,' any self-harm or suicidal thoughts, it's really important to urgently get a review.  

I think sometimes we can get a bit numb to that and not realise that this could be an opportunity to make a huge difference to a young person's safety and well-being to get a review immediately.  

But also, just looking at a reduction in functioning, and this is something when I reflect back on my own parenting as I wrote the book, realised that I've probably missed some early cues of functioning change and attitude change and behaviour change and appearance change.  

It's easy to put it down to, 'Oh, it's just a phase. It's where they're up to in their development’. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

Hormones. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yeah, but if a kid that's been motivated and interested in school suddenly has lost interest, become withdrawn, dropping out of things, or even if there's a dramatic change in a young person's appearance, it's just asking 'What's going on?', rather than just going, 'Oh, that's a phase. That's what they're going through'.  

Even a really sudden huge improvement in functioning or improvement in appearance can raise a question mark too. The adolescent years are a time where people can develop quite major mental illness like becoming manic. So, if you've got a kid that was pretty so-so about school and suddenly they're super motivated with great career aspirations and very conversational, that could be a red flag as well. So, it's looking for any significant changes. 

My son was actually quite an activist at school because after the COVID lockdown, there was such an incredibly high rate of mental health difficulties in his social group that he went to the teachers and said, 'Hey, if somebody's out of class wandering around the school, instead of going up to them and saying, You get back to class, you're not supposed to be out here,' asking them, 'You okay? How are you doing?' Because there's a reasonably high chance that a kid who's not in class wandering around the school, something's not going right for them.  

So instead of having that, telling them off reflex, having that raising the question of what's happening for that young person, are they okay? 

With one out of three Australian teenagers reporting that they have very high levels of psychological distress and a 60 per cent increase in anxiety and depression presentation to mental health workers, I think we almost have to presume that young people are struggling, and any change or misbehaviour,  presume that there's something happening with their mental health that's driving that. 

So, being very aware and observant of change. I know that's incredibly difficult in a classroom with lots of teenagers. It's easier as parents when you've only got a small number of teenagers that you're monitoring, but any significant change in teenagers' behaviours and attitude and things is worth raising the question of what's happening with their mental health. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

It's hard just being a parent anytime of the day, let alone throwing all that in. So having resources like your book and then having talks with the school if there is any concerns that the school's aware of it, I think just making sure communication's always open is the best way to go. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yeah, no, absolutely. That's one of the main reasons I wrote the book to be able to have all those red flag warning signs for different mental health issues that parents can become aware of, of things to look out for and also what's the threshold for reaching out for professional help? When it has crossed that line from observing and caring to ‘we really need to be proactive, here the red flags are definitely waving’. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

Yeah. Well, I think we've got some wonderful tips there, Dr. Jo. Thank you so much. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yeah, no problems at all. 

Natalie Moutafis: 

We look forward to talking to you again in the future. 

Jo Prendergast: 

Yes. Just a shout-out if anybody's in Melbourne on the 21st of October that I'm doing my comedy show, The Cool Mum, about parenting teenagers, which is a lot of fun for parents to come along to and teachers. It's part of Melbourne Fringe, so I'd love to see people there if people are in Melbourne that day. 

Michael Broadstock: 

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a leading expert in the science of learning has partnered with ISV to deliver the Learning Blueprint to schools in Australia. I spoke with Jared about how the award-winning metacognition program helps students and teachers get the most out of their learning.  

Jared, welcome to isPodcast. 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

Thank you so much for having me on. It's great to be here. 

Michael Broadstock: 

You're a new father! 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

I am indeed. We're at almost 10 weeks, now. 

Michael Broadstock: 

10 weeks. 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

Oh, boy. She is the love of my life already, but the last 48 hours, something's going on, man. Unless you're touching her, she is not happy. So, she's not sick or anything, but we'll find out what happens. 

Michael Broadstock: 

So, what have the last 10 or so weeks taught you about how you think? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

That sleep is the most important aspect of thinking. Oh, boy, not only is it lack of sleep, it's time of day.  

So, I've always known that people have their metabolic rhythms and that determines when you're going to be cruise-y, like are you a night owl? Are you a morning bird? For some reason, my wife and I, we are... I am the consummate night owl. I can stay up, and she's a morning bird. She can get up early, but for some reason we've swapped it where I have the morning feeds and she is the night owl. Neither of us are really firing on all cylinders right now. 

