Audio Transcript

[00:00:04]
Zeina Chalich: As a teacher, you want to create opportunities and experiences for your learners to do that. So stay connected to the real-world problems, open up your classrooms, get connected, do virtual excursions, connect with speakers and authors and real scientific researchers, bring authentic learning to your classroom, to your programmes. Break down those classroom walls. It’s not about the syllabus. It’s about the world around us and the people who are actually struggling or have problems and need them solved.

[00:00:41]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:58]
Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. It’s a big week this week as we get to speak with Zeina Chalich, who’s a highly respected and dynamic educator. She truly is. And I’ll tell you what, she loves maker spaces and STEAM and digital pedagogy and getting personalised learning to work. This is her passion, and it truly shows in this chat when we get to talk about all that sort of stuff.

[00:01:20]
Ben Newsome: Now, by the way, she’s also a co-founder of #AussieEd, which is this massive Twitter chat which happens every Sunday night, which helps educators all around the globe. And not just through Twitter, she also helps educators in all these different ways. She won the New Voice in Leadership Scholarship from the Australian Council for Educational Leaders and in 2015 picked up the Brother John Taylor Fellow Research Prize from the Catholic Education Commission. She really loves her education, you can tell, and I could probably throw hyperboles in here for a while, but you want to hear from her herself. So let’s get on with it. I hope you enjoy the chat.

[00:01:50]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

[00:01:53]
Zeina Chalich: My name is Zeina Chalich. I’m a Leader of Learning Technologies at an independent school in Sydney. I’m also the co-founder of #AussieEd, a big global professional learning network on Twitter. I’m also a sister, an auntie, a friend, a mentor, and just someone who’s really passionate about creativity, finding purpose, and joy in the everyday stuff that we do as educators and learners.

[00:02:22]
Ben Newsome: I love the fact that you just slid in there the sister and the auntie. That’s just cool because it’s so true.

[00:02:28]
Zeina Chalich: It’s the stuff that really matters at the end of the day. We’re inspired by the people that are closest to us. So we need to stay next to them. I always tell people stay near the things that make you feel alive, and it starts with people.

[00:02:41]
Ben Newsome: That’s so cool. And the thing is, though, what you’ve also been doing is also very cool. That’s why I wanted to chat with you on this thing. Let’s just take a little step back because you’ve been heavily involved with #AussieEd and all sorts of things. Let’s be honest, and if you aren’t aware, Zeina really is. Jump on Twitter and find out all about it and we’ll certainly chat about that soon enough. But just as a simple question, why did you get yourself into education before you even got into what you’re doing now?

[00:03:09]
Zeina Chalich: I’ve got two answers for that one. When I was younger, my mum found me sleepwalking one morning when I was probably about seven, and I was teaching kids. I was writing on the wall in my bedroom and I was acting like a teacher. We came from a big Lebanese family, so every family gathering I would be the teacher giving out worksheets and stickers and just constantly teaching. I think I’ve always had that. Growing up, I loved my teachers. I grew up in an EAL/D family, so I learnt a lot about life and culture and art and things like that from my teachers and about literature. I think it was just a natural calling to say I want to be like that person.

[00:03:50]
Zeina Chalich: As an adult, I actually wanted to go into law or journalism. Growing up with parents who put us through good schools, and we were the first in our family to actually go to university, for them it was like, “Maybe be a teacher because then you can have a family, be home by 3:30 to look after your kids. It’s an easy profession, you’re good at what you do, you’re good with people.” I think it was a combination of “Yeah, that’s the path that I’m going to take.” I only ever knew teachers. I didn’t know women could do other things. I never saw other women doing other things. So I guess I thought, “Yeah, this just feels good, it fits.”

[00:04:26]
Zeina Chalich: I went down that path and I’ve been doing that since, but I’m really lucky that my career has taken so many turns and changed so that I feel like I’m more than just a teacher now. So that’s the start of the journey, but it hasn’t been limited to just being a classroom teacher.

[00:04:46]
Ben Newsome: True. And mind you, I know for sure there’s no such thing as “just” a classroom teacher. But at the same point, it’s what your family might tell you or your friends might tell you, going, “Oh yeah, it’s an easy profession, you finish at 3:30,” and you know full well that it’s way more than that, a little bit busier than that.

[00:05:04]
Zeina Chalich: I guess the question really is why did you stay? Why I became a teacher is one thing, but what’s kept me in education is that the profession is so diverse and teaching isn’t the traditional method of teaching that we grew up with. Schools have changed, education’s changed. Because of the disruption, the very slow disruption that’s finally happened in education, the excitement, the change, the innovation, there’s so much more happening in education that’s kept me here, because the world is changing, learning’s changing, teaching’s changing.

[00:05:39]
Zeina Chalich: For me now, my calling to stay in education is because we need to change how we do things because these kids are growing up in a different world. The world out there for them is different, and for me now, it’s more about purpose. Purpose to make an impact, purpose to make a better future, and just making sure that we’re doing it authentically and properly from the start, not for the sake of being innovative, but actually truly changing the way we do things in education. If I could be education minister tomorrow I’d love it. Set me up.

