Episode 5 transcript

Talking Teaching with Maxine McKew, Kerry Elliott and Sophie Murphy

00:00 - Maxine McKew

I'm Maxine McKew, and this is Talking Teaching.

00:12 - Jo Boaler

So we have a math crisis in this country, children everywhere are failing, inequities are widespread. Why? Because math classrooms are boring, procedural, rote learning calculations. Just as bad, we tell children all the time that they can't do well in math.

But real math is visual, creating, exciting and accessible.

00:36 - Maxine McKew

Hi there, good to have your company again. In this podcast, we take a look at what happens when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia says to an Australian university "We want you to fix our education system,".

The remarkable story of how 42 Saudi champions are completely rethinking their approach to how they teach. And it's all happening here at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. That story's coming up. But first, an interview with Stanford University's Jo Boaler. Now her work on mathematical mindsets has attracted attention across the globe.

She was recently named by the BBC as one of eight people whose ideas are challenging the future of education everywhere. Drawing on the latest in brain research and influenced by the work of Carol Dweck, Jo Boaler is on a mission to persuade teachers and students that by developing a growth mindset, anyone can do maths. Or "math" as they say in the United States.

Sophie Murphy recorded this interview with Jo Boaler on a recent trip to the United States. Where they were both keynote speakers in Washington DC's American National Council of Supervisors in Mathematics conference.

01:45 - Jo Boaler

I started teaching mathematics in London, in a London comprehensive schools, we had about 200 languages spoken at the school I was teaching, very inner-city school in London. And I myself, as maths student, used to get a little frustrated with the teachers, I used to think "Why isn't this taught better?".

So I was always interested in the learning of maths and then when I got into teaching maths in these London schools, I just found it fascinating how students think and learn maths.

So I went to Kings College, London, did a master's degree in maths education and then a PhD. And I chose to get at my PhD on different ways of teaching. I felt that there was a lot of argument and people saying "Do it this way, do it that way," but not a lot of real evidence about different teaching approaches at the time, this was a while ago.

And so I studied two different schools, I spent three years in each of the schools following students over three years, to look at the impact their very different teaching approaches. So on how they developed as people, what they were able to do, their identity, lots of interesting things came up.

02:54 - Sophie Murphy

And other things you continue to see in maths classrooms, that are the issues perhaps for students, what are the common things that they're asking you and what, what, do you see and what has the greatest impact?

03:05 - Jo Boaler

I would say that what had the greatest impact and the reason we're getting such a lot of attention, our site just passed 25 million views, we have, just been going a couple of years, is because we share the neuroscience coming out and translate that into education.

The very big message that maths teachers are on the whole very grateful to receive is there's no such thing as a math person, and you know, you're born with a maths brain or you're not.

They're teaching kids who believe that, and of course when kids believe you're a maths person or not, every time they struggle, they just think, "Oh, that's it, I'm not a maths person,", it's a terribly debilitating idea that's been pretty much disproven by brain science.

So sharing that evidence, and other brain science has been very helpful too and I think what transforms people is knowing they can learn anything and also knowing that speed is not important.

03:59 - Sophie Murphy

So do you mean automaticity or, what, what do you mean exactly by?

04:03 - Jo Boaler

Automaticity is part of it, but in maths, people have this idea that to be good at maths, you have to be fast.

It's a very damaging idea and it turns a lot of people away from the discipline. I teach Stanford undergrads, many of whom have maths trauma, and I always ask them, like "How did this happen, when did this happen?" and almost all of them will point to the days in second or third grade when they started doing timed tests of multiplication tables.

At that point, some of them became very anxious, so maths anxiety sets in and others were good at them, but at that point they thought "Oh, maths is a subject of shallow recall and I'm not interested in that,".

So, a lot of damage is done in, in the name of speed and so to get rid of that idea, we share the stories of famous mathematicians who won the Field's Medal and who've then gone on to talk about how they're very slow with maths.

One of them, Laurent Schwartz, who was a French mathematician talks about how when he was in school he felt stupid because he was so slow and went on to win the Field's Medal, which is like the greatest honour in maths.

So, we find that those two messages, your brain can grow and change and it's not about speed are really transformative for many people. And of course those messages go across all subjects, but I do think that maths is the subject that has been most held up by those ideas.

05:22 - Sophie Murphy

And did that inspire you to write your very successful book Mathematical Mindsets, because this book, it has changed their practice and changed them as mathematicians?

05:31 - Jo Boaler

Yeah, it's been really fantastic, actually.

