Rebecca Birch, The Educator's Most Influential Educator, pursing authentic change through classroom practice and research

I mean, and just to expand a little bit on the work you did in terms of writing and smart study, that's gone on to have a significant impact for other people.

Do you want to just unpack that a little bit? Yeah,

so

I'd

say smart study, it came at a time when...

People were just thinking about things like retrieval practice.

So we're talking about sort of 2020, I want to say end of 2023, I think.

And those conversations were pretty new just for starters, like how does memory work? How do students study optimally? And at the same time, there are a lot of issues with student well-being.

So independent schools are constantly in the newspaper for their high numbers of students with disability provisions and all that kind of stuff.

And so the school was looking at how do we actually – address the root cause of this is if it's genuinely, you know, study anxiety, we can put that, you know, give that locus of control back to students.

And so schools were really interested in that work and we got a number of schools get in touch and visit the school and see the program as well.

And even people from as far away as the UK were asking us about that particular program.

It was a continual stream of schools interested in doing something similar.

And I think the program itself, it's a pretty low barrier to entries in that you just need to know how retrieval works.

You need to know the sort of basic research by Bjork and Dunlosky on what practices work best.

And then you can develop a program pretty easily.

Like once you get some of those fundamentals across to students and then some of the more sort of well-being student support, socio-emotional aspects of the program, it's not hard to have a few sessions and actually really empower students.

And so we had a lot of interest from all over, all different types of schools, boys' schools as well.

Um, and then the writing instruction framework, uh, again, it's sort of, a lot of this is fortuitous timing because a lot of the, um, syllabuses started to change and writing actually became something that everyone had to teach.

So, but there was a bit of pushback to that as well.

It took a little while for English to come out and for people to really get to grips with the fact that it was there and it was clear as day that we had to teach writing suddenly, which in English, we didn't have to teach before, ironically.

And then the other syllabuses started to come out, which also had components of writing at that sentence level.

So I guess the sort of stimulus for it was that the NAPLAN results were so dismal that they made headlines.

And in the background, Arrow was developing this research project.

And then the syllabus came out.