Well-being Data - A Conversation with Matthew Savage

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Data and assessment can commit small or large acts of violence. I choose as a leader, as an educator, I choose what I assess, I choose who I assess, I choose when, I choose where, I choose why. So I talk about it being a moral and revolutionary act.

Hi, thanks for joining me for another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast, brought to you in partnership with Notosh. For this last episode of 2023, I'm really happy to be able to bring you this conversation I had with Matthew Savage. It's been a huge pleasure to be able to meet and get to know Matthew over the recent months, and the work he's doing with data and the importance of measuring what really matters is fascinating and important work. Formerly a principal of an award-winning international school in the Middle East, Matthew has a long and varied career in school leadership, both in the UK and internationally. Matthew now works with premium schools and school groups worldwide, helping them to use data wisely and well. In recent years, he's worked face-to-face or remotely with thousands of educators across hundreds of schools in more than 60 countries, exploring the intersection of wellbeing and DEIJ through the prism of triangulated warm and street data, both of which we talk about in the conversation.

Hey, Matthew.

Hello, Tim.

How you doing?

I'm good, thank you. How are you?

Good, good. I'm really eager to learn more about your work you've been doing with schools particularly, but there's a lot of conversations I know you're having around data and wellbeing and I think really important ideas right now. So yes, a great pleasure to be able to chat to you today.

It's lovely to be here with you, Tim. I'm looking forward to the conversation too.

Cool.

Thank you. So I liked, there was a phrase you used in one of your pieces of writing that I really appreciated, which is performing and conforming, two kind of verbs that seem pretty present in the way that schools function right now. So I wondered, maybe we can start there just kind of as a slightly more high-level picture, but yeah, I mean, that those kinds of cultures of performing and conforming, how do you feel that interacts with conversations around wellbeing, the way students are and showing up in school? Let's, let's start there and we'll see where we go.

Yeah, I, I was talking with a school recently about school reports. And how, you know, we have school reports that we send home because that's what schools have always done. That's what parents feel that they should have because they had it when they were a kid. And, you know, in fee-paying schools— and most of the schools I work with are fee-paying schools— then again, you know, one of the things they pay their fees for is to get the, the report that comes home. Yeah, exactly. The end of a semester or the end of a term or whatever. But ultimately, it seems to me that so many school reports are reports of performance and compliance. To what extent did your child perform? And to what extent did your child conform? And if they did both of those, then they get good grades, scores, marks, comments. And if they didn't do either of those, then obviously they would have less positive comments or responses. So you perform in order to be somehow judged and evaluated on that performance. And yet the evaluation or the judgment that we receive as children in schools is based on a really narrow definition of success. Yeah. So that's some, that to me seems to be really problematic because the majority of kids are not able to succeed very much of the time. And if we've got a system which actually ensures that the majority are not able to succeed very much of the time, then we've got a problem, right?

Yeah.

Cathy O'Neil, I don't know if you've read Weapons of Math Destruction. It's a fantastic book about the, the dangers of the algorithm. And, and she talked about how algorithms are as she puts it, opinions embedded into code. And it seems to me that data and assessment in schools are opinions embedded into feedback, into assessment, into rubrics, into grades, into scores, into marks. The example she gives is that if she's cooking a meal at home, she feels that the successful meal will be one in which her kids eat lots of vegetables. And yet if she asked her young child what a successful meal would be, he would say a meal in which he got to eat lots of Nutella. So the problem for me—

I know that problem.

Yeah, exactly. So success looks like this, right? There also seems to be unfair competition then, because I am competing against my peers to achieve success. And yet, because the definition of success, the parameters are so narrow, actually only a small number of people will be able to enjoy success. So I'm competing in a competition, which is unfair. And as a result of this, I'm going to be compared against, and I will compare myself against my peers.

Yeah.

Um, in this unfair competition, my siblings, and I will be compared against my siblings too. I will be compared against what my parents did or didn't achieve or learn or succeeded when they were at school. And I just worry that this means that there's the, there's failure. There's almost a guarantee of failure for many children or much of the time.

Yeah.

And even if you succeed, that has costs, right? If I succeed in this domain, then that puts pressure on me to succeed next time and the time after and the time after that and probably to succeed better next time and even better the time after that. Or it leads me to feel complacent or to place myself in some sort of hierarchy. So I think it's really problematic.

Yeah, it's almost built into the system in many ways, right? The scarcity. Principle of, you know, that like you say, there is almost this opinion of we have to create success that is a scarce resource that only a few can reach, maybe partly in order to motivate everyone to try and reach this goal, but partly also as a function of the market and the way that the market functions and the way that there are only a certain number of places at the next prestigious institution you're trying to get to and all of those kinds of things. You've got this, yeah, this strange funnel almost, which by definition will not allow many people to achieve that success. And as you say, it will have costs to the so-called winners in it as well.

Yeah, and even the criteria, the rubric, are disingenuous and dishonest. So I'm taught to think that if I achieve this or demonstrate this knowledge, skills, understanding, then I will get this grade, right? But ultimately, the grades are determined by a certain proportion of students being able to get this grade, then the next proportion will be able to get this, and therefore actually Actually, it's a lie. This notion of success that we sell the kids is actually— there's something dishonest about it as well. Yeah.

So how does that leave you feeling when you then bring the concept of wellbeing into schools? Because, you know, obviously there's a structural constraint there that you're talking about, but then you're also working with the reality of classrooms and schools and teachers working and functioning within those structures. What happens then when you bring that concept of wellbeing into that space?