It started with an online class, so I decided when online classes were coming out that we had to get this brain evidence out, it was really important to get it out. And then I thought "I'll put this into a book,".

And I think the reason that the book has been helpful for teachers is it shares the neuroscience but it then says "Okay, what does this mean?".

"What does it mean for how we group kids? What does it mean for how we talk to them? What does it mean for the kind of tasks we give?". One of the big messages we have is it's really not enough to just say the right words.

Mindset has been taken on as a very popular idea, lots of teachers talk about it, they just say "You just have to try hard,", but they don't change their teaching. And for us, there's two aspects that need to change, there's the messages, but then you have to do that through your teaching.

So, what I say to teachers is, If your maths class is short, closed questions that kids get right or wrong, those questions themselves will make them think maths is a fixed subject that you can do or you can't. When you open up maths and you ask kids "How do you see this?", talk about the methods, discuss it, think about the connections, how does this connect to other things and it becomes a deeper subject.

We particularly share on our website what we call low floor, high ceiling tasks. Anybody can access them but they go to high levels, and so it's really about how you approach the content and the teaching.

06:56 - Sophie Murphy

If there was one message you could give to all educators, but particularly math teachers in Australia, what would you say?

07:01 - Jo Boaler

If I were to share one message, something I would put up on screen today and in yesterday's session is, cases of people who have been written off in schools and have gone on to do amazing things with maths, we have so many of them, we know now that anybody can learn anything and the labels we give kids are really damaging.

Whether they're labels of giftedness or whether they're labels of "You can't do this,", those labels are damaging.

So we know that everyone's on a growth journey, that's what the brain science tells us is, everyone's on a growth journey.

So this boy went into Australian schools as a youngster, was diagnosed as being learning disabled, having a low IQ, the worst child they'd taught in 20 years is what he was told, he just graduated with a mathematics PhD from Oxford a month ago.

So you know, we have these incredible cases of people who, are really written off, but then through particular teachers helping them or parents, they manage to keep going and do amazing things.

And so yeah, that's my biggest message I guess, is you have to believe in everybody, also believe in yourself, I share with teachers, that we have to change our own beliefs about ourselves. Many teachers themselves are mathematically traumatized and we have to believe that we can learn anything and we can have a different relationship with maths.

08:29 - Maxine McKew

Jo Boaler, speaking there with Sophie Murphy.

And the website that Jo was referring to by the way is ucubed. U as in the letter U, ucubed.org

As we heard recently on this podcast from Wootube founder, Eddie Woo, there's a growing sense of urgency around lifting the performance of Australians students in mathematics.

That in turn is driving some innovative resource material. And one of them is an online program that's been developed in Victoria called Maths Pathway. Now it's build around the Australian curriculum and it's adapted to meet different state requirements and is now being applied to close to 250 secondary schools to year 10 level.

As you'll hear in this interview with Michaela Epstein, herself a former maths teacher and the current president of The Mathematical Association of Victoria, Maths Pathway is making some big claims about student progress.

Kerry Elliott is asking the questions.

09:27 - Kerry Elliott

Are you with Jo Boaler in the belief that anyone can do maths?

09:31 - Michaela Epstein

Certainly. I think if you have a passion for maths and love to think and be curious and play around with mathematical ideas, you start to see how it's a subject that any student can understand as well.

Our challenge is when students are put in front of mathematical content that isn't pitched at the level that they're ready for.

A huge proportion of students starting year 7 are behind where the curriculum would expect them to be.

With that in mind, a one size fits all approach to teaching maths can't work for students where you want a student who's got level four of the curriculum in number and algebra starting to do things with linear equations.

That's not going to make sense for them and that's not going to help them to appreciate the subject or to have confidence in themselves that maths is a subject for them.

10:27 - Kerry Elliott

So what is Maths Pathway and what is it offering?

10:29 - Michaela Epstein

The Maths Pathway teaching and learning model is designed to enable teachers to have greater impact and then to support every student to have success in maths.

What that looks like in practice is a number of different components. So it is always a whole school approach, it's never an individual teacher going out and doing something on their own because the power of the collective is so much more impactful.

Schools that adopt this model will undergo a professional development for an extended period of time that's actually run in the school and led by the head of the maths department.

And they'll support one another in understanding things like formative assessment and appropriate goal setting and feedback, rich learning tasks, developing student mindsets.

