A friend recently visited me in Shanghai with her three-year-old daughter. The little girl’s mother is Argentinian, her father Australian. They were passing through, a few days in the city, ice cream, the kind of trip that leaves small impressions on small children.

At some point during their visit, their little 3-year-old girl ran back to her mother, face bright, urgent with news: Mummy, mummy, I said Xie Xie to the Señora when she gave me the ice cream!

English. Mandarin. Spanish. Three years old.

Something about that moment stayed with me. Not because she spoke three languages. But because she knew which knowledge to reach for.

What a knowledge-rich mind actually looks like

A knowledge-rich mind doesn’t just store things. It connects them. The difference between a knowledge-rich mind and an information-rich one is what happens when something new arrives. An information-rich mind has to treat each new thing as separate; it takes up precious space in working memory, it floats without an anchor, it disappears. A knowledge-rich mind already has a structure to receive it. The new thing connects to something already there, and both become more meaningful as a result.

That is what happened in that moment. The little girl didn’t retrieve Xie Xie from a list of Mandarin words. She read the situation, Chinese woman, ice cream, gratitude, and her mind reached for exactly the right piece of knowledge for exactly the right moment. Pattern recognition built from structure.

The chess grandmaster does the same thing. The experienced surgeon. The historian who reads a primary source and immediately understands its significance without being told. They are not smarter in a raw cognitive sense. They have richer, more connected knowledge, and that structure lets them perceive things that others simply cannot see yet.

A knowledge-rich mind also transfers. It can take something learned in one context and apply it in another, because the underlying concept, not just the surface fact, has been secured. A student who truly understands cause and effect in history can apply that thinking in science, in literature, and in their own life. A student who only encountered it as a worksheet activity cannot.

And a knowledge-rich mind has depth beneath the words. When it encounters language, a text, a conversation, an argument, it can decode not just what the words say, but what they mean, what they assume, what they are reaching toward.

What the Knowledge Revival actually says

Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival (Surma, Hattie, Wiliam, Kirschner et al., 2025) makes a central claim: a knowledge-rich curriculum, one that is content-rich, coherent, and clear, is the foundation for developing both deep knowledge and complex skills.

They define a knowledge-rich curriculum as:

A plan for learning over time that is concept-led and knowledge-led, which encompasses a wide range of specified knowledge, and provides ample depth and opportunities to engage with that knowledge. It sets high expectations for all students and systematically builds their knowledge of words and the world. It aims at a broad and steady foundation for complex thinking skills — but also knowledge building that is further amplified and deepened by those complex skills. A comprehensive knowledge-rich curriculum covers subjects and concepts that go beyond children’s day-to-day experiences and is based on the best disciplinary knowledge available. It ensures that every child has access to a broad and solid knowledge base in school, even if it has not been acquired from outside school.

The cognitive architecture argument is elegant. Working memory, the workspace where active thinking happens, can hold only four to seven unconnected pieces of information at any one time, for roughly twenty seconds before they dissolve. When new information connects to something already held in long-term memory, it stops being disconnected data and becomes meaning. Prior knowledge effectively expands what a learner can do cognitively, not by making the workspace bigger, but by enabling chunking, pattern recognition, and connection. The chess grandmaster recalls a complex board position in a single glance, not because of superior memory, but because deeply structured knowledge has made 32 pieces readable as patterns rather than isolated data points.

This is what knowledge does for every learner, in every subject. It creates the conditions for thinking.

The implication is significant: we cannot think critically in the abstract. We think critically about something. We cannot solve problems in general. We solve problems in a domain. We cannot read for deep comprehension without knowing enough about the subject of a text to decode not just its words, but the meaning those words are reaching toward.

Knowledge, Erickson, and UBD: connected by design

Lyn Erickson’s Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction and Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design further support a knowledge-rich orientation.

Erickson’s three-dimensional model moves from facts → concepts → generalisations and principles. A concept has no meaning without the knowledge it emerges from. Erickson herself is explicit on this: facts are the vehicle through which conceptual understanding becomes possible, not a preliminary to be moved through as quickly as possible. The knowledge-rich curriculum does not slow down concept-based learning. It makes it possible.

The same logic runs through Understanding by Design. McTighe and Wiggins built backward design as a disciplined process for being intentional about conceptually-led and knowledge-led outcomes. The first stage asks: What enduring understandings do we want students to carry? Those understandings are knowledge, deep, transferable, conceptual knowledge that a well-designed curriculum deliberately builds toward. UBD is not backward from activities. It is backward from understanding.

Both frameworks, when implemented as designed, are underpinned by knowledge. The Knowledge Revival simply makes that dependency explicit — and gives curriculum leaders the research base to structure their designs.

The curriculum design implications: coherence, alignment, and the work that changes outcomes

This is where the conversation must move from philosophy to practice. A knowledge-rich curriculum is not a belief system; it is a design challenge. And it is more demanding than it might appear.

The Knowledge Revival identifies three structural requirements for a curriculum that genuinely builds knowledge: content-richness, coherence, and clarity.

Content-richness means making deliberate, principled choices about what students will actually learn, not just what experiences they will have, or what skills they will practise. It means understanding the hierarchical structure of disciplinary knowledge: that some things must come before others, that certain concepts cannot be accessed without the foundational content that gives them traction, and that coverage without depth rarely produces durable understanding. Content-rich curriculum requires leaders and teachers to ask a deceptively simple question: what do we actually want students to know by the end of this unit, this year, this phase of schooling? Not what they will have experienced. What will they carry?

Coherence is where curriculum design most frequently encounters difficulty and where the consequences are most far-reaching. Coherence operates in two directions. Horizontal coherence means that across a year level, subjects connect, reinforce, and build shared knowledge rather than operating in isolation from one another. A student studying forces in science, scale in mathematics, and cause and effect in history is encountering related conceptual terrain and a coherent curriculum makes those connections visible and cumulative rather than incidental.

Vertical coherence means that what is taught in one year deliberately prepares the ground for the next. Knowledge accumulates when it is sequenced with intention. Without vertical coherence, the curriculum cannot compound each year level effectively, starting from a shaky foundation, and the knowledge that should be built is, instead, constantly being rebuilt from scratch.

This is a particular challenge in international school contexts, where student mobility is high, and assumptions about shared prior knowledge are easily misplaced. When curriculum is designed without explicit vertical mapping, when teachers are uncertain what students learned the year before, or cannot articulate precisely what knowledge students need to have secured before they move on the compounding effect that makes knowledge-rich curriculum so powerful simply does not materialise. Coherence work is slow and structural. It requires curriculum teams to hold the whole progression in view, not just the unit in front of them. But it is, the research is clear, one of the highest-leverage investments a curriculum team can make.

Clarity means that learning goals students will understand, not only what activities they will complete. It means genuine alignment between what the curriculum intends, what teachers teach, and what assessments actually measure. Misalignment here is common and consequential: a curriculum may articulate conceptual goals while lesson designs only ever reach the factual level; an assessment may measure recall while the stated goal was understanding; teachers across a year level may interpret the same learning goal in meaningfully different ways. Clarity work is the work of making the implicit explicit of testing, honestly, whether the curriculum as designed and the curriculum as experienced are actually the same thing.

Together, content-richness, coherence, and clarity constitute the structural conditions for knowledge to do what it does best: accumulate, connect, transfer, and become the foundation for the kind of thinking that curriculum leaders, across every framework and philosophy, are ultimately trying to develop.

Where Human Flourishing and the Knowledge Revival meet

The OECD’s Education for Human Flourishing framework (2025) arrives at a conclusion that brings these threads together. Its five competencies for a flourishing life, Adaptive Problem-Solving, Ethical Competence, Understanding the World, Appreciating the World, and Acting in the World, are rigorous and demanding. And they rest explicitly on a foundation the document describes plainly: “They do not replace foundational literacies but build on them.”

Think of it like a root system and a tree. The competency is what you see above ground. The knowledge is what makes it possible to grow there at all. So, what knowledge are we building, and how does it make the competency possible?

Consider the five competencies the OECD identifies:

· Adaptive problem-solving requires enough knowledge of a domain to recognise that a problem exists, to draw on prior experience to generate solutions, and to evaluate which fits the context. Without domain knowledge, you are not problem-solving. You are guessing.

· Ethical competence requires knowledge of history, of human consequences, of cultural context, of competing values. You cannot make a genuinely ethical judgment about something you know nothing about. Ethics without knowledge is just feeling.

· Understanding the world requires disciplinary knowledge, the specific ways that science, history, literature, and mathematics each produce and organise what they know. You cannot understand the world in general. You understand it through the lenses that disciplines provide.

· Appreciating the world requires enough knowledge to perceive what is there. You cannot appreciate a piece of music you have no framework for hearing. Appreciation is not passive. It is an act of informed attention.

· Acting in the world the central competency — requires the confidence that comes from knowing enough to trust your judgment. Agency without knowledge is recklessness. With knowledge, it becomes purpose.

The curriculum design question is therefore always: what knowledge do students need to have secured before this competency becomes genuinely accessible to them? And what does this progression actually look like at each stage of schooling?

Back to the ice cream

A curriculum that is deliberately, coherently, and equitably knowledge-rich is not a narrowing curriculum. It is the most meaningful commitment a school can make to every child who walks through its doors, not only the ones whose families already gave them three languages and a Shanghai afternoon and ice cream handed over by a stranger whose language they somehow already knew.

The work of building that curriculum, making principled content choices, mapping coherent knowledge progressions vertically and horizontally, aligning goals with teaching and assessment, is demanding and structural. It requires curriculum teams to hold a long view, and leadership to create the conditions in which that kind of careful, sustained thinking can happen.

But it is the work that compounds. It is the work that, over time, changes what students carry with them. And for every child who doesn’t yet have the words for the world they are standing in, it is not optional. It is the point.

Further reading: Surma et al. (2025), Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival — open access at link.springer.com OECD (2025), Education for Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Framework — open access at oecd.org

Entry-level job postings in the US are down by around 35% since January 2024. Unemployment for recent graduates sits at 5.8%, one of the worst figures in recent years. Harvard Business Review suggests that AI can already handle 50–60% of typical junior-level tasks. In Europe, the picture is similarly stark, with tech companies cutting entry-level hiring by more than 70%.