Michael Broadstock: 

Do you think all your study and knowledge about how we learn will inform your parenting? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

No, not in the least. At some level, of course, it's going to, but I found all it's doing is it's making me more nervous. 'Should I be reading to her now? Do I need to be stimulating her cortex today?'. I'm finding it's overwhelming me, so I'm trying my best just to let it all go and just be present, just be dad and try my best and hopefully, everything will work out. 

Michael Broadstock: 

So on to The Learning Blueprint. What is The Learning Blueprint? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

So, okay, one of the biggest buzzwords in education right now today is metacognition and student agency. We want students to be able to run their own learning. What's the point of secondary school if you graduate without knowing how to drive your own learning system? So that's what the Learning Blueprint is aiming to do. It's aiming to help students start that journey of metacognition, of awareness – this is how learning works, this is how memory works, this is how attention works – so that they can start to see patterns in their schooling and their own thinking and then start to drive that.  

People always ask me why did I build something like this? I originally was teaching high school, then I went back to university. So, for the last 10 years, I've been teaching university students, and I had freshmen seminar for a couple of years. 

So, you get 400 freshmen in the room at once, I could tell you within a week who was going to succeed and who was going to fail that class. It was based purely on who understood the learning process and who still thought the purpose of school was to tell me exactly what to do.  

The kids who knew how to drive their own learning, they were fine. They'd show up, they'd ask some questions. They'd disappear, and you'd know you're doing all right. The kids who were just like, 'Do I take notes on this? Is this important for me?'  

So that's why I figured, 'All right, let's start hitting them early'. I could teach them how to learn in college when they already need to know that, or we can go back, and we can hit them in high school and say, 'Let's start to focus on that kind of agency, that learning, that metacognition there so you're ready when you step into the wider world to run that show'. 

Michael Broadstock: 

So how does it gel with the different educational approaches at schools, 'cause obviously, with independent schools there's a lot of different teaching approaches? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

The good news is learning is completely agnostic. So, the way human beings learn, and this is going to sound a little trippy, so bear with me: all human beings learn in exactly the same way. For 150,000 years since we first stood upright and for the next 150,000 years so long as we're still humans, we will all learn in exactly the same way.  

Now people get a little thrown by that statement, but let me shift it a bit here. All human beings digest in exactly the same way. No one has a problem with that. Yes, we eat different foods. Some people can't digest lactose, some people can't digest, I don't know, glutens. No one has six stomachs and chews cud like a cow. All human beings breathe the same way. We all respirate the same way. Again, some people smoke, some people don't. Some people have asthma, but the process of breathing of respiration – exactly the same across all people. 

All human beings learn the same way. We might need different inputs. Like if you're blind you won't be able to see something, so maybe I need some audio there, but the process of learning stays the same. That's what makes science of learning. That's what makes metacognition agnostic. It's not a teaching method. It doesn't say, 'Here's what your pedagogy needs to look like'. It says basically, 'Here's that learning process'.  

Now, whatever you choose input wise to layer over that, that's like choosing between Italian food and Indian food. They're all fine. It's all good. So, nothing about metacognition negates or impacts or changes or should really have any influence on whatever pedagogy a school is doing, it's purely the underlying foundation by which those pedagogies would work. Once we know that, we have a little more agency and control over those decisions. 

Michael Broadstock: 

So, there are two streams. It's one for educators and one for students. How are they different? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

When we know how human beings learn, you now have to filter that through your personal experiences, expertise. So, Science of Learning for Teachers is basically we're going to filter that through pedagogy. We're going to say, 'If this is how say, memory works, then what does that mean for how we're organising our sessions? What does that mean for when we're bringing in projects versus this?' So we just filter all that thinking through pedagogy.  

From the student angle, you filter all that same thinking through study and revision. You start to say, 'All right, if your job is to learn, how do you survive in class? How do you survive at home? How do you survive the two hours before an exam? How do you survive after an exam?'  

Same basic information, you just put it through a different filter, which gives it a different flavour. One is, I'm walking you through the learning process. The other, is I'm walking myself through it. So, what do I need to know about myself personally to make that work? Does that make sense? 

Michael Broadstock: 

Yeah, yeah. So, if educators and students are both doing the program – separately, presumably – how do they then bring it together? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

What's brilliant is now you'll start speaking the same language. When teachers and students are both doing their version of The Learning Blueprint simultaneously, now all of a sudden you're saying the same things. You're both talking about priming. You're both talking about learning principles. You're both talking about surface learning and deep learning in the same way. So, once you start to get the overlap of language, then it makes it so much easier.  

