The EduShift Collective

26/08/2026

What is student agency?

We talk about it a lot in education.

We say we want students to take ownership of their learning. To make decisions. To have voice and choice.

But then we decide what they’ll learn.
When they’ll learn it.
How long they’ll have to learn it.
Where they’ll learn it.
Who they’ll learn it with.
When they’re ready to be assessed.
And what counts as evidence that they’ve learned it.

Then we might offer a choice between a poster, a presentation or a video and call it student agency.

Question: is that really student agency?

What if students had some say in what was worth learning?

What if they could decide when they were ready to demonstrate mastery, rather than everyone being assessed on the same Tuesday?

What if learning sometimes lasted as long as the learning required, rather than until the bell rang or the term ended?

What if students could seek out people, places and expertise beyond their classroom because that was what their learning needed?

That starts to change the conversation about agency.

And it starts to raise bigger questions about curriculum, assessment, timetables, staffing and the structures we’ve inherited.

Strategic planning for 2027?

These are exactly the conversations we have with schools at EduShift .

We don’t stay up in vision statements and strategic priorities. We work alongside schools to get into the decisions underneath them.

What are we going to change? Why are we changing it? What do we do first? What needs to happen next? And how do we make it work in our school?

If your strategy says learning will be more student-centred in 2027, let’s work out what that will look like on an ordinary Tuesday.

26/08/2026

The best schools in Australia for 2026 prove excellence starts with academics – and doesn't stop there

16/08/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/19CjZXbxoo/?mibextid=wwXIfr

14/08/2026

“But what about no school uniforms?
It’s probably the question I’m asked more than any other when people visit contemporary schools with me.
Having visited schools across Australia and in many other countries, Finland, New Zealand among them, what’s striking is how similar the student perspectives are regardless of place.
Instead of me trying to sum it up, I’d encourage you to spend a few minutes listening to our friend Claire Victoria Amos from Albany Senior High School.
She responds to many of the common concerns with honesty and experience.
And it also raises a question I’ve been sitting with:
Have we overestimated the role uniforms play in creating belonging, respect, and a great learning culture? I’d be genuinely interested in your thoughts after you watch. https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1JGP1AhxV7/?mibextid=wwXIfr

14/08/2026

"But what about no school uniforms?"

It's probably the question I'm asked more than any other when people visit contemporary schools with me.

Having visited contemporary schools across Australia and in many other countries, Finland, New Zealand among them, what's striking is how similar the student perspectives are re no uniforms regardless of place.

Instead of me trying to sum it up, I'd encourage you to spend a few minutes listening to our friend Claire Victoria Amos from the showcase contemporary school - Albany Senior High School.
She and students responds to many of the common concerns with honesty and experience.

And it also raises a question I've been sitting with:
Have we overestimated the role uniforms play in creating belonging, respect, and a great learning culture? I'd be genuinely interested in your thoughts after you watch.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Mqu2rr23F/

12/08/2026

After another week of PBL uplift at Faith Lutheran College Redlands, we're noticing something powerful.

Teachers are beginning to share, unprompted, rich words of wisdom about the impact of contemporary, experiential pedagogies not only on their students, but on themselves as educators.

They are seeing students engage more deeply, take greater ownership, connect learning to real purpose and grow through the process of creating, testing, receiving feedback and refining.

And they are also naming their own shift: designing differently, questioning differently, and trusting students more deeply.

That is where transformation begins to become visible.

Not just in the final product, but in the conversations, reflections and professional language of teachers doing the work.

07/08/2026

Spotted in the wild this week… the rarely observed EduShift co-founders. 👀☕

With Mel & Derek living at opposite ends of the country, it’s not often they’re seen together in their natural habitat.

Here, we see them beginning a familiar ritual. First, caffeine. Then comes the laughter, big thinking, wild ideas and the inevitable “hear me out…”

Once sufficiently caffeinated, there’s really no telling what might emerge. 😂

Best observed from a safe distance

Melissa Evans Derek Bartels

03/08/2026

Here’s a thought experiment for your week.

Imagine school doesn’t exist.

No timetable. No year levels. No subjects. No report cards. No school day. No assumption that learning happens in one building with one particular group of adults.

You have young people who need to learn.

What would you create?

That’s the question behind our latest EduShift blog, sparked by a conversation Mel had several years ago with the architects at Hayball while they were designing a new community from the ground up.

The challenge, she discovered, is that it’s incredibly hard to imagine learning without slowly putting “school” back together again.

So this blog asks us to try.

Not because everything about school needs to disappear, but because there is a difference between keeping something because we’ve always had it and choosing it because it still meets the needs of the young people we’re designing for.

Have a read, then we’d love to know:

If you could erase one part of school and design it again from scratch, what would you choose?

A couple of years ago, I found myself sitting around a table with some of Australia's most talented architects at Hayball. They were working on the design of a new, purpose-built community, created around the needs and culture of the people who would live there, and we were talking about where a sch...

03/08/2026

One of the biggest and authentic AI in Education online conferences in the southern hemisphere. And under $150!
https://www.facebook.com/share/14ibTnan2dk/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Australia’s national day of AI professional learning. Hands-on workshops, student experts on site, and a program that rolls west from Sydney to Perth.

28/07/2026

One of the biggest misconceptions in education is that school transformation has a finish line.

It doesn't.

Last week, Derek and Melissa spent the morning with the leadership team at Faith Lutheran College Redlands, reflecting on the first six months of our partnership and planning for the next six.

What's inspiring isn't simply the work they're doing. Faith has been recognised for years as one of Queensland's leading contemporary learning schools. They have every reason to pause and admire how far they've come.

Instead, they continue asking better questions.

How can learning become even more meaningful? How can we continue to grow as educators? How do we ensure our vision keeps evolving alongside the world our young people are growing up in?

That mindset is exactly why we love working with schools like Faith.

At EduShift, we don't believe in cookie-cutter transformation. Every school has its own story, its own culture and its own aspirations. Our role is never to arrive with the answers. It's to walk alongside schools, challenge thinking, celebrate progress and help create the conditions for the next stage of their journey.

We're excited to see where the second half of the year takes the Faith team.

If your school believes transformation isn't about arriving but about continuing to learn, we'd love to have a conversation.