 Thank you very much. Isn't it funny how we always choose to sit at the back? It's just brilliant. So yeah, thanks very much for having me. It's a really interesting journey that I've been on over the last, what is it now? 20 years I've spent in education. And before that, I was at school. So I've never really known any other environment other than the school environment. Yeah, I've had a lot of jobs here and there. But I've really been immersed in education ever since I was a kid. And it's quite interesting that I should do that. Because when I was at school, I spent a lot of time trying to get out of it. My career advice, for example, was you, Daniel, are going to be lucky to get one. So to then find myself 20 years later, being invited to speak to people around the world, essentially, about how to engage kids, is really quite interesting. There's so much rhetoric out there in the education debate. And the one thing I sort of have over this crazy dream, and that dream is what would happen if educators controlled the education debate. Because I reckon we might sort of change our focus a little bit. For example, how many of you went into teaching to beat Finland? Case in point, right? So how many of you went into raise victorious NAP plan scores? Again, probably not many. And yet, unfortunately, that's how the rhetoric turns our focus in schools into these outcomes, outcomes, outcomes, at the expense of engagement and well-being. And I would argue, along with lots and lots of prominent researchers, that if we actually focused on engagement and well-being of kids and of staff, then outcomes would actually take care of themselves. But somewhere along the line, that gets lost. So that's what I want to kind of explore with you today and share with you some ideas. And share with you some research. What I'm not going to do is tell you what to do. Because I'm pretty sure I've not actually worked with you. I've never worked with your kids. I've never worked with your parents. So in that regard, I'm certainly no expert. I don't know what it's like at your school. But what I can do, like I said, share some ideas and then ask you to be the experts, to think critically about what we've said, to think critically about what the research says, and see, well, how can you contextualize that into your own communities? And then we'll take it from there. So what I would say is, as great as for my self-esteem, when I say something really thoughtful to see everyone quickly tweet it out or write it down or take a picture with the phones with that, what I would say to you, straight off the bat, is that you're going to get all the slides and any links to any research by going to that website there, danhazle.com.au15. So you could, if you want, just kick back and do nothing and you'll still get all the information. But we wouldn't be talking about education if we didn't at least talk about PISA just for a second. So for those of you who don't know too much about PISA, it's the performance of international students assessment. It's run by the OECD every few years. What they do is they take all the different countries in the OECD and non-partner countries, all the performance of the 15-year-old kids in standardized tests. So in Australia, it's the NAPLAN test. And then very, very generously put them into league tables and publish said league tables. So politicians in the media can use those league tables to hit us over the head and tell us what a bad job we're doing in Australia. Thank you. So what I'd like you to do is just very quickly with the person next to you, decide which of the PISA league tables that is. So, you know, maths or literacy or whatever. Very, very quickly. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go. Right, shout out. Maths, wrong. Next. Literacy, wrong. English, wrong. Sorry? Funding, no. Salaries of teachers, no. I'm going to take three more guesses. Science scores, no. Two more guesses. Sport, sport. I don't know, maybe. Maybe it's the soccer standings. I'm not sure, but it's not sport. Internet speed, possible. Some places I go in Australia, that could be right. It's not, though. Last guess. Teacher training, what do you say? The cost of going to school, education ranking in the world. You know when we say to kids, there are no right or wrong answers. This is actually, right, so in addition to being able to answer maths questions, literacy stuff, science and stuff, kids also in this particular programme have to answer value statements. And this is actually a league table of the proportion of kids who report that they don't belong at school. Now, in Australia, what we find is that 20% of our kids feel that they don't belong at school. Now, bear in mind that these are national statistics, which means I go to some schools and they go, turn it up, damn, kids love it here. They're beating down the door at the start of the day and we can't get them out of school at the end of the day. It's not just because we're a boarding school, they love it here. And I go, yeah, fair enough. But the very next day, I might find myself in another school where they would kill for it to only be 20% of the kids who felt they didn't belong there. And so my question is, well, what is it in your school? Do you know? Do you care? Why should you know? Why should you care? Just explore that a little bit later. I'm tipping you've heard of Finland. What's interesting is that Finland, despite having a fantastic education system, 35% of their kids feel they don't belong in there. Now that's really, really interesting. And when Estonia overtook Finland in the math scores