I have also been noticing this shift much closer to home. In recent conversations with friends who are senior business leaders, I have heard remarkably similar descriptions of how AI is already changing the shape of work.
“Claude is already doing what my junior analysts used to do.”
“We’re replacing functions with AI.”

Work that once took weeks is now happening in days. Teams are shrinking. Roles are shifting. Hiring is being rethought, not towards those who can simply do the analytical work, but towards those who understand how to work alongside AI tools, who can ask better questions, and who can catch what is wrong. These are not predictions. They are descriptions of what is already happening inside organisations.

Then I had an experience that made all of this feel more visceral. A colleague offered to show me her fully autonomous vehicle. I was sceptical. But watching a system navigate urban streets, making decisions, managing space, signalling, braking, and parking with calm precision, was surreal. It wasn’t a prototype. It was operational, deployed, and, in many ways, better than most human drivers.

And then, while the Grand Prix was unfolding in Shanghai, I found myself reading about the new Formula 1 regulations and the response from James Vowles.

It struck me how closely this mirrored the idea of transformation in a very different field.

In the lead-up to major regulatory shifts, teams are often forced to dismantle systems that are currently working, not because they are failing, but because they know those systems will not carry them forward. As Vowles describes, transformation at that level is not incremental. It is deliberate deconstruction. Teams take apart processes, assumptions, and ways of working, even the parts that feel successful, in order to rebuild in response to a new reality.

That idea stayed with me.

Because what I had just experienced, the autonomous system, the conversations with business leaders, and new Formula 1 regulations, felt less like improvement and more like the early signs of something being fundamentally reconfigured.

A System Being Reconfigured

In January 2026, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published an essay titled The Adolescence of Technology. He describes “powerful AI” as a model that is not simply a tool you interact with, but something far more capable: a system that can operate across domains, complete complex tasks autonomously over extended periods of time, interact with the digital world much like a human worker, and scale into millions of parallel instances working simultaneously.

It’s worth reading his definition carefully, because this isn’t speculation; it’s a description of systems his team believes are coming.

By “powerful AI,” I have in mind an AI model—likely similar to today’s LLMs in form, though it might be based on a different architecture, might involve several interacting models, and might be trained differently—with the following properties:

In terms of pure intelligence, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields: biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc.

In addition to just being a “smart thing you talk to,” it has all the interfaces available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. It can engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet, taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on. It does all of these tasks with, again, a skill exceeding that of the most capable humans in the world.

It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it can be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary.

It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory, it could even design robots or equipment for itself to use.

The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it (this matches projected cluster sizes by ~2027), and the model can absorb information and generate actions at roughly 10–100x human speed. It may, however, be limited by the response time of the physical world or of software it interacts with.

Each of these million copies can act independently on unrelated tasks, or, if needed can all work together in the same way humans would collaborate, perhaps with different subpopulations fine-tuned to be especially good at particular tasks.

We could summarize this as a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.”

— Dario Amodei, “The Adolescence of Technology” (January 2026)

The Constraint Has Shifted

Let’s be honest about what Amodei is describing. This isn’t AI that can help with homework or draft essays. This is AI that can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write advanced codebases, direct scientific experiments, work autonomously for extended periods, and do so at scale and speed far beyond human capacity.

Every one of these capabilities challenges the traditional educational promise: work hard, master this skill, secure your future. Because if AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper, that promise becomes unstable.

But what matters is this: AI cannot decide what questions are worth asking. It cannot determine what problems matter. It cannot choose what kind of future to build. It cannot act with wisdom, judgment, and discernment about what matters.

Those capacities remain human. That’s where education needs to shift.

This shift requires understanding three things:

1. The Jobs Won’t Disappear—The Nature of Work Will

Amodei doesn’t predict that work disappears. He predicts that work *transforms*. The humans who thrive won’t be those competing with AI on speed and capability. There will be those asking: What should we create? What problems matter? How do we want to live? What constitutes a good society?

These are fundamentally different questions. And they require fundamentally different capacities: judgment, values, discernment, the ability to ask powerful questions, and the capacity to think about second and third-order consequences.

2. Fluency With AI Becomes Foundational

Just as literacy became foundational in the industrial age, fluency with powerful AI becomes foundational now. But not in the sense of “learning to use AI tools.” Literacy didn’t mean “learning to use the printing press.” It meant developing the capacity to read, write, think, and communicate in a world where those abilities mattered.

AI fluency means learning to work alongside superintelligent systems. It means understanding what they’re good for, what they’re not, when to trust them, when to question them, and how to delegate to them while maintaining human responsibility and judgment.

This is a skill educators can teach right now. It doesn’t require waiting for perfect technology or perfect understanding. It requires cultivating intellectual habits: curiosity, scepticism, the willingness to test, and the ability to verify. Anthropic offers a great 4D AI Fluency framework for this work.

3. Character and Values Become Decisive

In a world where capability is commodified, where any question can be answered, and AI can solve any problem, what distinguishes human contribution is character: integrity, ethical reasoning, the ability to care about long-term consequences, and the willingness to stand for something even when it’s inconvenient.

These aren’t new virtues. But they become newly urgent when raw intelligence and speed are no longer scarce.

He also states:

“A country of geniuses in a datacenter.”

It is worth pausing on this. Amodei isn’t suggesting that knowledge becomes obsolete. He is pointing to something more subtle.

Where We Risk Getting It Wrong

The constraint has shifted.

For a long time, what limited us was access to information. Schools existed, in part, to provide it. In that context, information was a scarce resource, and schools were the primary distribution mechanism for knowledge. In this system, the following paradigm existed.

• Teacher role: Knowledge importer—you memorise what’s told

• Curriculum: Coverage-based—breadth of content

• Learning: Passive consumption of teaching

• Assessment: External exams testing recall

• Governance: Bureaucratic control

But as AI begins to handle that more easily, what limits us changes. Information is abundant and free, and a shift in paradigm is required to accommodate this.

• Teacher role: Facilitator—helping you learn how to think

• Curriculum: Depth-based—real competency

• Learning: Active; you have agency in what and how you learn

• Assessment: Real-world, competency-based

• Governance: Participatory, peer networks

It becomes our ability to interpret what we see, to question it, and to decide whether it is valid, meaningful, or incomplete. And that requires knowledge

The Illusion of Understanding

Anthropic’s most recent AI Fluency Index offers an important insight. Nearly 10,000 real conversations with Claude were analysed to understand how people actually interact with AI. When AI produces something polished, people are less likely to question it. When they iterate—ask follow-up questions, test reasoning—they engage more critically. But when the output looks complete, many assume the thinking is done. They stop asking: Is this true? What is missing? Does this hold up? Why does this happen?

Perhaps it is cognitive offloading, but more fundamentally, it is because you cannot question what you do not understand.

You cannot evaluate a mathematical proof without mathematics. You cannot assess a historical argument without historical knowledge. You cannot recognise when an AI response is incomplete, misleading, or biased without expertise in the field.

In a world where information is instantly available, knowledge does not become less important. It becomes the foundation for discernment. It is what allows us to recognise when something makes sense and when it doesn’t.

What Deep Knowledge Enables

An incredible living example of this is Demis Hassabis, a British AI researcher and co-founder of Google DeepMind, whose work bridges neuroscience, game design, and artificial intelligence, demonstrating what becomes possible when deep knowledge is integrated across disciplines and guided by purpose. After watching The Thinking Game, Google DeepMind’s documentary about his work, his story isn’t just about brilliance. It’s about what happens when knowledge, curiosity, and values integrate.

Demis was a chess prodigy at 4. But he didn’t just get better at chess. He developed pattern recognition, systems thinking, and an understanding of how complex systems work. He moved to neuroscience, studying how the brain works, then to AI. Each domain is built on the last. By the time he tackled protein folding, he had integrated knowledge across multiple fields. That’s not luck. He developed the intellectual foundation.

But here’s the part that stayed with me: when his team solved protein folding—200 million protein structures—they gave it away. They could have built a proprietary platform, charged access, and made billions. Instead, they understood what protein folding meant for medicine. They saw the cascading possibilities: diseases understood, new drugs developed, research accelerated for decades. They chose long-term human benefit over profit.

That decision required deep knowledge, the capability to solve the problem, and values that prioritised human good.

And that, to me, is what education should be developing.

Why Struggle Still Matters

Also in this space, Mustafa Suleyman, Head of AI at Microsoft, insights become crucial. He was asked what parents and educators should focus on in preparing students for an AI world. His answer cuts through everything:

“The discipline of being able to teach yourself. That’s a meta skill. And that comes with friction. You have to introduce discipline and friction into the process because if it’s always on tap, then the child could get used to having everything instantly available and doesn’t learn from hard work.”

This is the meta skill: learning how to learn. And it requires struggle. This is why struggle matters. This is why friction matters. This is why finishing what you start matters. When everything is instantly available, the neurological changes that constitute learning, the struggle, the effort, the productive difficulty, disappear. And with it, the cognitive resilience needed to think alongside powerful AI. Schools must protect the struggle. Not reduce it. Protect it.

This Is a Transition — and Possibly a Transformation

If I step back, what we are seeing is not simply a shift in tools or practices. It is a shift in the underlying conditions that have shaped education for over a century. And that matters, because when conditions change at that level, what follows is not improvement—it is transformation.

I’ll admit—I can imagine Amondi’s prediction as being possible.

Perhaps because I’ve already started to see glimpses of it. Watching robots move in China with a level of fluidity that no longer feels mechanical. Seeing a robot act as a tennis partner and coach, returning serves, adjusting position, and volleying seamlessly with a human. It doesn’t feel like a distant future. It feels like something that is already here.

Too often, we describe incremental adjustments as a transformation. We layer new ideas onto existing systems without questioning whether those systems are still fit for purpose. But real transformation does not work like that.

It is not additive.
It is not comfortable.
And it is rarely clean.

In the work of Brené Brown, transformation begins with breaking. Breaking apart assumptions, systems, and ways of thinking that no longer serve. And that breaking is not easy. It creates uncertainty. It creates resistance. It often feels like loss because what is being dismantled is not just structure, but familiarity, identity, and the sense of competence we have built within existing systems.