Well, if I know that I need to perform and I see that the way in which I will be validated will be if I perform against the very narrow definition of success, as I've mentioned, then I'm going to be putting on whatever masks are possible to give the impression that I am performing.

Yeah.

And a lot of my work is based on the essential problem of masking, of wearing a mask in order to get validation and get worth. Give an example. When I was a child at school, I studied Latin, and in my Latin GCSE, there was a translation paper, and we knew the texts from which an excerpt would be taken, and then we had to obviously develop the translation skills in order to translate it in an examination setting. But because I'd done a lot of acting at school, I could memorize long scripts. So actually I memorized the entire English translation of each of the texts we were going to have to translate in the exam.

Yeah.

And if all I had to do is recognize the start word, where was that in the script? And then I just wrote out the script that I had learned.

Interesting.

And I ended up getting a really high mark in my Latin translation. So that dishonesty, I think that I was referring to earlier, I've learned to be dishonest in order to perform. And that's going to take its toll on me as well, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you're jumping through the hoop. I mean, it's funny now because it almost reminds me of that's exactly what, not quite what ChatGPT does, but it kind of feels like that's, there's a similarity of that just vacuous performative language that comes out that has no understanding really underneath it.

Absolutely. You know, when I was a deputy head in the UK, um, years ago, and we were under pressure from the local authority to stop being an underperforming school and being a school that performed, there are all sorts of hoops that we jumped through. If we did this qualification, that would count for 4 A*s back then. And so if we got a child to do that one qualification, that'd be 4 of their 5 that they needed in order to, again, to be deemed to be successful. So there's lots of dishonesty. And I think that takes its toll. The mask wearing, I think, takes its toll. If I wear the mask, then I'm repressing and disguising and therefore being a little bit ashamed of the things about me that don't fulfill those criteria. And if I don't wear the mask, then I risk, well, open failure. I risk humiliation. I risk shame, etc. And so I think there's a massive cost of this culture of performance. And I think, you know, some perfectly benign concepts have been almost bastardized in the kind of the worship of this false god, such as growth mindset. I love the idea of growth mindset. I love Dweck's early work.

Yeah.

But in so many schools, I've seen that being contorted into, you can always do better, you can always be better. Remember, you can always do better, you can always be better. And that mantra is again really, really punishing.

Yeah.

So this idea of performance, I think, is, is troublesome. Not that we want kids to fail, but we want kids not to do well. And same for schools, right? And you asked about conforming as well. This perhaps troubles me even more, the extent to which in schools we expect kids to conform. That troubles me because the thickness of the mask that I will end up having to wear in order to conform will be so heavy as to be painful. And I, I'm not a developmental psychologist, I'm not a neuroscientist, but even I know that adolescence is supposed to be a period of experimentation, right? We're establishing new neural pathways the whole time in response to the experiments that we take, the risks that we take, and then learning from the consequences thereof. So it seems to me that this is a time when we should be trying on new clothes, trying on new faces, trying on new behaviors, new mindsets, new opinions, new beliefs, etc., because that's what it's all about. And yet the uniformity we demand as schools of kids is antithetical to that. It says, actually, no, you don't experiment, you don't try all these other things, you fit these clothes, either literally or metaphorically, you know. So it seems to me that that uniformity is a power function. Ultimately, it's about those with power wanting those without power to stay in their place and not shake the natural order, I suppose. And where does this come from? I suppose it comes from industrialization and the need to have a workforce that have a certain degree of education in order to enable the system to become richer, but not too much because then they might be a threat to that natural order. Does it come from colonialism also, this desire to convert, this desire to have a people conform to a model from the imperialist country. But it seems to me it's about power, all of this, isn't it?

It's interesting, right?

Because I think that, to get slightly academic for a moment, the postmodern reading is that everything's about power, right? And I struggle with that position because I don't think everything is about power personally. But it clearly is a huge dynamic, you know, that is involved in relating between people and building society and all of that stuff. Another part of it for me is something around conservativism as well, in the sense that there is a desire in many people for more certainty, more structure, more passing on of knowledge to the next generation to live like we lived, and to some extent uniformity to that, to that idea. And I, so I, so I think that's one of the things I'm particularly interested in is that kind of dynamic between the, the kind of progressive and the conservative, because it's constantly trying to balance each, you know, one's trying to disrupt the current status quo and the other one is trying to somehow preserve it. And I, I mean, I, it feels like we see that in horrendous ways kind of manifesting in the world right now, politically and religiously and all of those things. On a more local level, there's almost some of that dynamic happening in schools because the crass stereotype of the progressive school is that it's a free-for-all and everybody's doing whatever they want and they're being, they're showing up fully authentically. No one's wearing their masks, they're wearing whatever clothes they they want. They're being, they're being themselves, right? And there is, you could argue, there's a performativity to that as well, because in that environment you show up in a way that fits to that environment. In the, the opposite, again, crass stereotype of the other extreme of the kind of almost military boot camp of a school where everybody's wearing exactly the same thing, everyone's skirts are the same length and everyone's ties are the same, you know, all of that. And, you know, no one's talking in the corridors and it's absolutely structured with this rigid hierarchy of authority and power. And I know, you know, there are schools in, for example, in the UK, more and more of those types of schools, which is deeply worrying to me personally. But at the same time, those are extreme stereotypes. And actually the reality is somewhere in the middle of how do we navigate this kind of need for structure and certainty, but also this desire to let young people, as you said, experiment. And explore and understand who they are. And I think those things in tension, that constant dance of rebalancing those two things are phenomenally interesting and unsolvable in many ways, right?