All of these different ingredients fit into then what happens in the classroom. The model has been designed with the idea that you need to have a balanced approach to a maths program, so yes, students need sufficient time in class to work on skills development and to be um, accessing the content that they're ready for.

They also need opportunities where they can work collaboratively on open-ended problems that get them thinking in creative and critical ways about mathematics and seeing that there can be multiple solutions or ways of thinking about the same problem.

11:48 - Kerry Elliott

Thanks Michaela.

Well one of the things we like to do is get the view from inside the classroom, so joining me today is Michelle Fry. Michelle heads up the maths teaching team at Redcliffe High, a large co-educational high school, just north of Brisbane. Michelle, good to have you with us.

12:04 - Michelle Fry

Thank you.

12:04 - Kerry Elliott

Michelle, can you tell me why you went with this approach?

12:07 - Michelle Fry

I was recognizing a few problems our Middle School maths classes. We had an eight year gap between the student who was the most capable to the least capable all coming to grade seven at once, and so to cope with that gap we streamed the student so we had the students ranked by what we perceived their ability to be, and then broke the classes up.

This burnt out certain teachers and it meant that a lot of students who had lots of gaps were all in once class together with the hope that they would gain some skills moving through High School. But we were also facing a teacher shortage, and, we wanted to use technology in the classroom in a more robust way so Maths Pathway was able to solve some of those problems for us.

12:50 - Kerry Elliott

So what does it look like in your classrooms?

12:53 - Michelle Fry

Students bring their own laptop to school and when they enter the classroom the students spend 30 seconds reconfiguring the desks so they are facing the wall so the teacher can be in the centre of the room and see their screens. Then the students have about 15 minutes of silent work where they go on to the computer and they are offered work that is individual to them. So the computer has already diagnosed what they know and what they don't know, and the system will only offer them work that they are ready to learn at the level that they're at. So, students could be working in a Year 8 class on Year 10 work, the person next to them could be working on Year 4 work but neither student is really aware of that.

Once the students have had some time to really get involved in their own work which involves a lot of writing that students have to complete very strong book work.

And the content comes from the computer. So it's like having your own personalized text book. And then that frees the teacher up to be able to give individual feedback and individual short lessons to students who are ready to hear what the teacher can contribute. So, for the teacher instead of saying the same thing 20 times to students who are not ready to hear it, the teacher is able to say 20 different things to students who are ready to hear that concept because that's the stage that they're at.

14:06 - Kerry Elliott

Michelle, what's the evidence of what you're seeing from students?

14:09 - Michelle Fry

Well we came from the basis that we know that students are not mastering everything in primary schools. So we didn't need researchers to tell us that when they go through primary school they only master at 60% of the curriculum, cos we could see it when they got to high school.

So we knew that anything above 60% would be good and we also wanted to get away from streaming because we didn't want to have students of - all the same sort of habits and capability all together. And what we found with students who had poor maths skills who were struggling and finding that they entered high school and were expected to do maths that they weren't ready for because they had so many gaps in there, in their fractions or place value or whatever it might be, those students are now breathing again because they're actually not feeling the pressure and they're actually able to grow and still progress and actually progress quite rapidly because they're only being given the maths that they're ready for. But then talking to the students it's really good too.

We had one student who for six months was on detention because he was refusing to do his homework and within one week of Maths Pathway he came back and said to the teacher "Oh, can you see what I'm doing on my computer", and she said "Ah yeah", and he said " well. last night I started doing this module then I did another module and then mum called me for tea". So he completely lost track of time and was stuck doing his maths homework after 6 months of giving up his lunchtimes because he refused to engage with the work that was four years above what he was ready for.

15:37 - Kerry Elliott

How did you go about getting teachers on board?

15:39 - Michelle Fry

The change management is a big aspect and that is one of the reasons why we were happy to go with Maths Pathway because part of what they explained to us was how much they support the change management process for the teachers because there are a lot of teachers who believe they are center of the room and everything has to be linked back to them and that doesn't work with Maths Pathway. It's no longer about the teacher, it's definitely about the individual student, and that change of mindset has to be managed. And I didn't go in and ask my teachers if they thought it was a good idea. I said "These are all the challenges we are facing, this is why we can't ignore them. This is what we're going to do".

16:17 - Kerry Elliott

So what are your teachers saying now?

16:19 - Michelle Fry

Well, they don't want to teach any other way so [laughs], um, we have some teachers who are contract teachers who may go and teach at another school and they shudder at the thought because they can see how different this is for the student and how it can change students whole approach, and we can see the skills that the students are getting from Maths Pathway to be a lot more independent. They are going into other subject areas as well, so there is no appetite for the teachers to go back to standing in front of the classroom and lecturing on one topic.

