ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS

An interview with Jamie Gerlach on the Kaleidoscope Podcast

⏺ Disruption ⏺ Agency ⏺ Participation ⏺ Creativity

If any of these topics are spiking your interest, take time out of your day to listen to the provocations of Jamie Gerlach as he shares his experiences and learnings with David Drumond and Christina Luzi on this episode of the Kaleidoscope Podcast.

This podcast was published on March 26, 2024 on the Kaleidescope Podcast, by the Kaleidoscope Movement.

An interview with Michael Anderson on The NAME it Podcast.

In this episode 3rd episode in a special series exploring the re-imagining of education, 4CTL co-founder, Prof. Michael Anderson, and podcast host Jonas Ogonowski talk about:

• The pivotal moment that led Michael become involved in transformative education

• What transformation of education means in the context of our conversation

• The 4C Transformative Learning Framework

• The need for concerted, committed, long-term energy at all levels of education to bring about a transformation

• Local examples working on the transformation of education

• The cost of the status quo

• Education as a midwife to the renewal of democracy in each generation

• How AI and other technologies are exerting transformational pressures on status quo.

And many other topics.

This interview was published on July 2, 2023.

A blog article written by Michael Anderson for Kadenze Creative.

As I look over the posts in this Kadenze series on the ‘new normal’ post-COVID education, it seems that many are exploring (sometimes using different names) what might be called a ‘pedagogy of creativity’. There has been a long running and extensive discussion about the place of creativity in education but perhaps we are now inching closer to what we might call a pedagogy of creativity. This is probably unsurprising because there is a history of a pedagogy of creativity hiding in plain sight.

 Things seem to be on the move.

Many educational pioneers provide the foundations for this educational priority. In 1929  John Dewey argued in the Quest for Certainty “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” and provided clear insights into how the imagination drives progress, and that such progress is not exclusively associated with the arts.

 What are the Features of a ‘Pedagogy of Creativity’?

To imagine a pedagogy of creativity we need first to imagine its features…

This article was published by Kadenze Creative on Feb 22, 2023.

An article by Michael Anderson for AARE’s publication EduResearch Matters.

How do we measure success in education? At the moment, and for a fair while, we have measured success through a benchmark score, standardised testing and a system that often pits individuals against one another and schools against schools. The result is less like comparing apples with oranges, and more like a system to rank the relative worth of a fingerprint. While fingerprints are useful they don’t tell us all there is to know about ourselves. And our modern testing regimes certainly don’t tell us all we need to know about student progression and what’s working in schools, universities and other organizations.

As an education researcher and university teacher I often find myself in discussions with teachers and school leaders about how we might reimagine our schools to embed deeper learning. A few weeks ago, I found myself in a school talking about the capacity for the 4Cs – creativity, collaboration, communication and critical reflection – to fundamentally transform not only schools, but the way we view learning in many contexts.

This article was published on the EduResearch Matters website on March 4, 2019

An article by Michael Anderson for the Sydney Morning Herald.

About 70,000 students will start kindergarten in NSW this week, part of a nationwide cohort of more than 300,000 children.

By 2031 most of them will pop out the other end of the education system into a world with widespread autonomous transport, artificial intelligence embedded in most things, healthcare that will make present approaches look medieval, and radically changed ways of working, doing business and being a citizen.

Are the roughly 10,000 hours students spend at school good value and are they preparing our young people for this brave new world or do we need to rethink this precious resource?

And if we do have the courage to change, how might transformation even be possible when the shape of the future is uncertain? If we want to avoid our schools becoming museums – packed with approaches from the teaching past – what changes can we make?

This article was published by the Sydney Morning Herald on Jan 27, 2018.

An article by Michael Anderson for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Innovation in how learning generates creativity in their students. Innovation that re-imagines learning as evermore engaging and challenging.

Imagine a school where the students have the agency to know how to learn. Where students have the curiosity and confidence to engage with the world as active citizens in small and big ways.

This is what we call 4C schools, and these schools exist. The 4Cs are creativity, critical reflection, collaboration and communication. In their classrooms and staffrooms, 4C schools are transforming learning and teaching through this quartet. But in these schools it takes will, energy, inquiry, courage and determination.

The 4C evolution is only just beginning in certain schools but it is always characterised by a climate of re-invigoration, excitement, challenge, difficulty, uncertainty and possibility.

This article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 7, 2017.

An interview with Michael Anderson on ABC Radio National.

4C's Co-Founder Michael Anderson spoke to Geraldine Doogue on ABC Radio National about our work in Transforming Schools and Transforming Organizations.

Economists Brent Marshall and J. Steven Picou have said “the critical question is not how do we reduce uncertainty but rather how do we make better decisions in a world or irreducible uncertainties.”  An apt quote when thinking about how corporations can transform to be more efficient in a climate where businesses move through their life cycle twice as quickly as they did thirty years ago.

The interview touches on everything from the "infinite game" of education, to the qualities required for successful leadership.

"If you're teaching year 9 on a wet Thursday afternoon, what does creativity actually look like as a learning strategy?"

This interview was published by Radio National on April 20, 2019.