and the media went to the equivalent of the Finnish, well, the equivalent of Christopher Pine and said, what are you gonna do about the fact that Estonia have overtaken us in maths? Do you know what he said? He said, the first thing I'm gonna do is find out why 35% of our kids don't feel they don't belong at school. That's why we should look to Finland. Not because of what they're doing, but because of their mindset. And Korea, brilliant at maths, but 40% of their kids feel they don't belong. Now I asked you before, why is that important and why should you care? I'll tell you why I should care, because school-connectedness, the extent to which a kid feels that they belong at school, is a better predictor of youth well-being and depression than even how attached they feel to their parents. So when a teacher tells me, oh, well, I haven't got time for kids well-being, they've lost me, we're more important than parents. More important than parents in determining whether a kid feels good today, six months down the track, five years down the track. Why is that important? It's bloody hard to learn if you're depressed. So before we get, talk about engaging and before we talk about amazing apps and giving every kid an iPad or a laptop or whatever, we need to make sure they feel like they belong. Relationships, all this research on student, teacher-student relationships comes down to three things. They don't want you to be their best friend, they've got loads of them. And besides, that'll get you sacked. What they want you to do is care about them, respect them and trust them. That's it. But they're actually quite hard concepts to get right in school. Respect, teachers still tell me kids have got a word in their respect. Not for me, mate. If you want to be a teacher, respect for kids should be the number one prerequisite for going into this job. Care. Do we really care about them or are the things we're saying and the things we're doing, giving them the very real opinion that actually know they don't give a toss about me? And trust. How interesting is trust in schools? Let's be honest. We ban the best bits of our technology because we don't trust kids. We need to try and break that cycle. But at the very least, kids have got to be able to answer two questions in your school. First one, do they feel able to be themselves at your school? Not in terms of what they wear and how they dress or what they look like in terms of hair color and piercings, but do they feel able to be themselves there in terms of their gender, their sexuality, their religious beliefs, their cultural backgrounds, their aspirations? And sometimes adolescents can be hard, right? So they might feel a bit tricky being themselves around their mates or they have to be able to feel that they can be themselves around you. The second thing is, is there an adult in that organization to which they can go to if they've got a serious problem? Again, if they can't answer yes to those two questions, we need to try and address it. That's before we worry about the next cool teaching strategy. So let's talk about the next cool teaching strategy or let's actually talk more about engagement first in our classroom. Let's actually look at what's happening in our classrooms. So this is a graph of engagement over time. You'll see down at this end of the graph here, five years of age, kids are never more engaged. Never. My kid started school last year, loved it. Why? Why do you get a sticker every day? What do you get a sticker for today, Jackson? Oh, I asked a good question in class, Dad. What do you get a sticker for today, Dad? Reading in class, Dad. What do you get a sticker for today? Picking up litter. That's irony, right? Because those stickers then become litter in my house. And he has no inclination in picking them up because I ain't giving them a sticker to do so. But I think there's something bigger at play when we talk about the stickers and we'll come back to them a little bit later. But what we do know and what the research shows over and over again, and this is actually research from a company called Gallup who do all the surveys that you've probably heard of. This is engagement over time. Now we have a bit of a dip and it actually gets to the point where in year five, 25% of the kids have disengaged from learning. Now that's not to say they're not turning up to school. They had to be there to take this survey. It's just they don't really see the point of why they're there. And then we see a continual dip and then there's a little, you see the little ski jump towards this end of the graph. Does anyone know how old they are when that little ski jump happens? 16, why do you think it's 16? Okay, so every year, every time they do the survey in Australia, we see it, every time we do it in the UK, you see it, every time you do it in New Zealand, you see it, America, you see it. Around about the time that they go into their final years of study, whether it's VCE down here, whether it's the SACE in Adelaide, whether it's HSC, there's a little peak. Why? We've told them it's important. And they stick their heads up, they look around for a few weeks and that's still crap. And it dips down again. So what we find in year 12, in year 12, one in two kids in your year 12 classes right now are disengaged. They're doing the stuff. They just don't really know why. Well, some of them are doing the stuff, let's be honest. There's a lot in your year 12 classes who aren't doing anything if we're being honest about it. So what we need to do is sort of really look at this and see, well, you know what's going