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29 April 2025

What if education was about more than just academic success? In this episode we explore how the expeditionary approach to learning can drive student growth, wellbeing and meaningful outcomes. Ron Berger, Senior Advisor for EL Education and Harvard Graduate School of Education professor, and Gwyn ap Harri, Chief Executive Officer of XP School Trust in the UK, reveal how powerful learning experiences can empower students to thrive, both in and beyond the classroom.

Show Notes

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode and any ideas you have for future topics. Get in touch with the Teach Podcast team at education.teachpodcast@sa.gov.au.

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach Podcast about teaching and learning in ���ϳԹ�. My name is Dale Atkinson from ���ϳԹ�'s Department for Education, and today's episode has a bit of an international flavour. We are joined by Ron Berger, who's the acclaimed senior advisor for EL (Expeditionary Learning) Education, a bestselling author and Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor, and also Gwyn ap Harri, who's the Chief Executive Officer of the XP Schools Trust, which is in the UK, Ron joins us from the US. Welcome to you both.

Gwyn ap Harri: Thank you.

Ron Berger: Thanks. Thanks for having us.

Dale Atkinson: Now you are both spending quite a bit of time in ���ϳԹ� lately, and the reason you are here is that you are working with some of our schools to explain the philosophy of education that you have developed through Gwyn you opening a school and Ron through your many, many years of working with schools and school systems to help to drive improvement.

My first question, Gwyn, as somebody who started a school. What would possess somebody to do such a thing?

Gwyn ap Harri: It's, it's funny people say that, like who starts a school? But when we decided, when me and Andy, my colleague, decided to open a school, it was like we didn't have a choice. So we went over to America and we saw these amazing schools, high tech, high being one in San Diego, but we saw King Middle in Portland, Maine, Springfield, Renaissance, in Massachusetts.

And we couldn't unsee what we saw, we couldn't, we knew that we could replicate elements of those schools in England, and if we were to go back and just carry on doing what we were doing, we would be charlatans and we, me and Andy both felt that we had no choice but to do something. We first tried to do it in Andy's existing school 'cause he was a head teacher of an existing school.

But that it had no mandate for change, it was a strong school and we wanted to change a lot of things. So then we ended up going down the route of opening a new school and there was a strategy from the government of the time to open a new school and, and that's what we did. So, when people say like, why do you do it, or who does that? It was really like, we didn't have a choice.

Dale Atkinson: What was it about the philosophy and approach of the schools that you visited in the US that was particularly appealing, that gave you that compulsion to follow on?

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah, very, very clear. Uh, so personally myself, I was always asking myself this question when I thought about schools, is that.

I'd have done okay in any school I can remember things, so I can do well in tests, but when I went to the schools in Expeditionary Learning schools. I felt that if I went to those schools, I would be a better person. And that really fundamentally hit me and I knew that we wanted to do that for the kids in Doncaster.

Dale Atkinson: And it's that kind of connection, I think, with being a better person. So the education and development of the individual, of the child as a whole being, which I think Ron, you focused on in your work fairly substantially over the last 50 years. What brought you to that approach as the meaning and purpose of education?

Ron Berger: Well, I don't think it's possible to separate academics and character. Schools often think, well, we're here to teach academic skills. And character growth happens at home or at church, or at some other, on the football pitch, whatever. But schools have no choice to teach character because we are all doing it all day long anyway.

The very experience of going to school shapes who a person is, and it makes them more respectful and responsible and courageous or less so. Our schools are already shaping kids deeply for 6, 7, 8 hours a day, and we have to do it intentionally and positively rather than haphazardly. And so, the focus of EL education and of Gwyn's XP schools is, we never say, this part of the day is academics, and this part of the day is character. In your maths class, in your history class, in the service work, you are working on your character all day long and the faculty and staff are modelling that character. I come from America, this is a tough time in America, just to be candid.