16:49 - Kerry Elliott

What about some of the general capabilities and what about collaborative problem solving and critical and creative thinking? How does that interweave in terms of what's happening?

16:56 - Michelle Fry

The way Maths Pathway quizzes the students on their knowledge does include reasoning and problem solving, so, for example, the student will be presented with a maths problem that another student has answered incorrectly and the student has to say why it's incorrect. So that's just part of the run of the mill way that the program makes sure that the students have mastered the concept -

Instead of asking them the same question fifty times they just ask them one or two reasoning and problem solving type questions.

And also Maths Pathway supports us to carve out time in the school day to just focus on open-ended questions and just do investigative tasks that are based on the real world, that yes they fall on those skills, that they've had to learn. Some of the skills the students haven't learnt yet because they're working at level five, but they can still access part of the problem and then exit when they need to exit.

17:43 - Kerry Elliott

Michelle, what's the success you're noticing?

17:46 - Michelle Fry

Well the biggest thing that we didn't expect actually was the lack of waiting by students who are successful students. So, people assume that Maths Pathway is just about filling gaps left behind from primary school but it's also about the students who have been relatively successful through primary school. They are organized, they have good note-taking ability but they spend a lot of their day waiting for the kids who aren't ready. So when we give them Maths Pathway they then fly, because their time is much more efficient and they were always mid- to upper-kids and they're the kids that students will often say "Oh, you know, I'm spending all my time on behaviour management and I've got brilliant students that I know I could stretch and extend if only I didn't have to worry about these kids that don't bring a pen".

We didn't realize how positive it would be for that group of students who are ready to learn they're just stuck in the system that isn't making it one size fits all.

18:42 - Maxine McKew

If you ever find yourself in a classroom in Riyadh or Jeddah or Medina, some of Saudi Arabia's biggest cities, it would be, a bit of a trip down the time tunnel for most western educated teachers. You'd see very large classes, strictly segregated and with students focusing on repetitive teacher driven work.

But change and dramatic change is coming. And it's being driven by a fascinating partnership with the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

The Saudi education authorities are committed to a root and branch reform of their system. Everything from curriculum, assessment, to teacher training. Like much of the OECD, they want to move to a competency based model of learning, and recently the University of Melbourne welcomed 42 Saudi champions. The first cohort of lead teachers to be retrained in something that for them is radically different.

In a moment I'll be speaking with Dr. Sandra Milligan, who is directing MGSE's partnership on what's called the Caveat Program. But first, Talking Teaching went along to the launch of Caveat and I talked to some of the Saudi teachers and heard from the Deputy Director of Education, Dr. Nieff. You'll hear his voice and also that of Professor Patrick Griffin, who's globally recognized work on 20th Century skills was the key to attracting the Saudis to Melbourne.

20:04 - Professor Patrick Griffin

I was asked to go and meet with the Minister in March of 2017 and the Minister said would I run a training program for the school supervisors on competency assessment? I said "Well, of course I would, how many are there?". And he said "20,000". [laughter].

I said "OK, what could possibly go wrong [laughs]". [laughter]

So we went away and wrote another proposal [laughter]. We put that to the Minister and the Minister said "Really, what we want you to do was to reform the whole curriculum, and have all schools teaching in a competency based education model". "How many schools are there?", I said. "36,000". "Sure, what could possibly go wrong?". [Laughter]

[Audience claps]

21:00 - Mohammed Abdullah Alroaig

I'm so happy to be here today, so happy to see the champions, teachers and supervisors who will get back to Saudi Arabia to help reform education, trying to transform the way we teach to a more modern way of teaching that is focusing on students instead of being teachers centered.

21:24 - Maxine McKew

Mohammed, you're one of the champions in the project, which I guess is a considerable responsibility.

21:30 - Mohammed Abdullah Alroaig

Yeah, it is.

21:31 - Maxine McKew

How has the course been for you?

21:32 - Mohammed Abdullah Alroaig

It was excellent. But I thought is was going to be really easy but it started to get really difficult as time progresses. But, well I think I can manage, me and my team.

21:43 - Maxine McKew

Why do you think this is so important for Saudi Arabia, I mean of course your Minister talks about the reform of education being central to Saudi Arabia's vision 2030.

21:54 - Mohammed Abdullah Alroaig

Yes.

21:54 - Maxine McKew

How do you see this?

