Index to the full interview series.

The following transcript has been cleaned up slightly and filler removed (errors may remain). Note that this recording session was interrupted by the internet cutting out, so it ends very abruptly, and is rather short.

Leaving Croydon and the Move Back to Brisbane

Michael Nielsen: So last time we were talking about a lot of things, but one of the things was Croydon. And I was thinking afterwards, one of the things I wanted to ask you, but I forgot to ask you then was—my memory, and I could be wrong because I was six, was that Mum, Stuart and I basically packed up our bags and went back to Brisbane after about three or four months. And then the plan was that you were going to come back later in the year. Can you just tell me what happened?

Howard Nielsen: Yeah. You need to take it back two steps for this all to make sense. When we were at Evergreen, I got a promotion to go to Croydon. So that was an advanced promotion—you're supposed to have been in a school three years before you get that sort of promotion. We'd been there two years. So we took it, and you had to respond by November or December.

Anyway, in between accepting it and going, we discovered that we were pregnant with Kate. And if we'd known that earlier, we may have requested not going to Croydon because the facilities weren't all that great there. Indeed, the Croydon Hospital recommends people go to either Townsville or Cairns or Brisbane if they're having a baby.

So anyway, at the same time as all that was happening, I got an opportunity to apply for the Schools Commission project on parent participation. And we weighed it all up and decided that I didn't necessarily want to go down the principal track, but would go to Croydon, have a period there.

By the time Easter came around, I had to go to an external studies conference in Sydney—it was part of my qualification for a Masters in Ed Admin. So we all packed up, but then you three guys stayed in Brisbane and I came back to Croydon for another three months. So it was Easter time that we relocated really from Croydon back to Brisbane, back to Ferny Hills. But I was delayed in coming by three months to see out the rest of that semester for my job.

Michael: Okay.

Howard: I didn't know that I had the job with the Schools Commission until I came back from Brisbane to Croydon, after Easter. I can't be sure of that exactly, but I had to consider all the finances because the pay for the parent participation job was nowhere near what the principal's job was, and it was also only part-time.

And Wendy was pregnant, so she wasn't working at that time anyway. But I negotiated a part-time lecturing job at Kelvin Grove campus.

Michael: Already at that point? I didn't remember that. I knew you did it later.

Howard: Yeah, there were two lots. One of the people on the committee that was employing me through the Schools Commission was a lecturer, senior lecturer at Kelvin Grove campus, and he was aware of my background. He negotiated with the college for me to work—I think it was nine or twelve hours a week—which was quite good pay. At that stage it was something like $120 an hour, which would probably be $400 an hour in current pay rates.

So I was happy with that, because there was a small number of hours to do that as well, which left me more time to do the parent participation job. So anyway, that's explaining the ins and outs of what happened in all that relocation. And then I came back in June or July—mid-year break it would have been.

Michael: So I didn't know quite a bit of that. Had you already applied for the Schools Commission job while you were in Evergreen?

Howard: No, no, I didn't know anything about that then.

Michael: So why did you decide to do it?

Howard: Multiple reasons really. I never saw myself as a bureaucrat in the education system forever. I saw myself as being principal of a school, maybe doing some curriculum development stuff, but didn't see myself going through the normal ranks of principal, regional director or inspector.

I was told that was a path for me that would be mapped out if I wanted it by the department. So that was a real option, but it would have meant we'd have to shift around Queensland quite a bit. And I don't think either of us really wanted to be doing that.

I really enjoyed the work as a principal. I knew that in five or ten years time I'd probably want to move on, but in the meantime have a good time. We could have probably stayed in that next school for the period that you guys were going into high school and finishing high school. My next move from Croydon was probably going to be another country town or a regional city, or maybe Brisbane, but probably not.

Plus, I wouldn't have taken the job if I hadn't really wanted to do that sort of work. Parent participation and school-based decision-making and democracy in education was something I thought was really important. It was the first job ever offered in Queensland to do that sort of work. Ideally it might have come another year or two later, but it probably came a bit earlier than I imagined.

The Schools Commission and How the Job Worked

Michael: So the Schools Commission—I don't even know quite what the Schools Commission is. I always associated it with the Department of Education.