And it is a tough time in the world because there are people right now whose character is not great. Who have a lot of power in the world, and we need to be leaning into creating the kind of human beings that we want to be running our world. Like they, we can't separate, we want. Smart people who are also good people.

Dale Atkinson: You started your journey in a small school in Massachusetts, in a poor rural area. Yes. What was it about working in that environment that has informed your approach over the last many decades?

Ron Berger: Well, it's true. I still live in a very small rural town, and my town is so small that I was the only upper primary teacher in this town for a long long time. So I was teaching there for 28 years. What it means is that basically everyone in my town is my former student, and when your nurse is your former student and the policeman is your former student and the all the volunteer fire department, are your former students and your plumber is your former student, and your electrician is your former student, you realize, I just don't care only about test scores.

Like I need these people to be good human beings who are really good at what they do. I need them to have a really strong work ethic and high standards for the work that they do, because my life is in their hands, really, and I mean, literally, my life is in their hands.

My wife had a, a serious accident at home, I was not home and she called emergency services, and everyone who showed up to save her life was my former student. And so it's an easy reminder every day for me that we need to care about people who are good, courageous, kind, respectful human beings that are also really good at what they do, that they have the highest standards for their work.

And you know, my wife was saved because my former students had that. So it helps me not be reductionist that the whole point of school is to get kids ready for exams because I live among all my former students. And I think the point of school is to create the kind of citizens and human beings that we wanna live around and live with who take care of our lives.

Dale Atkinson: Now Gwyn, part of the philosophy of XP schools is a kind of relentless focus on the quality of work, but combined with character growth, how do those two things work together to make for a great education experience for the kids, and how do you enact both those elements?

Gwyn ap Harri: So I think one of the keys to enable both of those things to happen is for our work, for the work, the students' work to not just exist in the classroom.

Our kids learn things in order to create a product that often exists outside of the classroom, outside of the school and in our communities. So it gives our children, a purpose beyond themselves, beyond their personal individual test scores and they are learning for a purpose to create a product. And that product could be physical or digital, it could be scientific, it could be artistic.

So examples are, if you go to Waterstones, the bookshop in Doncaster. There's a whole shelf of books that our kids have published on the history of and legacy of the coal mining industry and Doncaster, the rail industry, the National Health Service. If you get off the train at Doncaster and you're lucky enough to be in the first class lounge, you'll see the legacy of the railway industry in terms of steam engines that were created, such as the Flying Scotsman and the Mallard, and you can walk through any of our towns with the XP schools that are in there, and you can see the legacy of our kids' work. So when our kids are creating work that's important to them, not only just to them but the community, and if you walk in the woods, it says, what can you find in the woods today?

It not only creates a sense of purpose, but like Ron said, you can't separate character and work. So in order to create the best work that they can, because it's public, they've got to activate their courage and their craftsmanship and quality, their integrity to the subject. They've got to work hard, they've got to invite critique.

They've got to do more than one iteration of the work, like we do. You know, our first draft, is never normally our best yet in most schools. That's the piece of work that you get judged on. So I think that's a key, really a key difference is that our kids get smart to do good in the world and to do it through creating products and giving them a legacy by placing them in the community

Dale Atkinson: and placing it in the community is really the key point here, isn't it? That for these students, and Ron I might to throw to you, for students grounding the work within the broader community, the broader place they live. Is a really powerful tool for engaging them in their learning, but also making meaning of that learning for them.

Ron Berger: Exactly, yeah and we try to do this all over America, but I don't know any example better than what Gwyn and the XP schools are doing in England, but it's so often the case that kids go to school because they're supposed to, and they do their lessons because they're supposed to, but they don't actually see the importance of it in their lives or in the world. That's very different in the schools that we're privileged to work with. These kids feel like they're on a mission to do something important, and the work that they do ends up.

