Workshop 2

Day 2 | Tuesday 26 September 2023 | 10.30-11.30am

Sustainability
Rechargable: How to recharge on the go, practical ways to prevent fatigue and burnout
Dr Adam Fraser

ABSTRACT:

With the massive levels of disruption seen in our lives, burn out is a real issue for many people in schools today. When team members burn out their performance plummets which means they are more at risk of being disengaged, which then leads to a dysfunctional impact on the culture of the team.

But how do you prevent burn out when you still have a mountain of work to get through? Dr Adam Fraser’s research has proven that it is possible to improve your wellbeing while work­ing at a fast pace or under high demand. The mistake most people make is that they think that in order to recover, they need to take long breaks off work. However, the research of Dr Adam Fraser and Deakin University shows that the best way to prevent burn out is short, regular but consistent bursts of recovery. Recovery is a regular habit we need to do each day, each week and each month. We can recover while working hard.

The strategies shared in this presentation have been shown in University studies to reduce stress and burnout in various stressful jobs such.

Sustainability
Demystifying innovation for management: how to create a culture of innovation in the workplace
Dr Colin Kennedy, Chief Innovation Officer, Creative HQ

ABSTRACT:
A school's drive to innovate at any given time lies somewhere between curiosity and survival, and along that spectrum the question of 'why innovate' can be answered in a number of different ways: process efficiency, student experience, continuous improvement, responding to external pressures... This list is much longer but as long as it is, so too is the list of barriers preventing innovation from happening.

To name a few: staff resistance, focus on immediate goals, team silos, poorculture, low risk appetite, lack of funding and/or skills. It can often prove too much for a senior leadership team and innovation is, far too often, left on the nice-to-have pile rather than the need-to-have pile.

So what needs to change?

This session will explore a few options that a management team should think about when evolving a culture of innovation:
- How to define innovation within the school's context
- How to frame and prioritise the critical problems that need to be addressed
- What is the Return on Innovation Investment (ROII)
- What resources are available to execute
- What is the current level of innovation capability in the team?

Leaders need to be clear where they want to play in this space. Is the appetite for short-term incremental change or larger-scale long-term disruption? Is their approach one of being a catalyst to empower a team to create change or one of relying on expertise for achievement?

By taking on these questions, this session aims to demystify innovation and challenge / inspire school leaders to create new value across all parts of their schools.

Leadership
Creating a Culture of Belonging, Agency and Autonomy in Schools
Rebecca Butterworth (Hunter Valley Grammar School, NSW)

ABSTRACT:

Student and staff agency is often spoken about in schools. However, what agency looks like in practice is often hard to define despite it being central to the creation of a culture of belonging in schools. This workshop session will explore how to strategically and systematically build agency across school communities. Moving between theory and practice, participants will explore concrete ways to cultivate student and staff "voice" in decision-making through the building of a strategic vision. Participants will also come to understand what it means to ensure school systems are "human" by design and remain focused on building strong connections, mastery, and autonomy. Participants will also reflect on their own journey towards belonging and agency and the ways in which this has been deliberately cultivated in their schools.

Leadership
Artificial Intellegence in Education - Promises and Pitfalls 
Gerard Houlihan (St Michael's Grammar School, Vic)

ABSTRACT:

Artificial Intelligence – What is all the hype about? Over the past three years, no educator could have remained immune from the wide-ranging public pronouncements in the media about the looming impact of AI on the sector. Whilst these pronouncements have typically been delivered with some gusto, there has been scant detail as to what this will look like at the coalface, leaving most teachers and school leaders devoid of the information necessary to make informed decisions around AI. And whilst most schools no doubt already access commonplace applications, the question remains - what are the broader implications for more nuanced applications of AI across less well-defined problems, such as with student wellbeing? Drawing on Gerard’s work in the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Programme and at St Michael’s, this workshop will carefully unpack these questions, first starting with an accessible introduction to the history of AI in context of parallel developments in society and education. Gerard will lead workshop participants through the technical ways in which machines learn, identifying those areas with most potential for schools. A range of case studies will show how St Michael’s and other schools deploy AI. We will look at how recent work in neural networks mimics the human brain and provides inspiration for our understanding of how our students think and learn. We will explore the impact of AI in getting students future ready for work. Lastly, we will consider the numerous ethical and legal conundrums of AI as it applies in an international context and to the education sector, especially focussing on replication, privacy, and inbuilt decision-making biases. There will be many opportunities for everyone to consider the implications of AI for their own school.

Wellbeing
Generation Y (haven’t you praised me today?) Or is it Generation Y (aren’t you getting the best out of me?)
Dr Judith Locke

ABSTRACT:

Generation Y/Millennials are increasingly a big part of the workforce. Parenting, social, and economic changes in their lifetime have made many of these employees have different expectations of organisations. Can workplaces help them adjust to the reality of work? Should workplaces adjust to them? And what can we do to better prepare upcoming generations for the reality of occupations, such as people-care professions?

In this workshop, Dr Judith Locke will examine the research around millennials’ strengths and challenges when they reach working age. She will look at some solutions to better meld early- to mid-career workers and their responsibilities, with an organisation's goals and practices.