Howard: No, it wasn't. The Schools Commission is the mob that funded it all. But they funded it through a State Development Committee that represented the state school system, Catholic school system, and independent school system—and also represented the bureaucracies, the teachers unions, and the parent organisations.

So collectively the Commonwealth put this call out saying, if you're interested in parent participation, how are you going to do that? Please give us a plan.

Because the Schools Commission at the time—this was just after Whitlam was in power—there was a big change in the way the federal government normally would have had nothing to do with education or schools other than funding buildings. So what they said was, there are some states that are way behind the eight ball on a lot of things. And one of them was participation in schools in Queensland.

So in order to get that system to do something, the Commonwealth said, we'll fund this activity. And I was the activity, as it turned out.

Michael: That's really interesting. I'd never put that together—I always think of education in Queensland as a state matter. And it's a bit contentious, the intrusion of the federal government into state education.

Howard: Oh yeah, and there were people in the education system who weren't very happy about funding this parent participation thing. It was okay to talk about it, but actually doing it—that's getting too excited. Whereas the Catholic system was probably more inclined that way.

Michael: Really?

Howard: The independent school system wasn't really inclined that way, even though they were more autonomous generally speaking than any other system. But the independent schools in rural settings were very much in favour of it.

So it was a very interesting dynamic. I got the job—I actually went for an interview during that Easter break while I was in Brisbane. They gave me a response within just a few days. So by the time I went back to Croydon, I probably would have known then, subject to me getting some work from Kelvin Grove campus through the contact on the committee.

The guy called Jim Lennon was a senior lecturer and he ran the Department of Teaching and Curriculum Studies at Kelvin Grove campus. And he was also on the Parents and Friends Federation of Catholic Schools—so he was there as a parent as well. Interestingly, Jim still—I run into him now and again. He actually lives out at Samford. He was just one of the good guys.

Michael: So can I just see if I've understood this right? You've applied for this very unusual bespoke job, and Jim Lennon happened to be involved in that process as well?

Howard: Yes.

Michael: And so then you're able to come in and say, look, this is not a highly funded job, it's not very practical for me with my family to accept whatever, probably 400 bucks a week or something. And he's like, well, I can sort you out with some other part-time work that pays all right?

Howard: Yeah.

Michael: That makes a lot of sense. And I suppose it's really good from your point of view—you get to bootstrap up one job while you're doing this other thing that would have suited you quite well.

Howard: Oh yeah, I was really happy with that.

Michael: I always remember going out to Carseldine—you obviously didn't want to spend your entire life doing it, but you did seem to get a lot out of it and enjoy it. And I'm sure that was probably mutually received on the part of the others.

Hello. We have an intruder.

Howard: We've just come off the phone to Stuart actually, only about an hour ago. He's on his way up to Bribie.

Anyway, so the way the QIPC—the Queensland Intersystemic Parents Committee, which is a mouthful—was set up was: it had two parents from the state school system, two parents from Catholic, and two from independent, making up an employing group of six. And all decisions were to be by consensus—it wasn't a numbers game.

And that management group had to report to the state in-service education committee called QUINSEC. So QUINSEC was the one agency that was given accountability for expenditure of that money to the federal government, to the Schools Commission. But internally, I reported to QIPC, the parents, and also to quarterly meetings of QUINSEC.

By the way, I just remembered—my original contract was to work for ten hours a week.

Michael: It's funny, I actually more or less remember that. What I remember you doing was nine hours a week—I remember that from when I was seven or something.

Howard: Well, I did nine hours, I think, at Kelvin Grove campus and then started ten with the Schools Commission. And then they said, look, it will go up—we can more or less guarantee you it will be more than that. So after only one term, it was twenty hours a week, and then after about another term it was like thirty hours a week until it was full time.

And then we actually employed fifteen other parent-school consultants around parts of Queensland. Our budget—we were able to show a whole lot of benefits out of it all. They had no real reason not to continue funding. They continued to fund me full time and then I managed the delivery of similar service through various regions around Queensland.

What Howard Was Most Proud Of From that Early Work

Michael: What are you most proud of out of all that work? Or what was striking—even just a good story? A disaster?