In a public product that helps the world or a performance or something that, an action in the world that helps the world. So they take it really seriously because it has meaning not in their future, not like someday you will be using the maths or the language work you're doing, the history. Someday when you're an adult, you might find this useful. No, it's like right now you need to know this stuff because you're going to be interviewing these people and they're local heroes and no one knows their story and you have to know the history behind this, and you need your interview skills, and you need your note taking skills, and you need then to learn to edit that work to make a book honouring their service.

And so it's like you need to get smart right now. You need to build your skills right now because your work matters in the world. I.

Dale Atkinson: Well, it's an incredible link between learning and active citizenship. Which goes back to exactly what you're talking about in terms of how we prepare these kids for a world of increasing complexity and the kinds of changes and influences that we're seeing to democracy in in recent years.

Ron Berger: Exactly right. And I think we can teach a civics class and hope that that will make kids active in the democracy. But if the civics class is only content, if it's only, this is the structure of government in Australia, this is the structure of government in the UK, or that's just content for them. But if kids get active in the democratic process of, oh, how do we make things better? What are the steps to improving our community? That creates a connection with their heart, which is, I need to connect my life to making good through our democracy, which is a very different approach.

Dale Atkinson: We're seeing a trend in Australia and, and I think internationally as well, towards increasing standardization within education and certainly an appetite toward direct explicit instruction within schools. The motivation being lifting kind of standards of literacy and numeracy as drivers. Now, sometimes there's kind of references and inherent tension between direct instruction and perhaps giving students more control and agency over their learning. Gwyn, have you had to reconcile that and if so, how have you done that?

Gwyn ap Harri: Well, we use direct instruction too in our schools and classrooms, but that's not the only mode of instruction that we use. We have many different protocols that we use, and direct instruction is one. So we don't limit our teachers to just one mode, I don't see the advantage of that.

We've got to be really careful around our positionality as teachers, because most teachers only see, might just view themselves and how they were good students and how they could turn up and attend and engage and listen for an hour. And most of our kids, you know in England we talk about the forgotten third. That a third of our kids don't do that. So we've, we've got to be really careful as a profession and as practitioners around our professionality where there's a lot of work that we have to do in order to get kids to school, lower the barriers to learning of our kids. I'm sure there are tensions around that in Australia as well, where we have to do a lot of work to get those kids into school. And it's the same with engaging in the different protocols around teaching. So direct instruction is one protocol that we employ. So I don't see it as being one or the other, I just see it as being a rich repertoire as to what we can do and if there are kids that can just sit there and listen and take in everything that they're being told, that's not the majority of kids, that there are kids that respond differently to different people and to different teachers depending on who they are.

I don't know what your experience is, but I know I used to work harder for the teachers that I respected more. Kids aren't just a blank canvas so I think it's quite dangerous to reduce practice just to one mode. That's one aspect of that argument. Do you want to chip in there, Ron?

Ron Berger: I agree with everything. I mean, this false binary that you are one or the other is crazy. Like we, we all need a full repertoire of different approaches. Direct instruction being one of them. I think it's important to remember that how do we learn things, ee as adults, everyone listening to this podcast, how do we learn things?

If you wanted to learn something new right now in your life, let's say your daughter's getting married and you'd like to dance at her wedding or play guitar at her wedding, but you don't know how to do that yet. You would not sit in a class and just listen to someone talk about it for a year. You would want somebody telling you some things, but you'd need a lot of practice and critique.

And you'd have a motivation because you think, I'm gonna perform at my daughter's wedding. I need to play the guitar well, I need to watch videos and be with a teacher. But I also need to practice a lot on my own and I need to try things and try performing, and I need to get critique on my performing.

And if I'm getting ready for something real I've gotta like take this seriously in my life. That's the way we learn, why would it be different for kids? Like why would they learn by just sitting passively in a classroom and having things told at them without having the chance to practice to try to get critique to get better at it, to have models of what a good version looks like.

Like the way we learn is the way kids learn. We need a variety of things and they need a variety of things.