[00:06:14]
Ben Newsome: Imagine that. Imagine if teachers were education ministers, that’d be interesting. I wonder what would happen.

[00:06:20]
Zeina Chalich: Oh gosh, could you? For me it’s purpose, it’s calling, and like you said, it’s making a difference. Everyone talks about being successful, about making money or people knowing your name, but if you can just make a little impact and that has that ripple effect that goes on and on, then that’s living joyfully and having purpose in what you do. So that’s why I’m in education now.

[00:06:44]
Ben Newsome: I reckon so, and I think that sentiment is completely echoed globally to be honest with teachers all over the place. And you’re definitely living that, that’s for sure. I know you’ve been through a bunch of different schools. So you’re primary trained, right?

[00:07:00]
Zeina Chalich: Yes, primary trained. Then I completed my Master’s a couple of years ago in educational leadership just to upskill myself a little bit more in that department. My role at the moment works across the P to 12 campus that I work on. So I have a bit of work to do with the middle years as well, but formally on paper, I’ve got a Bachelor of Education.

[00:07:23]
Ben Newsome: Good fun. And I tell you what though, the amount of impact you’ve had, not just on your students, but importantly, teachers and beyond has been profound. Co-founder of #AussieEd. There might be some people who have not heard of #AussieEd before. It’s on Twitter and it’s a bit of a network. Tell us a bit what this is about and where this came from.

[00:07:44]
Zeina Chalich: Basically, if I tell the story correctly because it happened many years ago now, and it’s interesting because when we talk to the #AussieEd team, everyone has a different understanding of how we came together. We went to a Google teach meet. I think we were all in schools, frustrated, a little bit isolated, restricted by red tape, bureaucracy, lack of resources, autonomy, everything that turns a teacher off being in teaching. I remember going, “There’s got to be more to this.” I was in one of my first schools and one of my principals said to me, “You’re too disruptive. You move too quickly, you break too many things, you want change to happen too quickly.”

[00:08:26]
Zeina Chalich: I remember thinking, “Yeah, there’s an urgency to change how we do things. Can you not see the system’s not working?” Everything that I was doing just felt wrong. So I started going outside of my school network and trying to figure out, “Okay, what do I do here? If I can’t make a change, if I can’t work the way I need to in education, maybe I’m not cut out to be a teacher and stay in education.” I shouldn’t confess this too loudly, but I was looking for something else. I wanted to see if there were like-minded people out there. Let’s see what they’re offering for teachers outside of school PL. So I went to a Google teach meet and just sat there, didn’t present, didn’t even know anything about it. It was my first time.

[00:09:08]
Zeina Chalich: I heard people get up and talk about their passions and what they’re doing in schools, and how their principals love this, and how their kids are doing that. It was just this ‘aha’ moment where, “Oh my goodness, there are other people out there doing this, but I just don’t know them and I’m not connected with them.” Then I bumped into the other people that are in #AussieEd. We kind of knew of each other, but we all felt the same way and there was this big yearning to connect and to collaborate and to celebrate the disruption of what we’re doing in schools.

[00:09:41]
Zeina Chalich: We had dinner and had a chat. Brett Salakas was probably one of the first ones that was online during a chat one night. All the Americans had been on Twitter before, and he just put out the hashtag, #AussieEd, to see if there were any Aussies out there talking. Obviously no one replied to him. At dinner he was like, “Hey guys, I’ve got this hashtag that I’ve put out there and wouldn’t it be great if we could connect with other Australian educators who feel like us in this same situation where we could have conversations?” Because that night at dinner, we covered everything you can imagine in education. It was like finding your best friend on the first day of school.

[00:10:19]
Zeina Chalich: From there, we started joining in the conversation using the hashtag, then bit by bit other people started discovering it and then we started hosting formal chats where we’d have set questions, have set topics. The biggest thing for us was that connection and collaboration and offering something for that teacher out there who is isolated, or the one that has no bounce and needs to be part of something bigger than what their school might offer.

[00:10:45]
Zeina Chalich: The other part is that we hear about authors of books and professionals and experts and research, and by the time it gets trickled down to schools it’s maybe one, two, or three years old. People pull out the parts of that research that they want and we never get the real deal. So for us, it was important to connect educators with the practitioners, with the researchers, the real people, so that they were getting current research in good time, and had accessibility to those people who also wanted to connect with their audience.

[00:11:18]
Zeina Chalich: It was a number of reasons why we got together and I guess, five or six years on, it’s just become a thing that people do Sunday nights. People know that there’s going to be a group of people talking about a topic. But the fun part of #AussieEd chats now is actually the side chats that take place during the real chat.

