Breaking Legacy Thinking in Schools | Francois Naude

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [04:22]I think one of the teachers that really stood out for me was a teacher I had very early on. We had immigrated from Scotland when I was seven, and they put me into what is now grade three at seven years old, because we started earlier in Scotland and I was reading quite well. And I really struggled. It just didn't go well with me for that first year. And there was one teacher who really took me under her wing, Mrs. Lorenz. It was the first time I'd experienced a teacher really seeing me, not just a face in the classroom, not just a number at a desk. But actually seeing me and spending time with me, not necessarily on the academics, but helping me with the adjustment that I was going through as a young child in a very, very different culture. I remember, well, she did elocution lessons for me when I was trying to learn the transition between this broad Scots accent and the South African accent. And then I remember also having a conversation with her the one day, and she said to me, you know, Jax, at some point your immigrant status is going to fall away, so you're going to have to learn how to speak some Afrikaans. And I was terrified. And she said, no, no, it's fine, we're just going to go very, very slowly. And she had us all sitting on the carpet in her classroom, and every child had to say an Afrikaans sentence before they could get up and go back to their desks. And I sat there absolutely quivering with fear, because I didn't know a single word. And I was the la- all these kids were getting up and saying their sentences and going back to their desks, and there were fewer and fewer and fewer kids on this carpet until, of course, I was left sitting on my own. And she was just so kind about the whole situation, and so supportive about the whole situation. and to this day, I remember the sentence that I ended up having to say, because she coached me through the whole sentence, saying, and everybody cheered, and I went back to my desk, and, you know, that was that. So, yeah, she was definitely a super teacher for me, because she, she saw me, and she literally held my hand through all the stages that I needed help with. She walked that road with me while I was adjusting, so she was just incredible.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [11:59]The reason we're laughing is that this is a very, if you went and looked on our website at our recruitment, you'd be going, we've never seen this before.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [12:06]Yeah.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [12:06]We call it the Shackleton process. And it's based on Ernest Shackleton, and he was recruiting men for going to the South Pole, and I'm, it's probably a very abbreviated version of what I'm talking about, but his ad was, men wanted, dangerous journey, pay low, success doubtful, reward If come back is going to be a lot of esteem type of thing. And he kind of put it out there as this is what it's really about. And our Shackleton process exactly that. Teachers wanted toughest job in the universe, pays low, rewards immense, and you're probably going to cry quite a lot along the way. And the thing about Ernest Shackleton is that he ended up on his ice-breaking ship getting caught in, the ice flow. His ship got crushed, everyone got marooned on an ice island, and it took them six months to trek to a place where people could, you know, get them back again and into civilization, and he didn't lose a single crew member because he had the right team members on board with him. And again, that's a very abbreviated version of what happened. But when looking at recruiting teachers, we've done it over many years, and the very strong team we have at the moment is a result of realistically understanding that being a teacher is probably the toughest job in the world.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [13:18]So that's how we put it across in the, in the application process. We have a space for a very short CV, but it's more about answering questions about themselves and for us really putting across that the job is not for sissies. Gershom and I don't believe in hiring someone with a fabulous CV with a great brain in their head and then as soon as they walk through the door expecting them to stop thinking. They're going to be hired because they have a brain in their head and then we're going to say, right, go. And so there's a lot of, I suppose there's a lot of deep end. But we do offer the water wings, and we walk the journey with them. There's a lot of training and a lot of support, but it has resulted in an exceptionally strong team, and I think their response to COVID, you know, is a, is a recent example of, of just how strong they actually are.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [20:30]Yeah, I think we, there's two things that we've started focusing on that has helped us feel a lot more comfortable and we think brings out the authenticity in it. The first is that we say to the person coming in, you're sitting here because you've got all the qualifications, we like what we saw with your teaching. The interview with us is to see if there's a meeting of the minds, to see if we have a relationship, to see if you're somebody we can work with. Because, you know, ideally, if you're going to have relationships with students, you need to have relationships as leaders of a school with your staff as well, with your teachers, your faculty. And that first interview is just about us finding a connection, some common ground, and just seeing if there's a meeting of the minds in terms of how we're approaching education, what the school's doing, what your thoughts are, et cetera, and where you are in your life. And then the second thing that we do, because we can't always just trust our own judgment, we always bring our own bias and filters to the, to the party, is that we then hand them over to the faculty. So we'll choose three or four teachers, depending on the circumstances, who's available, who's interested in it, and we'll do a second interview where that person goes and talks to the teachers, because ultimately, Jax and I might be the leaders of the school, but we're not in the trenches day to day as the teachers are, and they have to know, this is a dude that I can rely on. If the person's not going to do the job properly, then they're the ones who are going to have to pick up the pieces and help them along, they're the ones that are going to have to train them and help them in that process. So it allows for a lot more buy-in. This is someone we got on, so when things, you know, if the team has chosen this person as well and given us feedback, Then there's buy-in from helping and walking the path with them. And that's probably created the stronger team because prospective teachers are a lot more comfortable asking the tough questions of their teammates. So what is the boss really like? And what is it really like working here? And they'll get a realistic idea of what's happening. We found that at the moment that's working, as Jax and I said, we don't have a fast and hard, it's experimental, and we're trying to keep it as experiential as possible in that place as well. Trying to get to the root of authenticity so that, as you said, there's no BS happening when they're coming in and sitting in the room, you know?