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah. And everybody wants kids to be, that are in front of them, to work hard, to ask questions, to show courage, to show craftsmanship and quality. So how do we get kids to do that? Do we just expect them to turn up and be like that? Because I dunno about you, but I wasn't like that all the time. Right? So how, how do we do that? Do we shout at 'em? Do we expect 'em? Do we put 'em in detention or do we teach them? I prefer to teach kids how to do that.

Dale Atkinson: Now Ron, you sort of were talking there about the concept of critique and Gwyn, you mentioned in one of your earlier responses the idea of, you know, first draft not being the, the final draft.

And connected with that is the concept I think that, XP schools, kind of go after, which is this idea of beauty, beautiful work. Can you explain a little bit about how that emphasis on beauty kind of intersects with the idea of a kind of iterative processes of working and, and why beauty is the aspiration that you're going after.

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah. So, I dunno if you know, but I used to be in a band, not a famous one. That's why I work in schools. I can't make it pay enough. You know, one of the phrases that we used was that like, effortlessness takes a lot of effort, you know, when you're watching your favorite band and they look effortless and they're jumping around and they're jumping up and down and they're hitting the right notes all the time. Effortlessness takes a lot of effort, a lot of practice, a lot of critique, a lot of feedback from your friends. You know, what's working, what's not working. So that is what we honour the kids', work with time, to critique and iterate and reiterate.

Much like we do in our professional careers. So the first draft, think of the last piece of work that, that you worked on. Probably your first draft was not your best and that you looked at it. You ask your colleagues, what do you think to this? You pass it around and you get advice, and then you make it better and better and better.

The biggest impact that we've found on critique and iterations is that kids end up creating a quality of work. That is much higher than they ever thought that they could. And if you do that and you do that once, a lot of the time, you expect more from yourself in the future.

Dale Atkinson: One of the things both of you talk about a lot is the concept of belonging in the way that that contributes to students' engagement, but also how that is so powerful within their learning.

The thing that you talk about quite a lot Gwyn is the concept of crew. Can you tell us a little bit about what crew is and, and how that plays an important role in the XP school experience?

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah, so it's really interesting about the history of crew because we picked up crew from Expeditionary Learning (EL), in America, and then we found out that like a lot of things in America, that we started it first in England or in Wales, to be precise. So crew obviously comes from the Navy and a guy called Kurt Hahn, who was a German educator who'd, come across before World War II to England and started a school called Gordonstoun.

Ended up creating with another guy called Lawrence Holt the organization called Outward Bound, which I believe you have in Australia too and Outward Bound originally was to do with Navy and teaching character to the Navy. In Aberdyfi Wales was the original Outward Bound centre, and that's where our kids go for the first week, the first day of school in XP our kids go to the Outward Bound centre in Aberdyfi to learn about character.

Dale Atkinson: And you make them moderately uncomfortable. Would it be fair to say in that experience?

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah. So crew starts for our kids, they get on a bus and they spend four and a half hours on a bus with probably 49 strangers, because we don't just have two or three primary schools that come into the secondary school and they get to Aberdyfi Wales.

They get off the bus, they drop their bags, they jog, it's called jog and dip. So they jog down to the beach, get into the sea. Some of our kids have never been in the sea and they dip their heads under the sea as a crew of 12 or 13 kids and they get out, they get dry.

They get given a massive ruck sack, they go halfway up a mountain and they spend the night in a log cabin. They get up in the morning and they summit the mountain as a crew. They don't leave anyone behind and they reflect on, we are crew, not passengers, so we don't leave people behind. So crew is our teamwork approach to school culture and it doesn't start with the students, it starts with the staff as well.

Dale Atkinson: We'll get to the staff in a little bit because I think that's an interesting addition in that space. But Ron, what was it about the idea of crew that appealed to you initially and, and what does the evidence tell us about why this is kind of critical for students?

Ron Berger: Well, let me use an example from my youth. So I grew up in the US I went to public school. I did well, but my job was to get myself to graduation, myself into university, and it was a competitive game, right? So if my peers did poorly, it would help me, my class rank would be better. Like there was nothing about school where the charge for me was to help anyone.

