Dialogic Learning · Melbourne
For ten years I have worked alongside school leaders and their teams, designing programmes, coaching individuals, and holding partnerships that are counted in years rather than pupil-free days.
Designed for your context and run across a school year. Leading Powerful Dialogue, and bespoke programmes written from what I learn working alongside your team.
The programmes → 02One to one, long term. Helping leaders think more critically, work more creatively and lead more effectively, in person and online.
How coaching works → 03Twelve months and more. A critical friend to your leadership and teaching teams, working from inside the story of your school.
The partnership model →Programmes
The real work of a leadership team happens in conversation: decisions weighed, concerns raised, feedback given and received, disagreement held well or badly. Yet dialogue is usually treated as something leaders can already do, rather than a practice a team builds together. This programme treats it as the craft it is.
Nothing here is off the shelf. The scenarios, cases and materials the team works on are written from the school’s own context, close enough to be recognisable and far enough to be safe.
Tom has opened our minds to new ways of thinking and working. He has enabled us to think deeply about what we value in learning and to reflect on where and how this is visible.
Senior Leadership Team
Methodist Ladies College, Melbourne
The bedrock condition. Working from Amy Edmondson’s research, leaders examine how a team comes to believe that interpersonal risk is survivable, and what a leader does, often without noticing, that opens or closes that belief.
聽, the Chinese character for listening, holds within it the ear, the eye, undivided attention and the heart. Leaders work on the receptive posture that makes challenge possible, and on the strong pull to fix or rescue rather than listen fully.
The leader as architect rather than participant, designing the purpose, the process and the place of a conversation before stepping into it.
The module teams need most and expect least. Challenging each other without damaging relationships is nearly always treated as a problem of delivery. Far more often it is a problem of reception.
The question turns outward, from how we hold better conversations to how our conversations build a better school.
Why it is built this way
The conditions that shaped the old habits are waiting outside the door. So the modules are spaced across terms rather than compressed. Coaching runs between them, one to one, so each leader carries the practice into their own meetings and their own hard conversations. And a personal challenge runs the length of the programme, chosen by each leader from their real work, which is where most of the learning actually lands.
The design follows the evidence on how professionals change practice: that experience is the richest resource adults bring, and the Education Endowment Foundation’s work on effective professional development, which is to build knowledge, motivate, develop techniques and embed practice, with the last of these the one most programmes skip.
What counts is what a leader does differently on the Monday: practical, applied, and changing behaviour one small step at a time.
Also available
Both were built inside long partnerships and can be commissioned for your leadership team.
Problem Solving, Decision Making, Productivity, Communication, and Innovation and Change. A working set of mental models for leaders, built with the leadership team at Adelaide Botanic High School.
A practical look at how to anticipate, name, connect, nourish and illuminate change within an organisation, and how to gauge whether the conditions for it actually exist.
Coaching
My own first experience of coaching helped me navigate a difficult time in my professional life. Your motivations will be different, but I suspect you are looking for the same thing: a strong connection and a supportive partnership. Someone in your corner. A different voice. A new perspective on a long project.
Tom enabled me to clarify my thinking, empowering me to critically design my choices as I approached a new leadership role. His capacity to deeply listen, ask questions which structure insights and unearth further reflection and action resulted in a successful transition into my new environment.
Director of Learning
Independent school, regional Victoria · 2022
Tom’s capacity to be process aware but open enough to intertwine the appropriate mental models provided tremendous personal and professional insight.
Steve Brophy
Director of ICT, Ivanhoe Grammar School
What changes
It is what a leader can do afterwards. These are clients describing their own practice at the close of a coaching partnership, rather than describing me.
After thirty sessions
The breakthrough was increased self-confidence to feel ‘smart’ enough to play in this space.
Now I guide sessions at a pace that goes deeper into the mud, rather than skimming across it.
I’m comfortable with not knowing the answers.
Project lead · Independent school, regional Victoria · 2025
A staff member shared a reflection on when she came to me for advice. When she left my office, she realised that in our discussion I hadn’t actually given her the answer, but had led her to solve the problem herself.
It always felt like you were ‘in my corner’, but pushed me to seek solutions rather than wallowing in the difficulties I was having.
I have a greater appreciation for how I do my work rather than simply what I do. My assumptions of what I am capable of have shifted. I see my leadership style as an extension of who I am rather than an add on.
Curriculum leader · Independent school, regional NSW · 2023
Partnerships
That is a founding principle rather than a slogan, and it is why every school partnership is long term. I commit to working together for twelve months or more, and in practice the longest have run six years and beyond.
One hit wonders do not work. I would be very happy to recommend him to any learning organisation.