Howard: Well, when I'd been at schools as a teacher and as a principal, I'd always been really alert to and aware of the need for parents as the primary educators to be fully connected to their school and to their children.

So my mantra was: if you're a child in this schooling system and you saw that your parents—who were one of the biggest contributors to your life—and your teachers—who are the other biggest contributors to your life—if you saw them as not being at all connected or not working with each other, what would you think?

Or conversely, if you saw them really working well together and having a whole lot of positive contributions, would that affect your attitude to school?

And of course, I picked the inarguable, really. You can't argue that students would be less inclined to want to go to school if their parents and teachers were well connected together. Just one big—not so much happy family.

Michael: One big dysfunctional family.

Howard: Yeah, it could be just a dysfunctional one.

So I would say we had a big attitude change amongst principals of schools and teachers in schools. And the same—different attitude but a similar change—amongst parents who understood they had a role to play that they probably didn't really understand fully before.

There were lots of parents around who gave their kids a lot of support and were well connected with school. So that was just normal. But for a lot of kids that wasn't normal. And so there was just a gradual change.

Mind you, I look at it now—this is forty or fifty years later—it's sort of like, yeah, there's a whole lot more being done, but there's still the same issues, still the same problems within schools, between communities and schools and teachers and parents. Just at a different level.

Michael: What do you mean? What's an example?

Howard: Well, depending on what you were like as a teacher—for me, when I was a teacher, I invited all my parents to come along for parent-teacher interviews at the same time as the school year started. Which is quite different to parent-teacher interviews about how well you've done the last semester. I did that anyway.

But the whole concept was to transfer some of the responsibility for a child's education away from just the teacher totally, to teacher and parent. And one way of doing that was to invite parents along in the first two weeks of school and say, look, I've got Freddie in my classroom. I don't know him all that well. You know him a hell of a lot better than I do. What sort of things switch him on? What sort of things do I need to know?

And of course, most parents don't think they really know the answer to those questions, but once they start the conversation, they totally understand. And of course, most kids have got idiosyncrasies that can sometimes take you the whole year—or you never ever find out—because sometimes it might be a bit embarrassing for them or not important from their point of view, but it is from the teacher's point of view.

If nothing else, for those people that changed some of their thinking about what they need to do—in that case, that would have helped their child, and that would have helped that child's children. It's sort of like what makes the world go round really—that engagement and understanding and collaboration.

There were some interesting issues. We had issues with head office people from the Education Department—one or two Directors General who were not very happy with the idea because it took the control mechanism out of the way they saw the system should work.

But there was a change. The worst example of that was only in power for the first year or so of my work, and the next person was a lot more convivial with that idea.

And what I discovered during all that time was that the facilitative role of the teacher was really the same role I needed to play in the work I was doing. So it was getting people to think differently about stuff.

I remember there were many days when at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning I would have a meeting down at a school somewhere with teacher aides and cleaners to just find out from them a little bit about some of the issues. Then I'd go have a chat to the principal. Then I might have an appointment at head office with the regional director, and then I might have a meeting with the minister for education that afternoon.

So that happened more than once. And you've got to figure out how to manage conversations at different levels.

The Same Process, Different Contexts

Michael: I know—probably seven or eight years after all of this, you were working often as a consultant and you used to get me to type up reports and do data entry and stuff. But I remember I learned a lot as a consequence of doing that.

One of the most interesting things—and I think you articulated this to me, but it was also very obvious what was going on—you'd go and do some consulting job for an organization, and the top management would be worried about some issue. You would go and talk to everybody about that issue, and you eventually realized that what was going on was top management couldn't talk really all that well about the issue because all those people are a bit scared of them. They're a bit worried about the relationship.

And very often whatever the actual problem was, it would have prevented them from being able to have the conversation. So your job seemed to be to establish all those relationships, get people to trust you, get people to actually talk to you, then you sort of write it all down and you can show it in a non-confrontational way to the people purportedly running the show.

And at that point, what they do with that information is to some extent up to them, but all of a sudden they have this knowledge. It's just so funny to hear you describing yourself doing this in a school context—what I later saw you doing was really very similar.