Yeah, I think there's an absolute tussle going on there. And that's one that we as school leaders have to navigate, but do so in the right ways and for the right reasons.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I do think, I don't think everything is about power. Absolutely. But I do think there is a lot of our play in our approach to performance and conformity.

Yeah.

In schools, you know, we want, we want kids to wear— not in France where you live so much, but in lots of the schools with whom I work around the world, we expect kids to wear a uniform. Yeah. In almost every school I've worked with, we expect kids to follow a particular curriculum and to learn in a particular way. We expect them to exhibit certain behaviors, learning behaviors and social behaviors. And all of that is about conformity. And again, there, either I put on those masks, I've realized that's the game and I need to be that person in order to receive that, that validation, that sense of belonging. And then I'm repressing so much about myself, which is a massive wellbeing cost. Or again, I decide, you know what, I'm not going to wear a mask. And then I risk, especially in today's world, I risk that marginalization. I risk that othering, right?

Yeah.

I think perhaps it's useful also to just kind of bring into the conversation the fact that this doesn't affect everybody the same, right? Like it strikes me that what we're talking about here disproportionately negatively affects certain people with, you know, certain aspects of their identity or ability or whatever it is. That find it more difficult or more damaging perhaps to repress those things in relation to this so-called norm that actually doesn't exist, but we like to pretend it does.

Yeah, I think that, I think if you're neurodivergent in schools, then you're not going to fit or it's not going to fit you. So you're going to be disproportionately affected. If you're queer in schools in most countries, you're going to be disproportionately affected because you're going to want to put on a pretty powerful mask. So I agree that certain, certain groups are on the margins, but that's what marginalization is, right? And a lot of the work I'm trying to do is to help schools identify who is on their margins, and it will be different for different schools and different communities, different sociocultural contexts, but to find out who is on those margins, to use your words, to find out who is being disproportionately affected and to do something about that. So no, it doesn't affect everybody. In any system, in any society, there are those who are very much on the center. A friend of mine, Fiona Carter, talks about the heat lamp. Uh, so certain kids who are always very firmly beneath the heat lamp, right? And they're okay. But what interests and innovates me is what do we do about those who are disproportionately affected? Yeah, those on the margins.

And to, to your earlier point, everybody is affected when you live in a society where certain people are under the heat lamp and fine, and then other people are really not fine, but people under the heat lamp are kind of looking the other way or pretending that that isn't happening. And I think so everyone's affected by that in some way, but obviously, as you say, there are certain people who are very much disproportionately affected by many of those structures, et cetera. But so then if we then think about, as you mentioned, data and assessment, and that's a big part of what your work, I think that nicely connects with this idea that data and assessment are a moral and a revolutionary act in the way that you might use them in schools. So perhaps you could say a bit more about some of the ways in which you are working with data and assessment to take those systems that exist, because they, they, those systems and structures do exist. People are working to shift them in many ways, but actually also in context, you can work with those systems to see how could you subvert them in ways that actually honor some of that difference and diversity across the whole student population in order to, you know, make a more equitable place to be and learn.

Yeah, I think if I, if I set aside the utopia for now, and as you say, accept that there are certain characteristics of most school communities that are harder to change in the short term, right? So we're going to have data and assessment. So I talk about it being a moral and revolutionary act because I think it can and should, and I would say must be moral because data and assessment can commit small or large acts of violence. Data in society can be a very violent thing, right? And so I talk a lot with teachers and leaders about how they can reflect upon the form and function of data and assessment in their schools and how they can identify when that data and assessment may be committing this small or, or big act of violence and then make a choice.

Yeah.

So I also talk about data and assessment being a choice. I choose as a leader, as an educator, I choose what I assess. I choose who I assess. I choose when. I choose where. I choose why. I make those choices. I choose what I side by side, to use Nora Bateson's phrase, I choose what I compare with what. I'm making these choices institutionally and individually as an educator all the time. So, do I assess in such a way, do I use data in such a way that perpetuates this performance model? Or do I use it in such a way that it genuinely facilitates growth? So do I use it as a force of harm or as a force of healing, I suppose? It reminds me, when I was at school, I went to a very traditional British private school, and I remember lots of our big test results were published on the main school notice board, past which every child walked every day. And they were published in descending order. And I'm sure I remember sometimes the number of kids was bigger than the notice board. So if you had one of the lowest scores, you'd need to almost kneel down and find where you did. Now that's a very stark example of data and assessment being used as an act of violence, right? And then I ask teachers to reflect on how different their own classroom is. You know, when they set an assignment, they give grades for it, you know, communicate those grades to the kids. Those kids then know each other's grades. They talk about each other's grade, they tell their friends, they tell their parents, who tell the uncle, the grandparents, the siblings. It's all out there. Essentially, it's a very, very similar thing. So I do think it does a big moral act. I think we need to recognize that we've got choices and we make those choices in the knowledge that there will be consequences of those choices. Yeah. And I think I've got to reflect on that before I make those choices.

Absolutely.

That makes sense.

Yeah, no, 100%. And I mean, I'd love to talk a bit of specifics in a moment, about how that works in terms of constellations and the way that you use data in your data wheel. Cause I think that's, it's good for people to get a sense of the specifics and practical, you know, cause we're, we're talking in big ideas around moral choices, but actually people then have to do something different in practice. So I think that's really important. But just before we do that, you invoked Nora, Nora Bateson, who's been on the podcast recently. But then also I know that you use the work of Shane Safir and Jamila Duggan from Street Data. So warm data, the way that Nora Bateson uses it, and street data from Tim Logan, Shane, I wonder, could you just say a little bit about those and what you've kind of learned from that work? Because I think there's a lot of really important insights in both of those places.