Jamie Wahab
Workstream Lead, Capability and Enablement of our People
Catholic Schools Broken Bay
His commitment to get the job done meant that very soon he was welcomed as one of the team, an integral part of our approach to solving the challenges set before us.
Dr Neil Hopkin
Director of Education, Fortes Education, Dubai
Selected work
Ten years of partnerships across Australia, Japan, China, Taiwan, New Zealand, the United States, Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UAE and Russia.
Another brand new school, opening in 2020. Our partnership has been extensive and involves a wide range of consultancy support to the leadership team. Leading Powerful Dialogue is running there now, five modules with individual coaching between them.
A seven year partnership supporting the foundation leadership team and staff establish this unique school. The first truly vertical school in South Australia, situated in the parklands of Adelaide adjacent to the Botanic Gardens.
A K–12 partnership co-constructing a learning framework for the whole school, working alongside the executive team and curriculum leaders.
Working directly with executive leadership and learning teams to establish design thinking projects across upper junior and secondary years.
Regular development sessions with the leadership team and grade-level teams, implementing a co-constructed school-wide pedagogy.
Designing coaching programmes and change leadership with school leaders across England, Scotland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and India.
Opening and closing keynotes for the ANZ Summit with Apple’s Australian team, followed by a series of online workshops for school leaders: cultivating innovation, the actions that spark it, and making change stick.
A range of keynote talks on learning, leadership and creativity at Apple Leadership Events in Dubai, St Petersburg and Copenhagen, to groups of over eighty school leaders from those regions.
Designing and delivering a speaker series for the ADE community.
Authored the lesson plans and the teacher and student decks for Google’s Gemini Academy, across both the teen and university streams. Five lessons per stream, covering how AI works, prompting practice, and the ethics of bias and fairness. It is used by thousands of teachers worldwide as their introductory professional learning with Gemini AI.
Programme design and facilitation of a new style of Google Teacher Academy. The two day, fifty participant event incorporated design thinking and ran in Sydney, London and Amsterdam.
Contributing to the GELP gathering in Jakarta alongside Google, UNICEF and NCEE.
Designed the dialogue through which police, fire, the port authority and insurers built a shared risk framework, which is disagreeing well at a considerably higher temperature than any school meeting.
A special project supporting teaching in Papua New Guinea using Google technologies, delivered with the Asia Education Foundation. Followed by an effective learning action research programme across participating schools.
Redesigned and facilitated the Burberry Foundation’s work experience programme. Using design thinking, the programme helped thirty unemployed people aged 17 to 25 learn workforce skills.
Coached the teachers of the Education Institute to develop their approach to learning, with coaching support on design thinking inquiry and the role of reflection and feedback.
Supported the education leadership team and support officers to review the various learning programmes on offer.
Designed and created a Masters degree in Innovation in Education, covering design thinking and the use of technology. The course is still offered online and is one of their most successful programmes.
Design thinking has been the method underneath a great deal of this work for more than a decade, in classrooms and boardrooms, hospitals and libraries, and with a luxury fashion house in London. It travels because it is a disciplined way of holding a hard problem open long enough to understand it.
The Innovation in Education Masters at Torrens University takes design thinking as a core topic. It continues to run online.
Design thinking rebuilt the format of the Academy itself, then ran as the spine of the two day programme in Sydney, London and Amsterdam.
Design thinking used with thirty young people who were out of work, to build the skills and the confidence to enter a workforce.
Design thinking inquiry with the teachers of the Education Institute, alongside reflection and feedback practice.
Establishing design thinking projects across upper junior and secondary years with the executive leadership and learning teams.
A design thinking programme and review with the Marshmead campus team.
What changes for people
Tom’s session changed me. It has changed how I look upon myself and how I act when supporting others. What I bring with me is how to facilitate with the content in the back of my head, just like Tom did. He walked the walk.
Apple Distinguished Educator and ICT coach
Sweden · 2025
Your work and the topics you are covering are extremely beneficial to school leaders in their roles in contemporary schools.
Primary school principal
Queensland · 2024
Writing
Fifteen years of weekly writing on dialogue, leadership and learning. Four pieces that show how I work through a problem, one for each thread of the practice.
About
I founded it on two commitments: build partnerships, and put relationships first. In practice that has meant fewer clients and longer arcs.
Before consulting I spent ten years teaching in UK primary schools, so the work has always kept its feet in classrooms. Underneath all of it sits fifteen years of weekly public writing on dialogue, leadership and learning.
Tom Barrett. Director, Dialogic Learning Pty Ltd. Melbourne, Australia.
Get in touch
Tell me what your team is wrestling with. If I am the right person for it I will say so.