Howard: Yeah, that's right. And I found some interesting times when—after I got to know people, when I was in the business area doing consulting work with businesses or government departments and I'd got the trust of people—they would often have conversations on the side to say, how did you learn to do this? What's your training for all this?

And eventually, when I got to know people really quite well, I'd say, well, very similar process to what I used to use with my year three class at Clontarf Primary School.

And of course you had to be careful—people need to understand you were sort of half joking, but not. It really was the same stuff, just different language.

Michael: Yeah.

Howard: Not even different purposes—the purposes were the same.

One of the processes I really enjoyed doing—you talked about the one-to-one stuff before. I remember talking to Bill Mitchell from Australia Post. He had been intrigued by my approach before he had the capacity to actually fund me. He said, when I get some money, I'm going to get you to come and do that with my future leaders.

I said, okay, Bill, I'm happy to do that, provided you're happy with the idea of funding one-to-one time between me and each of these people, three times at least during the whole process. Because that's a fairly expensive exercise—that's four to five hours with twenty people, three times. That's not just a couple hundred bucks.

So Bill agreed. And I saw that as being—you just sit down at a coffee table or a cafe somewhere and the conversation might start off with: what are we doing here?

And they'd say, "well, what do you mean, what are we doing here?"

I said, "well, why? What are you doing here?"

"Well, I'm part of the program."

We'd be smiling—I knew it was a bit of a joke, but not quite.

I said, "but have you chosen to be here?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

But then some people would say, "well, not really—my boss asked me to be here."

So you'd have a different conversation with them compared to the others.

And then eventually you get all that data, collate it all, and I'd take it back to a workshop—not all of it was ever disclosed at a workshop—but I'd get people to sit in pairs or trios and say: of all that data, what's the most interesting thing for you? And then what's the most interesting thing you think Australia Post needs to do about that?

So I'd say, you think I'm going to go through a nine month program on leadership—well I am, but I'm not telling you what the content of that's going to be at the moment. You're going to tell me, based on what you've already told me and what your collective wisdom is about this stuff. We've got a process design, but the content design is still to come.

And of course, anybody who sat down and thought about it for a bit of time would know that most people come up with similar things when asked these questions. And I think the important thing is to be asking questions that don't actually have defined answers.

So my skill, if anything, was to not pretend to have an answer, but have them disclose what the answer is, and then we work on all that.

I did a lot of that with schools in the parent participation area as well—all that appreciative inquiry stuff. What's the most important good thing that the school does at the moment? And how do you contribute to that? How do students contribute to that? Not get into problems to start with at all. Just get into what we already know.

Because David Cooperrider, with his appreciative inquiry, knew that people are unlikely to want to change what they do and how they do it until they've had their current work recognized.

Michael: Hmm.

Howard: So that question was important—how are you contributing to that?—because they're already more engaged. People say, oh, well, I don't really do much. Well, I'm sure you do something, so just tell me one thing.

And by the time you're finished half an hour later, there's three or four really important things. And out of those, one thing might pop up, which might be: I think I'm doing well at this part, but I reckon I need to be better at that.

So: which part of that do you reckon you need to be better at? Are there any others around that you think could benefit from that?

So you start building up your agenda for what the actual content of the program is. And by the time you finish that first workshop—the outset workshop—you actually had an agenda for the whole year, give or take a few gaps for things that arise.

And people were really buoyed by the idea that they had actually come up with all this. Because I'd then say, you thought I was going to tell you about this—you're telling me now, and I agree that is stuff. There might be a few other new things that we haven't thought of yet, so let's leave space for that.

And that would make them feel more confident. And those who were there because their boss had told them to be there came out of that process with a different perspective on what their role might be. Previously their role was to do what they thought their boss wanted them to do. Anyway, enough of that—it's a whole week's worth of downloading on that one.

Where Did This Approach Come From?

Michael: How did you get into that? I mean, some of this you got intuitively with your grade threes. But a bunch of it is also actual process that you've picked up along the way.

Howard: I don't know, really.