[00:11:38]
Ben Newsome: I always wonder about those Twitter chats. If you’re listening in and never been on a Twitter chat, get your fingers warmed up before you start. You’re going to be typing fast because it is frenetic watching it happen, especially with all the different side chats and bits and pieces. I’ve been invited to co-host occasionally and it’s busy, it’s flat out. But everyone on there is genuine. They really want to help and share things. The amount of content that comes out and links to “go check this thing out” and videos, it’s amazing. I tell you what, #AussieEd totally got the ball rolling.

[00:12:20]
Zeina Chalich: I always say it’s the staffroom that you wish you had every day. Just after this chat, I’m going to send you an email to come and co-host #AussieEd, so I picked up on that, Ben. It’s all good, we’re going to get you on.

[00:12:35]
Ben Newsome: See, this is my subtle dig at everyone. I should have done the same thing when Brett was on.

[00:12:44]
Zeina Chalich: When we first started, I won’t lie to you, we got a little bit of resistance. It was like, “There’s other chats, we don’t need another chat.” It was like, “Yeah, but all the other chats are about people sharing their wisdom and what they think. This chat is about connecting people.” Fair enough, we facilitate the chats, but if we walk away from #AussieEd, #AussieEd will continue without us. It’s not about us. The people are connected. There’s a PLN, a community out there that’s running with or without us. We just help facilitate it so that new people come on board and it has a bit of structure.

[00:13:21]
Ben Newsome: Which means it’s truly working. And that’s actually a lot of what we often talk about, getting kids to understand design thinking which I know you’re big about, but also just entrepreneurship in whether it’s creating an entity or a project. Eventually that thing’s got to fly, and at some point it’s got to fly without you. That’s exactly what you’re doing with #AussieEd, which is wicked.

[00:13:45]
Ben Newsome: It’s such a cool thing. Now I do know though that whilst that’s a fantastic sharing forum, you do have a bit of passion for science and tech. You clearly do. Thinking back of all the different lessons, and let’s be honest as educators we’ve run so many lessons, of all the different lessons with science or tech, what are some of those lessons where you’ve stepped back and gone, “You know what, this is just singing, it’s working so well”?

[00:14:14]
Zeina Chalich: It’s so funny you say that because if you asked me how often I was kicked out of my science class in high school, it’d be every second day. It’s quite interesting that I’m here talking about this, but I think the science and tech part was missing at my school. It was just your traditional methods of science, like lab work and specimens and rocks and chemicals. So I guess science looks a bit different for me now, which is exciting.

[00:14:41]
Zeina Chalich: It’s definitely an exciting space for me at the moment. My interest in science stems from curiosity and creativity and that wonder and awe of “Why is it like this and how does this work? How can we fix something that’s broken?” whether it’s something physical or a space or a concept or a system. I guess that’s what attracts me in that science and tech space at the moment.

[00:15:06]
Ben Newsome: That’s the fun thing about science, it really is just a methodical way of thinking about the world and testing it. The beauty about that is it’s now wrapped in a bigger acronym, and let’s be honest, there are so many different versions of this acronym. STEM, STEAM, STEAMA, I don’t know, one of these days I’m going to just put it out there and ask, how many versions have you seen?

[00:15:28]
Zeina Chalich: I’ve seen SHTEAM, I’ve seen STREAM. I got into a discussion last year with some history teachers and religious teachers, and it was basically about government grants. They were like, “STEM and STEAM is turning off kids from other topics and subjects.” I had a massive debate saying, “Put your grain in, be clever, integrate it into other key learning areas. It doesn’t have to be limited to STEM or STEAM. Break down the silos, work together.”

[00:15:53]
Zeina Chalich: They were like, “Yeah, but our subjects are different.” I was like, “Well, if you’re going to see yourself as a teacher of a subject, then STEAM, STEM, whatever it is, that transdisciplinary approach to learning is not going to work for you regardless of what the acronym is.” It’s about that mindset rather than subjects that have to be integrated. You have to go beyond subjects and silos because in the real world, our problems that we solve are actually transdisciplinary. They don’t sit in subject boxes.

[00:16:21]
Ben Newsome: They do love a label. Eventually, it’s what’s underneath the label that matters.

[00:16:26]
Zeina Chalich: My favourite part of STEAM is actually the Arts.

[00:16:28]
Ben Newsome: This is the thing, I love it because the creative aspect in STEAM in its true form, the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics, that’s the part which ties it all together in a lot of ways. I’d love to think more. What have you seen?

[00:16:44]
Zeina Chalich: STEAM is thrown around so much now, like kids are building something and it’s like, “Oh it’s STEM, STEAM.” I look at problems, authentic problems that need a transdisciplinary approach to be solved. They may need a bit of scientific knowledge or application, technology can help that, the engineering principles that we might know. And then when I look at the Arts and the Humanities, what are we influenced by? Who’s the need for? Why are we doing what we’re doing? Are we solving a problem? Are we creating a product that’s in demand? What’s the purpose of the innovation or the creation or the project or task?