Both warm and street data have infused my work to a tremendous degree.

Yeah.

And I'm reflecting on and fed by the learnings that I've enjoyed in both of those domains all the time. Right. And this, I suppose, is where the revolutionary— you talked about me mentioning it being a revolutionary act. This is where the revolution starts. There's a data science anthropologist, Hugo Baunanderson, who, who said that data and assessment or data as a whole, data science, if you like, is a social discipline that has the ability to consolidate and rearrange societal power structures. So in other words, data can and will change the world, and it's up to us whether it changes it for good or for bad. And whereas Cathy O'Neill talks about how we're controlled by data, I think Nora and Séverine Dugan, they talk about how that dynamic can shift. And actually, it's a relationship with data, and within that relationship, allowing the right data used in the right way to help be a force for good, right? So my understanding of Nora's work is really complex because Nora's work is really complex, right? But I love this idea of a thanopoiesis, what she calls a thanopoiesis, which as I understand it is this sort of liminal space in which you share a story and I share a story and those two stories sort of commune and commingle and something at some point will sprout from that process.

Yeah.

So the focus on the shared story and the organic power of the shared story seems to me to be really important there.

But it's absolutely, it's interesting, isn't it though? Because as you say, it kind of sprouts and it's the sprouting where we see something, where we say that's data in a way, right? It's like as soon as we can see it, it becomes explicit, visible, countable, whatever. Then it becomes data in the kind of traditional sense of what data means. But actually, as Afropoiesis and Nora's work is talking a lot about is that there's so much happening in that space that is implicit and in between people and that relating and sharing of stories. And, but to many people, that's not data, right? It's not because it doesn't meet that definition of, it doesn't have the hard edges. You can't count it. It's not something that you can put on a report card. So therefore it doesn't constitute data. It's just stuff happening, right? And I, I think that separation between that idea of could say cold data and warm data is to highlight that that has been created by a particular way of understanding the world, that we value the cold data, but we don't really often value the warm data, even though it is there. It's an interesting, as you said at the beginning, it's like there's an opinion embedded in that. It's not necessarily truth.

Yeah. For me, data is stories. That's ultimately what data is for me. It's, it's how do I learn from and listen to the stories of the community with whom I'm working. Both the individuals within that community and also the community as a whole. The better I listen to and learn from and hold those stories, the better placed I am to understand that individual and that community and therefore to see which members or groups within that community exist on the margins.

Absolutely.

So that's, I think, where, where warm nature has kind of come into it for me. And, and the numbers, right? And, and Nora would say the same, that the numbers, that, that abstraction, that, uh, reductionism, that serves a purpose, but not on its own. And the real violence is committed when we allow those abstractions to have almost supremacy, I suppose.

Yeah. And, and then the street data, I, I don't know that work as, as well, but as I understand it, when you're talking about that idea of stories, for me, that's about who gets to tell the stories, like whose stories are particularly valued and whose stories are marginal and who doesn't get to tell their stories at all. Is that somewhere?

Yeah. Safiya and Dubin talk about the process of equity transformation. So for them, street data is a mechanism through which one can achieve equity Transformation. And I gather street data by using intentional, nuanced, and careful devices to listen to the stories of the voices on the street. And I might do that in numerous different ways. Examples I give in, if you were to go to Qatar at the moment, or at any point, you'll find lots of international schools in Qatar are wrestling with a problem. And that problem is teenage Qatari boys. Okay, when I'm in the Emirates, some of the schools that have a lot of Emirati kids, one of the things they're wrestling with is teenage Emirati boys. When I was in Jordan, I was told, one of the big problems here, Matthew, is that you're going to have, we are teenage Jordanian boys, right? So we see a problem there. And this is where warm data has really helped me. We see a problem. And what I've learned from warm data is that I need to say that the problem is not the problem. It is not just that and nothing more, to use Gregory Bateson's words, right? I need to find out more. There's so much I need to learn about the interrelationality in the system which has given rise to the sprouting of that particular problem. So Street Data would give an example such as, uh, maybe I go on a community walk with, um, a group of those boys, and I go to their mosque, and I go into their family, and I sit and have tea with their grandfather, and I go to the market where they shop. And all of this is giving me data on this group of kids, but that is very much street data. Or I would go and observe a lesson and I would keep a log of, of the types of contribution that a particular group of kids in that class was making, and also the types of responses that that particular group was getting from the teacher. And I keep a log of all of that, and that enables me to understand how that group of kids experienced that lesson. Or they talk about the idea of kind of fishbowl discussions whereby I get kids to in a circle, a listening circle, and we allow them to talk about a particular challenge or obstruction or mechanism for marginalization that they experienced. And then we record that, we get it transcribed, we give it back to that group to read, and then they have a second circle around that. And if we're observing and listening again, it's a way to, to harvest that, that street data. That's what street data is for me. It's about, yeah, it's about harvesting stories really, which is kind of very similar to some aspects of warm data, right? But for me, and this is where Nora might disagree with me, I do see a role for quantitative data in the identification of some of those groups on the margins. And my fear is that without a holistic and triangulated approach to the quantitative data we have in schools as well, we may miss some of those margins. And therefore we may miss the identification of the group with whom we need to allow our stories to commune and commingle, the group onto whose streets we need to descend so that we can hear their stories.

Yeah.