So, one of the biggest things I tell my students during the metacognition process is, 'I want you to start to get meta with your classes. Don't just go through class, take a step back and start asking yourself, 'Why is my teacher doing this? Why would my teacher ask me to do this today and not next week?'  

Then your goal starts to become to try and predict what they're going to do. 'I think if I understand learning correctly next Friday, my teacher's probably going to do this. If I understand how all this works, then next week we're probably going to move into this realm’. 

Once you can start to predict what your teacher is doing, congratulations, that means you understand pedagogy and learning. That means you can do this stuff yourself. So, from a teacher's perspective too, then once we share that language, then we can start letting them in.  

A lot of the time we just have to Trojan horse our teaching. We know what we're doing and why we're doing it, but a lot of the time we just hope through osmosis they're going to figure it out. But it's like The Wizard of Oz, you got to open that curtain and now we can let them. If they know our language and we know their language, now we can just flat out let them.  

'Boom! Why are we starting today's session with this? What am I doing? Boom! Why would we end Friday's session with this? What is that helping out with memory?' That's our entry point where we can now let them see why we're doing what we're doing and that helps them take better control over that. 

Michael Broadstock: 

So, your educator program, how's that different to other professional learning courses that they might be doing? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

The big difference with it, for the educators is we have what's called micro projects. The experts, when it comes to teaching, are teachers themselves.  

We can learn a lot from researchers and their work in a laboratory, but the specifics, the practicalities, when the rubber hits the road, that has to be filtered through your expertise. No one in the world has spent the time, the effort, the energy to the craft of teaching more than teachers have. So, we have to recognise that expertise.  

So, what this process of micro projects basically says is, 'We're going to learn about the science of learning and then you are going to go generate your own data. You are going to start building your own principles, your own strategies off the back of this, and we're going to start sharing that amongst each other. We're going to start building a database for teachers by teachers’.  

Informed by science, absolutely, informed by the science of learning, but built by people who are actually doing the work day-to-day.  

The more we get people doing that, that's where you start to take agency over your own teaching process. 

Michael Broadstock: 

So, what's one thing you wish more educators understood? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

It's that you guys are the experts. We are browbeaten so much as teachers to believe that somebody out there has the answer and it's not you, and that gets my goat 'cause A, there is no answer to teaching. There's just day-to-day evolution and growth. There is no final point. If you're really good at teaching this year, great. Get a new class next year, you're going to have to tweak it and five years from now, you're going to have to keep tweaking it.  

Anyone who stops evolving when it comes to teaching – like the paint on the wall, nothing changes – Their students aren't necessarily doing better. They're fading back and back and back into the background as well. 

Teaching is a continuous evolution. You're not done. You're not ever going to perfect it. It's just like painting; If you're a painter, you're never done painting, you're always trying something new. 

And that the only people poised to do that are you. You are the experts in that craft. You are the experts in what it means to be a teacher, in pedagogy and just we don't recognise it. Sometimes, the world certainly doesn't recognise it.  

So, if there's one thing you can take away, let it be that and tell the world: ‘Stop dictating to us what to do. Oh, you made a computer so now you can drive education? You don't even understand education, Google, why are you trying to tell me what I need to do in my school if you've never spent a day in a classroom in your life as a teacher?’ 

Michael Broadstock: 

But there's still room for professional learning, right?. There's still room to say, ‘I've got this gap in my knowledge. I can see that person there knows a bit about it so I can– 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

Absolutely. But then the good thing is you start to what I'd call situate that learning. So, if you go to medicine, if you go to a conference, say a cardiac conference with a bunch of heart surgeons, 80 per cent of the speakers are going to be practising heart surgeons. They're going to going to be telling you what they need to do and what you need to do and what they've learned and how to change it.  

Go to a law conference, 80 per cent of the speakers are going to be practising lawyers.  

Go to a teaching conference, 80 per cent of the speakers are going to be academics who have never taught a day in their life.  

So, here's where I start to situate it. We are still going to learn, but now we can start to situate our learning where we can say, 'Okay, there's professional learning where I'm learning from my peers, and that's the practical stuff where the people who are doing my job are telling me how to do my job differently and better because they have the same experience I do. We're learning from each other'. 

The other form then of professional learning, that's going to be where the Learning Blueprint sits in. That's when we take all this academic stuff and we stop thinking that's the answer, and we start recognising ‘I just got to situate that. I need to filter that through my own professional expertise’.  