My job was to get myself to graduation and into a good university, and so I did, but many of the students in my high school didn't make it to graduation or didn't make it to university and it wasn't my concern. In contrast, in the schools that I'm privileged to work with and that Gwyn has founded and worked with students see their job entirely differently.

They see their charge at school is, I need to get myself to graduation and all of my crew mates and all of my classmates and get them all to a good post-secondary life like we are in this together. No one gets left behind. It's not me getting to the top of the mountain, it's us getting to the top of the mountain.

So I work with a number of high schools in America. Where every single student every year is accepted into university, and these kids come from families where their parents didn't go to university where no one would assume they could make it to university. And people say, how is that possible? How is that possible that they get a hundred percent of kids accepted in university every year?

And I say, be because they view their life in school differently than we did, which is they're on a team getting there. They're not trying to fight their way against their teammates to get there. It's like we're in this together. And so the reason it's spreading in America is the results are good.

It's not spreading because people think, what a clever idea, it's spreading because they think, how is it possible that these schools are having such success? And when they visit the school and they ask the kids, the kids will say, because we're part of a crew, because our whole school is crew, because we are in this, our job is to help each other.

And that's very different than just thinking. The adults are the only people who can help you in the school. Your crew mates will hold you accountable to work hard and be your best person.

Dale Atkinson: And Gwyn you've extended that to staff, as you mentioned, that you make them, put them in a, should we say a moderately, mildly, potentially uncomfortable position very early on in their careers with XP schools. What does that look like?

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah, we've put them outside their comfort zones, that's what we call it. And my wife Kate, she frames it really well. She said, you know, we want our teachers to remember our experience, what it might be like for students every day turning up to maths or to art or history or PE, which, you know, they're subjects that they're not comfortable with.

So we need our staff to understand what our students may be experiencing before they start the lesson. So yeah, we take them on an outward bound experience. It may include rock climbing, it may include abseiling, caving at times.

It may include a long trek in the rain, if we're lucky enough to have rain, and camping out. For adults it's not a thing that they're used to. And what we do is it's not just doing the activity. We unpack that activity and we ask them how will they feel? We do exactly what we do with students and we talk about their character traits, habits of work and learning. Where has someone shown courage? Where has someone shown compassion? And we surface those character traits. We circle up as a crew 'cause in order to teach crew, you've got to be crew.

Dale Atkinson: And that's really just the start of, I guess, the professional development for teachers and educators when they join your school, how else do you help build those capacities among your teachers and educators? To kind of focus education in a slightly different way, which is sort of broader than perhaps conventionally defined.

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah so most people are sort of pigeonholed, especially at secondary school. They're pigeonholed into subjects and if you ask a secondary teacher what they teach, they'll often just say, I teach science, or I teach computers.

Whereas if you ask primary teachers what they teach, they'll say, I teach year three kids and really we've got to do both. We've got to teach kids a subject, so it's all relational, so it's the relationship that the teacher has with the child and the relationship that the teacher fosters between each child and the subject that they’re teaching.

So that's part of our staff induction, you know, most staff in England have a day if they're lucky, you know, if they turn up to a new school that they might have one staff day, and then there's your class, teach it. We have a few weeks to do this, we invest in our staff to do this as you would hope in other professions like, you wouldn't want a surgeon to turn up for the first day and, and do a heart bypass, you know? Right. But we let people teach our kids after after one day.

Dale Atkinson: We do let 'em loose, there's no doubt about that. It must be intimidating for the educators as well. On that flip side. Ron and Gwyn you've both been here in ���ϳԹ� a couple of times now and you've been working across the system. Ron, what do you observe that's going well within ���ϳԹ�'s public education system, and where does the opportunity lie for us?