So the quantitative, qualitative, the emergent and the submerged, the abstraction and the essence. I think all of these things are important if we're to achieve the equity transformation that Safiya and Dugan talk about.

Absolutely. No, that's really powerful. And as you said, in a way, at a certain level, there's just something very simple about listening and learning at the heart of all of that, isn't there? I mean, you know, if you think about data as just listening and learning about people's stories, and clearly on the basis of that learning, you want to then act in order to, as you say, support some of them to be less marginalized. That's a very simple idea, really.

Yeah, but if, if I live in rural Scotland and some of our local primary schools only have like 6, 8 kids in the whole school, right? Now if I've got 6 to 8 kids in a school and I've got a couple of adults, then my opportunities for sharing and listening to stories are going to be abundant. I work with schools who have 6, 8, 10,000 students in the school. Therefore, those opportunities for that story sharing are not going to present themselves spontaneously and abundantly, right? So my argument is that somehow I do believe that we need to look at all of the quantitative data we have available, not just about academics, and I'm sure we'll talk about wellbeing data in a moment,, but look at all that quantitative data in order to triangulate it and find who is lurking on the margins of our school.

Yeah.

And sometimes those won't be surprises and sometimes those really will be surprises.

Yeah.

And if we don't have that mechanism, I fear we won't know where to go to listen to the stories to which we need to listen the most.

Sure. No, and absolutely, I think it's so important to be surprised, isn't it? Because otherwise we're just, you know, we're on the treadmill, we're not really thinking, you know, we need to be surprised about those things.

But I Absolutely.

I mean, I think again, it's a function of the structures that we are working within. And as you say, when they're that large with that many young people, there's something very, very challenging about working in very human and kind of learning ways in such large communities. But therefore there is a role for that kind of— Dave Snowden talks about it as weak signal detection. You know, when you're looking at more quantitative data, you, you wanna look, listen out for the weak signals. That aren't the obvious thing, but are somewhere in, and I think absolutely there's a really definitely a role for that quantitative. And then again, it's quantitative, qualitative ethnography and, you know, large-scale surveys. I mean, these are, these are kind of methodological questions in a way, but so important, as you said, back to your idea of it being a moral and a revolutionary act. We have to make choices intentionally about how do we set up the systems to gather that data and what do we do with it?

And I love what I'm learning about Dave Snowden's work at the moment. I love that description of weak signal detection because that's ultimately what I'm trying to do through data triangulation in schools is to try and find those weak signals so that we, we can act.

Brilliant. So then let's talk more specifically about the wellbeing data, as you said. So you're working with ideas of constellations and then your wellbeing data wheel you've brought together, which I think again, just is really useful for people to have things that they can tools they can use to start bringing some of these quite big ideas down into the very practical doing of being in school. So yeah, could you perhaps talk a little bit about how the data wheel works and, you know, some specifics of how you would work with a school on wellbeing data?

Well, firstly, just to explain why we need to have wellbeing data. And as I mentioned, I think earlier, it's about challenging the supremacy of academic data in schools. It's about measuring what really matters. And there is so much research which proves what we all know anyway as educators, right? Which is that if I am, feel safe and well, then I'm more likely to perform. I'm more likely to achieve. I'm more likely to thrive, right? So if we put wellbeing first, I think academics will thrive, which is what so many of our communities say they want to happen. Whereas if we put academics first, then what I see in schools is for, for some kids increasingly, wellbeing starts to wither and suffer. So there's a real, there's a moral imperative here that we need to understand that wellbeing better so we can support that wellbeing better. And how do we understand it better? We understand it by measuring it. And I'm really cautious here of the idea that, again, I learned from Nora about the fact that the territory and the map are not the same thing. So the more that I gather data, be it qualitative or quantitative, on something, that doesn't mean that that collection of data somehow is that something. So I'm aware of that the whole time. However, in that context, you mentioned constellations. I talk about this a lot. I see each, each child and each group of children in my school have a galaxy of data stars all around them, right? Data stars being stories.

Yeah.

Stories from their past, their present, and their future. And somehow as educators, we need to try and join up some of those stories to form a constellation. That constellation tells a story in itself. And that story helps us sense-make in the same way that as long as there have been humans, we have looked up to the firmament to try and understand this weird life that we are living. I got this from a data scientist friend of mine in Vietnam who grew up in rural Vietnam and looked up at the stars each night in the dry season and could name all of them by an early age and went on to become a data scientist, and she talks about it in the same way. We've got to find the constellations. Now, how do we do this in a way that isn't reductionist? How do we do this in a way that it doesn't become such an abstraction that it loses the essence of the warm data at its core?

Yeah.