Michael: It's the kind of thing I can easily have imagined your dad doing little bits and pieces of, and maybe actually your mum as well. She was a different kind of person, but she was quite a systematic person. I always had that sense.

Howard: Yeah. I sort of tend to go to the end first. So I would have said at some point: what's the end that we want here?

When I was in the student union, running meetings there, it would be: so what's the purpose of being here? What's the end product?

And it might be agreement about such and such, or it might be about developing new facilities. So then you sort of went back from there. What sort of information do we need in order to make a good decision about that? Who are the key people involved with that?

So I would do that intuitively. And I realized later on when I did my masters—my MBA and my M in Ed Admin—that there was a lot of organizational psychology around all this. So that helped fine-tune it.

I wrote a booklet on Collaborative Action Learning. I'd come across the Action Learning stuff, which was about identifying a problem and then looking forward to what that might look like as a solution, then how do you fill the gaps between the two.

But I changed it around a little bit to say not so much that you had a problem, but you had an issue or an opportunity or a question that was unanswered. I mean, it's a scientific process, really. What work do you do? Why do you do that? Well, because I'm inquisitive about this, or curious about this.

Like open science, for example—why would you bother doing that when a lot of other people aren't doing it?

So it's not unusual to have—for me, it was not so much the content of what the outcome might be, but almost the process or the tentative solution to something. It may not end up being the end product solution.

When we did the Samford Futures process here in Samford, I just used the same mechanism for that. The questions we asked people, one to ones—same stuff. Slightly different language probably, but the same process.

Michael: I remember you saying you basically tried to talk to every single person in Samford.

Howard: Well, we certainly gave them the opportunity to talk to us. And we ended up—out of 4,000 households, I think we had 800 households that responded in some specific way.

Usually if you're taking a survey of something and you get better than 4%, you're doing pretty good. A lot of people make judgements based on that. In our case, we had a whole lot more than that.

But it took us three years, which was—people had to be quite patient really in Samford. The early parts were workshops held in the little neighbourhood areas, and then a wrap-up workshop. Each of those workshops identified priorities that seemed important, and each of those priorities got volunteers attached to them to go through another process of unfolding.

It's almost like a process within a process, and my job was to make sure people were doing that properly and they weren't falling into the trap of just being only expert-led.

Sure, some expert leading—but who says what the expert is? For new things it might be somebody's intuitive thought about something, and if you don't have the opportunity for that intuition to come forward, you miss out on all that and you just rehash all the stuff we already knew. In the end that might be what we need to do—rehash all that—but until you've actually explored…

Michael: But it'll happen anyway.

Howard: Yeah, that's right.

But good question about what turned me on to doing that sort of stuff. Something just clicked in then.

When I was at college, in my first year as a student, they did these psychological tests. We didn't really know what it was for, but we just did it because we did it.

When all the stuff was said and done and they gave us the outcomes—the outcomes didn't really necessarily mean too much—but what happened was the senior lecturer who oversaw it took me to one side and said, I think there's a bit of information you'd probably like to know about.

I said, yeah, so what was that?

He said, your profile is precisely what the most progressive educators in the world are saying we need from teachers.

I said, exactly what is that?

He said: student-led thinking, exploration of thinking rather than didactic teaching, et cetera, et cetera.

And I said, I don't know how many others are like this or not.

And he said, nobody else in this whole group.

So it sort of explained to me why, when I started teaching, my approach to teaching was quite different to the other teachers around me. Not that there wasn't a lot of really good teaching going on, but it wasn't what I'd call exploratory teaching.

It was more teachers who are really kind, gentle, thoughtful, responsive, good listening people who could help solve problems and could help teach something. But the one thing that maybe wasn't there was having people take responsibility for their own learning and managing that well—even in year three or five or ten, or a parent or a teacher or a principal.

Indeed, I remember one time I had a meeting of regional directors that I had to present to, and they wanted to know what I was actually doing in schools with the parent participation thing.

And I said, look, probably the best way of explaining that is for me to do an activity with you, so you understand this is what I do rather than—

Michael: [connection cuts off] All right, we seem to be cut off here. We will try and reconnect.

We couldn't get reconnected – seems to have been an internet issue. But we'll pick it up in a later interview.