22:26 - Mohammed Abdullah Alroaig

The vision is looking for students who are people thinking creatively, thinking by themselves, they don't memorize a lot because the companies are looking for people who think creatively. The system that we are teaching, we just ask the student to memorize things and then regurgitate, but that doesn't happen in real life. We all gonna face problems and you got to  solve them. If you not equipped with that throughout your life, throughout the teaching that you are taking, you cannot acquire it in about one year or two years.

22:28 - Maxine McKew

Fatima, why does competency based learning seem to be the right approach for you, do you think?

22:32 - Fatima Saad Alghamdi

Well because we still have problems with learning outcomes. I mean they get the grades but when they go to university they're still at a lower level, and so the universities complain about the levels of the students, that they don't know anything or their skills are very low. It's not about, er, knowledge it's about other skills like communicating, collaborating with each other-

22:54 - Maxine McKew

Critical thinking -

22:54 - Fatima Saad Alghamdi

Critical thinking, problem solving, all the 21st Century skills are not there.

22:59 - Maxine McKew

Do you think students are up for it. Do you think they're ready for change?

23:01 - Fatima Saad Alghamdi

I think students are more adept right now, than we are, you know, the new generation. They're more open to a lot of new things and they're more adaptable to new methods and new techniques because they're into technology. I think with the whole social media thing, they're into working well with each other and they like to communicate and collaborate but are we doing that in our classrooms? I don't think so.

23:29 - Maxine McKew

And we heard there the voices of Fatima Saad Al Ghamdi and Mohammed Abdullah Al-Ridgh.

I also recorded this interview with Dr Sandra Milligan. Now, she's the director of the Caveat program and head of the assessment research center at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

Sandra, I must say, what an assignment. I mean, after a lifetime really of working at so many different levels in education you've now got this job of transforming the education system of an entire country, and one in the Middle East. [laughs] How does this strike you?

24:00 - Dr Sandra Milligan

It really is exciting, Maxine, I could never have imagined that we ...

It really is exciting Maxine, I, I could never have imagined that we'd be doing work like this.

I think the first thing that's important to say is that Saudi Arabia is an amazing country. 70 percent of its population is under the age of 30, they've got 500,000 students, they've got 36,000 schools, they've got an economy that they want to refresh and they know that education is absolutely at the core of that.

24:32 - Maxine McKew

And its change at every level that they're after isn't it?

24:35 - Dr Sandra Milligan

In some respects the Saudi changes are very similar to the changes that countries are making all over the world because to live and work and create in the 21st century, our children need to learn different things at schools and the Saudi's understand that, as the Australians understand that, as everyone understands that. The question is how you get your education system to meet those needs and every education system is different. Saudi Arabia has different challenges to other people, their curricular are very content heavy, they've got beautiful text books but they're a little like our curricular were in the 60's and 70's here, so they've got a massive change to change not only what students learn, but how it's taught and how it's assessed in a period of about ... they, they're setting 15 years to do it something that Australia would probably will have taken about 20 years to do.

25:36 - Maxine McKew

One of the teachers we just heard in that clip, Fatima, says that the students certainly are up for change and she described the problem as we heard this way that students are passing their exams but when they get to university in Saudi Arabia, they're not good at thinking through problems. So this is an interesting issue they have identified isn't it, it's holding them back.

25:55 - Dr Sandra Milligan

I think it's holding people back all around the world. So again the Saudis aren't unique, they've just got a particular manifestation of it. Even in Australia, our curriculum people are saying look, you need to learn your maths and your science and English but you also need to know how to apply that and how to work with people and how to solve problems, how to be creative, and that's a bigger educational challenge.

26:20 - Maxine McKew

Tell us about the approach you're taking then. This is lead by your team at the, Assessment Research Center, if you like, re-orienting the thinking of the 42 champions here around competency based learning?

26:33 - Dr Sandra Milligan

What we are actually providing is a number of things. Firstly the technical know-how about how you put together training materials for teachers so that they can manage the change, how you put together the assessment to be able to assess these new skills, I mean assessing whether a person is able to do collaborative problem solving using the scientific method in physics, you can't assess that in the same way that teachers used to assess it with, you know, multiple choice questions or essays. So you've got to change how teachers teach, how they assess and how the curriculum is framed. We've got the technical know-how to do that, so we're working with them to work out what's the best way to do that in Saudi Arabia.

27:20 - Maxine McKew

So you're building an online platform I gather called [Rubi 00:27:22], how's that going to help?