[00:17:21]
Zeina Chalich: Ultimately, when we look at doing STEM or STEAM in education, the greater purpose is learning the skills to find problems, to solve problems, and then to leverage whatever skills and tools and resources at your disposal to prototype solutions that actually meet a need, be it for people or places or animals. You’ve got to have purpose in STEM and STEAM. It’s not just about robotics or learning how to code because at some point we’re going to be oversaturated with coders. Everyone’s going to learn how to code. It’s going to be hard to get a job as a coder because everyone’s going to learn how to code.

[00:17:58]
Zeina Chalich: But writing code is very different to trying to write code for a solution that’s actually going to solve a problem that somebody has. So how do we find out what the problems are that need solving? How do we find out if my solution or my engineering aspect or innovation is actually going to meet a need for someone? I think sometimes that’s what’s lacking in education when we look at STEM or STEAM. We’re so blindsided by the shiny gadgets and the fancy technology. Like 3D printing. I am yet to see 3D printing purpose in action at the moment. I’ve seen so many people print toys and keyrings and nametags and it just blows my mind because we talk about not using straws and not using paper cups with the kids, yet we’re printing off all this random stuff for the purpose of saying “Hey, look what I made.” Is that the mindset we’re trying to develop for our students? Is it about stuff or is it about people and problems and making an impact?

[00:18:59]
Ben Newsome: True. Even just honing in on 3D printing for a little bit. I do remember chatting with Mandy on this podcast ages ago from Makers Empire, which is a group that does 3D printing stuff. They were talking about a group in Western Victoria. What they were doing was they had found out that one of their kids’ little sister had a need for a prosthetic apparatus for her hand. I can’t remember exactly what the requirement was, but the kids went, “Well, why don’t we try and help her make the part that will fit this prosthetic thing?” That to me is an application. I like that idea of genuinely solving problems rather than making a pretty toy. Or even when you’re doing a design, it might be part of your project-based learning, having that fancy 3D printer, but budgeting not just the plastic but going, “Time’s actually a resource too, because these things take time to print.”

[00:20:00]
Zeina Chalich: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:20:02]
Ben Newsome: We can always go down every shiny toy, and trust me, I love shiny tech toys, but I’ve got to sometimes go, “You know what? Simplistic stuff.” I’m thinking of the cardboard challenges going around the world right now. It’s cardboard! But the kids love it and they make some really cool stuff with it.

[00:20:21]
Zeina Chalich: “Oh, but it’s messy and it takes too long and they make too many mistakes and it takes longer than an hour on a Friday afternoon.” It’s like yes, yes, yes, because that’s how we function in the real world.

[00:20:33]
Ben Newsome: That’s right. And you know what? There’s a learning outcome in cleaning a mess up.

[00:20:38]
Zeina Chalich: Yeah, and it’s collaborative, it’s hands-on learning by doing, making something tangible. You’re usually creating something for a reason. You touched on it before about the tech stuff. When I think of STEM, STEAM, science, the focus is the thinking skills. If we look at the new curriculum, we’ve got systems thinking, design thinking, computational thinking. One thing that I’m super passionate about making sure that we do right and do it well is design thinking.

[00:21:07]
Zeina Chalich: I think that fits in really well when we look at the new curriculum and science. Who are we designing for? What are we going to use to create that? Are we contributing to our overall vision for a sustainable preferred future? We talk about sustainability, but we’ve actually got to live it. We’ve got to show the children how to do it. Using older materials, repurposing things, cardboard. Prototypes are quick, they’re fast, they’re inexpensive. We don’t have time to create that picture-perfect model of our product.

[00:21:40]
Zeina Chalich: Making mistakes through learning is another one. When you’re younger you did a science poster, you took it to school, the teacher gave you a mark, and you got this feedback: “Next time, try to do X, Y and Z.” Never in my life have I had that next time to catch up on that skill or that advice. A challenge for us is that agile design process of thinking big, then thinking small, changing your type of thinking from divergent and then prototyping and getting instant feedback and feed-forward as you go along. Like you would on a real-world project. You don’t wait till the end to get feedback or advice or guidance. It’s really important that design thinking is not seen as just a design and make process, but rather a mindset. It’s an approach to how we make things, how we create things and why we do it.

[00:22:36]
Ben Newsome: Yes, that’s right. I totally agree with you with the design process because it is a process and a mindset 100%. It’s not just a linear type thinking space. But at the same point, it’s got an end goal in mind; you want a problem to be solved in some way.

[00:22:52]
Ben Newsome: It’s challenging though, because you’re looking at whatever particular topic you’re trying to deal with. You’re trying to work out how much can I allow these kids to fail? Or are you prepared to allow failure in the first place? In the real world, failure is somewhat common. Dealing with that in the limited amount of time you might have in the classroom is a tough ask in some ways. How do you address that? I suppose it’s a case-by-case basis.