We need to keep that in mind the whole time. But the Wellbeing Data Wheel that I work with is quite similar to the state of Ontario in Canada's triangle of assessment. So in their Growing Success Model, they talk about a triangle of assessment. Whenever I want to assess anything, by which I mean whenever I want to understand anything, I understand it, I assess it through observation, conversation, and product. The paradigm that we've inherited insists that product is everything. But the more that we can understand by conversation and observation, the better we can reach a holistic understanding of the person or the group with whom we're working. So the Wellbeing Data Wheel is based around that idea. And so there are 5 spokes to the Wellbeing Data Wheel. The first is observation, because as adults, we are observing children and young people all the time. Yeah. So the more that we can do so intentionally, the more that we can do so tuned into their frequency, the more we can gather really critical weak signals about whether they are okay, right? As a school principal, I used to be on the school gate most mornings and most evenings, and it was one of the richest experiences for me because I could interact with students and their parents as they came in and as they left. But I could also observe and see Tim coming in today, and usually Tim's coming in with a spring in his step and his head is up and a big smile. But today his head is down and he's doing the preadolescent shuffle. Then I know then that Tim's probably not okay. Now, what do I do with that information? If all I do is say to myself, I better speak to Tim later, but I'll probably either forget or something else will come up or there'll be a safeguarding issue or, you know, any number of things could happen. So what if I could log that information somewhere, just that I was concerned, worried about Tim? And then what if 4 or 5 other teachers that day observed Tim and were worried about him? Then we've got 5 different reports of a bit of a concern. That gives us really critical wellbeing data, it seems to me. And then observational data in the form of learning walks. So if I'm, rather than going around observing the teachers, if I'm going around and actually observing the students and whether they seem okay, whether I do that specifically for kids who are on my radar, maybe I know that Tim's having some issues at home at the moment, so I want to particularly keep an eye on him, or maybe Tim has been behaving in such a way that didn't conform to our behavior expectations. And I want to understand that better. And then the Löwen scales of wellbeing involvement come into this, which I'm still so excited. This is Professor Ferralava's model of assessing initially in early years. So a 5-point rubric for children's wellbeing and a 5-point rubric for their involvement or their flow. And early years educators who work within this model will, over a period of time, be able to evaluate children's wellbeing and involvement and report even on that. And when they're passing on a class to another teacher, they're passing on that information. That's observational data about the things that really matter. So observation for me is a really exciting part of the wellbeing data wheel and one that we have been doing accidentally for a long time. Sure. But I think if we move from coincidence to consistency. On that, then I think we could pick up all sorts of weak signals.

Nice.

Well, the next was conversation or check-in, really. And, and this ideally, like we talked about earlier, the ideal, ideally this would be a one-to-one relationship where I am a trusted adult to you. You and I have enough quality time in the day, week, month, semester, year that actually we can talk and I can listen to your stories, right? Maybe I do it in listening circles, or maybe there are apps for those kids who don't feel comfortable or don't necessarily have that safe adult to hand. They can check in via apps. And some of those apps are really exciting because not only do they let certain adults know that I'm feeling anxious today, but they also flag resources such that I can learn about some kind of CBT strategies that I might be able to use with my anxiety, etc.

That's, that's an interest, if I could interrupt briefly, there's a, that's an interesting point because I, that was something that surprised me about my initial reaction to those things that they're very cold and actually in talking to you and then talking to others, just understanding that actually they might be spaces where young people feel more able, not less able to disclose certain things because they don't feel judged or that they have to perform in a certain way saying certain things. So I, I found that for me was a really important learning that actually they maybe have a real place, those types of tools.

I think lots of kids will say things to their phone, to their device. That they wouldn't feel comfortable to say directly in conversation to a teacher.

Sure.

So I think they put— they can, for some kids, again, fulfill a really, really vital function.

I suppose the flip side of that is that maybe they should never be given to anyone else because they only ever belong to that young person. And in terms of their ownership and privacy of that data.

Yeah, there's a massive ethical dimension there and about data ownership. I think that's a really, really important piece and that's one that We've got to navigate through all of this as well. So there's got to be consent. If I'm using this app and I'm logging this information, I'm doing so consensually in the knowledge of with whom it will or won't be shared, how it will or won't be used, etc. So that's a really important piece, definitely. Third, the third spoke is product, I suppose. This is surveys. You know, schools use wellbeing surveys and then on the back of the surveys they tell me that the wellbeing of their kids is really high or whatever else. And so surveys can be powerful. They can can be incredibly misleading. I think often we need to make a decision. Are they standardized? Are they anonymized? How do we guarantee authenticity in returns? The fourth spoke is counseling data, not the private stuff, but the hotspots, the kind of key issues that are being discussed, etc. And then the fifth spoke is everything else. Like if we, if we see all data as wellbeing data, then actually we can get the good out of the majority of data we're using.

Yeah.

And then on the back of this, Tim, that's when we, if we have it on a student level, I've got that wellbeing data on a student level. I know when I might need to intervene and support. But if I have it on a group level, that's when I can pick up those weak signals of groups who may be on the margins about whose marginalization I wasn't aware. And then I can seek adaptation such that they are brought in from the cold.

And that, that, if I could, that's a, that was something I wanted to ask you about, which, because I know you've done some work with Helen Street, and I've spoken to her previously on the podcast. And that for me is a really key piece as well, because often the wellbeing conversation is about individual wellbeing, but what you're talking about there and what Helen talks about really powerfully is contextual wellbeing of the wellbeing that is possible within this space, within this structure that we're working in that affects groups of individuals and the whole community. And actually it's not therefore the responsibility or fault in a kind of a blame culture of those individuals to just improve their own wellbeing. This is about something that is structurally perhaps needs looking at within the context or culturally within the context. Next, because this is affecting all of us and, or as we said at the beginning, particular groups perhaps disproportionately. And so I think, because I think that kind of individual focus of wellbeing can be a bit damaging sometimes to the way that it, if we don't bring in the, the, the collective piece.

Yeah. And I think it's where some of the biggest change can happen. Because it, I've worked with schools where I don't know where they found that their grade 11 and 12 students seem to really lack a sense of a why, a sense of an intrinsic motivation, whereas their grade 10 and below don't. Or worked with schools where the girls in the school seem to have much lower self-esteem from all of the wellbeing data we got than, than the boys. And yeah, there are lots of ways in which that group-level data can lead to wholesale adaptations where the school reflects really, really interrogatively and critically And what is it about the system? What is it about that soil which is leading these particular challenges to sprout? And then they start getting messy and digging into the soil rather than on that student level. It can be very much, I see the emergent problem, I'm going to fix the problem. Exactly.

