But while these critically important skills and cross-curricular learning areas are obvious inclusions in schools’ programs, resources and professional development on how to teach them more effectively aren’t as readily available as we’d perhaps like them to be.
Thankfully for O’Connell, as this year’s recipient of the Public Education Foundation’s Teachers Mutual Bank Victorian Mid-Career Scholarship, she’s been able to use the $10,000 in prize money to wing her way to the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in late June, to join the famous weeklong Project Zero Classroom (PZC).
Almost 50 years in existence now, PZC asks “How can the classroom become a place where today’s learners become the citizens and leaders of tomorrow?” and takes educators through its pioneering research that examines key facets of human potential such as intelligence and creativity, asking how educators and schools can design learning experiences that are engaging and exciting for all learners.
O’Connell is head of humanities at St Albans Secondary College in Melbourne’s outer northwest, where many of the school’s students come from diverse cultural, economic and linguistic backgrounds
Now in her seventh year of teaching following a career change from publishing seven years ago, the Victorian educator is passionate about the importance of access to public education as a human right, regardless of circumstance, and says the trip was everything and more she’d hoped it would be.
“…one of the things I said in my application was I am very interested in these big questions and how to teach them,” O’Connell tells EducationHQ.
“So issues like climate change, media literacy, gender diversity, sexuality, all that sort of stuff, and it’s quite daunting to know how to teach that, and not to just kind of skim over it, but to teach our students the thinking skills to be able to grapple with these issues independently and be able to discuss them with other people in their classroom.
“So that was really what attracted me to the course at Harvard, because they have a huge focus on teaching critical and creative thinking, which, I think for most of the problems in the world, if we were better critical thinkers, we could probably go some way to addressing them.”
While the PD itself was outstanding, O’Connell says the people she met were the absolute highlight.
“So the way that the week was structured, was, we would generally have a lecture in the morning, and we could choose from a range of different topics, and then go into a workshop which had maybe 20-25, people in it,” O’Connell explains.
“Then in the afternoon, we would have a home group, and the home group was really the highlight of it.”
O’Connell says all the content and approaches covered on the trip will directly inform her own teaching.
Within O’Connell’s home group of 12 or 13 people were six Americans, a Canadian, two Greeks, two Palestinian women, a Jordanian woman and the facilitator was from Panama.
“I think it really helped me understand that we’re all struggling with the same issues in our classrooms, although obviously there are huge regional differences,” she says.
“I had some really interesting conversations with the women from Palestine, for example, and one of the American guys in our group, he was in charge of the school’s active shooter drill – so there are so many different issues that we’re all dealing with in our own countries, but fundamentally, we’re dealing with these global challenges as well.”
In terms of common challenges, student apathy was an area that really struck a chord with all of the teachers.
“One afternoon, we were having a small group chat within the larger home group, and I said something like, ‘I’m really struggling with student apathy, and I know a lot of other teachers at my school are as well post-pandemic'.
“I said ‘I can understand from the students perspective, all these issues seem so enormous, and you have some students who are very into wanting to address them, but then there’s a huge cohort who just sit back and aren’t really engaged with it.
“And the minute I said that, everyone responded with, ‘oh, you too? Yeah, absolutely that’s the case in my classroom as well’.”
O’Connell says the various sessions she attended all included content and approaches she will draw on in her own teaching.
“A real PZC focus is on making visible thinking routines. So it’s all about students not just knowing facts, but really genuinely understanding particular issues and embedding thinking skills so it becomes automatic in their life.
“One of the best sessions I went to was about choosing maybe four thinking routines to embed in lessons once or twice a week, just to get students into the habit of being able to look at different issues more deeply and not just skimming the surface.”
The beauty of the routines, O’Connell explains, is that they’re easy to embed in a lesson.
“So, for example, there’s a thinking routine, where at the start of the lesson you might ask your students for three words relating to a particular topic, come up with two questions relating to that topic, and then come up with a metaphor around that topic, around whatever you know about that topic, and it might not be much at that stage.
“And then part of making the thinking visible, is to make sure that it’s written up on the whiteboard.
“And then you carry on with your lesson, and do the same thing at the end of the lesson – write all of that up so students can actually see where or how far they’ve come from the start of the lesson to the end of the lesson, or you might do it over the course of the unit...”
O’Connell says it’s a simple technique, but, importantly, it’s also quite easy to plan for as well.
“We’re all time poor, so embedding different routines like that is definitely achievable – and as head of my department, I plan on running some PD with my staff around that sort of thing.
Other sessions O’Connell chose to attend included one on migration, and another on teaching students to use technology in an ethics and values driven way.
“So rather than talk about banning social media, it was on how to actually help them to engage with what they’re seeing,” she says.
“I did go to one specifically on climate change, looking at how to teach students about the different perspectives that people might have on these things, and another really good one on teaching about power dynamics and using art as a way to explore different power dynamics.”
As expected, simply being at Harvard, walking the halls, enjoying the history of the world-renowned place of learning was a highlight in itself.
“It’s such a calming environment,” O’Connell says.
“The weather was just perfect, it was about 28 degrees and sunny every day, and it’s just such a beautiful learning environment.
“And then, of course, walking down the street, walking past Harvard Law School, where so many amazing people through history have attended, and going to Harvard Art Museum and so on – yeah, it was an amazing place to be.”