[00:23:22]
Zeina Chalich: Absolutely. You’ve got to model the mindset and give the kids the toolset. It’s just not a one-off project thing; it’s got to be inbuilt in what you do and how you do things. As an example of what we did, we’re a PYP school here. Basically, we have a transdisciplinary approach to solving problems and hitting our outcomes. One of our projects was about people and how communities function. We used this project called City X Project, created by Stanford design thinking.

[00:23:51]
Zeina Chalich: It’s like a toolkit approach project, but it’s all about collaboration, innovation, and real-world problems to solve. Basically, it gave the students a context and it gave them profiles with needs for students to identify. It scaffolded the inquiry so that it was authentic. The children were given a problem by the mayor to solve. The city had all these issues, and there was about 20 or 30 profile cards with people with genuine problems moving through this new city. It could be transport, health, or education; different people from diverse backgrounds with different problems.

[00:24:28]
Zeina Chalich: Prior to that, we would probably talk about creating your dream school or creating a new playground. That’s just the traditional way you would normally go with this type of unit. But what we went through was creating a new city where here are people with genuine needs. We worked through the design thinking framework, so we focused on human values. The students looked at pain points and the needs of these specific people. We gave them the tools to develop empathy. They did some research, they did surveys and roleplays, and they looked at real data to see how someone in a wheelchair uses public transport. What are their pain points? What are their problems?

[00:25:07]
Zeina Chalich: As teachers, we had to facilitate a lot of structure around that. Then we went through radical collaboration where they were always working with somebody while they were brainstorming and coming up with ideas. It naturally lent itself to “I don’t have the answer, but I’m going to keep figuring it out.” The more I know, the more I realise I actually don’t know anything. Because we were giving them a genuine task, and when I say genuine and authentic, this is at their level for nine or ten-year-olds, they were like, “Okay, so my plan won’t work because I just did five interviews with these people and they all told me they don’t like that.”

[00:25:46]
Zeina Chalich: Obviously this child’s not in a wheelchair; he had to go out and speak to someone in a wheelchair to find out what their experience was like. When we take it away from them and not make it about them, but focus on human values and other people, it naturally happens. Without me having to tell this child “No, that won’t work,” they naturally came to that conclusion. This is just in the ideation phase, not even in the prototyping. When it got to the prototyping of actually coming up with solutions and testing things out, they didn’t need me to say “That won’t work.”

[00:26:20]
Zeina Chalich: They weren’t focusing on getting a mark or a score. At the front centre of their mind was this person in a wheelchair who they were designing a solution for. It was really empathy-driven. It wasn’t about school or marks; it lifted the direction away from “me, me, me” and my learning and success to “how can I help this other person?” I think that’s the design thinking mindset that as educators we really want to instil in our students beyond just hitting the outcomes of “can create a solution”. Like, why are they creating it? The human-centred approach to learning that often gets lost at schools, unfortunately.

[00:27:03]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, but I can see it. The thing about it is, it’s so perfectly reactive to the student voice. If the student’s saying, “This is what I’m really interested about, this is what I actually care about,” funnily enough, if someone cares about something and they’re especially empathetic towards a particular problem, their engagement’s going to increase a bit.

[00:27:23]
Zeina Chalich: 100%. And it’s not about them. They’re not looking for a sticker from me. They’re not looking for an A+ from me because they’re genuinely motivated by making an impact, solving a solution for someone else. When you give them authentic problems to solve and you give them ownership over their learning, you’re not going to have a problem with kids taking risks because they’re motivated to do that.

[00:27:46]
Ben Newsome: That’s right. I love in your ideation process that you addressed pain points, because so often we want to make the cool gadget or whatever it is we want to do. If it doesn’t solve a thing, or worse even produces even more pain points, you’re really not doing your job properly.

[00:28:03]
Zeina Chalich: Yeah, absolutely. I often get told, “Look, I’ve got all these robots. What can I do with them?” I kind of work backwards a little bit now. I go, “Okay, I’m going to meet you where you’re at.” Usually when we work here, we look at the outcomes and then we go, “Okay, where in the real world are there problems that our kids might know about locally, nationally, globally?” The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, they’re brilliant because they’ve got real data, real context, global issues that our kids can tap into. So for me right now, we’re using them as much as we can.

[00:28:40]
Zeina Chalich: With teachers who maybe don’t have that context, we work a little bit backwards. Look at the robotics. What do they do? They might sweep something, they might rescue something, and I work backwards and go, “Okay, where in the real world can students learn about how technology rescues people or goes into dangerous situations?” We do a bit of backward planning. Sometimes you have to plant those contexts if teachers aren’t ready to lead students into that inquiry.

[00:29:10]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. I love the fact that you’re framing around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, because that is a big thing and it goes well outside of education. Businesses and everywhere are looking at this. Some of them are seriously over-the-top. Goal 1: No Poverty. Goal 2: Zero Hunger. These are some serious challenges at the global scale. But these are also things that kids can in their own local community impact and make a difference. Simple things from quality education and gender equality. All that stuff can be done in your own classroom.