It requires the courage to question what has worked, the discipline to sit in uncertainty, and the clarity to understand what we are building towards. And this is where the connection to AI becomes sharper. Because powerful AI is not simply making tasks faster or more efficient. It is exposing the limits of the systems we have built. It is revealing that many of the structures we have optimised, curriculum, assessment, pathways into work, are grounded in a world where information was scarce and human cognitive labour was the constraint.

A Question Worth Sitting With

That world is shifting. And so the question is not whether we adapt. The question is whether we are willing to do what transformation requires: to look closely at what we have built, to identify what no longer holds, and to be willing to take it apart.

Return to Amodei’s description. Read it again.

Share it with your colleagues, with your teams, with educators.

And ask:

Do we believe this could be the world our students are entering?

Because if there is even a possibility that it is, then the questions we ask of education, and of ourselves, need to shift accordingly. Amodei describes this moment as a kind of technological adolescence, a period where our capability is accelerating faster than our wisdom. And perhaps that is what makes this moment feel less like a reform and more like a transition that may become a transformation.

The question is not simply how we respond. But what we are willing to let go of.

Further Reading:

• Amodei, D. (2024). ‘Machines of Loving Grace.’ darioamodei.com

• Amodei, D. (2026). “The Adolescence of Technology: Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI.” https://darioamodei.com

• Anthropic Research Team (2026). AI Fluency Index. Analysis of 9,830+ real conversations examining adoption, fluency, and critical thinking patterns.

• The Thinking Game. Documentary by Google DeepMind. Explores Demis Hassabis’s intellectual journey.

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“What exactly do we mean by flourishing?”

It’s a fair question.

Human flourishing is a phrase we’re hearing more and more in education. It is also increasingly shaping strategic direction across schools and systems. And it matters, because it invites us to clarify what we value and what we’re designing for. The challenge (and opportunity) is making it concrete in the daily.

So perhaps we should begin by grounding it in what it truly means.

Eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία) is the ancient Greek word often translated as “human flourishing.” It literally means “a state of good spirit,” but philosophically it describes something far richer: living in alignment with virtue, wisdom, and one’s highest nature. For Aristotle, it was not about feeling good. It was about living well (Aristotle, trans. 2009).

Not pleasure.
Not status.
Not performance.

But a life in which character, purpose, and contribution are cultivated over time.

That is where the contemporary language of “human flourishing” begins.

In recent years, the language of human flourishing has moved from the margins of philosophy into the centre of educational conversation. Across research, global policy, and school leadership networks, it is no longer peripheral. It is becoming a shared reference point, a way of describing what education is ultimately for.

That, in itself, feels significant.

When I listen to educators discuss and share deep thinking about flourishing, I don’t hear “add another programme.” I hear something quieter:

Name and focus on what matters most.

Notice what your community already does that supports it.

Design assessment, learning, and adult culture so that it grows over time.

I am wondering whether we are on the cusp of a renewed paradigm? Or are we being invited to notice the paradigm we are already inside and decide whether it still serves our young people?

A paradigm is the underlying logic that shapes what we value, what we measure, and what we design for, a framework of beliefs, assumptions, values, and practices that shapes how a field understands problems and solutions.

So when we talk about flourishing, we are really asking:

What is the purpose of education today?
How are we preparing our children to thrive in their future, not our past?

This Is Not a New Idea. But Something Is Shifting.

Aristotle gave us eudaimonia.

Centuries later, Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum (2011) reframed the conversation with a deceptively simple question:

What is a person genuinely able to be and do?

Not what score did they achieve.
Not how efficiently can they perform a task.

But what real freedoms and capabilities do they possess? Are they living well?

This question invites us to reflect on how performance systems and flourishing ambitions can better align.

Flourishing as “Living Well”

Tyler J. VanderWeele, Professor at Harvard University, reviewed decades of longitudinal and experimental research across psychology, sociology, economics, and public health to examine what genuinely contributes to a good life (VanderWeele, 2017).

His work sought to bring coherence to fragmented measures of wellbeing.

Across disciplines, he found that flourishing is not reducible to happiness alone. It involves doing or being well across at least five broad domains:

1. Happiness and life satisfaction

2. Mental and physical health

3. Meaning and purpose

4. Character and virtue

5. Close social relationships

Each of these domains, he argues, is generally regarded as an end in itself and nearly universally desired (VanderWeele, 2017).

Importantly, the strongest predictors of sustained flourishing were not momentary emotional states. Rather, they were participating in stable life structures, family, work, education, and community contexts in which individuals are embedded in meaningful roles, responsibilities, and enduring relationships.

People thrive less because of passing feelings and more because they belong somewhere meaningful.

More recently, this work has expanded into the Global Flourishing Study, a large-scale, multi-country longitudinal research project tracking over 200,000 participants across cultures (VanderWeele et al., 2023). The study now examines flourishing across six domains, adding financial and material stability to the earlier five.

It asks:

To what extent are individuals in different nations flourishing?

What factors influence flourishing in each country?

The OECD Shift: From Human Capital to Human Flourishing

In 2025, the OECD released Education for Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Framework, developed with engagement from high-performing systems including Estonia, Singapore, Finland, British Columbia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia (OECD, 2025).

The framework presents flourishing as an integrated architecture.

At the base sit foundational conditions:

• Foundational literacies (reading, mathematics, science)

• Social and emotional skills

• Well-being factors

These are not optional extras. They are the ground.

Above this foundation sit five interrelated competencies:

• Adaptive problem-solving

• Ethical competence

• Understanding the world

• Appreciating the world

• Acting in the world

“Acting in the world” draws together the others, agency exercised with judgment.

At the top are the dimensions of flourishing itself:

• Happiness

• Relationships

• Meaning

• Accomplishment

Flourishing does not float free from rigour. It rests on knowledge. It integrates skills, values, and agency. And it ultimately aims at lives lived well, personally and collectively.

The shift is not away from standards. It is toward coherence.

AI only sharpens the conversation. If routine tasks are increasingly automated, then distinctly human capacities matter more:

Judgement.
Ethical reasoning.
Creativity.
Collaboration across differences.
Meaning-making.
Agency exercised within the community.

Literacy and numeracy remain essential, not as endpoints, but as enablers of adaptive thinking and contribution (OECD, 2025).

The opportunity before schools is not to soften expectations.

It is to align rigour with capability.

Lessons from Estonia and Singapore: Naming the Tensions

In an OECD panel discussion, Kristina Kallas, Estonia’s Minister of Education and Research, emphasised that flourishing begins with adults. Human flourishing does not grow in isolated career ladders but in collaborative professional cultures. AI, she suggested, can either erode agency or strengthen it; leadership determines which.

If we want students to develop agency, we cannot design systems that strip it from teachers.

Meanwhile, Liew Wei Li, Director-General of Education in Singapore, named a tension many leaders quietly recognise:

The curriculum is crowded.

Designing competencies is easy. Making space for them is hard.

Trade-offs are unavoidable.

Flourishing requires prioritisation.
And prioritisation requires courage.

What International Leaders Are Wrestling With

In a recent virtual roundtable hosted by the JUMP! Foundation, three international leaders reflected on what flourishing looks like when it moves beyond theory and into the lived experience of schools:

· Fatma Odaymat, School Director, Al-Rayan International School

· Marta Medved Krajnovic, Head of School, Western Academy of Beijing

· Angela Mikel, Global Head of IB World Schools

What struck me first was how personal their definitions of flourishing were — and how quickly those personal stories became system questions.

Fatma described flourishing as something that grows when young people can identify who they are, what matters to them, and how their lives can have an impact. She returned to this repeatedly, schools should help students find purpose earlier, not “wait for university” to discover their passions. And she was candid about where schools are right now: we don’t fully have the answers, but we can create the conditions for inquiry, risk-taking, and growth.

Marta spoke about flourishing as being grounded, connected, and growing with others and the world around you. She also named a tension many educators feel: schools can’t treat flourishing as “the next new thing.” Her solution was practical and strategic: use flourishing as an umbrella concept, a way to connect what many schools have already prioritised, wellbeing, agency, learning that is joyful and purposeful, global citizenship, without turning it into another add-on. In her context at WAB, flourishing wasn’t presented as a new direction; it was framed as a thread through the school’s mission, values, and long-standing commitments.

Angela’s lens widened to the global moment. She described flourishing as a container for competencies, values, and skills, grounded in humanity and interdependence, and made more urgent by the world we’re navigating, global crises, complexity, and AI. She also connected flourishing to strategy at the IB level: flourishing is not just a concept being discussed; it’s being positioned as a design goal (“designing education for flourishing”), with specific capabilities in view (wellbeing, empathy, critical judgement, navigating complex systems, and continuous self-development). Her framing echoed what many leaders are feeling: this isn’t about adding softness to schooling, it’s about designing for what human beings will need to live and contribute well.

When asked what they would redesign, their answer was unanimous: assessment. Assessment can become “the tail that wags the dog.” If schools are evaluated primarily through grades and narrow outcomes, the system quietly teaches everyone what matters, regardless of what schools say they value.

Which raises the question:

What are we signalling, implicitly, about what matters?

Across contexts, the same design tensions recur:

Assessment reform.
Authentic experience.
Agency and personalised pathways.

None of these are new ideas. But they feel different today because leaders are naming, with more urgency, and it forces the uncomfortable (and necessary) system question:

If flourishing is the aim, what might we need to protect, strengthen, or redesign so it can grow over time?

We might begin by asking:

• Are our foundations genuinely strong (literacies, wellbeing, relational trust)?

• Where do students practise ethical judgement and adaptive problem-solving in real contexts?

• How do we create space for agency, not simulation, but action?

• Does our assessment system reflect what we say we value?

• Are adults working in conditions that allow them to exercise professional judgement?

• What would genuinely need to shift in our systems for flourishing to move beyond aspiration?

• Where does flourishing already live in your context?

• Where does it create tension?

• What feels possible and what feels difficult?

What We Are Really Trying to Cultivate

If we follow this conversation back to its roots, flourishing is not a programme. It is a portrait.

A young person who lives in harmony with their inner guide acts with virtue and reason. Someone who develops excellence in character, contributes meaningfully to the community, and continues to grow in practical wisdom. Someone who fulfils their highest nature and expresses wisdom through action.

