The Kitchen Think podcast/vodcast – Season 1, Episode 8

What if the city itself became the classroom?

In this episode of The Kitchen Think, Dr Tim Kitchen interviews Laura Bain, Director of Vision and Development for the Immanuel Lutheran College Urban Campus Project on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.

Laura is helping to develop an innovative senior learning community in the heart of the Maroochydore CBD on the Sunshine Coast on QLD, Australia. Built around the idea that “the city is your campus”, the project aims to connect students with local businesses, universities, community organisations and authentic real-world learning opportunities.

During the conversation, Laura explores:

• Why traditional schooling does not meet the needs of every student
• How curriculum, wellbeing, technology and community partnerships can work together
• The importance of student agency and personalised learning
• How physical spaces can influence learning
• The potential for AI to provide timely feedback and support individual learning journeys
• How schools can help young people use AI thoughtfully, responsibly and discerningly

At the heart of the conversation is a hopeful vision for education – one in which every student is deeply known, learning is connected to the wider world, and schools become springboards into the future.

Subscribe to The Kitchen Think for more conversations about education, creativity, technology and preparing young people for an AI-rich world.

Dr Kitchen’s CTL – Creative Teaching & Learning site – ⁠https://timkitchen.net/ctl ⁠is also worth a look if you for more resources and support around the safe & ethical use of AI and digital creativity.

You can book Dr Kitchen to engage with your school in-person or online via – ⁠https://timkitchen.net/book-tim/⁠

By Dr Tim Kitchen

Across Australia this year, “back to basics” has become an increasingly attractive answer to some of the challenges facing schools. Put the laptops away. Bring back exercise books. Get students writing by hand. Less screen time, fewer distractions and perhaps a return to the quieter, more orderly classrooms many of us remember.

Schools are dealing with genuine issues around attention and distraction. Young people spend a lot of their lives looking at screens. Anyone who has watched a student flick from a piece of schoolwork to YouTube in about half a second knows the challenge is real.

But I think we’re asking the wrong question. The question isn’t whether screens belong in classrooms. They’re already part of the world our students live in, and they’ll be part of the world they graduate into. The better question is what we’re asking students to do with them.

Are they creating something? Solving a problem? Getting feedback? Collaborating with someone? Thinking more deeply? Or are they sitting in front of a laptop completing a digital worksheet that would have been just as useful on paper?

Because putting a worksheet on a screen doesn’t make it better learning. But taking the screen away doesn’t automatically make the learning better either.

That’s where I worry about the “back to basics” conversation. There’s a danger that we confuse nostalgia with evidence. The classroom we remember isn’t necessarily the classroom our students need. And quieter doesn’t always mean better learning.

We absolutely should teach students to write by hand. They should read books, work without distractions, talk to each other, concentrate for extended periods and sometimes put every device in the room away.

But they also need to learn how to use technology well. When to reach for it. When to ignore it. How to question what it gives them, and how to use it to do things that simply weren’t possible in the classrooms we grew up in.

So perhaps the conversation shouldn’t be about choosing between exercise books and laptops. It should be about choosing the right tool for the learning. Because if we diagnose the problem as “technology”, taking technology away feels like a solution. If the real problem is how we design learning, that’s a much harder conversation. And it’s one worth having.

The decisions we make now will shape the future our students walk into.

What the recent PISA results tell us

When I started teaching more than 35 years ago, nobody talked about a “digital detox”. We used pens, paper and textbooks because, well, that was school. There wasn’t really another option. A lot has changed since then.

If you’re looking for evidence that technology has become a problem in Australian classrooms, the latest PISA results give you plenty to work with. Around 41% of Australian students said noise and disorder were a regular feature of their classrooms, compared with a global average of 31%. Another 39% said their peers were distracted by digital resources, well above the OECD average of 28%.