on. Furthermore, one of the reasons might be that nationwide only one in three kids have a sense of hope for the future. Only one in three kids feel that they're likely to get a good job when they leave school. So all this stuff that we put about, saying, oh, you'll need this when you're older and you're gonna need, this is gonna help you get to uni and you get a good job. Only one in three nationwide actually believe you. Again, what is it in your school? Because in some schools I go to, it's not even that. Do you know, do you care? How can we address that? So let's talk about this word engagement. Let's be honest, it's used a heck of a lot in schools. What does it really mean? Because if you ask me, I think a lot of times we confuse conformity and compliance for engagement. We look at the kids who are doing, if we're being honest, everything we've asked them to do, so turn up, wear your uniform, do the work, ask questions, go home, do the homework, take part in sport, do a little bit, extra curricular stuff, maybe volunteer in the community because it's good to give back. And all these things are ticker box, ticker box, ticker box, ticker box, and then when it comes to report time, we can say, oh, little Johnny is engaged. Are they, or are they just playing the game? You know, schools are wonderful places if you're a slightly outgoing, compliant kid. Brilliant places, because you just get rewarded, you get the stickers from year five, you get the badges by the time you get to year 12, you get wonderful references from your principal and then you go and fall flat on your face in the workplace, or on campus, sometimes. I'm not saying that those kids who are doing everything we're asked aren't engaged, I'm just saying there are a lot who aren't. Again, do we know, do we care? Or are we happy just to keep doing what we're doing? Because if it's not broke, don't fix it, right? So let's think about this in terms of a continuum of engagement and this works whether you're thinking about your kids, yourself, your work colleagues, anyone in your life, really, and it can be contextual, so it can be from situation to situation to situation. So right down at the bottom end of the continuum of engagement, we've got rebellion. In some schools, the middle finger would be raised, right? But we've got rebellion, we've got the kids who have just gone, or doing everything they can to go, poking you and prodding you and getting you to kick them out. Then what we'll go back, then what we've got is retreatist behavior. So this is now moving up. So these are the kids who turn up but do everything they can to get out of doing whatever it is they're supposed to be doing. So I used to be a PE teacher. And when I first started, these were the kids who'd rock up and go, oh, sir, I didn't know I had PE today. All right, no worries, don't let up again. Next week, oh, I knew I had PE, but I was at my mom's house last night and the kids at my dad's. Or they turn up the next, oh, my kid's wet, sir, it's soaking wet. And I used to think that these kids were really disorganized, but they're not. They're supremely organized to make sure that they had the perfect excuse to get out of whatever, because I could, yeah, your kid's wet, mate, I know it is. Your dad, I know it is, I just spoke to him, well played. You know, and it's only of late that I realized just how organized these things, how much effort they must put in to getting out of doing whatever it is they're supposed to be doing. Nowadays, of course, it's the flat battery. Oh, forgot to charge my iPad. Or the internet was down at my house last night. Or they're the one kid who saved their work to USB and pulled it out without first clicking eject and it's corrupted the data. Like, you know, we all get that warning, but they're the one kid that's actually happened to. And we can't do much about it. How do you prove them wrong? Then we've got these passive compliers. So I do a lot of classroom visits, classroom walks, observations, all that kind of stuff. I sit down with the kid. And what I'm seeing in Australia in particular is this great move to having learning intentions on the board, success criteria. So kids know what they're learning and they know how to achieve success, brilliant. So I sit down and I say, what are you learning today? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, tell me. How do you know if you're gonna do it well? What do you have to do? Oh, it's up there, look, blah, blah, blah, and this is my work. Great, why are you doing it? I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? It might be on the test. Or is that, you know, you'll need this later in life? You tell a group of kids that, you know what they think? They go, sweet, I'll worry about it then. You know, they're quite pragmatic kids. They're gonna put off things which aren't important right now, right? So don't be telling them, oh, this is really important. You'll need this when you're older. They'll worry about it then. So it's interesting because these kids are still doing what we want them to do. They might still be quite successful actually, especially in the lower levels of stuff. These are a lot of the kids who might just be getting over the line. A lot of the time we'll say that these kids might not be necessarily reaching their full potential, but it's usually just a throwaway line in the reports. They're still doing the majority of what we want them to do, so the machine's working. Then we've got these bunch of kids. These kids know what they're doing. They know how to do it and they know why they're doing it. Everyone else's. And