Have I gone off learner well-being?

I hear that the question gets asked! It’s no secret that I’ve been vocal recently about the direction of SA public education. It’s got some tongues wagging (lucky me), and I've heard around the traps that I may have decided that learner wellbeing isn’t essential anymore, that I’ve gone off wellbeing!

Just to set the record straight. I have not.

What I have gone off is the false dichotomy that gets pedaled (either inadvertently or deliberately—I'm not sure yet) that a school or a system can only be doing one or the other, focusing on student wellbeing or good curriculum teaching. I’m certainly off the idea that one has to come at the expense of the other. As I wrote in a recent Facebook post, it is not a zero-sum game.

Once upon a time, restorative practice/ behaviour management was the core of my consulting work. It’s still there (check my menu of workshops). Still, it shares my work life with specialist dyslexia remediation and mentoring at Fullarton House, where I’m a co-director. I’m also running a literacy program with some very talented individuals that has got really big, really fast. A nice problem to have.

Sharing my work life between Restorative Practices/behaviour management (wellbeing) and evidence-informed literacy instruction has given me (I think) a unique vantage point. I’ve yet to meet another consultant who spans these fields, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have helped schools do some great things in both endeavors. This has proven something I’ve always suspected:

Ensuring excellent teaching in every classroom is the number one thing a school can do to improve student well-being.

As a classroom teacher, I was good at relationships and classroom management; however, I had to be good at these things to compensate for being a weak pedagogue. At the time, in the late 90s and into the 000s in SA, the SA Department’s PD offerings were thick on ideology. Initiatives like “Learning to Learn” dominated the landscape. Still, they were thin on anything to help teachers lift student literacy and numeracy and pull kids out of educational disadvantage. You’ve picked what I think about the core business of schools as well:

Making kids literate and numerate.

Carol Scerri, ex-principal of Salisbury Primary School, repeated this core business mantra often. She also became good at asking, “Bring me the evidence.” Carol and the folks, who started what was nothing short of a teaching revolution at Salisbury Primary School (I’m talking about you Fay Mackey, Kristen Aldenhoven and Leah Draper and then others) ended up with a school of excellent teachers and students who could do things I never expected I’d see in a category two school. Inspired by Sarah Asome, Steve Capp, and the Bentleigh West Primary School team, the Salisbury Primary folks said, “We’re going to do what BWPS did, but we’re going to do it in a Category 2 school”. They pulled it off.

Here’s what else they did at Salisbury Primary School. They created a calm, safe, and orderly learning environment. The kids and staff were generally well—better than the majority of schools. Of course, Salisbury worked hard to improve the learners' well-being. They had an excellent leader of well-being (that’s you, Steph) and did lots of work with kids in the affective domain (I can use words like that because of a master's Degree in School Counselling).

Leah Draper - Ex-Salisbury Primary School Leader. Leah is a powerhouse of knowledge.

If you ask me what shifted the needle the most, it was the teaching of content at Salisbury and the continuous focus on improving it. Staff meetings were dedicated to upskilling teachers in pedagogy and content knowledge, and in the words of Anita Archer, Salisbury Primary decided to “teach the stuff and cut the fluff”.

Salisbury defied statistics and outperformed their postcode. Their student growth data outperformed private schools everywhere, and I cheered—loudly. Sorry, private schools— I love you, but’ll always back the underdog. And boy, did those private schools flock to Salisbury Primary School when they generously opened their classrooms and instructional playbooks for the famous—but sadly now gone—Salisbury Study Tours. Travis (Progress Educational), myself, and countless other schools will be forever grateful for this.

When you’re literate and numerate, you have the foundations of critical thinking and problem-solving. Without these, you’re really in trouble in all sorts of ways. You can have all the learner dispositions you like, but you’re still stuffed. The wasted potential and unfulfilled lives that come from education systems failing kids on these essentials still make me want to cry.

So, although I may do more work nowadays in the literacy space, I’m still in the well-being space. My thoughts have changed over the years, and a few folks have pointed this out to me, sometimes rather accusingly. Salisbury Primary School, I will always blame you for being the inescapable truth. However, I knew it deep down, and some fellow named Hattie showed that teachers who know their content, teach it well, and, I’ll add, love their kids, will always make the most significant difference to learner wellbeing.

.

.