[00:29:43]
Zeina Chalich: We did it last year here. We were part of Tech Girls, the Tech Girls Challenge, and it was our first time doing it. You had to pick one of the United Nations goals, and we left it open-ended for the girls and they came back and went, “We don’t have any problems. We’re okay.” We were like, “Oh my goodness,” we didn’t know that they didn’t know how to look beyond themselves and go beyond their context. We spent a lot of time immersing them in different experiences and situations around health, around poverty, about education until they found something that really caught their attention.

[00:30:20]
Zeina Chalich: They looked at, I think it started off as a gender equality thing, and it was about girls having to travel so far to get to school, some girls not going to school because once they hit puberty their parents didn’t want them to go or they got married. At first they thought it was a gender issue for the girls, but then they went, “You know what? That’s not healthy for them. They have a right to be healthy.” We unpacked the layers and essentially they came up with the definition of what health is. We looked at health as… is it a luxury? Is it a right? They ended up coming up with an app called Be Well.

[00:30:57]
Zeina Chalich: The app was about identifying what it means to be healthy. As they were looking at all the stats and things like that, they looked at, well, what does it mean to be healthy in our context? How can we set something up so that people all over the world can learn on how to be healthy? Once they latched onto that, we stood back and they just knew exactly where they had to take it. They wanted to raise awareness of health around the world, especially for girls. They did all the research about what makes a healthy girl, what she needs, how often.

[00:31:31]
Zeina Chalich: They came up with all these cool community challenges that people could upload and share their wellbeing strategies and achievements towards looking after their health. They did a campaign about being a young girl is about looking after yourself and being responsible for your health. “This is how you can do it. Let’s do it together.” They created a pitch demo, they created an app demo, they pitched a video, and they actually won a United Nations Health Award for it last year. First-time coders, first-time project managers.

[00:32:02]
Ben Newsome: Well done. Congratulations on that. That’s so cool.

[00:32:06]
Zeina Chalich: I was really proud of them because we didn’t try to tell them, but we tried to direct them to a problem to solve. Once they learned other people’s values, once they learned perspective, once they immersed themselves in other people’s experiences and lives, it just naturally happened. They learned their values, they learned their pain points, and they just knew that “I have to do something about it.” And they took action. So it was really powerful.

[00:32:32]
Ben Newsome: You know what? I’m going to actually just throw down almost like a gauntlet or a challenge to the people listening in. Why not get your class, no matter where you are, you might be in an education centre, you might be in a school, wherever it is, why not get the learners who are in front of you to band together around a problem, create that solution, but also take that step and let other people know what you did during the process and then what the solution was. Enter competitions with it because there’s something to be said for, yeah, some people are like, “Oh, you got an award on the shelf, what does that mean?” It’s not just an acknowledgement to those learners, but it’s also a possibility to provide yourself a stage to then tell people about what they did. So funnily enough, they can do it too.

[00:33:19]
Zeina Chalich: Oh absolutely. I did this last year with year five. Now I’ve got girls in year three and four saying, “Hey, I want to be a tech girl, I want to solve a world problem as well.” With this Tech Girls competition, I think everyone should jump on. It’s for free, it’s like a three-month project, it’s fully resourced with fantastic design thinking resources, and it’s got a schedule to keep you on track. Not only that, the thing that I loved about Tech Girls as well was that it connects you with a mentor in the industry. It’s a competition for girls, so our girls were connected with a mentor from CommBank, and she’s from the innovation lab, and she actually created the AI robot and she actually worked on the chip that now makes Apple Pay so convenient for all of us.

[00:34:06]
Ben Newsome: Oh cool!

[00:34:07]
Zeina Chalich: For our girls, they got to Skype with her every couple of weeks and then I was a bit bold and I asked her, her name’s Astrid, so shout out to Astrid, we went and visited her at work one day. She had us in her boardroom, we went and hung out at the Innovation Lab, and it was just an amazing experience for our girls because we tell them they can be anything they want in the world. If you ask girls to draw a picture of what a computer scientist or a roboticist does, they all do the lab coat with glasses and whatnot. When our girls actually met her, they were like, “Miss, she’s tiny, she’s wearing a dress, she’s got pink nail polish, she’s just like us.” I was like, “Absolutely, she’s just like you.”

[00:34:49]
Zeina Chalich: For us, it was a powerful lesson for girls in particular: one, that you can be anything you want to be; two, they have to see it to be it. I know you hear it all the time but honestly, when these girls met our mentor, they were like, “Oh my goodness, she was just like me. I can be like her. I can be into feminine stuff and girl things and still do that.” And then going to their showcase at Accenture. We’ve got another mentor parent here who works for Accenture. For our girls to actually go to another person’s real workplace and meet other schools who also entered this competition, they were asking genuine questions, they were exploring different prototypes, giving feedback, asking them what they learned from this, what problems did you guys solve? Honestly, I’ve had feedback from parents and they’ve all said it’s been life-changing for their children to be part of something like this. So very powerful.