we leverage this quite a bit even from the lower end and stuff. Why can't you sit over here and be quiet like everyone else? Why can't you wear a uniform like everyone else? Why are you working on your own? Come and work with the group. So that's the lower level stuff. But then you go to the higher end where you've got your selective schools, for example. That main driving motivator isn't that they want to learn. It's because they're freaking out that everyone else is learning more than them. They don't want to get better for the sake of getting better. They just don't want to fall behind. And there's a big difference. And that's a massive, has massive impacts on well-being of kids and lifelong learning and all those kinds of things. So what we want to consider is a genuine sense of engagement. The sense of living a life, how an interest, curiosity and absorption, engage individuals, pursue goals with determination and vitality. What does that really mean? What does that look like? How engaged are you by that definition? And what I would suggest is that being engaged all the time is probably impossible. We could argue it'd be quite annoying to have a friend who is like that all the time. Just settle down. So when we look at it like this, why do we then think that kids should be engaged in every single class? If you think about your role, I'm guessing that there are some days that you wake up and go, oh, I'd rather not today. I'm guessing that when you look at your syllabus for the year, you're not looking at that and going, oh, every single lesson or winner. Right? There's probably some stuff in there that's a little bit dry, a little bit boring, something that if you'd rather, you know, if I could, I'd not do it. And you chose to do this. So what about the kids who don't have any choice? They have to come. What does that mean for them? Why are we so hell bent on engaging them in every single lesson? And let's be honest, if we are thinking that, are we setting ourselves up for failure? Or do we just lower the bar and convince ourselves, well, if kids just do as we're told, then we've engaged them? You know, this is when I go, it's called would kids turn up even if you didn't have to? I'm guessing that you guys are fairly engaged because let's look around. A lot of people didn't turn up right now because they didn't have to. But what about your classroom? Would kids turn up if they didn't have to? Would kids do the work that you're setting them even if they didn't have to? And I'm not saying that you'd have a walk out, you know. But I wonder how many empty chairs you might have. And again, I ask you, do you care about that? Or do you go, oh, well, it'd be good if those two kids didn't turn up because then I could teach the rest of them properly. If that's something that's going on in our heads, fair enough, that might be a fact, that might be your reality. But as a school, as an organization, what can we do for those two kids? Because, again, I don't think we went into teaching to just only teach the good kids. Because let's be honest, that's pretty easy. There's no fun in that. The fun's when you get the kids who are pushing you, thinking and challenging you, and you get that little glint in their eye and you get them just for a split second. And then you come back the year later and you say, oh, hang on, they've improved it. Or you see them five years down the track and they're looking really strange and different but they remember you. That's why, well, I don't know, that's why I went into teaching. Can we shift from this idea of just keeping kids on task to actually considering what it might look like if they get in-task? In-task, this is a concept, well, it's not his concept necessarily, but I got this on-task in-task from a guy called Jeff Munns and he ran a project called the Fair Go project in the New South Wales Department of Education. And basically what he's talking about is that concept of flow. You know where time stands still? You know when you say, I'll just be under the five minutes? And it's another half an hour and you get, whoa, where did that go? Or an hour passes and you're not thought about anything but what you're doing and you've lost complete track of time. That's called flow, that's peak engagement. I wonder how often that happens in our classrooms. I also wonder how many kids are at the opposite end of that spectrum where five minutes feels like an hour. I used to play a game at school where I challenged myself not to look at the clock until I knew it was halfway through the lesson. And the amount of times I got it wrong because it was just bragging. I wonder how many kids are playing that game. So the secrets to engagement aren't anything new. This has been around for a long, long time. The first thing for kids to be genuinely engaged or for you to be genuinely engaged, so this is regardless of whether you're a kid or an adult, right? You need to have some sense of autonomy, some sense of having a voice and having a choice. And it's remarkable how many kids say they feel like they have neither. Even when it comes to choosing their electives, let's be honest, it's a fairly narrow list in the broad scheme of things. But depending on how old the kids are, we might think, well, we can't give kids any more time. It's all about control. But the times have changed significantly. You've spent the last two, three days looking at Moodle and looking at all the different technologies. This idea of autonomy means that we can let kids work how they want, when they want, where they want, with who they want. That's what it