Australia’s disciplinary climate ranked behind 68 participating countries. Over the longer term, our results in reading, mathematics and science have also continued to slide. Yes, Australia remains above the OECD average in all three, but I’m not sure that should make us feel particularly comfortable (Cassidy, 2026).

Stop there and the solution seems pretty straightforward. Take away the devices. Except that’s not the whole PISA story.

One of the findings that has received far less attention is how Australian students performed in the newer “learning in the digital world” domain. This looks at whether students can use technology to learn, evaluate information, solve problems and create things.

Australian students performed well above the OECD average (OECD, 2026). That makes the picture a bit more complicated. The same students who tell us technology is distracting them are also developing strong skills in using it. And PISA does show a relationship between distraction, excessive device use and poorer academic performance. What it doesn’t show is that putting a laptop in front of a student automatically makes the learning worse.

In fact, moderate use of digital devices for learning is associated with better results than no use at all. Performance starts to fall away when that use becomes excessive, or when the device becomes more about entertainment than learning (OECD, 2026).

So perhaps we need to be careful about what lesson we take from these results. If a student is watching YouTube while the teacher is explaining algebra, the problem is fairly obvious. If that same student is using a digital simulation to test a mathematical idea, collaborate with classmates or get immediate feedback on their thinking, we’re talking about something quite different.

Both involve a screen. They’re not the same learning experience. Which brings us to the question I think matters far more than whether technology belongs in our classrooms:

Are we actually using it well?

A phone is not the same as a laptop

On balance, I think restricting mobile phones in schools has been the right move. I didn’t always think that.

I was teaching at an independent girls’ school in Melbourne when students having their own phones started to become the norm. This was before our 1:1 laptop program, and at the time those phones were actually pretty useful.

A student could quickly research a question that came up in class, check another perspective or take a photo of something on the whiteboard to come back to later.

Were they distracting? Absolutely. Parents would sometimes message their daughters during lessons. Occasionally they’d even ring them, which was always interesting in the middle of a class.

My approach was fairly simple. Phones on silent, face-down on the desk where I could see them. It wasn’t perfect, but most of the time it worked. But those were different phones. Or perhaps more accurately, it was a different digital environment.

That was before “the algorithm” really took hold. The phone I was managing in those classrooms is quite different from the one sitting in a teenager’s pocket today. What was once a useful device that occasionally interrupted a lesson is now connected to social feeds, recommendations, notifications, messages and a seemingly endless stream of content, all competing for attention.

I noticed the change outside the classroom too. My work as Adobe’s Education Specialist took me into schools regularly, and before the phone bans I’d often walk through playgrounds at recess or lunchtime and see groups of students sitting together, each absorbed in their own phone.

They were together, but they weren’t really together. Not much conversation. Not much laughter. Mostly heads down, scrolling.

Then the phone bans started arriving and the difference was hard to miss. I saw students kicking a ball around again. Sitting in groups talking. Laughing. Moving around. Looking at each other.

For me, that shifted the conversation. This wasn’t just about whether a teacher could manage phones during a lesson anymore. Something bigger had changed.

But this is also where I think we need to be careful. A phone is not the same thing as a laptop. Yes, laptops can distract students too. Anyone who has taught in a 1:1 classroom knows that. But a laptop is also a working environment.

Students use laptops to research, write, analyse data and code. They design things, edit video, build portfolios, collaborate and access specialist tools that simply don’t have a paper equivalent. That distinction gets lost surprisingly quickly when we bundle everything together under the label of “screen time”.

An hour scrolling through social media is screen time. So is an hour editing a documentary, building a 3D model or writing an essay. Counting the minutes tells us very little about what was actually happening during them.

That’s why I’m quite comfortable supporting phones being kept out of classrooms while also wanting students to have access to laptops when there’s a good educational reason for using them.

They both have screens. That doesn’t make them the same thing.

From screen time to screen purpose

Maybe we need to stop talking quite so much about “screen time” and start talking about “screen purpose”. Because the number of minutes a student spends looking at a screen tells us surprisingly little about the learning taking place.