[00:35:45]
Ben Newsome: Totally. Really what you’re doing is you’re giving them permission to dream. And not just permission to dream, permission to do. It really is important. Let’s be honest, everyone’s got different access to wealth and connections, but unless you think you can even try, you won’t.

[00:36:01]
Zeina Chalich: Absolutely. I think with the beauty of something like this as well, it was human-centred. It was about people, their problems, it wasn’t about how clever I could be in technology. I think that’s so important when we look at STEM and STEAM. The technologies are the tools. Let’s not make it about that. Let’s make it about the people and how we can help meet their needs better.

[00:36:26]
Ben Newsome: I totally agree. There are people going out into pre-service teacher training and they’re starting out as beginning teachers and hearing these jargonistic terms in various ways and potentially confused. I would be. If just focusing on design thinking, what would you suggest that would empower them to take their first step and thereafter?

[00:36:52]
Zeina Chalich: That’s a really good question. Can I tell you what I’m currently doing? On a Monday afternoon I teach second year science and tech students at ACU as well at the moment.

[00:37:04]
Ben Newsome: Oh there you go. These are your class. I didn’t know that. How about that? Imagine you’ve got the class that you’re actually meant to be teaching.

[00:37:12]
Zeina Chalich: I do, I get them. I’ve just started week one of semester. So shout out to ACU Strathfield students today.

[00:37:21]
Ben Newsome: You’ve got this class. Guess what class you’re getting graded on this?

[00:37:26]
Zeina Chalich: I co-teach it with somebody else and on Monday, we hit them hard with the Australian curriculum, the design and digital and the new one. I had one of them, bless her, she goes, “Zeina, this is just insane, it’s just so technical, there’s big words, this is beyond teachers, how are we supposed to know how to use digital networks and digital systems?” We just looked at them and thought, “Welcome to teaching, you’re more than just a teacher these days.”

[00:37:57]
Zeina Chalich: To answer your question, when I did introduce myself to the class and we talked about the units about science and technology, the new curriculum, we were basically telling them, “Think of yourself as a teacher, but continually think of yourself as a learner, and think of yourself as a learning designer. Your role is to design learning that’s authentic, that’s evocative, that’s going to fuel empathy for your students to actually want to know more and for your students to actually have a call to action.”

[00:38:28]
Zeina Chalich: Because science and technology, there’s knowledge, there’s content, they’re going to learn the skills, but ultimately it’s a call to action. They have to do something with what they know. As a teacher, you want to create opportunities and experiences for your learners to do that. Stay connected to real-world problems, open up your classrooms, get connected, do virtual excursions, connect with speakers and authors and real scientific researchers, bring authentic learning to your classroom, to your programmes. Break down those classroom walls. It’s not about the syllabus. It’s about the world around us and the people who are struggling or have problems and need them solved.

[00:39:10]
Zeina Chalich: We told them to keep it real, to be open-minded, realise you don’t need to know everything. Just realise you don’t have to know everything. I’m not expecting you to know the outcomes off by heart. You don’t have to be experts in science and tech. What you do need to know is the content and then make connections to the real world so that your students have these authentic learning experiences.

[00:39:34]
Zeina Chalich: He still looked at me confused and he said, “Can we talk about the assignment now?” I just laughed and went, “Okay, that was too much for you.” It’s definitely from a mindset everything flows. In this particular student, his mindset is still on the exam, but he spoke on behalf of everyone. Obviously they’re still learning the art of teaching, right? We hit them and say, “Hey, you need to be a robotics teacher, you need to teach coding, you need to teach this.” I’m trying to get him to focus on actually defining himself as a learner and teacher and what that actually means besides just the content that they have to cover.

[00:40:17]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. This reminds me of a recent podcast we did with Michael Casumovic from Arludo who really did talk about this, whereby four years ago he didn’t know a thing about code and he just needed to help his students understand evolutionary concepts, because he’s an evolutionary biologist. He thought maybe he could work in their world a little bit and went onto some open source software and started producing stuff. Clunky, but it taught the things he was trying to do. Now he’s got all these games out to help people understand biology in a deeper way. The thing is, he never intended on learning coding. He didn’t think he was going to be coding as part of it, but it was just a tool and you just had to learn the tool. That’s how you learn all tools.

[00:41:04]
Zeina Chalich: We were at Google head office last week and we were talking to some software engineers and I asked them, “If you could go back in time and get your teachers to show you something, what would you have wished they taught you?” I thought they were going to say code. They actually said problem solving and analytical thinking and communication. It just reminded me, because we’re so focused on the coding part, that most of the time the people who fall into coding or coming up with solutions like this didn’t actually know how to code. It’s not about the computer science, it’s about people and problems and values.