Let’s dump outmoded practices and mindsets

An article authored by Michael Anderson and Miranda Jefferson for AARE’s publication EduResearch Matters.

On October 5th 1979 stuntman Kenny Powers attempted to jump his rocket powered Lincoln Continental car from Canada to the USA across the St Lawrence River; a jump of 1.6 kilometres. The preparation took more than four years; it was costly (more than one million dollars), methodical and exacting. When the day finally came for the jump the car flew about fifteen metres and plunged into the river seriously injuring the stuntman. In the end, no matter how careful the preparation of the equipment or how experienced the team or highly trained the stuntman they fell woefully short.

Fast-forward to today and our schools face a similar jump. We have spent years preparing ourselves, training, restructuring, ‘harmonising’, recruiting and developing our people. However we currently don’t have the capacity to make the jump from old ways of thinking and doing in schools, to approaches that are going to help us jump the gap from rhetoric in policy to the realities of teaching in an uncertain world. We have lots to say in our policies about creativity, innovation, effective and authentic collaboration, perceptive critical reflection and incisive communication, but in schools our teachers face complex problems, fixed mindsets and outmoded practices.

In the University of Sydney’s recently released report Preparing for the Best and the Worst of Times we discuss the complexities created for our schools from the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence and the need for a focus on what we call ‘learning dispositions’ to respond effectively to that challenge. As we see it, Australian schools have the resources they need in energy, hope and compassion but they lack the structures and processes to make the jump.

This article was published on July 9, 2018.

Machines don't care about making society flourish, but teachers do.

An article by Michael Anderson for Huff Post.

Recently, I attended a discussion on the future of education where the answer was more technology. All we need is to develop an app or online course -- and that will solve the problem. Unfortunately, that completely misses the point. While the way we interact with technology will be critical, the transformation of education is going to be so much harder than a 'machine fix'.

The transformation of schools will depend on how successfully we can build capacity to create, communicate, collaborate -- and think better -- to make human society flourish rather than decline. Machines do not know or care about that at the moment and potentially never can.

And that for me is where teachers, not technology, are the ultimate disruptors. Science Fiction writer Arthur C Clarke said almost 40 years ago that if teachers could be replaced by machines, they should. In Japan and Korea robots have already been used in a number language lessons. But there are certain changes that only teachers can bring to a schooling system badly in need of transformation.

We need a schooling system that moves beyond an obsession with testing static knowledge to making schools places where knowledge can be applied flexibly to intractable problems.

This article was published by Huff Post on June 6, 2017.

A podcast interview with Michael Anderson and Glen Snowball on the Learning Conversations podcast from Inaburra School.

Creativity is something which is inherent in each of us, and yet certain activities we engage in can strengthen that capacity. Michael shares a global perspective on where creativity education is up to, and Glenn speaks from the viewpoint of a teacher seeking to build students’ creative capacity for design thinking.

This podcast was published on March 24, 2023 on The Inaburra School Podcast.

A podcast interview with Michael Anderson on the Leadership Decanted Podcast.

“Professor Michael Anderson joins us over a few glasses of wine to talk about his research and work in the areas of education and how some of the ideas, concepts and frameworks might be relevant to leadership practice.”

This podcast was published by Apple Podcasts on Jan 30, 2022.

Preparing for the best and worst of times

An article authored by Professor John Buchanan, Dr Rose Ryan, Professor  Michael Anderson, Professor Rafael Calvo, Professor Nick Glozier, Dr Sandra Peter for the NSW Department of Education.

The NSW Department of Education challenged a consortium of University of Sydney academics to consider the important question of what today’s kindergarteners will need to thrive and not just survive in the 21st century. The Department is particularly interested in the predicted changes technologies could bring to Australia’s economy, workplace and community. This report, which integrates insights from scholars in faculties as diverse as engineering and medicine, business potentially relevant issues; rather, it explores some of the challenges and opportunities around these emerging technologies and what this might mean for education, particularly school education.

This article was published by NSW Dept of Education on May 13, 2018.

The Creative Thinking Project

Professor Michael Anderson of The University of Sydney joined “The Creative Process” course last week to give a compelling guest lecture on the importance of creativity in education.

Professor Anderson addressed “the elephant in the classroom”: the lack of creativity in many standard practices in the current education system. He argued that focus on meeting narrow assessment criteria – a model developed in the nineteenth century – meant today’s students were not being given the necessary skills to deal with the twenty-first century. His suggestion was that creativity needed to be added to the existing “basics” of education, so that the new core curriculum would feature literacy, numeracy, and creativity.

Professor Anderson offered two reasons for this change in approach. First, rapid technological advances mean that computers and robots can increasingly handle mechanical tasks (from product assembly to data location and matching). Human workers need to have the skills to work WITH the resultant products and data to add value to the modern workflow. Secondly, the huge challenges facing the world today – climate change, poverty, warfare, food scarcity – cannot be solved without new and innovative strategies. (As Albert Einstein said, “problems cannot be solved using the same thinking that created them.”) Educating for creativity is vital to the survival of the planet, not just the human race.

Aug 14, 2015