27:24 - Dr Sandra Milligan

Well, the name [Rubi 00:27:25] comes from the concept of rubrics which are used by teachers to assess very complex outcomes or performances of children that can't be assessed using things like multiple choice. So [Rubi 00:27:39] is a system that will help teachers assess and provide feedback to students on a student-by-student basis, in other words it's not just putting a test over at class, reporting a class average and where everyone came up to, it's actually helping place each student on their individual progression so that a teacher knows what they know, where they're up to, what they need to know next.

28:05 - Maxine McKew

So how's it going so far, I mean we've had the 42 champions as we've said, they're still here in Melbourne, how are they going? What sort of challenges are they finding, what are the questions they're asking?

28:14 - Dr Sandra Milligan

I think they're learning what is the key challenge that their system has got to face. These people who are here with us at Melbourne are the leaders who will be taking forward the whole Saudi system, the responsibility for it will be resting on their shoulders. So we're doing everything we can to make them feel confident that they can lead the Saudi system forward and they will, they're a truly remarkable group of people.

28:43 - Maxine McKew

When I spoke briefly to both Mohammad and Fatima, they both identified that the big issue for them is when they go back to Saudi Arabia and the resistance they expect from some very traditional teachers. Not an unknown problem in Australia one would have to say.

28:59 - Dr Sandra Milligan

That was exactly what I was going to say. For an average classroom teacher, whether they're in Australia or Saudi Arabia or America or anywhere, this change is very deep for their practice and whenever you get deep change, you get on one hand enthusiasm and excitement, on the other you get fear and, um, despair because it's so hard and then you get resistance. So the Saudis understand that, we understand that in Australia as well and our governments like other governments are putting a lot of money into teacher development to support people to make these changes. So the Saudi champions are fully aware of the challenge that they're taking on and we really admire them.

29:48 - Maxine McKew

One thing that is quite different with Saudi Arabia of course has been the segregation of men and women that plays out in their education system as well, but of course it's very interesting to see that they are some highly educated, highly committed Saudi female teachers as part of this program, central to this program, how is the gender issue playing out from your observation?

30:12 - Dr Sandra Milligan

Look, this is one of the most fascinating parts of it for me. The more I participate in professional activities with the Saudis the more I understand that I don't understand the gender issues in Saudi Arabia, it's very complex. On the one hand, it looks simple, women educate girls, men educate boys and there's a deep separation. The curricular are largely the same for girls and boys except I think in, slightly in the area of Islamic studies. The Saudis absolutely understand that they need to educate their girls, they've got a long history of that, and in fact in things like the [pesa 00:30:55] results, the Saudi girls did better than the Saudi boys.

So there's nothing wrong with girls education and there's equal commitment to that, but the separation is quite marked to the western eyes in that even in professional learning activities, the female teachers and the male teachers wills sometimes be separated physically even when they're in the same room they'll be at different tables and there are clear conventions about communications between the genders that are, and I think most westerners struggle to understand the sophistication and complexity of it.

31:33 - Maxine McKew

And is that playing out in the Melbourne training as well? You have the cohorts of females and males separate but in the same room?

31:41 - Dr Sandra Milligan

It's become very clear that there are cultural differences but when you get down to it, when a bunch of teachers get in a room, we talk about education and [inaudible 00:31:53] all sorts of differences be it cultural, economic, social, they disappear in the challenges that are the same across the two countries and, uh, I guess that's what we're enjoying so much.

32:04 - Maxine McKew

Sandra thanks so much [inaudible 00:32:06] it is a great partnership and we will certainly come back to this story at some point. Thanks for joining us today.

32:10 - Dr Sandra Milligan

Thank you Maxine.

32:11 - Maxine McKew

Well that's it from Talking Teaching this time round, but we thought you might enjoy another podcast from the University of Melbourne and it's called Expert Hack. Now it's a show about the changing world of work that our students are going to be heading into and how industry experts are finding clever solutions to tricky problems. There's an interview there with Michael [Muscat 00:32:31], a school principal in Melbourne, and I think you'll enjoy hearing what he has to say. So you can find that show in the podcast app that you're using right now or you can go to the website unimelb.edu.au/experthack. Talking Teaching is produced by myself Maxine McKew, Sophie Murphy and Kerry Elliot and is recorded and mixed by Gavin Nebauer at the Horwood Recording Studios at the University of Melbourne. And of course he's the composer of the opening and closing music that you hear on Talking Teaching. Bye for now.