When framed this way, flourishing does not compete with academic excellence. It deepens it.

Literacy becomes a tool for meaning-making.
Knowledge becomes a foundation for wise action.

Perhaps this is why the urgency feels different. Because we are not simply refining systems.

We are shaping lives.

References

Aristotle. (2009). Nicomachean ethics (C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company. (Original work published ca. 350 BCE)

Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press.

OECD. (2025). Education for human flourishing: A conceptual framework. OECD Publishing.

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press.

VanderWeele, T. J. (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(31), 8148–8156.

VanderWeele, T. J., et al. (2023). The Global Flourishing Study: Study design and initial findings. Harvard University Human Flourishing Program & Baylor University.

The start of a new year always brings a particular kind of optimism.
Not the loud, fireworks kind. The quieter kind. The one that shows up as a pause. A reset. A chance to try again.

This year, that feeling arrived alongside a question I’ve been wondering as artificial intelligence reshapes how we live, work, and learn: what must we be careful not to lose?

The answer met me on the water, on holiday, surrounded by family and friends.

Teaching children and first-time adults how to kneeboard and water ski has a way of stripping learning back to its essentials. There are no worksheets. No rubrics. No algorithms nudging the next step. Just a rope, a body trying to find balance, and that low hum of anticipation before the boat moves.

And once again, I was reminded of the joy of learning when the conditions are right.

When wellbeing comes before performance.
When people are free to act, adjust, and try again.
When feedback clarifies rather than judges.
And when effort leads to a sense of accomplishment that actually means something.

What unfolded over the week was a quiet but powerful illustration of how learning allows people to flourish.

The foundation comes first

Before anyone ever stood up on skis, learning was already happening.

Family and friends watched closely. They asked questions. They hovered at the edge a little longer than expected.

Will it be fast?
What if I fall?
Can I stop if I don’t like it?

Then the practical questions followed.

Tell me again — what are the hand signals if I want to go slower? Faster? Stop?
Will it hurt if I fall?

These weren’t technical questions. They were human ones.

Nothing began until people felt safe enough to begin. Physically, yes. But also emotionally. They needed to know they had choice. That stopping was allowed. That falling wouldn’t be laughed at or rushed past.

At one point, I had to remind my thirteen-year-olds that the rush they were feeling was completely normal. That flicker of nerves. The quickened heartbeat. The surge of adrenaline just before the boat pulls away.

Even after skiing for many years, I still feel it myself. Every single time. The moment I dive into the water for the first run, there’s the same brief pause. The same anticipation. The same reminder that learning, even when familiar, still asks something of us.

As the days unfolded, I could see a subtle shift taking place. Family and friends weren’t just learning a new skill; they were beginning to think like skiers and kneeboarders. They grew calmer. More regulated. More willing to notice what was happening and adjust. And, crucially, more able to stay engaged even after falling.

That foundation mattered more than anything else. Without it, nothing that followed would have stuck.

Choosing to act

Before the slack tightened, there was always a moment.

A look back at the boat.
A nod.
A small hand signal.

I’m ready.

Confidence didn’t come first.
Choice did.

Standing up on skis isn’t about believing you’ll succeed immediately. It’s about deciding to try without knowing how it will go. Learning begins there, not when outcomes are guaranteed, but when people feel able to act anyway.

That moment is where belief starts to form.

Albert Bandura described self-efficacy as the belief that “I can do something about this.” Not abstract confidence, but confidence grounded in action. On the water, all four of his sources were visible.

Small mastery experiences — staying up just a little longer than before.
Vicarious experiences — watching someone else wobble, fall, recover, and try again.
Calm verbal encouragement — steady, credible, never exaggerated.
And emotional regulation — learning that nerves and adrenaline don’t signal danger, but engagement.

Belief didn’t arrive all at once. It accumulated quietly, through experience that made sense.

Learning as adjustment, not just achievement

We never rushed to one ski.

We started on the kneeboard, low and stable, close to the water. Then two skis, where balance suddenly mattered more and wobbles became part of the deal. Only later, when bodies had learned something about timing and tension, did one ski even become an option.

Not because it was the goal.
But because it was the next thing that made sense.

Every attempt taught something. Every fall carried information. Each run looked a little different from the one before.

Learning didn’t move in a straight line. It looped. It adjusted. It responded to conditions.

As the process unfolded, I could see people becoming adaptive problem-solvers, calm enough to notice, regulated enough to adjust, and secure enough to stay engaged after falling.

That’s what real learning looks like. Not neat. Not linear. But alive.

How confidence actually grew

What struck me most was how confidence developed.

Not through hype.
Not through praise for its own sake.
And not simply because someone said, you’ve got this.

Confidence grew because effort kept leading somewhere.

Someone stayed up half a second longer. Someone softened their knees at just the right moment. Someone fell hard, climbed back into the boat, and asked to go again.

Encouragement mattered, but only because it was calm and credible. Fear softened as familiarity grew. Bodies relaxed as the unknown became known.

Belief didn’t arrive suddenly. It built slowly, through experiences that linked effort to outcome.

Making sense of what happened

After each run, family and friends didn’t just want applause.

They wanted understanding.

Why did that one feel steadier?
What changed that time?
Was it my arms or my knees?

Feedback worked because it helped people make sense of their experience. It turned movement into insight. It gave them something concrete to try next.

That’s when learning deepens, when experience becomes information, not judgement.

The feeling at the end

There was a moment I kept noticing as each skier and kneeboarder climbed back into the boat.

They were exhausted. Arms aching. Legs shaking. Faces flushed.

And yet they were glowing.

Smiling. Laughing. Replaying the moment they stood up, or stayed up longer than before. Physically spent, but emotionally elated. Beaming with a quiet sense of pride.

There’s something deeply human about that feeling. When effort leads to understanding, the brain rewards us. Not with ease, but with satisfaction. That mix of fatigue and joy is learning doing exactly what it evolved to do.

Easy success rarely motivates us for long. Earned progress does.

What stayed with me

Looking back, all the dimensions of flourishing were there on the water, lived out by my family and friends.

Happiness — but not the shallow kind.
The happiness that comes from believing in yourself at the very moment you doubted yourself most, and then doing it anyway. I saw it written all over their faces as they climbed back into the boat. Not a loud celebration. Quiet pride. The kind that settles in slowly and stays.

Relationships, built through trust and care.
Through the way we watched out for one another. Through encouragement that was steady and genuine. Through shared laughter after falling, and shared silence before trying again.

Meaning, rooted in doing something real.
This wasn’t learning for display or performance. It mattered in the moment. It asked something of the body, the mind, and the will. And because it was real, it stayed.

Accomplishment, earned rather than given.
Not perfection. Not mastery. Just the honest satisfaction of staying up a little longer than before. Of adjusting. Of persisting. Of knowing that effort led somewhere.

As we look ahead, especially in an AI-rich world, moments like this help us hold our priorities steady. They anchor us to what cannot be automated: the human capacity to persist, to adapt, and to find meaning through effort.

So, in the end, it wasn’t all just about skiing.

It was about what happens when people feel safe enough to try, supported enough to adjust, and brave enough to keep going.

It was about people, learning together, supporting one another, and sustaining the connections that allow learning and living to flourish.

I saw an image recently: two ladders leaning against a wall.

One is crooked, uneven, imperfect, a little wobbly, but it reaches the top.
The other is beautifully designed, straight, and polished, but it stops well below the ledge.

The image stayed with me because it captures something I’ve been feeling as this year draws to a close, a time when life picks up speed in many directions at once: new projects moving, courses to finish, family visiting, teenagers navigating their own paths, festive plans taking shape, and that familiar urge to pause and reset before the new year begins.

In the middle of all this, the temptation of the “perfect ladder” is strong.
The perfect plan.
The perfect timing.
The perfect conditions for the “right moment.”

Waiting feels sensible.
Finishing the plan feels responsible.
Clarity feels like something I should have before taking a step.

But the truth is this: learning, improvement, and impact don’t come from waiting.

So what do we do when waiting feels safer than taking the first imperfect step?
When does the desire for clarity become the very thing that slows us down?

I’ll say this openly: I naturally seek clarity… maybe a little too much. It has helped me in many seasons, yet sometimes it quietly keeps me still.

Michael Fullan often reminds us that clarity is rarely a starting point; it develops because we begin.

So another question arises: If clarity grows through movement, what do I lose when I hesitate?

The perfect ladder, half-built, is the plan that never leaves the page.
And haven’t we all been there?
The elegant document, beautifully structured, refined again and again… instead of being climbed.

Why imperfect steps matter

Educational research helps explain why the crooked ladder often leads to bigger, more meaningful change:

• We uncover things that planning can’t show us.
  Real action — even messy action — reveals hidden assumptions and details we couldn’t see on paper.

• We create feedback that helps us grow.
  Early movement, even small movement, gives us something real to respond to.

• We build a sense of “we can do this.”
  Collective teacher efficacy grows when teams see small wins, not perfect plans.

• We make room for coaching and learning.
  Adults learn best through conversation, shared practice, and trying things together. Real work creates space for this; theoretical work rarely does.

In this way, the crooked ladder becomes a symbol of learning in motion.

Psychological safety and the first climber

There’s a reason many people wait at the bottom of the ladder before stepping on.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows that people take risks — asking questions, trying something new, exposing their thinking — only when they feel safe enough to do so.

The first person to climb the crooked ladder takes a reputational risk.
If the ladder wobbles or creaks, everyone notices.

Leaders don’t just design ladders; they climb them.
They invite colleagues into guided experimentation.
They treat missteps as information.
They protect the space for learning.

They hold the balance of high expectations and high compassion: committed to quality, while knowing that excellence usually comes through many rounds of refinement.

Perhaps the crooked ladder is not irresponsible at all. It is scaffolded bravery.

In busy, uncertain, or demanding seasons, professionally and personally, people look for signals of safety and direction. Someone stepping first matters.

Sometimes the first step is like switching on a light in a dark room.
Nothing is fully solved, but suddenly everyone can see enough to move.

A small action changes the emotional landscape. It says:

We’re not stuck.
We’re learning.
We’re in this together.