[00:41:42]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. I even think of the way medical faculties now work. They now interview prospective people who want to be doctors and you might have absolutely smashed it out of the park with your student results, but if you have no empathy or the ability to relate to the person, they want you nowhere near a bedside. That’s right. The idea to have what people call soft skills, they’re not so soft.

[00:42:13]
Zeina Chalich: Nothing soft about them, you know?

[00:42:15]
Ben Newsome: I think the world is certainly coming to realise this. It’s certainly in some places kicking and screaming, but as a whole, it’s at least becoming just as valued as the true hard-nosed knowledge aspect. Because funnily enough, Google is a useful searching device and allows you to find the knowledge that you may not know, so that means you then got to be able to apply that stuff with empathy and realism. Then you’re okay. Look, Zeina, thank you so much for spending some time to have a chat with me. I know you’re absolutely flat out. I know you’re pulled left, right and centre at school and various conferences and #AussieEd every Sunday night and everything else, but it’s very much a pleasure having a chat and I hope you have a fantastic afternoon and thank you.

[00:43:05]
Zeina Chalich: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. And yeah, we’ll catch up soon I hope.

[00:43:10]
Ben Newsome: We will do so, have a good one.

[00:43:59]
Announcer: Not all TPL for teachers is as awesome as it could be. I feel like there’s a lot of PowerPoint presentations, a lot of sitting and listening to someone talking. Well, if you want a break from that, Fizzics TPL sessions are fully hands-on, integrated with the curriculum and full of amazing science ideas that you can put in your classroom right now.

[00:44:21]
Ben Newsome: Well there we go. We heard from Zeina Chalich and how good is she as an educator? How passionate, and tell you what, I love how much she just wants to share this stuff out. And you can truly connect with her through Twitter. It’s the best way you can find her, trust me. She’s so flat out everywhere else, you can best find her on Twitter. Now how to find her again: @zeinachalich, just look it up on Twitter and you’ll be able to connect with her and hear about what she’s got to say and maybe find her on the next various versions of hundreds of different conferences that she presents at. She is flat out.

[00:45:00]
Ben Newsome: Anyway, so that’s enough for this particular podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and we’ve got more coming up. You’ve been listening to me, Ben Newsome from Fizzics Education. And you’ve been listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. I will catch you next time. Have a great day.

[00:45:08]
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Frequently Asked Questions

What is #AussieEd and how can educators get involved?
#AussieEd is a global professional learning network on Twitter that facilitates weekly educational chats every Sunday night. Co-founded by Zeina Chalich, it is described as the “staffroom you wish you had every day,” allowing educators to overcome professional isolation by connecting with practitioners and researchers to share current research and innovative pedagogy.

How does Zeina Chalich define the role of “Learning Designer”?
Zeina emphasises that teachers should view themselves as learning designers rather than just content experts. In this role, the teacher’s task is to design authentic, evocative learning experiences that fuel empathy and encourage a “call to action,” where students must apply their knowledge to solve real-world problems.

Why is empathy considered the starting point for effective Design Thinking?
In the design thinking mindset, identifying human values and “pain points” is essential. By immersing students in the lived experiences of others—such as understanding the challenges of using public transport in a wheelchair—the focus shifts from a student’s own success to meeting a genuine need, which naturally drives deeper engagement and persistence.

How can the UN Sustainable Development Goals be used in the classroom?
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals provide real data and global context for student inquiry. Zeina uses these goals to help students look beyond their immediate environment, allowing them to engage with local, national, and global issues through projects like the Tech Girls Challenge.

What is the benefit of “low-tech” prototyping in a high-tech world?
While high-tech tools like 3D printing are popular, Zeina advocates for rapid prototyping using materials like cardboard. Low-tech prototypes are fast, inexpensive, and allow students to make mistakes and iterate quickly. This agile approach focuses on the thinking process and human-centred solution rather than the price of the equipment.

Discussion points summarised from the Learning design with Zeina Chalich with AI assistance, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF

Extra thought ideas to consider

Breaking Down Subject Silos through Transdisciplinary Learning
In the real world, problems do not sit neatly within subject boxes. Educators should consider how to move beyond being a “teacher of a subject” to adopting a transdisciplinary approach. By integrating STEM principles into History, Religious Education, or the Arts, students learn that solving complex challenges requires a skilful combination of diverse knowledge sets.

The “See It to Be It” Mentorship Model
Student perceptions of careers in technology are often limited by stereotypes. Providing students with industry mentors—such as female software engineers who challenge the “lab coat and glasses” trope—can be life-changing. Educators should look for ways to bring diverse professionals into the classroom (physically or virtually) to provide students with the creative confidence to see themselves in those roles.

Moving from Passive Consumption to a Call to Action
Science and technology should not just be about acquiring content or learning to code for its own sake. A successful programme should culminate in a “call to action.” When students realise that their digital systems or engineering prototypes can actually improve someone’s health or accessibility, they move from being passive consumers of technology to purposeful innovators.