It is never going to tell me what to do. Science and research and learning – believe it or not, learning and teaching are dissociable. Knowing everything about learning still doesn't tell you how to teach. That is literally what you do – so, we filter that. We learn to stop looking for answers there, and we learn to just say ‘Thank you for that information. Now I'm going to filter that and I'm going to see how that impacts my practice’.  

It's the same thing across the board. If you look at the most, what we would call, and I hate to use this term, but revolutionary creativity. So, you've got evolutionary creativity, which is basically, how do you just iterate within your field? That's what a lot of us are going to do. That's what most scientists are doing. That's what most teachers should be doing. You're just iterating in your field.  

You then get revolutionary creativity. These are the people who somehow change a field, and the difference between the two is evolutionary sticks purely within their field. If they go to professional learning, it's just going to be them talking with other people doing their same stuff.  

So, if I go to a law conference, it's 100 per cent lawyers talking to me. If I go to a heart conference, it's a 100 per cent cardiologists. Revolutionary creativity is they do about half of the internal stuff and the other half of their life, they spend learning other random stuff that they can then filter in through their context.  

So, for example, and by no means am I saying I'm a revolutionary creativity, but I went to a conference once on neuroscience and it was 80 per cent neuroscientists talking about the job. But they had one guy come in and he talked about bees and bee communication.  

I had no clue why this guy was there, but wasn't that the best hour of the entire conference? It's been years, I still think about it, trying to filter what does that have to do with the brain? That very question, what do bees have to do with the brain is where revolutionary creativity comes from, 'cause now I'm trying to meld something that's not specific to my field through my filter to say, 'Can that make me a better teacher?'  

So, that's why I think still bringing in learning, bringing in research, all this outside stuff is still really incredibly important. That's where a lot of creativity is going to come from. But all that still has to be filtered through your internal creativity, which is where most of your focus is going to be, that evolutionary step-by-step creativity you're doing in your job. 

Michael Broadstock: 

Yeah. So, the same question, then. What do you wish students understood about education? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

That … well shoot. I would say two things.  

First, when it comes to learning, I'd say for students that learning isn't an accident, that learning is a very specific biological process. When you know those rules, you can game those rules. A lot of students think that learning just happens, 'Sometimes I'm good at it, sometimes I'm bad'. No, it's a system and the people who know how to run the system are always good. The people who don't know are always hit or miss.  

So, I want them to recognise that ‘learning’ isn't you. It's not, some people are good at it, some people are bad. We all have the same system, you just need to learn to run it. Once you got that, you can do whatever you need to with learning in any field, really. You just start transferring knowledge. You're now in the driver's seat.  

So, on the one hand, I'd say I'd want them to recognise that learning is a process and it's learnable and it's controllable by you.  

On the other hand, I'd also want them to know that when it comes to just pure education, we are not the bad guys. Man, there is some weird narrative going on, and I think it's from, probably started with Ferris Bueller's Day off, where somehow school is this boring monolith where all kids do is sit there and if they're bored, it's because the teacher sucks...  

What are you talking about? All these people who say school is broken. I'm like, 'Have you been to a school in the last 20 years? We're killing it'. But for some reason, this narrative is, 'School sucks'. So, anytime a kid feels slightly bored, it must be, 'the school sucks, and I'm just not a school kid'.  

Man, school is wonderful. Everyone there is on your side and we're doing great things, and that's what learning feels like sometimes. If learning is hard, great, that's welcome to learning. It's never going to get easy. It's never going to be fun. People assume that everything's got to be a game show and exciting all the time.  

Heck no, man. Look, think of work. I love what I do. I'm absolutely 100 per cent in love with what I do. 80 per cent of what I do is still work. It's still a slog, and it's not fun, it's what you do to get to that 20 per cent. 

That's the same thing with learning in school. It's not always going to be bells and whistles, but if you can... that's the point. You get through this 80 per cent, there is 20 per cent of just absolute magic at the end. But if you fight me the entire time we're doing this 80 per cent, there is no 20 per cent at the end 'cause we just don't have the time or the effort or the energy to get there.  

So, stop thinking school sucks and that it's broken and somehow you don't need it – you can drop out and go run Google. That's a myth. That stuff doesn't happen. School is wonderful. The way we're doing it right now is really solid. We care about you more than you could possibly know.  