Progress — a quiet driver of joy

Harvard researchers Amabile and Kramer found something striking in their study of 12,000 diary entries. On days when people made even a small amount of progress toward a meaningful goal:

• motivation rose

• mood improved

• creativity strengthened

• performance lifted

Another reason the crooked ladder matters: imperfect progress still moves us, as long as we’re climbing in the direction of purpose.

A gentler intention for the new year

As I move through this busy stretch of the year, the visitors, the travel, the work I care about, the parenting, the celebrations, and the early shape of next year, I am learning to hold a softer intention.

Not to perfect the ladder, but to step onto it sooner.
Not to let go of high standards, but to remember that excellence grows through iteration, not immaculate beginnings.

And perhaps most importantly: to move with enough humility to learn, enough courage to begin, and enough compassion to allow the work, and myself, to unfold in real time.

Some ladders are crooked.
Some seasons are messy.
But movement creates meaning and sometimes even a little magic.

Here’s to imperfect starts, adaptive journeys, and the courage to climb the ladders that actually reach the wall.

A question to carry forward

Where in your life or work are you still waiting for the perfect ladder, and what small step might help you see just enough to move?

Over the weekend, I celebrated a friend’s birthday in a Harry Potter-themed escape room. Six grown adults, locked in a sequence of rooms, deciphering riddles, finding clues, and solving puzzles to escape. It was chaotic, hilarious, and deeply satisfying.

Admittedly, this wasn’t my first escape-room adventure. My family and I once tackled one in Perth, but this Shanghai experience brought an entirely new layer of challenge. Many clues were written in Mandarin, so our one Chinese-speaking friend became the translator-in-chief. Another had an encyclopaedic memory of every Harry Potter book ever written. Others contributed sharp logic, lateral thinking, or a knack for observation.

By the end, we were laughing, patting ourselves on the back, and feeling accomplished. We commended each other on how well we had “escaped” and how utterly ridiculous some of the clues were. We shared the success, and we shared the pain.

Escape rooms are social fun, but they also offer powerful lessons about what makes successful teams.

The success of a team depends not on any single person’s intelligence but on how effectively that collective intelligence is mobilised. In our case, success emerged from interdependence, everyone relying on one another’s strengths.

For this to occur, one essential element needed to be in place. Amy Edmondson (2019) calls it psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Laughter, light-hearted teasing, and shared excitement reduced tension and self-consciousness, allowing us to collaborate freely.

When teams feel safe, they speak up, ask questions, and build upon one another’s ideas, all of which are essential to innovation and problem-solving (Edmondson, 1999). Escape rooms create that environment almost by design: there’s a time limit, a shared purpose, and a clear need for open communication.

As we moved from room to room, natural roles emerged: the analyst, the communicator, the memory bank, the translator, the problem-solver, and the motivator.

This reminded me of Belbin’s (2010) research on team roles, which shows that effective teams balance different strengths: thinkers, doers, and social glue.

There were moments of frustration, over-talking, even chaos, but those were quickly diffused by humour. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) might call this group flow or shared flow, the state where people lose themselves in a shared task, fully engaged and mutually attuned.

There we were, six fully grown adults, absolutely playing.

And it was real play. The kind Stuart Brown (2010) describes as the route to creativity, empathy, and connection, not the opposite of work. In the escape room, we rediscovered the joy of curiosity and exploration, the very qualities we try to nurture in our students and teams!

These moments of shared problem-solving remind me that learning and joy are not mutually exclusive. When people are engaged, emotionally safe, and united by a common goal, they do their best thinking, whether that’s decoding magical spells or re-imagining school systems.

Somewhere between the laughter and the clues, I also learned something about myself.

My relentless questioning and action, exploratory mindset came to life in each room. I wanted to read everything written on the walls, quickly scan and absorb my surroundings, and understand what resources were available so I could leverage them to solve the next task.

I realised that this instinct, to question, observe, and connect, is not just a game strategy. It’s how I approach learning, leadership, and change. In many ways, an escape room is a mirror for how we navigate complex problems: with curiosity, energy, and a drive to make sense of what’s around us.

In education and leadership, we often talk about collaboration as if it’s a box to tick. But perhaps the real lesson lies in rediscovering the joy of working with others.

Whether in a school, a boardroom, or a Harry Potter escape room, the formula for success remains the same:

Shared goals. Psychological safety. Diverse strengths. A sense of play.

And maybe a little magic, too!

References

Belbin, R. M. (2010). Management teams: Why they succeed or fail (3rd ed.). Butterworth-Heinemann.

Brown, S. (2010). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.

Over the break, I took my kids skiing in Shanghai. Yes, skiing, indoors, in a dome on the edge of one of the busiest cities in the world. Only in China could you leave a crowded subway and twenty minutes later find yourself standing on a manufactured slope. But as a family activity, it was brilliant. It was exercise, fun, and a chance to try new tricks together.

“Only in China could you leave a crowded subway and twenty minutes later find yourself standing on a manufactured slope.”

As a parent, I loved watching their confidence grow with each slope. I hated watching them fall, of course, but I was proud to see them brush themselves off, click their skis back on, and go again. Indoor skiing is strange in another way too: without mountains or scenery to distract you, you end up focusing on the details, the angle of your knees, the pressure of your edges, the precise point where balance meets speed.

My mum always said skiing was a selfish sport. “You’re out there on your own,” she’d tell me. But it wasn’t about being alone; it was about independence. On the slope, you make your own decisions, find your balance, and learn to recover when things don’t go as planned.

The first thing you learn is the snowplough, that awkward “V” shape where your knees bend and your skis point inward. It looks clumsy, but it’s how you learn control. Watching my kids inch their way down the slope, skis shaking and faces determined, reminded me how control always comes before confidence. You have to find your footing before you can really move.

“Control always comes before confidence.”

Eventually, you start to experiment. Add a bit more speed, lean a little deeper into the turn, and test what happens if you trust the edge. That’s where it gets interesting. You learn that progress doesn’t come from staying rigid; it comes from release. The moment you stop fighting gravity and start working with it, skiing becomes something else entirely. Smooth. Fluid. Addictive.

I took a few of those “let’s see what happens” runs myself, slightly faster, sharper turns, just enough to make my stomach drop. My children, of course, found this hilarious. They raced past me, shouting encouragement and unsolicited advice (“Mum! Bend your knees more!”). They were taking on the steeper section while I was still practising my weight transfer through each turn.

“Something is humbling about that, watching your children outpace you, cheering them on while quietly realising you’re learning just as much as they are.”

I thought of Mikaela Shiffrin, a two-time Olympic champion and the most successful alpine skier in history, with 88 World Cup wins before the age of 29. Beyond her record-breaking career, she’s known for her honesty, discipline, and the mindset she calls “the confidence to try,” to keep learning, adapting, and finding calm in challenge. At a recent interview, she spoke candidly about what keeps her grounded on the world’s steepest slopes (watch here). She spoke about how her mother, Eileen, who’s also her coach, helps her stay aware of sensations and reactions on the slope. Together, they analyse the feeling of a turn rather than just the result, and that process of noticing details builds both confidence and control. She also spoke about how failure teaches you more than success. Every crash gives you data for the next run. Confidence doesn’t come from hoping you won’t make mistakes, but from trusting your preparation enough to keep going when you do. When the pressure builds, she narrows her focus to the next gate, the next breath, the next decision.

That stayed with me. Whether on snow or in schools, the same truth holds: growth comes from curiosity, confidence from preparation, and calm from trusting the work you’ve already done.

“Growth comes from curiosity, confidence from preparation, and calm from trusting the work you’ve already done”.

It’s a lesson that applies equally to leadership. I often see young leaders rush from idea to implementation, eager to prove themselves through action. But without an implementation plan or space for reflection, those efforts can quickly become scattered, a flurry of energy without direction. Momentum is valuable, but without structure, it burns out. Just like in skiing, confidence doesn’t come from speed alone; it comes from rhythm, design, and trust in the line you’ve mapped ahead.

And somewhere between the snowploughs, falls, and “Mum, you’re too slow,” I started thinking about my own work, not in a grand, metaphorical way, but in the quiet parallels that creep in when you’ve been doing something long enough to see the patterns. I’ve been in education for nearly two decades, long enough to see how learning and leadership both rely on the same habits: curiosity, deliberate practice, and the willingness to look slightly foolish before you get better.

When I first stepped into leadership, I treated it a bit like my early skiing lessons, too much focus on control, not enough on flow. I wanted everything stable, predictable, precise. But leading, like skiing, asks for trust. You have to lean into the slope. You can’t correct every wobble or stop at every bump. The art is knowing when to steer and when to let momentum help you.

Eileen Gu, the Chinese-American freestyle skier, became a global phenomenon after winning two gold medals and a silver at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics (watch here). She is also a Stanford graduate in Product Design. She blends creativity, intellect, and athletic precision in everything she does. Off the slopes, she’s a Victoria’s Secret model and ambassador for brands like Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., and IWC. Born in San Francisco and representing China, she’s become a bridge between cultures — using her platform to champion women in sport, advocate for mental health, and inspire young people to pursue their passions with confidence and purpose.

She speaks beautifully about this balance in her conversation with IWC’s Franziska Gsell (watch here). She describes free skiing as “gymnastics on skis”, expressive and creative, where style and variety matter as much as technical difficulty. For her, the beauty of skiing lies in creativity, in finding your own line. Growing up between two cultures, Chinese and American, she’s learned how to live with multiple perspectives at once and how diversity deepens empathy. That bicultural awareness, she says, has taught her to embrace differences.

“The beauty of skiing lies in creativity — in finding your own line.”

She also talks openly about being the only girl on her ski team after coming from an all-girls school, how that experience made her aware of her gender but also of her strength. She turned that awareness into advocacy, using her voice to champion representation and to remind young women that confidence doesn’t mean conformity. And then there’s her view of social media as a “double-edged sword.” It can amplify pressure, but it can also amplify purpose. She chooses to use it to inspire, connect, and spark change.