Yeah. No, amazing. So in a way we've been talking about this, it's been kind of with us in the conversation is this idea of inclusivity as we're thinking about marginalized groups. But I do want to ask you specifically about it because this is this seems to be a core part of your work as well. And you've— I read a piece that you wrote where you talked about your own experience reflecting on your failings in a way as a school leader to lead a trans-inclusive school, as one example of dimension of inclusivity. So yeah, I would love to ask you from a leadership— or it could be leadership in the sense of leading a classroom and educators— what do you find the challenges leading truly inclusive schools are, and that unconditional inclusivity that I know you talk about, which I think is a really powerful idea as well.

Well, I think I did fail to lead a trans-inclusive school, just as I failed to be a trans-inclusive parent within a society which is fundamentally and horrifically failing to be a trans-inclusive society, right?

Yeah.

But in terms of me as a leader, the specific challenges were many. You know, most of my clients are international schools and they each inhabit a very specific sociocultural context.

Sure.

And that will pose a challenge to inclusivity in all sorts of ways.

Yeah.

In the UAE, for instance, there's a Minister of Tolerance, but it can only within UAE law be tolerant of certain characteristics of identities. Yeah. So the social, sociocultural context is a big piece. Government and law. If we look in the UK at really sinister shifts on the horizon in terms of what teachers must or must not do in relation to trans and non-binary students, for example, the, the law and government can be a major challenge. The media and the noise that comes from the dominant news media, again, that's a challenge. The parents who have grown within that sociocultural context under the kind of shadow of, of that law and that government, surrounded by and deafened by the noise of that media. The parent community can sometimes be a challenge. Another challenge is if we try and be reactive rather than preemptive, that can be a real challenge because then we're putting a spotlight on the, the individual who has that need. For example, I mean, I use a wheelchair and when I visit schools, some of the schools I visit for the first time, they think, oh, Wow, we should, we should actually have done this with our campus, etc. And then with the very best of intention, they may then move to a point where they affected that adaptation, right? But they're doing it because they realize that a user might need it. And I think that's another challenge. We have to dig around in the soil such that should we have members of our community who inhabit any of those marginalized characteristics, they're going to be okay. You know, they're going to belong. Yeah, I suppose another challenge is curriculum and resources. These are all incredibly prejudiced, incredibly biased, incredibly exclusive, incredibly narrow. So you asked about challenges. Those are all challenges that would affect me as a leader trying to include my queer kids, but trying to include kids with any intersecting identities and characteristics.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it strikes me that it brings us back to the conformity idea as well, because there are the values, as you said, of the sociocultural context and of the dominant culture, the media and all of that kind of baked into the way that an institution like a school runs. And there is pressure for conformity to that set of values. So in a way, there are a lot of prevailing winds pushing in the, the other direction of exclusivity rather than inclusivity in a way, right?

Absolutely. But, but even though I've failed as a trans-inclusive principal, there were still things that I managed to achieve before the end of my tenure that I think did pull the school towards being a more inclusive space for trans and non-binary kids in a society which, in which we couldn't even discuss gender identity or sexuality. So I introduced a new uniform which was entirely gender neutral, but I did it without fanfare and without mention of its gender neutrality. We changed the name of our head boy and head girl to head students. We introduced a menu of sports that were not so gender stereotypical. We had mixed PE lessons. We encouraged teachers to refer to their kids in gender-neutral ways. All of these things were what I would call curb cuts. They were, they were tiny changes that we could make that draw in those kids on that particular margin, but from which everybody else benefits too. And we did them without fanfare, and therefore they don't draw the ire or the approbation or the shock of those in the community who might not be on the same page, right? So I think there are things I did and think there are things that schools can do in however a tight context. I think there's absolutely change that we can affect, but it's, it's a challenge certainly.

Yeah, no, but I love that idea of not— of without fanfare though, because I think there's a lot of virtue signaling that happens in different ways, in the ways that we, we do a lot of this work. And, and it's not always from a place of love, right? Which is kind of where I'd love to end the conversation. Sometimes it's It's from a place of political positioning and actually something at the very heart of this kind of notion of inclusivity. Because I mean, there are some really uncomfortable conversations that everybody needs to be kind of open to, to, to do this work as well, right? I think it's important to say that because it's, it's all very comfortable and warm and, you know, to have these conversations about inclusivity and we're gonna include everyone, but then that may be, you have to challenge your own assumptions and values I think that inclusivity is an absolute.

I don't think you can be partially inclusive.

Exactly.

Yeah. And yet there's almost every school I work with has somewhere in their collateral or in their guiding statements or on their website that they're a totally inclusive school, right? Apparently the world is full of totally inclusive schools. And yet, yet the world is also full of lots of students who feel excluded. So, you know, it doesn't compute.

No, absolutely right. And that is a kind of, in a way, a perfect segue to my last question. I, you talked about why we need to talk more about love and, you know, again, talk about fluffy concepts, right? But there is a fundamental grounding and I, I, I absolutely agree with you. You can't, you can't talk about inclusivity if you're going to add conditions to that, right?

Mm-hmm.

It has to be unconditional inclusivity that everybody is loved and accepted for who they are. Who they wanna show up as in every moment, even if there are pushbacks and there are conversations and uncomfortable conversations that, but they come from a place of love. And I, yeah, where do you see that conversation happening and needing to happen more in education?