means. And yet there's still far too many who are operating at the other end of that spectrum where I'm gonna tell you exactly how you're gonna work, when you're gonna work, where you're gonna work and with who you're gonna work. Why do we only let kids work with the kids sitting next to them? Or the kids sitting across the hall? Why can't we let kids work in different year groups, in different schools, in different states, in different countries? The answer is we can. It's just we choose not to, because we tell ourselves it's too hard. And once we start realizing that it's too hard to do that in school, we start becoming ever more irrelevant in the lives of our kids. Because as soon as they go home, they're playing games, where they want, when they want, how they want, with who they want. And we're starting to see this really big disconnect between how kids and adults, as well, if we're being honest, are operating in their downtime, or their own time, to when they come into institution or organizations. Corporate will to get in hold of this and understanding that for their employees. Schools are slowly catching up for their employees, but are really lagging behind for the kids. But clearly, whether it's Moodle, whether it's the technology that you're using, we've got the power in our hands to give kids more autonomy. Why are kids all doing the same task? You know, there's no need, the reason is, because it's easier. But again, if we keep lowering the bar and going to the lowest common denominator, we're going to be missing out on a heck of a lot of kids. The next concept is this idea of mastery, getting better for the sake of getting better, not for the sake of a grade. Now let me be, I'm going to put this right out there now. Anytime a software developer stands up in front of a group of teachers and says, hey, this is awesome, right? Because kids can see their grades. You can put all the grades in. I want to punch them. Because what we know about, it's not really, I don't freak out, right? But what the problem is, all the research around kids knowing their grades is that it squashes learning. If I've got three kids in here and we've studied sonnets in Shakespeare and I give Martin an A, I give gentlemen here a C, and I give the lady here an E, right? What desire does that have on their, sorry, what impact does that have on their desire to want to write a better sonnet? Martin doesn't need to. He's got an A. If Shakespeare himself was in my class, he could only get an A. The gentleman here's got a C. If we're being honest, most people, especially boys, will go sweet. That keeps everyone off my back, right? And they'll tell people things like, ah, I'll put more effort in when it's important. No, they won't. And the lady down here just gets an E and goes, well, that just confirms the fact I'm rubbish. I can't do this. And even when we put comments on, because obviously we very rarely just give a grade, right? We put useful feedback. Problem with that is, if you put the feedback with a grade that all the research shows that they don't even read the comments. And even if they do read the comments, they don't believe them because I don't need to read, improve. It still keeps everyone off my back and you don't believe that you can improve because the grade says you're done. So in terms of mastery, mastery should be the core of what we do in schools, right? Getting better at stuff all about education. But our very, the most common form of feedback we give kids of grade and feedback, we're wasting our time. Which is really, I'm very careful when I say this, because you'll have just written reports last semester, I'm guessing, but it's something to think about. I'd be much happier if software designers could say, you know what, I've developed a way where we can write reports and kids can chart their progress without the need for a grade. Or if they do need a grade, make that the last thing they see as opposed to the first thing they see. At least then you've got a chance of them taking on some of the feedback which you've spent hours writing. Let's not waste our time. And the last thing is this idea of purpose. So as I said, we've got to take the grade, we've got to take the focus off grades. We don't create lifelong learners if they're only motivated by grade. If you don't believe me, right? When you set a piece of work, what's the first question that you get asked? When's it due? What's it out of? Is it going to be on the test? And if you say, no, it's not going to be on the test, actually you can hand it in when you want, guess where it goes into the list of priorities? They're not genuinely interested or absorbed in what you're doing. So we've got to try and break this cycle of, as I said before, Jackson will pick up litter if he gets a sticker. I've got no problem with a six-year-old kid doing stuff because he gets a sticker. I've got a massive problem when 16-year-old kids only choose it's worth their while doing something if they get something for it. And if we've got lifelong learning anywhere on our website or where the individual succeeds or anything like that, we need to pay heed to these things, otherwise it's just empty rhetoric. So what do we mean by purpose? Well, I'll give you an example. So I spend a lot of time working with harder-to-reach kids. And our indigenous community, as we know, suffer large inequities in education, and let's be honest, across a whole raft of issues in society. And I was working with this one school and was saying, how are we going to get these kids to read? And write. And I said, well, what are we asking them to