What connects Mikaela Shiffrin and Eileen Gu isn’t just their talent but the mindset behind it: a blend of curiosity, discipline, and trust in the process. Mikaela’s mother, Eileen, shaped her growth through questions rather than answers, guiding her to think, notice, and refine for herself. That kind of coaching, built on inquiry, mirrors what we aim for in education. It’s what helps learners develop awareness, not dependence.

And Eileen Gu’s reflections echo the same truth from a different slope. Her success comes from creativity, courage, and using her platform with purpose to empower others and expand what’s possible. Both remind me that mastery, whether in skiing or in schools, comes from the same place: curiosity as the driver of learning, confidence as the product of preparation, and progress as the willingness to keep finding new lines forward.

“You fall, you get up, you learn. You find your edge.”

Skiing, whether on a mountain or in a Shanghai snow dome, keeps reminding us what it means to lean in. Learning and leading aren’t linear. It’s messy, joyful, humbling work. You fall, you get up, you learn. You find your edge.

Keep leaning into the slope.

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I’ve been sitting with this lately, both in classrooms and as a parent. Scaffolds are meant to lift, to steady, to protect.

But what happens when they stay in place too long?

Do they start to hold us back instead?

Ladders or Ceilings?

In theory, scaffolds are elegant: temporary structures that allow learners to reach higher than they could alone. Once stability comes, the scaffold fades away.

But in schools — and in life — scaffolds don’t always behave so neatly. They linger. They multiply. They become routines.

“They stop being ladders and start becoming ceilings.”

From Disrupting to Driving

Amy Berry (2022) helps me think this through. She frames engagement as a continuum: disrupting → participating → driving.

• Disrupting: pushing back, resisting, avoiding.

• Participating: doing what is asked, willingly enough, but within the boundaries set by others.

• Driving: taking ownership, shaping direction, self-regulating, pushing learning further than the adult imagined.

So often, I see scaffolds keeping children in that middle stage. They’re busy. They’re compliant. They’re participating. But they’re not yet driving.

And that leaves me asking: are we preparing them to act for the sake of learning itself — or simply to comply with the system that rewards participation?

What the Research Tells Us

The theory on scaffolding is deep and well-established.

• Vygotsky (1978) placed scaffolds at the heart of the zone of proximal development.

• Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976) described them as temporary supports that enable a learner to succeed where they could not succeed alone.

• van de Pol, Volman, and Beishuizen (2010) showed that scaffolds only work if they fade.

• Hammond and Gibbons (2005) reminded us that scaffolding through language can open thinking, but over-direction suffocates it.

• Sweller (1988) demonstrated how scaffolds reduce cognitive load for novices, but can actually hinder advanced learners if they linger.

• Puntambekar and Hübscher (2005) argued that scaffolds must prepare learners for transfer, not just task completion.

The message across decades of research is consistent: scaffolds matter most when they disappear.

What We Mean by Scaffolding

A scaffold is a temporary structure used to support workers and materials when building, repairing, or cleaning a building.

In teaching, a scaffold is a temporary support given to learners to help them accomplish a task or understand a concept they couldn’t manage on their own. The teacher provides guidance, prompts, tools, or structure.

As learners gain confidence and skill, the support is gradually removed — just like scaffolding is taken down once a building stands on its own.

Scaffold = temporary support that helps you reach higher until you can do it independently.

But: what happens if it never gets removed?

If scaffolds never come down in learning…

• Dependence develops: Pupils rely on prompts, sentence starters, visuals, or teacher cues and don’t attempt tasks independently.

• Limited transfer: They can perform with the scaffold in place, but struggle when asked to apply the skill in a new context.

• Ceiling on growth: The scaffold becomes a permanent crutch, stopping learners from stretching beyond guided steps.

• False sense of mastery: Work may look strong, but it reflects the support system, not the learner’s own capability.

What’s supposed to happen
Scaffolds are faded gradually as competence grows. Responsibility shifts from teacher → shared → pupil. Learners internalise strategies so they can plan, monitor, and evaluate their own work without external support.

An Analogy: Training Wheels

I’ve watched my own children learn to ride bikes with training wheels. At first, the extra wheels are essential. They give balance, reduce fear, and allow the rider to focus on pedalling.

But training wheels are not neutral. They change the way the bike moves. They stop the natural lean into corners, the subtle shifts of balance, the control that only comes with risk.

And here’s the irony: if the wheels stay on too long, the rider can cycle further — but never really learn to ride.

“They participate, but they do not drive.”

That image haunts me when I think about scaffolds in classrooms. What looks like steady progress can mask a deeper dependence.

The Adult Dilemma

Here is the tension I wrestle with:

How do we know when to remove the scaffold?

As adults — teachers, leaders, parents — we like smoothness. Quiet classrooms, finished tasks, tidy transitions. We step in quickly to keep things “on track.” But efficiency can come at a cost.

If scaffolds are taken away too soon, learners falter. If they’re left too long, independence suffocates. How do we know when the timing is right? How do we release the slack, but not abandon?

And most of all: how can we be sure that when we remove the supervision, the set tasks, what remains is not just habit, but values? The drive to learn for the sake of it. The choice to behave in ways that are respectful, safe, and contributing — not because an adult is watching, but because it matters.

This keeps me up at night.

Scaffolds On, Scaffolds Off

In classrooms, this dilemma is perhaps most visible in the tension between direct instruction and an inductive approach to learning.

Direct instruction is often heavily scaffolded. The teacher holds the structure, carefully sequencing each step, controlling the pace, monitoring behaviour, and ensuring that everyone is moving together. It is efficient. It keeps the room calm. Pupils know what is expected.

But an inductive approach feels different. This is where the scaffolds come off, but are not absent. Pupils are expected to do the thinking, to make the connections, to wrestle with the ambiguity until the fog lifts.

“Louder, messier, a buzz of talk… the sound of learning happening on their own terms.”

I call these the “scaffolds-off moments.” They are not always comfortable, and they are not always tidy. But they are incredibly necessary. Without them, children remain participants. With them, they begin to drive.

Not all day, perhaps. Structure is still important. But increasingly, more and more, pupils need to live in that space where the scaffolds are loosened.

Practising the Choices

And here’s the critical point: when pupils are asked to drive their learning, it isn’t just about the task, it’s about the behaviours they choose.

When scaffolds come off, pupils are responsible for how they learn: how they collaborate, how they manage their time, how they persevere when it gets hard, and how they express their thinking.

This is where the IB Learner Profile attributes and the Approaches to Learning (ATL) skills come alive.

• Open-mindedness, balance, risk-taking, reflection — not abstract ideals, but real dispositions guiding behaviour when adults step back.

• Self-management, communication, research, thinking, and social skills — the muscles that must be flexed when pupils drive their own learning.

But these do not develop by osmosis. They develop by practice. Which means we have to create scaffolds-off moments on purpose, giving children opportunities to test these skills in safe but challenging contexts.

It will be messy. Sometimes they will choose poorly. But if we never let them practice, the Learner Profile and ATLs remain words on a poster rather than lived habits.

Beyond the Classroom

This isn’t only about children. Schools scaffold teachers, too.

We provide templates, scripts, PPTs and pre-packaged systems. We call it support — and sometimes it is. But sometimes it becomes a constraint. Too much scaffolding of teachers erodes the very agency we want them to model for pupils.

As leaders, we talk about innovation, but our processes often reward compliance. We ask pupils to drive their learning, while giving adults very little space to drive their teaching.

Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky (2009) make a useful distinction: technical fixes (scaffolds, structures) are important, but adaptive work — navigating ambiguity, wrestling with values — is where real growth happens.

“We risk building ceilings over both teachers and pupils.”

A Parenting Parallel

As a parent, this question feels even sharper.

When I loosen my supervision, when I stop setting every boundary, how do I know my children will choose well? I can only hope that the values I’ve tried to instil — kindness, safety, contribution — will hold when no one is watching.

It’s the same with pupils. We scaffold behaviour, routines, and learning in the hope that when the supports are lifted, they won’t just collapse into disruption, but step into driving.

But this is a fragile hope, not a guarantee. And perhaps that’s the point. There’s no formula for the “right moment” to remove scaffolds. It is judgment, risk, and trust — and it will always be a complex web.

A Tension Worth Holding

None of this is straightforward. Scaffolds are necessary. Without them, learning falters. With them, left in place too long, agency suffocates.

So perhaps the work is not in perfecting scaffolds but in perfecting our judgment about when to remove them. To trust that what remains will be enough. To accept the wobble, the stumble, the uncertainty, because that is where driving begins.

“Agency — for pupils, for teachers, for our own children — rarely grows in the comfort of supports that never fade.”

That is the tension worth holding.

References

• Berry, A. (2022). Reimagining student engagement: From disrupting to driving. Corwin Press.

• Fredricks, J.A., Blumenfeld, P.C., & Paris, A.H. (2004). School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74(1), 59–109.

• Hammond, J., & Gibbons, P. (2005). Putting scaffolding to work: The contribution of scaffolding in articulating ESL education. Prospect, 20(1), 6–30.

• Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Harvard Business Press.

• Puntambekar, S., & Hübscher, R. (2005). Tools for scaffolding students in a complex learning environment. Educational Psychologist, 40(1), 1–12.

• Skinner, E.A., & Pitzer, J. (2012). Developmental dynamics of engagement, coping, and everyday resilience. In S. Christenson et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. Springer.

• Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.

• van de Pol, J., Volman, M., & Beishuizen, J. (2010). Scaffolding in teacher–student interaction: A decade of research. Educational Psychology Review, 22(3), 271–296.

• Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Harvard University Press.

• Wood, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), 89–100.

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We all know what it feels like to work in an effective team.

That flow of understanding your role, recognising each other’s value, knowing you can depend on one another. There is confidence that expertise is present in the room to deliver the work to a high standard. And the deep satisfaction of seeing how, collectively, you’ve made a difference.

So… enter the Professional Learning Community (PLC). The question is: how do school leaders set this up successfully?

- What needs to be communicated?
- What needs to be systematically supported?
- What are the essential elements?

In this post, I draw from my own experiences and stand on the shoulders of giants who have spent countless hours researching and developing frameworks to give schools mental models for nurturing such environments.

My encouragement to you is this: don’t get caught in the weeds. Yes, there are details and frameworks, but the essence is simple: progressive collaborative inquiry is the heart of interdependent work that makes a difference to learning, for both teachers and pupils.