I think, I think I've learned about this really acutely in recent years because my mother and my children's grandmother got to a point where it became obvious she wasn't able to accept my son's gender identity, right? And we kind of said, well, you know, we want you in our life, we want you to love us unconditionally, right? But if you're attaching conditions to that love, then we need some space from you until such point that you can love unconditionally. And we've been estranged from her for the last 5 years. And so we've learned acutely as a family the power of unconditional love and the destructive power of the existence of conditions within a supposedly loving relationship. So for me, love is unconditional, and that's one of the most powerful ingredients of love, right? It's the lack of conditions.

Sure.

In a school context, and for me, love is, I suppose love is two things in a school context. One is an abundance of care. If I love, then I care, and I care in abundance. I am feeding and tending the soil from which your future will grow. And I'm doing so with that abundance of care. And secondly, there are no conditions to my love. So whatever emerges at whatever point, you mustn't be scared that somehow because of that emergence, I will stop loving you because actually my love for you is unconditional and therefore it is perpetual.

Yeah.

Now me saying that about myself as a parent with my kids probably is easy to digest for most people. But somehow when we talk about love in schools, it becomes more uncomfortable. And I think that in schools there should be an abundance of care, like the school and everything it represents should apply an abundance of care to all of the children and young people in that school. They should feed and tend the soil from which those students' futures will grow.

Absolutely.

And they should apply no conditions to the validation and the respect and the love that they show. So I think it is absolutely applicable.

Yeah. And that, that last one is more challenging, right, for educators?

Yeah, I think so, it is. But we know also that children need to be aware of and experience that abundance of care and that lack of conditions from adults so that they can in turn apply that abundance of care and lack of conditions to them selves. So if I grow up as a child, as a young person, applying an abundance of care to my own soil and applying no conditions to the love I'm able to show myself, then I'm going to grow up into a much happier adult, right? And then I'm going to thrive. And then all the outcomes that we all want for our kids are going to happen. But I'm only going to apply that abundance of care and that lack of conditions if I also receive it. And that for me is that, that function of of love in schools. I mean, the antithesis of it is hate, obviously, right? But there's a set of scales there, and there seems to be a dangerous edging towards tipping points in the world around us today. You know, when a family rejects their child because they identify as queer, then that's love has tipped over into hate, right? The culture wars that we see around so many protected characteristics in so many countries, that love has tipped over into hate. Sectarianism, wars. So that I suppose the, on the same color scheme as love, you have peace, you have hope, you have belonging. And yet we live in a world where language is being contorted and twisted. I read in the newspaper today in the UK that marches for a ceasefire in the Middle East are essentially hate marches. So marches for peace. Have been labeled a hate march. So I do think it's that set of scales and the weight is pulling down so massively on this side that the imperative for us to apply an even greater amount of love becomes inescapable. One example I've seen of, of love within a school, so an actual specific example from, from a school where I saw that love was applied unconditionally and from an abundance of care and the effect that it had on a child's life. I shall just share this story with you. So I was working with a school in Singapore and the school was wrestling within a complex sociocultural context there as well, despite recent advancement in terms of law for the queer community. The school was wrestling with how do we keep our conservative factions within our school community on side? How do we avoid alienating them whilst also meeting the needs of the queer students and staff members in our schools? They were really wrestling with this and they didn't want to go too fast. They were treading carefully. And I facilitated a discussion with a group of queer students and staff in the school, or allies. And one of the slides I shared was a single slide with lots of the queer flags. So the bi flag was there, the trans flag was there, the intersex flag there. There were 9 flags on this slide. Now, I shared this because I wanted to suggest that in an international school where commonly in the large entrance lobby of the school, there'll be loads of flags, and the flags are saying, look how international we are.

Yeah.

My suggestion was, what if you just interspersed without fanfare, um, some of the queer flags in and amongst all of those nationality flags? Who are we to say that the 2 single most important characteristics I have are my nationality and my gender, for example? What if I had other characteristics which were far bigger for me? So interspersing those. Anyway, the example I gave, I shared this slide with this group of kids and there was one girl in the corner who immediately I shared this slide, she started to bounce up and down in her chair and she said, "It's me, it's me, it's me." So the simple display of the flag with which she truly identified above and beyond any notion of nationality, that communicated to her that she was loved, and it was transformative immediately. Yeah. In terms of her well-being and her sense of belonging. So there are specific acts that we can consciously, intentionally do. Yeah. Which communicate love.

No, absolutely. But I mean, there are important things that we have to intentionally think about and do, right? But there is also— it kind of leaves me also thinking that there are just a huge part of it is a, is a way of relating, right? That goes way beyond the flags or the curriculum or the intentional, like clearly we have to work with those structures, but also within all of that, back to the warmth, right? The warm data. There is just this interrelating in these communities of people and it is more challenging when they're 6,000 students, as you said, than a smaller one. But, but absolutely. I agree with you that it's so imperative now and I just, yeah, I mean, I so appreciate the work you're doing and just hearing more about it. Is a real privilege. So thank you so much.

And the fluffiness, you said that love can be fluffy. Talk of love is fluffy unless it is converted into some sort of action. And if that action is the immersion into the interrelationality that exists within and amongst all of us, then that love stops being fluffy.

Yeah.

And it's turned into something lasting and tremendously impactful. So yes, it's been a pleasure to chat with you.

Thank you, Matthew. Yeah, no, really beautiful stuff. And yeah, I look forward to staying in touch.

Absolutely.

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