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Using the guiding lens of the Stronger Smarter Approach, Masterclasses provide the deeper learning to work with the complex challenges you may find in your schools and organisations.
Day 1 - Attendance: From Compliance to Connectedness
Overview
For decades, school attendance has been framed through a truancy lens. Yet Indigenous attendance gaps persist, and in many places are worsening.
This course offers a different way forward.
Grounded in Indigenous scholarship and national evidence, this course reframes attendance as a systems-level signal of connection, trust, and belonging – not individual failure.
Gain a clear framework and practical strategies to redesign the systems, relationships and community partnerships that shape attendance outcomes.
Day 1 Outcomes
By completing Day 1, you will be able to:
- Reimagine attendance as system signal, understanding why enforcement approaches fail to produce long term improvement.
- Interpret Indigenous attendance data through a relational and cultural lens, reading attendance as a measure of belonging, trust, and connection.
- Apply High-Expectations Relationships that strengthen identity, dignity, and student engagement.
- Use ethical persuasion and connectedness approaches to support sustainable attendance improvement.
- Lead community informed strategies that sustain long-term attendance growth.
Topics Covered
In this course, you will:
- Explore a powerful connectedness model grounded in the work of Chris Sarra and Ian Mackie.
- Learn to read attendance as a systems indicator, linking data to school culture, relationships, and legitimacy.
- Design a Connected School approach that builds belonging, identity, and purpose.
- Implement eight practical levers for change, including ethical persuasion, community partnership, and re‑engagement pathways.
- Build a complete Attendance Operating System, including data narratives, Tier 1–3 re‑engagement pipelines, governance, and improvement cycles.
Day 2 - Emotional Agency and Relational Integrity in the Workplace
Overview
Emotion is shaping your workplace – whether you realise it or not.
How people feel at work shapes how they think, relate, lead, comply, withdraw, or resist.
This course explores how emotions shape behaviour, power, and relationships – and how emotional agency can drive wellbeing, accountability, and real outcomes.
Strengthen your workplace culture as you understand emotions not as weaknesses to manage, but as signals of culture and power. Move from emotional servitude toward High-Expectations Relationships grounded in strength, belief, and responsibility.
Day 2 Outcomes
By completing Day 2, you will be able to:
- Recognise and regulate emotional patterns that shape behaviour.
- Identify and reshape workplace emotional scripts.
- Transform resentment into constructive, ethical action.
- Build High-Expectations Relationships grounded in belief and accountability.
- Lead teams with emotional clarity, strength, and relational integrity.
- Apply decolonial perspectives to foster emotional sovereignty and agency.
Topics Covered
Drawing on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar, and the relational leadership of Chris Sarra, this course provides a deep and practical framework for emotional agency.
Topics covered include:
- Foundations of Emotional Agency: Spinoza’s affects – desire, joy, and sadness – and their relevance to workplace behaviour.
- Emotional Servitude at Work: How power, hierarchy, and social scripts produce reactivity, compliance, and disengagement.
- High-Expectations Relationships: Strength based, belief and challenge approaches to relational integrity.
- Emotional Scripting and Attention: How workplaces organise attention and produce patterned emotional responses.
- Decolonial Emotional Literacy: Resentment, anti hope, and identifying structurally produced “sad passions”.
Who Should Attend
This course is ideal for leaders, managers, and practitioners working in complex, high-stakes environments where relationships matter most.
Facilitator
Dr Ian Mackie is a highly respected education leader and researcher with more than 40 years’ experience working across schools, communities and government to improve participation, engagement and performance in complex settings.
He has held senior leadership roles as a principal in remote communities, Assistant Director General for Indigenous Education in Education Queensland, and Deputy Director General in the Queensland Government.
His work focuses on how culture, identity and expectations shape attendance, engagement and workforce participation. A former President of the Queensland Teachers’ Union and co-author of Nudge for Schools, Dr Mackie now works at the intersection of policy, practice and innovation, including AI supported learning, to strengthen purpose, agency and commitment in schools and workplaces.