So as you read, come back to that intuition: remember the feeling of what it is like to work in an effective team. Trust in that.

What Do I Mean by Progressive Collaborative Inquiry?

At its heart, collaborative inquiry is when a group of teachers work together through a disciplined cycle:
- identify a problem of practice,
- frame a question,
- trial strategies in classrooms,
- gather evidence,
- reflect and adapt.

The “collaborative” part means the thinking, action, and reflection are done collectively, not alone.

But when I use the phrase progressive collaborative inquiry, I’m signalling something more. It’s not just about completing a single cycle well; it’s about building momentum over time. Each round of inquiry should deepen, refine, and extend both teacher practice and student learning. It’s a stance, not just a method:
- iterative progression → each inquiry cycle grows sharper and more impactful,
- forward-looking orientation → the goal isn’t only solving today’s gap, but growing teacher capacity and shaping future practice.

In other words:
- Collaborative inquiry is the method.
- Progressive collaborative inquiry is the culture — a habit of professional life where every cycle builds on the last, creating continuous improvement.

Example: a Year 5 writing team co-designs a shared mini-lesson, trials it, and reviews the impact. That’s collaborative inquiry. When that team then comes back to refine its process, connects to wider school goals, and steadily embeds inquiry as its way of working, that’s progressive collaborative inquiry.

What Do We Mean by a PLC?

Different researchers emphasise different things about PLCs:

• Shirley Hord (1997, 2004): “a community of educators who work collaboratively and continually to seek and share learning, and then act on what they learn to enhance their effectiveness as professionals for the benefit of students.”

• Richard DuFour (2006): “educators committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve.”

• OECD (2016): “a group of teachers who meet regularly to reflect on their practice, engage in collaborative learning, and improve their teaching with the goal of improving student learning.”

• Judith Warren Little (1990; 2003): distinguished between shallow cooperation and true interdependency.

My Working Definition

A Professional Learning Community (PLC) is not just a meeting or a program. It is a discipline of collaborative inquiry where educators:
- Work interdependently — not simply side by side, but with shared responsibility and accountability.
- Use evidence of student learning to guide their practice.
- Take collective responsibility for the success of all students.
- Engage in continuous cycles of reflection, action, and adaptation.

Why Interdependency Matters in My Research

Interdependency is the difference-maker. Teachers who simply share ideas often remain in their silos. But when they plan, trial, and reflect together — when they rely on one another to move student learning forward — their belief in their collective capacity grows.

Think of it like a neural network: one neuron firing doesn’t do much. But when connections multiply, the system learns and adapts. That’s what interdependency feels like in a PLC: the intelligence is in the connections, not the individual teacher.

Misconceptions That Derail PLCs

Three traps I’ve seen most often:

1. PLC as program — announced with fanfare, lived out as another meeting on the calendar. The excitement fades faster than milk in the staff fridge.

2. Over-structuring — meetings so rigid you half expect someone to say, “Objection, Your Honour!”

3. Under-structuring — the “friendly chat” version of a PLC, where you leave 45 minutes later with nothing but a doodle in your notebook and a vague craving for biscuits.

The Power of Collaborative Inquiry

At their core, PLCs should run as collaborative inquiry cycles: identify a student need, frame a question, trial a strategy, gather evidence, reflect, and adapt.

For me, it’s a bit like my Garmin watch obsession (and yes, I realise my addiction to feedback is very real!). A Garmin doesn’t just tell you that you went for a run; it tells you how you ran, pace, cadence, heart rate, VO₂ max, and recovery time. It provides feedback that pushes you forward.

Collaborative inquiry is the Garmin of teacher learning. It’s precise, actionable feedback that drives improvement.

The Anatomy of a PLC (What Works in Practice)

From my experience, the anatomy of a PLC that works includes:
- Purpose. Everything comes back to student learning.
- Structure. 4–8 teachers, regular, focused time.
- Roles. Rotate facilitator, recorder, timekeeper.
- Protocols. Looking at student work, tuning protocols, data conversations.
- Inquiry Cycle. Identify → Question → Trial → Evidence → Reflect.
- Success Matrix. Impact on student learning, teacher learning, and culture.
- Leadership Alignment. Must sit inside the strategic plan, not on the margins.

What PLCs Are Not

Sometimes it helps to clarify the shadow side:

• A PLC is not a therapy group — venting has its place, but it doesn’t shift practice. (Biscuits optional.)

• It’s not a book club — unless your book club requires action plans and student data, which frankly sounds like a terrible book club.

• It’s not a meeting about meetings — we’ve all been in those, and they should come with hazard pay.

Case Studies From My Experience

The Year 5 Writing Team — Interdependency in Action

I still remember sitting in on a Year 5 writing PLC. The teachers spread out drafts of student work across the table. Instead of saying, “Oh, I did this in my class and it worked,” they rolled up their sleeves and co-designed a shared mini-lesson.

The following week, every single teacher taught that same lesson. A week later, they returned with student samples. There were sticky notes, laughter, honest questions:

• “Did you notice that the boys in 5C really struggled with paragraph transitions?”

• “This anchor chart made a huge difference in my room — let me show you.”

This was true interdependency. Each teacher was relying on the others, not just to share, but to build something stronger together. And the impact was immediate: students wrote with more confidence across all five classes.

The Science Department That Drifted — Cooperation Without Interdependency

Then there was the science team. They were collegial, kind, and genuinely enjoyed their meetings — but week after week, the conversations circled around logistics:

• “What equipment do we need for the lab?”

• “Can you cover me for duty on Thursday?”

One teacher bravely brought student work, hoping to spark discussion. It was glanced at politely, then quickly moved aside. Nothing ever looped back into classrooms.

Judith Warren Little (1990, 2003) would have called this cooperation, not collaboration. They were side by side, but not interdependent.

And the impact on students? Minimal.
(It was the educational equivalent of “this meeting could have been an email.” ARGH!)

Transforming a Bilingual Team — Building Interdependency Across Cultures

Perhaps the most powerful PLC journey I’ve witnessed was with a bilingual team — English and Chinese teachers working together.

At first, there was tension. The English teachers felt the Chinese curriculum was too rigid; the Chinese teachers felt the English approach was too loose. Meetings often ended with silence, or worse, polite nodding, followed by teachers going back to their old ways.

Through deliberate use of collaborative inquiry, the team began bringing shared student samples. Together, they asked:

• “How do our bilingual learners transfer skills between English and Chinese writing?”

Over time, trust grew. They discovered strategies that worked across both languages, like sentence stems and paragraph organisers. For the first time, they planned a joint unit — and when the students produced essays drawing on both English and Chinese skills, the pride in the room was palpable.

Neither side could have achieved this alone. Interdependency turned what began as conflict into convergence.

Frameworks for PLCs: A Bigger Landscape

To make sense of PLC frameworks, I think about two dimensions:
- Structure / Process (tight cycles, protocols, assessments)
- Culture / Inquiry (trust, reflection, equity, efficacy)

A note on the Great Teaching Toolkit (Evidence-Based Education, 2020):
The GTT is not a PLC framework, but a framework for what ‘great’ teaching looks like. It fits inside PLCs as the focus of inquiry cycles:
- PLCs = the lab (the process, protocols, and culture)
- GTT = the curriculum of improvement (what teachers reflect on, test, and refine)

The GTT gives us what to improve; PLCs give us how to improve it, together.

Future of PLCs

Looking ahead, PLCs can’t remain “Thursday at 3pm” meetings. They need to evolve into professional learning ecosystems:
- Could AI analyse student work and highlight misconceptions before the PLC meets?
- Could PLCs extend across schools and even countries?
- Could PLCs become the innovation engines that prepare teachers and students for futures we can’t yet imagine?

Looking back, I’ve seen PLCs falter when treated as a program, and flourish when lived as a discipline.

PLCs are not really a “thing” to implement, but a way of thinking and working together. They’re the convergence point where structure meets culture, where collaboration meets inquiry, where teacher learning meets student growth.

I began this post by asking you to remember what it feels like to be part of an effective team. The flow, the trust, the shared responsibility. Aristotle said it best: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” A PLC is not just teachers sitting side by side; it’s the alchemy of interdependency, where individual strengths combine into collective power, turning it into pure and precious gold. That’s the future of professional learning.

References

· Bloomberg, L. D. (2018). Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research for Policy and Practice. Routledge.

· Donohoo, J. (2017). Collective Efficacy: How Educators' Beliefs Impact Student Learning. Corwin.

· DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., & Many, T. (2006). Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. Solution Tree.

· Easton, L. B. (2009). Protocols for Professional Learning. ASCD.

· Evidence Based Education. (2020). Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review.

· Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School. Teachers College Press.

· Hord, S. M. (1997). Professional Learning Communities: Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement. Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

· Hord, S. M. (2004). Learning Together, Leading Together: Changing Schools through Professional Learning Communities. Teachers College Press.

· Little, J. W. (1990). The Persistence of Privacy: Autonomy and Initiative in Teachers’ Professional Relations. Teachers College Record, 91(4), 509–536.

· Little, J. W. (2003). Inside Teacher Community: Representations of Classroom Practice. Teachers College Record, 105(6), 913–945.

· McLaughlin, M. W., & Talbert, J. E. (2001). Professional Communities and the Work of High School Teaching. University of Chicago Press.

· OECD. (2016). Supporting Teacher Professionalism: Insights from TALIS 2013. OECD Publishing.

· Stiggins, R. J., & Arter, J. A. (2004). Classroom Assessment for Student Learning. Pearson.

· Stoll, L., Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Wallace, M., & Thomas, S. (2006). Professional Learning Communities: A Review of the Literature. Journal of Educational Change, 7(4), 221–258.

I’ll confess, I’m obsessed with my Garmin. It tracks everything: steps, heart rate, VO₂ max, recovery time, and even my body battery. And I actually let it guide my day. If my body battery reads lower than my husband’s, I’ll (half-jokingly) declare that he’s the one who needs to be more attentive to the kids. When it flashes a “low stress recovery,” I take that as my cue to go easy on myself. And when I hit the magic 10 minutes of elevated heart rate (which matters far more than the mythical 10,000 steps according to Harvard Health Publishing, 2021), I get that little jolt of satisfaction that I’m on track.