What are they actually doing? Are they passively consuming content or making something of their own? Are they bouncing between websites with no real direction, or using a digital tool as part of a lesson that has been carefully designed? Are they distracted, or so absorbed in what they’re doing that they’ve lost track of time?

Those are much more useful questions.

I’d be very happy to see less low-value screen use in schools. Much less, in fact. But at the same time, I’d like to see better digital learning. More creating. More designing and investigating. Students analysing information, solving problems, making things and working with other people. Some of that can happen perfectly well without a computer. Some of it can’t.

Paper still matters enormously. There are plenty of times when I’d rather walk into a classroom and see pens in hands, books open and laptops closed. Students should write by hand. They should read physical books, make things, have conversations without a device between them and learn how to concentrate on one thing for more than a few minutes.

If we’ve lost some of that along the way, then yes, let’s bring it back. But let’s not pretend paper can do everything.

You can read about video production in an exercise book, but eventually you need to pick up a camera and edit some video. You can explain coding on a whiteboard, but at some point, students need to write code, run it, break it, work out why it broke and try again.

The same applies to data visualisation, multimedia, design and collaborative publishing. These are things students learn by doing, and doing them requires digital tools.

Generative AI now sits in that mix too. Whether we’re comfortable with it or not, students are going to encounter these technologies well beyond the school gate. I’d much rather they learn how to question them, use them responsibly and understand where they fall short while there’s a teacher in the room.

So, I don’t think the choice was ever paper or laptop. Sometimes the best tool is a pen. Sometimes it’s a conversation around a table. It might be a camera, a laptop, a piece of software or no technology at all. Good teaching is knowing which one to reach for, and when.

We cannot prepare students for 1991

When I began teaching, there was no generative AI. No social media. No Google. The web hadn’t arrived in our classrooms and nobody was walking around with a computer in their pocket.

If students needed to research something, we went to the library. We were preparing them for the world they were about to enter. But we’re not preparing students for 1991.

The students sitting in our classrooms today will work in a world of AI, algorithms, digital communication, data and multimedia. They’ll collaborate with people they may never meet. They’ll need to work out whether information is credible, recognise when an algorithm is shaping what they see and decide whether an AI response is useful, misleading or just plain rubbish.

None of that happens simply because we hand them a laptop. It has to be taught.

Taking laptops away might mean fewer tabs open and fewer opportunities to disappear down a digital rabbit hole. The classroom might even become quieter. But quieter doesn’t necessarily mean better.

Remove technology from learning altogether and we also remove the chance for students to learn how to manage it, question it and use it well, with a teacher nearby.

Our job isn’t to recreate the schools we remember. There are things from those classrooms worth keeping. There are probably a few things worth bringing back too. But our students aren’t heading into our past.

They’re heading somewhere we never had to navigate at their age.

AI makes digital capability more important

Our students are going to use generative AI. Many already are. It’s appearing in search engines, writing tools, phones and the apps they use every day. We can ban ChatGPT from a classroom, but that doesn’t make AI disappear when students walk through the school gate.

I’d rather they learn how to use it with a teacher in the room. They need to know when using AI makes sense and when it doesn’t. They should question those wonderfully confident answers it produces, recognise hallucinations and bias, and think carefully about what happens to the information they type into these systems.

Then there’s the much harder question of authorship. If AI writes the paragraph, creates the image, summarises the reading and answers the question, where exactly is the student’s thinking? That’s a conversation worth having with students.

When is AI supporting your work? At what point is it doing the work for you? What have you learned if you hand the thinking over to a machine?

Students won’t learn to make those calls by pretending AI doesn’t exist. A student who is shielded from generative AI throughout school doesn’t magically walk out the gate as an AI-literate young adult. They’ve simply missed years when they might have experimented with it under supervision, got things wrong, challenged its answers and talked through the messy questions with a teacher.