Ron Berger: I think this is an incredibly exciting time for ���ϳԹ� education. I work across America and I also work internationally, I was working in Japan this year, I was working in Catalonia this year, I work in England with Gwyn. I don't know anywhere in the world right now where the openness to trying new things and being innovative in education is happening at the scale that it is in ���ϳԹ�. I know individual schools in countries that are doing innovative, exciting work. I know even some districts in America and other countries, but I don't know an entire state, anywhere, that is really open to cutting edge new things that can make sure every kid is motivated to do well, that every kid could succeed, like that's taken seriously here.

So there's a great moment of promise in ���ϳԹ�, that's why I'm here. That's why Gwyn and Kate are here. Is that this is something unique, that there's a willingness to say, let's, let's really take this seriously. That every kid has the potential to do great work and not do things in the same way they've always been done, which worked for some kids, but it didn't work for all kids.

Dale Atkinson: Now, Gwyn, from the schools that you've worked with and seen within ���ϳԹ�, where do you see the greatest opportunity for some of our schools?

Gwyn ap Harri: Well, I spent this Monday in Port Lincoln and just to sort of mirror that there's some things that Ron has said, like, we spent time with 200 teachers and leaders in Port Lincoln talking about the concept of crew, and they don't have to do this, they don't have to do it. I was talking to Martin Westwell and he was talking about moving from a system of accountability to a system of responsibility where we trust our professionals to have a sense of responsibility to do the right thing.

And in Port Lincoln I saw that manifest, I saw teachers say, we want to do this because this is the right thing to do, not because they need to do it or because they're measured by it, but that it's the right thing to do. They believe that ensuring kids are more courageous and more respectful, have more integrity, show more compassion is the right thing to do and won't change. And won't change over a political landscape or in a thousand years time, and I saw those teachers step up and go, we want to take on this work. That was a privilege to see.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that sounds pretty exciting. It was also a privilege, I think, for them to see your new Cold Chisel t-shirt. Now can you explain why you, out of penance, had to turn up in Port Lincoln with a brand-new cold chisel t-shirt.

Gwyn ap Harri: So I have this little skit with Ron, so obviously Ron is like the Jedi master, in fact Ron has a nickname, Obi Ron Kenobi. So when Ron goes on first and then I come on afterwards, I've done that a few times and that I've sort of in the past I've said, have you ever been to a gig where the support band's better than the headline band? So I have a friend in Australia whose favourite band is Cold Chisel, and I'd never heard of them, I didn't know who they were at all.

So I turned to Ron and I said, I'm gonna make a cultural joke here. I'm gonna go, there's a bit of jeopardy so I'm gonna do it. So we basically made this skit and I said, so can you imagine going to a gig in like AC DC are the support band and then the headline band comes on and it's cold chisel and there was silence in the room and this lady went, “I like cold chisel” and everyone went “yeah, AC CDC sold out years ago.” I was like, oh my god.

Dale Atkinson: So you're in very dangerous areas, but I like that you've redeemed yourself on this visit Gwyn, so thank you very much.

Gwyn ap Harri: Yeah. I have my Cold Chisel t-shirts.

Dale Atkinson: Excellent, and have you engaged with the music at all since buying the T-shirt?

Gwyn ap Harri: Well, you know, if you were to ask me my favourite song. I think it’d have to be off the album East, and you know that one with the piano, the four walls, I think that would've been my favourite.

Dale Atkinson: Not bad, not bad. I feel like the punk in you is naturally gonna bridle against the garage rock mainstream.

Gwyn ap Harri: No comments!

Dale Atkinson: Yes, but we are very pleased to have you here, we're very pleased to have you both here. Now leaders Day is tomorrow in the podcast timeline I’m on, for the listeners it'll be in the past. So I do want to say thank you very much for coming out and spending time with the Leaders at Leaders Day. Thanks for your time to come and speak to us and explain a bit more about it, Expeditionary Learning, and we're looking forward to working with you into the future.

Thank you.

Gwyn ap Harri: Great. Thank you very much.

Ron Berger: Thank you. We feel very lucky to be here.