read and write? And again, there's this idea that kids don't like reading or writing anymore. I'd argue we're just asking them to read and write boring stuff. If we actually went to them, if we're interested in getting kids to read and write, let's get them to read and write about things that they're interested in. So we were talking about this, how can we get kids to read and write? And the interesting thing about indigenous, these kids that I was working with, was that they were losing contact with their elders. So whilst we might have, you know, obviously a lot of teenage kids lose contact with their elders, but we're talking about losing contact with a culture that's been here for 60,000 years, right? And so I said, well, what if we did something which enabled them to rediscover their culture, to go, you know, so they could understand it? And what if we could just, I don't know, go into communities, it's Instagram and some stuff or doing some spoken word poetry using SoundCloud or blogging about stuff, and sharing these stories. And then it kind of hit us in this little workshop group were saying, wouldn't it be cool if other kids could access this? Because isn't it a bit sad that for the most part, even though every Australian kid needs to learn about indigenous culture, for the most part, they learn it from a white person. You know, if we're being honest, probably learn it from a white person as well. What if we could connect these kids to other kids? And so these kids started, you know, a little bit, because they knew they can't read and write particularly well and they were a little bit unsure. So we sort of broke it down a little bit. So what does it mean to be indigenous anyway? Well, what are we going to start from? And from our workshop, I just tweeted out, I said, is there any teacher working with an indigenous group around the world who'd like to connect with these kids? Within about 20 minutes, there was a school in Canada who worked with First Nation kids. They were connecting and they skyped and they started building up this stuff. Then they moved on to Native American kids, building these connections, understanding what it means to be indigenous, wanting to share their story, taking pride in their stories to then connect with anyone else who wanted to engage them. We gave them a sense of autonomy. You know, you could choose how you wanted to do this. Master is in play. We were never going to grade their blogs, grade their Instagram pictures, grade their... And the purpose was something really intrinsically important to them, but also served a wider thing. Giving kids an audience, an authentic audience, is the easiest way to create purpose. So when do you think kids are most in task? When do kids lose track of time? Bang, right? So Minecraft, right? So I usually get three reactions when I put a Minecraft thing up. First one is mind what? Second one is, oh, Minecraft, because you've probably got kids. And the third one is, yeah, awesome Minecraft. And what's interesting is that I put Minecraft up, not because necessarily Minecraft is the game, but Minecraft is certainly the game changer. What I mean by that is, do you remember the games we used to play? And I'm looking around, there's probably some who are too young to remember this. But we used to have to put, get this, 20 cents in, and we'd pay this out of our pocket money, to play Pac-Man. Now think about Pac-Man for a second, those old enough to remember it, right? How many choices did you have when you started Pac-Man? I can see someone going like this, right? So you could go up, down, left, or right, yeah? Could you be a ghost? No, could you change the color of Pac-Man? Could you go outside the square? Could you make your own maze? No, right? And how many ghosts did you get? Three, yeah? Three like Bangon, another 20 pence, please. One of the reasons adults don't understand why kids love gaming is because the games we played were crap. That's the bottom, that's why adults don't get it, right? Their gaming experience was rubbish, although we thought it was good at the time. But that's why you don't have people have grown up playing Pac-Man. They played it a little bit and then gave it away. But then games evolved, right? So let's say five, six, seven, eight years ago, Call of Duty comes out, you've got a narrative of Call of Duty, but you've got a lot of choice in that. You can choose what side, you can fight for both sides, you can choose a role, you can play online, whatever, whatever, whatever. But then Minecraft came out and there was no narrative. It just handed all complete creativity and ownership of the game over to the gamer. And that's why kids love it. Why is it kids will fail over and over and over again and keep coming back for more but fail once or twice in maths and give up? And some people say to me, oh, it's because they're anonymous online, they don't mind failing. Let me tell you, there are kids who are better known on the other side of the world than they are on the other side of your campus. It's nothing to do with anonymity, all right? And the second thing is that, you know, parents go, oh yeah, but it's fun. It's fun, kids don't mind it because it's fun. As if kids are just playing games, laughing and joking all the time. If you've seen a kid play a game, they're not laughing and joking any of the time. It's hard work, but they love it because it's got autonomy, mastery, and the purpose is whatever they want it to be. That's why Minecraft has really captured the imagination. How it's gonna change, who knows? I mean, who knows what the next iteration