They’ll learn about AI somewhere. I’d prefer school was one of those places.

What purposeful technology use looks like

So, what might this look like in practice? For a start, I’d keep classrooms phone-free. I’d also deliberately build device-free times into lessons. Students need time to write by hand, read quietly, talk to each other and make things. They need opportunities to concentrate without a stream of notifications sitting a few centimetres away.

Sometimes the best thing we can do with technology is turn it off.

And when a laptop genuinely adds something to the learning, open it. Use it to research, create, code, analyse data, edit video, collaborate, design or experiment with AI. Just don’t open laptops automatically at the beginning of every lesson because they happen to be sitting there.

Classroom routines make a difference here too. “Screens down” should mean screens down. Notifications can be turned off. Unnecessary tabs can be closed. Students can learn that opening a laptop comes with an expectation about what they’re there to do.

That sounds simple. In practice, it takes good classroom management and clear habits. Schools need to support teachers with this as well. Buying devices is the easy part. Working out how to use them well for learning takes time, professional learning, experimentation and plenty of conversations between teachers about what works and what doesn’t.

We should also be teaching students how to manage their own attention. They’re growing up with digital environments deliberately designed to keep them clicking, watching and scrolling. Telling them to “concentrate” probably isn’t enough.

Assessment needs another look too. If AI can produce a polished response in seconds, perhaps the polished response shouldn’t be the only thing we assess. Show me the drafts. Explain why you made that decision. Tell me what you changed and why. Show me where AI was used. What did it get wrong? What did you reject? Where did you struggle?

I want to see some evidence of the thinking. That, to me, is purposeful technology use. The laptop comes out because there’s a reason for it to be there. When there isn’t, close the lid.

Equity: who loses when schools withdraw?

There’s another part of this conversation that worries me. Imagine two students walking out of the same school at the end of the day. One goes home to reliable internet and their own laptop. Their parents understand digital tools and AI. There might be paid software, online courses, tutoring and plenty of opportunities to experiment.

If the school cuts back on digital learning, that student will probably be fine. They’ll keep learning anyway.

The second student goes home without those things. Perhaps there’s no suitable computer. Maybe the internet is unreliable. Nobody at home is experimenting with AI or showing them how to use digital tools well.

For that student, school might be the place where they get access to the technology. More importantly, it might be the only place where they get access to someone who can teach them what to do with it.

Take digital learning out of school and those two students don’t lose the same thing. That matters.

Socioeconomic background remains strongly connected with educational achievement in Australia, and we should be very careful about introducing policies that might make that divide wider (OECD, 2026).

A rule can look equal because it applies to every student. The opportunity it removes isn’t necessarily equal at all. For some young people, school is one place among many where they’ll develop digital and AI skills. For others, it might be the only one.

Better basics for a different world

Perhaps what we really need is a better definition of “the basics”. Literacy and numeracy remain foundational. Of course they do. But the basics students need today are broader than the ones I was teaching when I walked into my first classroom in 1991.

Students need to think critically about what they read, watch and hear. They need to understand something about how digital media works and how algorithms influence what appears in front of them. They need to distinguish credible information from something that simply looks convincing.

They need to create, communicate, collaborate and solve problems. And now they need to work out when AI is useful, when it needs to be questioned and when they’re better off doing the thinking themselves. That’s part of literacy now.

I began teaching with pens, paper and textbooks, and I still value all three. Walk into a good classroom today and I hope you’ll still see students writing by hand. I hope you’ll see books open, conversations happening, practical work underway and stretches of time where nobody is looking at a screen.

But I’d also hope to see students creating with technology. Analysing information. Editing media. Coding. Designing. Working together. Experimenting with AI and having a teacher challenge them when they accept its first answer without thinking.