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [29:01]Yeah, we have to be quite discerning, and an example that I can give you of that, that's a bit like the hornet's nest you mentioned earlier, you know, last year when we were in the heat of COVID, We would normally have a Suhiso meeting once a term, for example, but, we were having them once a week while we were really in the throes of, you know, trying to coordinate labor department and education department and everything else, health department, and get all these protocols sorted out. And while a lot of the information was valuable information that we needed to be able to get back to school successfully, there was a lot that wasn't necessarily relevant to a school of our size. We don't do ECD, for example, we start at grade four. And the meetings became, for Gershon, the meetings became a source of our stress. And a source of our depression, what we were really getting quite bogged down by the whole thing. So we made the decision to not attend some of those meetings and to kind of tag team on some of them, that he would do some and that I would do some, and then we would only discuss the pertinent bits with each other, so that we were eliminating a lot of the, the weight that other independent schools were taking on and communicating that was not relevant to us, and we were not achieving the objectives that we needed to achieve. You know, Gavin said something really interesting to us when, when we started the COVID journey. He said to us, you have to just keep your arc afloat. That's your journey here. Keep your arc afloat. And Gershon and I really took that to heart. You know, it was whatever needs to be done here, and our arc is our whole community, the, the children, our staff, and their families, because they're all interlinked and interconnected. So that was the objective we set out to, to survive COVID with. It informed a lot of our decision making and allowed us the space to say, okay, you know what, Gersh, you take that Tahisa meeting and then I'll do the next one and we'll only communicate the bits that are relevant to us. It also stopped us falling into that, that current that everyone was just following for the sake of it, because it was the easy route. So it is unusual, but it's working.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [39:19]The fifty percent pass mark as a minimum pass mark got two functions. The first is in the tertiary world, in the real world, when you, as an adult, fifty percent is the pass mark for most subjects, in tertiary education, et cetera. And secondly, if you get fifty percent for all your subjects, We feel that you, we've opened the door, the best door possible, which is a bachelor's pass, which allows you access to tertiary education if you want that. So that's why we've set the pass mark at fifty percent.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [39:45]That fifty percent pass remains in place right through until the end of prelims. So they have to maintain their fifty percent pass right through their prelims as well.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [39:53]And then the aspirational pass is seventy-five percent, and there's also two reasons for that. The first is, that's a distinction in most tertiary spaces as well, and more importantly, it takes you into the higher cognitive thinking. You know, the most of your exams, most of your tests, if they're structured properly, the top thirty percent of those questions are in the higher cognitive space in terms of Bloom's taxonomy. So the first thirty, forty percent might be in your, in your lower cognitive, your middle cognitive being from thirty, forty to about sixty, seventy. But we want our kids to engage in the higher cognitive thinking spaces, which is synthesizing, analyzing, creating. And having an aspirational path to that looks like what the rest of the world looks like in terms of distinctions and, and, and recognition in that space, but also having them wanting to be in the higher cognitive thinking space is very, very important for us. Well, it

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [40:45]tells us as teachers as well that The child's passing and moving into that cognitive space. We've covered all three cognitive levels. And again, talking about the cognitive levels, it's a conversation we often have with the kids and the parents. So we're all speaking the same language. You know, if we're going through a test with the children, we'll say to them, what cognitive level is that question? And they can identify it. It's not a mystery. It's not this big magical thing. But the 75% tells us as the teachers that our children are covering all three and moving into the higher third space.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [43:35]So something else we've done, and this is an advantage of being a small school and being the co-founders and still involved in the day-to-day of the school, is that teaching teachers to get away from the quantitative, you know, formal assessment, the summative assessment that Jax was talking about is quite a process because it's hardwired into us, even through our own learning experience. So there are certain subjects at Edu Inc up to grade nine that I've made non-examinable. Music and movement, technology. And what we've done is in that space, instead of following the old ice cream stick bridges and things like that, I introduced them to EGD for one semester, and then I introduced them into building raspberry pies and coding and things like that. And I've challenged the teachers in music and movement, the grade nines make a movie. So the first term is scripting it all out, second term is making all the costumes and that, and the third term is putting it all together and editing. There's so much more skills happening in that space. Soft skills, learning to work as a team and dynamics, and I can't make it to the shoot because of this. Figuring it all out, sometimes we have to jump in and intervene before blood spills. But at the end of the day, it's challenging the teachers to be able to evaluate performance, not on an end result, but on the process that leads to it. And it's part of design thinking for us. We want them to go through a process of fastest path to experience, and if the teacher sees them doing that, they're rewarding that, rather than belabor something that's really not working. Okay, that's not working. Let me try something new. We want teachers to reward the iterative process of failing, starting again, failing, starting again. So we've created subjects where the teachers are able to form opinions based on participation. They create rubrics that are different to what they would do normally just on the base marks. And it's starting to seep into the normal academic subjects because it allows them to see the strengths and what we're seeing and how it's coming out is that the quality of the different types of assessments the teachers are using in the traditional subjects, where they are understanding that different students have different strengths, therefore they are able to demonstrate their skills in different ways. It allows you to have two topics for the same assessment and still have it, but there's one child who is better equipped to do an oral presentation than a formal written presentation, for example, whereas you can get the same test of knowledge And mark it in the same way, but it's presented in two different ways. So we're challenging the teachers to do that through creating a space where they're very uncomfortable, they're not used to being able to evaluate children on things that are not black and white and binary type of thing. And it's an interesting conversation, but it's opening their minds to assessment being different than just putting down a formal assessment, and then you get your marks and that's that.