is gonna be? Like considering what I was listening to Dean Saunders talk before about virtual reality, I can just see, you know, actually playing Minecraft in world is just gonna be unbelievable. You know what? The games will have changed even more by then. But the question is, okay, so your kids are playing games, but what is it? So Jackson was six when he came to me and says, dad, what I've done, right, is I've built a chest, I've put all my stuff in it. So when I go out looking for a village, if I get got by a creeper, when I respawn, I won't have lost all my stuff, all right? Now, those people go mind what? You've got no idea what I just said. But what he said to me was, dad, I've developed a strategy to deal with failure. I didn't tell him that because I would have killed the moment, right? I just went, good lad, good lad, right? But that's what he said to me. And the point is, why don't kids develop those strategies in school? Because they don't, they see failure in schools and end point. You see failure in a game as a respawn. You respawn where you last had success. They know they're getting success because you got XB points. How can we do that? There's a lot of work around growth mindset at the moment. That's got some way, I think that's got a way in to help us understand how we can take the essence of gaming and put it into learning. I don't know if badges are the answer. If badges are just replacements for grades, kids don't play games to get those badges. All right, maybe there's a slight motivator, but a lot of kids are playing them because of those reasons we've talked about. And I guess, why is your kid playing online at 2 a.m.? Because that's when the USA come online. It's all about relationships. So it's interesting to have a look at these things. So I guess, as I sort of alluded to before, I think we set ourselves up for a bit of a failure if we talk about engaging kids in every single class. Because let's be honest, some of the stuff we're trying to teach is boring. But what if we could take a step back and say, well, in general, are you living a life high on interest, curiosity, and resolution? Are you, in general, pursuing your goals with determination and vitality? And then we can do that by taking a step back and looking to engage kids in their life, the world around them, and their future. So what I mean by that is, their life, I, it's a bit of a throwaway comment, but I sort of say, I don't think kids should go to school. I think schools should go to kids and meet them in their territory, right? So what I mean by that is use the technologies that they're using. Why would we not, you know? We just come up with a school version of Facebook or a school version of games. Why not use what they're using? Yes, it's hard, but that's why we're professionals, you know? The world around them, using blogs, connecting them to different cultures. You know, I gave a talk recently about how did we ever get to a point in our country where our Attorney General says it's all right to be bigoted? How did we get to a point in our country where our Prime Minister dismisses 60,000 years of culture as a lifestyle choice? How does that happen? I'll tell you what happens. Kids are told to stop asking questions. So, you know, you see in the supermarket all the time, kids looking at a go, Mum, why is that lady wearing a headscarf? And parents go, oh, don't be rude. It's not rude. You know, there's a very famous poem and it talks about the very first thing that we steal from kids is their questions. And because we just tell them to accept it, blind acceptance, blind acceptance isn't compassion, it's not empathy, it's ignorance. So why not let, if adults are uncomfortable talking about it, why not just connect kids to kids and talk about it, whether it's intercultural or interreligious or whatever it might be? And then what would be quite interesting, I bet you'd find, is that the kids don't know why Mum's wearing a scarf or they don't know why Dad eats a certain kind of food. So they have to go and ask and find out. And they'd just be interested in, I think, it'd be interesting to see what would happen if adults just shut up in certain areas. And that's what I mean by engaging kids in the world around them. And finally, the future, you know, we can always talk about the future as if it is, you know, not important. Well, we say it's important, but kids don't think that because it's, you know, it's way off. But we can have kids developing their digital footprints. We can have kids developing a work portfolio by engaging in platforms like freelancer.com, you know, or publishing on different platforms. So they can actually start pursuing their things, taking courses on Coursera, you know, building those in, you've got the capability to do it, building a Coursera course into your school curriculum or as part of the extension course or a way to personalise learning. Personalised learning isn't a teacher standing in front of 30 kids making it different for every single one. Personalised learning is giving the kids the tools to personalise it for them so they're making it intrinsically relevant to them. And we've got the technology to do it, we just need to change our mindset. And I think if we can take a step back and think a bit broader about it rather than just thinking, well, have I got the kids doing what I've asked them to do, then we can really start talking about what it means to engage kids today. That's how you can get hold of me if you want to talk more. Thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoy the rest of the event. Thank you.