We don’t need screens everywhere. And we don’t need to recreate the classroom of 1991. Phones can stay out. Laptops can stay closed when they add nothing to the lesson. Books, pens, conversations, practical work, cameras, laptops and AI can all belong in a modern classroom.

The important question is why they’re being used. That decision is best made by the teacher who knows the students in front of them, understands the learning and knows what they’re trying to achieve.

Maybe that’s a version of “back to basics” I could get behind.

Good teachers, clear purpose, and the freedom to choose the right tool for the learning in front of them.

References

Cassidy, C. (2026, September 8). Australia’s classroom disruption among worst in world, prompting calls for ‘digital detox’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/08/australia-pisa-2025-test-score-results-national-decline-reading-maths

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2026). PISA 2025 results (Volume I): Future-ready students. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/73451bc5-en

Dr Tim Kitchen is an Education Consultant in Australia and the founder of CTL – Creative Teaching and Learning.

Look up his podcast/vodcast called The Kitchen Think on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & YouTube (https://timkitchen.net/podcast)

Tim’s books that relate to this article are:

• The Best Way to Learn is to Make – Creativity in a Gen AI World
• The Human Advantage – Teaching, Learning & Leading in a Gen AI World

Tim regularly works with teachers, admin staff and students both in-person and online with a focus on safe, ethical & creative use of AI and other digital technologies. You can find out more and book Tim to work with your school via – https://timkitchen.net/book-tim

AI Use Statement

Generative AI tools were used to support the research and development of this article. Claude Sonnet 5 and ChatGPT-5.6 assisted with exploring ideas, locating and synthesising information, refining the structure, and editing selected passages. Adobe Firefly and ChatGPT-5.6 were used to create supporting visual content. All AI-generated material was critically reviewed, fact-checked and revised by the author, who takes full responsibility for the article’s final content, arguments and conclusions.

On 24 August 2026, Flinders Christian Community College hosted Maths Rethought at their Carram Downs Campus, a day of professional dialogue, live classroom demonstrations and practical exploration focused on the changing nature of mathematics education.

The event brought together school leaders, mathematics educators and education specialists to consider an important question: how can we best prepare students and teachers for learning, working and contributing in a rapidly changing, AI-rich world?

Luke Kerr, maths teacher at Flinders as well as the founder of Real Time Learning, was the brains behind this event which was partnered by Texas Instruments, Realtime Learning, Leigh Lancaster Consulting, IXL, Edunet and CTL.

The day began with a think tank involving members of the Flinders Christian Community College executive team. Our discussion explored the growing influence of artificial intelligence on education and the strategic directions schools may need to consider.

Rather than focusing only on particular AI tools, the conversation examined broader educational priorities. What knowledge, skills and human capabilities will students need? How should curriculum, pedagogy and assessment evolve when AI can generate sophisticated content almost instantly? How can schools support teachers to use emerging technologies safely, ethically and purposefully?

Following the think tank, mathematics teachers from several schools joined the event to observe a series of live teaching demonstrations. These sessions provided an opportunity to see experienced educators working with real students and to reflect on the decisions teachers make while learning is taking place.

Dr David Leigh-Lancaster and Antje Leigh-Lancaster (from Leigh Lancaster Consulting), conducted two live demonstrations. The first was a VCE mathematics lesson exploring modelling with circular functions. The second involved a Year 10 class working with quadratic functions. Both lessons demonstrated the importance of helping students move beyond simply applying a memorised formula or procedure. Through questioning, modelling and discussion, students were encouraged to recognise patterns, make connections and develop a deeper conceptual understanding of the mathematics.

Kelvin Finger from IXL Learning and Luke Kerr from Flinders then conducted a Year 9 lesson on linear graphs. Their session explored how understanding could be developed using PhET, Navigator and IXL. The combination of interactive simulations, visual representations and targeted practice enabled students to explore the relationships between variables and connect abstract mathematical ideas with more visible and dynamic representations. The lesson demonstrated how digital tools can complement one another when each is used for a clear educational purpose.