Recently, I bought fitness watches (Huawei/Xiaomi) for my kids. Suddenly, my reluctant swimmers, Mr 10 and Ms 12, swam non-stop for an hour. Not because they had a newfound passion for swimming, but because the watch was counting their strokes. That tiny stream of feedback was enough to keep them going.

I don’t think this is a wild idea. I mean, come on, we now live in an era where people aren’t just bonding with machines, but romantically attached to them.

I recently learned about a groundbreaking OpenAI + MIT study that found that some heavy ChatGPT users develop emotional or “affective use,” even treating the chatbot like a friend. MIT reports this emotional dependency grows with heavy use and voice interactions (Daniel, 2025). Additionally, Elon Musk’s xAI Grok has launched flirtatious anime companions like “Ani,” and reports surfaced of people wanting to marry their AI companions (The Week, 2025).

Are you kidding me?!

If tech can hook us emotionally, or at least keep kids swimming for an hour, why can’t we design something equally powerful for learning?

What Gets Measured Gets Noticed

Here’s what I know to be true. Children are motivated when progress is visible. Research has been saying this for decades. Hattie (2009) shows that feedback is one of the most powerful influences on achievement. Amabile and Kramer (2011) call it the progress principle—those small, visible wins that keep us moving.

That’s how most school systems still operate.

What Would a Learning Garmin Track?

And here’s the difference: it wouldn’t just track test scores (surely we have moved away from this). It would make progress visible across four areas:

1. Knowledge “What I Know”

Think of this like memory fitness. The Learning Garmin could:

• Show recall streaks: “You remembered your times tables three days in a row.”

• Give gentle forgetting alerts: “It’s been a week since you reviewed fractions—time for a refresher.”

• Highlight common mix-ups: like confusing area with perimeter.

• Compare confidence vs accuracy: helping kids see if they’re over- or under-confident.

2. Skills “What I Can Do”

This is about practice, effort, and performance. The Garmin could:

• Track writing stamina: “You wrote for 12 minutes today, up from 8 minutes last week.”

• Notice problem-solving moves: Did a child try more than one strategy before asking for help?

• Count questions asked: Was it a quick “what is…” or a deeper “why/how” question?

• Show discussion balance: Are all voices being heard, or just a few?

3. Understandings “What I Get”

Beyond facts and practice, learning is about connecting the dots. The Garmin could:

• Highlight concept links: “You connected multiplication to area in maths.”

• Spot clear explanations: when a child uses “because…” to show reasoning.

• Celebrate transfer moments: like using a science idea in art or a maths strategy in history.

4. Who We Are as Learners “My Learner Profile”

And here’s the IB twist: the Garmin could spotlight the Learner Profile attributes—the human side of learning. Imagine feedback like this:

• Inquirer: “You asked three ‘why’ questions in science.”

• Knowledgeable: “You connected today’s history lesson to last week’s discussion in English.”

• Thinker: “You tried a second method when the first didn’t work.”

• Communicator: “You built on a peer’s idea during discussion.”

• Principled: “You gave credit for an idea and admitted when you made a mistake.”

• Open-minded: “You listened to two different viewpoints and compared them fairly.”

• Caring: “You encouraged a classmate who was stuck.”

• Risk-taker (Courageous): “You volunteered to present your group’s idea.”

• Balanced: “You managed your time well between maths, art, and sport today.”

• Reflective: “You set a goal, noticed what was working, and adjusted your approach.”

How It Could Look

On a student’s wrist, an app, or even a classroom wall, it might show tiles like this:

• Today’s Streaks: “Fractions recall = 3 days in a row.”

• Skill Zones: “Writing ↑, Problem-Solving →, Inquiry ↓.”

• Personal Bests: “Most concept links in one lesson!”

• Readiness Score: “Energy low today—start with a quick recap, not a heavy challenge.”

• Learner Profile Highlight: Rotating daily: Today you were most a Risk-taker… Tomorrow you might shine as a Reflective.

Teachers could see a quick class heatmap: which attributes showed up most today (lots of Inquirers, not many Reflective). That data could shape tomorrow’s lesson: maybe add a reflection moment, or give space for quiet voices to contribute.

Counting What Really Counts

When my kids swam for an hour, it wasn’t magic. It was strokes counted. That’s it. And that visibility kept them going.

Psychologists have been saying this all along. Amabile and Kramer (2011) show that small wins spark motivation. Deci and Ryan (2000) remind us that people thrive when they feel three key things: autonomy (the sense of choice), competence (the confidence that I can do this), and relatedness (the feeling of belonging here). Hattie (2009) shows that feedback, specific, timely, and actionable, is one of the most powerful drivers of learning.

And Daniel Pink (2009) sums it up in Drive: what really motivates us isn’t carrot-and-stick rewards, but autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

So why not track that? Questions asked, strategies tried, courage shown, reflections made.

Because, in the end, it’s not the report card that makes us grow.

And perhaps when we start counting what truly matters, learning becomes unstoppable.

References

Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press.

Daniel, L. (2025, April 1). ChatGPT is my friend: OpenAI and MIT study reveals who’s most vulnerable to AI attachment. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2025/04/01/chatgpt-is-my-friend-openai-and-mit-study-reveals-whos-most-vulnerable-to-ai-attachment

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Harvard Health Publishing. (2021, June). Why the 10,000 steps goal is arbitrary—and what to do instead. Harvard Medical School. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/why-the-10000-steps-goal-is-arbitrary-and-what-to-do-instead

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2013). IB learner profile. IBO.

Pink, D. H. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Riverhead Books.

The Week. (2025, February 17). Would you marry an AI? Gen Z is saying yes. The Week. https://theweek.com/tech/ai-lovers-replacing-humans

Convergence is what happens when life, learning, and leadership come together—not to blur the lines, but to spark something new.

From Jet Lag to Blog Prompts

There’s something about the holidays that messes with your sense of rhythm.

In Australia, I’m my daughter’s mum, my mum’s daughter, the friend who’s been away too long, and the one still ordering oat milk lattes like I never left. There are sibling and cousin catch-ups filled with noisy laughter, watching my kids reconnect with family and bond with their grandparents, helping my parents with iPhones and whatever new app they’ve just discovered, and always, the inevitable question: ‘How long are you here for?’ followed by, ‘When are you coming home for good?’

Then I’m back in Shanghai, where school hasn’t yet started, and my focus has shifted entirely to parenting. My children—now a pre-teen and a teen—keep growing faster than I can keep up, which means I’m constantly updating wardrobes, rethinking the décor of their rooms, and negotiating the fine balance between too-much-tech and just-enough-to-keep-them-connected. I’m swapping out picture books for novels they want to read, trading dinosaurs for design posters, and trying to hold on to a sense of inspiration that doesn’t feel babyish but still speaks to who they’re becoming.

A Pattern Starts to Form

I wasn’t looking for insight—I was just scrolling through the pictures on my phone.

Melbourne skylines. Selfies with dearest friends. Food—glorious food. Leadership quotes. Ocean views. Celebrations. Adventures. Book pages. A redecorated room. Family moments.

Individually, each photo marked a moment. But together, they revealed something else: life wasn’t happening in compartments.

What I saw wasn’t random. It was a reminder that the personal, professional, reflective, and relational are always overlapping—shaping and informing one another.

That’s what convergence is.

A system-level phenomenon.

Not just about connection—but about the creation of a new whole through interaction.

One that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Teaching isn’t separate from parenting.

Leadership is shaped by experience.

Learning happens in between it all.

Convergence doesn’t blur the lines—it reveals the pattern.

And in doing so, it helps us make meaning from the messy, layered reality we’re living.

That’s what inspired this blog.

It started on holiday, but not in theory. In action.

I found myself shifting constantly between roles: mum, daughter, friend, organiser, emotional anchor. I wasn’t thinking about leadership frameworks. I was rearranging bedrooms to grow with my children’s changing identities. I was negotiating screen time in a way that felt respectful and human.

In systems thinking, a system is not just a collection of things, but an interconnected set of elements organised around a shared purpose (Meadows, 2008). The meaning lives in the connections.

This is what convergence feels like.

Not just switching hats, but living within a system of roles, ideas, values, and relationships that overlap and influence one another.

Convergence is when the professional, the personal, and the philosophical begin to align—quietly, meaningfully.

This kind of coherence echoes Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (1979), which reminds us that development doesn’t happen in silos. Who we are in one context—say, the workplace—is shaped by all the others around it.

It also resonates with Wenger’s Communities of Practice (1998), where identity is fluid, co-constructed across the many groups we belong to—family, school, research networks, even WhatsApp chats.

Because innovation doesn’t come from staying in one lane.

It comes from what happens when we cross them.

When parenting informs pedagogy.

When lived experience shapes leadership.

When theory is tested every day.

In this view, convergence sparks innovation

My doctoral research focused on Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE)—the belief that what we hold true together shapes what’s possible for students.

But belief doesn’t live in strategy documents.

It lives in hallway conversations, shared planning, side chats after meetings.

CTE isn’t just a theory—it’s what happens when teachers believe, together, that they matter.

CTE draws from Bandura’s work and has been extended by Hattie and Donohoo. As Donohoo (2017) puts it, “Collective efficacy is the belief that through collective action, educators can positively influence student outcomes.”

And that, too, is convergence:

Shared belief becomes shared action.

About this Blog

This blog is my way of pausing long enough to see what’s already taking shape. To share it, even if it’s still in progress.

If anything here resonates, if it feels familiar or even just possible, then maybe it’s done its job.

This blog is for the in-betweens. The half-formed thoughts. The patterns are worth noticing.

Lead. Learn. Inspire.

It’s the rhythm I return to:

• Lead with clarity and care

• Learn constantly, humbly

• Inspire through honesty and shared purpose

“Because the best learning rarely arrives fully formed. It arrives in moments of convergence.”

A moment to breathe.

A quiet nudge to notice what’s already converging in your own life.

Thanks for reading.

— Tania

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W.H. Freeman.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Harvard University Press.

Donohoo, J. (2017). Collective Efficacy: How Educators’ Beliefs Impact Student Learning. Corwin Press.

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Routledge.

Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press.

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