Sometimes, especially if you get metacognition, you'll start to recognise we're not kidding around. We know what we're doing. If you go through this, that's how you're going to run in your real world, in life beyond school. So, I just wish we had a new narrative about school and what it's doing. 

Michael Broadstock: 

And parents? 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

I think some parents are really good at recognising that teaching and education, it's a profession and we have trained our lives to do this. I think some parents still think of school as daycare, and they think they know better than teachers.  

Realistically, I do wish parents knew that, look, we didn't just wake up one day and say, 'I guess I'll teach because I can't do anything else '. We woke up one day and said, I'm going to teach because this is my passion, and I'm going to learn how to do it better than anyone else in this world'.  

It's not something you just magically can do, it's something you have to study. It's something you have to learn out like any other skill. The more you do it, the better you get at it. But sometimes parents don't recognise that. Their kid comes home and says, ‘I'm unhappy’, and they think, 'Well, the school must be broken. Let me tell you how to fix it'. That does my head in sometimes. 

Michael Broadstock: 

Parents can be part of the process though, can't they? They can contribute to the learning experience and support the learning experience at home. 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

Yeah, and that's what we see. If you look at school performance, there's a lot of factors driving some up and down. But one of the biggest ones is parent participation. If I know that the parent is there and the parent is kindly participating with that child, nine times out of 10, that child's going to perform better than the child whose parent is either not there or only shows up to yell.  

Yeah, there's this concept of recognise that learning is a process. Your kid is going through it, your kid isn't an adult yet, and you know that at home. But for some reason at school we're not supposed to acknowledge that, we're supposed to assume they can do anything. No, they're kids. We are helping them grow, and a lot of helping them grow is we have to teach them. We have to hold their hand. Sometimes we have to scold them. If they do something wrong, that's called learning. That's okay.  

So I think the parents, yeah, the more they can recognise you can be a part of this, and so long as you're a proactive part and a kind part, man, that's a great thing for your students. 

Michael Broadstock: 

Beautiful. Well, thanks for having a chat with us. It's great to have you on the program and good luck with parenting. 

Dr Jared Cooney Horvath: 

Thank you. I'll see you. 

Michael Broadstock: 

That's it for this episode of isPodcast. We're going to leave you today with The Man on The Steering Wheel by Aurelia Cabrera from The Knox School, which won best performance poem in the Years 7 and 8 category at this year's ISV Student Poetry Competition. The judges said Aurelia's powerfully-conveyed performance honours the poem and generates much to reflect on. 

Aurelia Cabrera: 

Hi, my name is Aurelia Cabrera, and I'm a Year 8 student at The Knox School. My poem is called The Man on the Steering Wheel.  

A car approaching at speeds eyes cannot follow.  

Blinded by the twinkling stars, holding our breaths, bracing ourselves for the worst.  

Panic braces down the man on the steering wheel's face.  

Two cars slam into each other, leaving us behind with the symphony of what could have been us.  

The swerves and turns really do sound like those in the movies. With all the crashing and bashing and smashing and like all movies, the man on the steering wheel story had a beginning, middle, and an end.  

Only if like with movies I could rewind or skip forward, maybe then I would often say these four words: 'I love you, dad,' not just on special occasions or persuasions for vacations and bizarre locations, but in situations like this.  

Situations which I never knew I would miss. 

The man on the steering wheel, the girl in the passenger seat, the tale of two stories I would never want to reread.  

Not because the plot was boring, but because of a lack of talking, you see, the girl in the passenger seat never understood that the man on the steering wheel's story was running out of pages. 

So, she treated him like she had done for ages, never saying those four words, never complimenting what he wore, never asking to go for a walk, never showing him that funny TikTok, never did, and now never will.  

Even though his cancer wasn't contagious, his cheeky smile that look could turn any frown upside down sure was.  

His strange yet unforgettable laugh that sprung from his belly sure was.  

His tears of anguish that raced down his yellow face as his last page turned sure was.  

The man on the steering wheel, the girl in the passenger seat, if only their story was not left incomplete. 

Michael Broadstock: 

isPodcast is brought to you by Independent Schools Victoria. It's produced by Duncan MacLean and presented by Natalie Moutafis and me, Mike Broadstock. Our podcast theme is composed by Duncan. There are transcripts of our show with links to what we've discussed at podcast.iseducation.com.au. Please follow us wherever you get your favourite podcasts. While you're there, we'd love it if you could rate and review the show so more people just like you can find us.