I had the opportunity to work with a Year 7 mathematics class on an activity that combined statistics, global data and digital storytelling. I would like to say a special thank you to Head of Mathematics Mrs Bethany Massey-Chase for allowing me to borrow her class for a double period.

Students explored statistics connected to data centres around the world. This was a particularly relevant context because data centres are essential to the operation of cloud computing and generative AI. They also raise important questions about energy consumption, water use, environmental impact and the growing global demand for digital infrastructure.

The students were challenged to interpret the statistics and transform what they discovered into a short video or animated story. This required them to do much more than reproduce information. They needed to decide which data was most significant, identify the story contained within it and communicate that story clearly to an audience.

By creating a video or animation, students could combine mathematical understanding with creativity, communication and digital literacy. They had to consider how graphs, numbers, narration, characters and visual elements could work together to make complex information meaningful.

This type of activity helps students recognise that mathematics is not isolated from the world around them. Statistics can help us investigate major global issues, evaluate claims and communicate evidence. Mathematics becomes not only something students calculate, but something they can use to understand and explain their world.

After the classroom demonstrations, the visiting teachers came together for an after-school professional learning session that I facilitated. The focus was on process over product and the use of digital portfolios through Adobe Express.

In an age when generative AI can produce a polished response in seconds, the final product alone may no longer provide sufficient evidence of student learning. Teachers increasingly need ways to see how students arrived at their conclusions, how their ideas developed and what decisions they made along the way.

Digital portfolios can help make this learning process visible. Students can document initial ideas, research, calculations, drafts, feedback, revisions and reflections. They can include photographs, videos, audio explanations, screen recordings and examples of work in progress.

Maths Rethought was a valuable reminder that meaningful educational change occurs when strategic thinking, classroom practice and professional collaboration come together. The day was not about abandoning established approaches to mathematics teaching or adopting technology simply because it is new. It was about thoughtfully examining what effective mathematics learning can look like in a changing world.

Across the think tank, live lessons, student storytelling activity and professional learning session, a consistent message emerged: technology is most valuable when it helps students think more deeply, explore ideas, make connections and communicate their understanding. As AI continues to influence education, the challenge for schools is not merely to keep pace with new tools. It is to ensure that learning remains purposeful, intellectually demanding, creative and deeply human.

My sincere thanks to Flinders Christian Community College for hosting the event, to the school leaders and visiting teachers who contributed to the professional dialogue, and to Dr David Leigh-Lancaster, Antje, Kelvin Finger and Luke Kerr for making their teaching practice visible.

It was particularly enjoyable to work with the Leigh-Lancaster’s who I haven’t seem for over 30 years when we all worked at Kingswood College together in the early 1990s.

Most importantly, thank you to the Flinders students who participated so enthusiastically and reminded us that the best conversations about the future of education should always remain centred on learners.

My first book with Amba Press is now available to pre-order before it is officially published in November, 2026.

The Human Advantage: Teaching, Learning and Leading in a Gen AI World.

More info here

Drawing on more than 35 years across classrooms, school leadership and education consultancy, the book explores an idea I believe is becoming increasingly important:

AI hasn’t necessarily created many of the challenges schools are facing. It has exposed them.

And that creates an opportunity.

As intelligent machines become increasingly capable, education needs to place even greater value on the capabilities that make us distinctly human:

• Curiosity
• Creativity
• Critical thinking
• Empathy
• Discernment
• Ethical judgement

My new book is designed as a practical resource for teachers and school leaders. It includes strategies, classroom activities and frameworks to help educators rethink curriculum and assessment, embrace AI wisely and ethically, and keep people at the centre of learning.

Because the future of education shouldn’t be about humans competing with machines. It should be about helping young people develop the capabilities machines cannot replace.

Great teaching, now more than ever, is a deeply human endeavour.

Let your networks know about this new publication.