Welcome to Grow Your Flow & Glow, a podcast where educator and Assistant Principal Kurt Walker explores the real heartbeat of learning: belonging, self-regulation and those powerful moments when students lose themselves in their work.
Through practical examples, honest reflections and research that actually makes sense in a classroom, Kurt helps teachers understand how to build environments where students feel capable, motivated and deeply connected to their learning.
Simple ideas. Real stories. Better learning. Every episode.
Series 2: I is for I is for Identity and Narrative
Send us Fan Mail Kurt kicks it off with a narrative that every teacher and leader can relate to. Researchers Sfard and Prusak have a definition of identity that every teacher should know. Identity is a set of significant, endorsable stories about a person. And here's the part that matters: those stories — even the ones a student tells about themselves — are products of collective storytelling. The student who says I can't do maths didn't invent that story. It was built for them. Interaction b...
12 Aug 2026
Series 2 - R — Relevance and Purpose
Send us Fan Mail Global practitioner network (2025). The Why Behind Educators Who Thrive — six respondents across four continents. Kurt Walker LinkedIn study. Want to participate in the study? Click Here This week's worksheet is here. Want to help keep this work going? Your support helps Kurt and his small research team continue creating meaningful, practical content for educators. Or perhaps you simply want to buy him a coffee to say thanks for the chat. You can do that here. A mayor i...
8 Aug 2026
Series 2: H is for High Expectations
Send us Fan Mail In a re-release and improved episode... Episode Worksheet is here What happens when we hold high expectations for students — but forget to build the ladder that helps them reach them? In this episode, Kurt begins with an unlikely classroom thought experiment inspired by Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi: what if you could return to a moment in your learning history and change what happened next? Then come the stories. Mat, a ten-year-old blues guitarist who t...
26 Jul 2026
Series 2 - T is for Trust and Belonging: The Foundation
Send us Fan Mail T is for Trust and Belonging — the first element of the THRIVE framework, and the one that comes first for a reason. Kurt opens with Molly Morgan. A convict transported from Devon in the late 1700s, whose ship wrecked on Tuggerah Beach on the NSW Central Coast. Rather than turn herself in, Molly disappeared — lived with the local Aboriginal peoples on the land, outsmarted the red coats who hunted her for years, and eventually emerged as a businesswoman and respected community...
25 Jul 2026
Series 2 - The Framework Introduction: The Room That Works... and the Room That Doesn't
Send us Fan Mail You've walked past both rooms. You know them without needing them described — because you can feel the difference from the corridor before you've even opened the door. One room is functioning. The other is alive. In this opening episode of Series 2, Kurt Walker asks the question that drives the entire series: what actually accounts for the difference? Not resources. Not experience. Not personality. Design. Along the way: the story of Tom — a brilliant educator who the system ...
22 Apr 2026
Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - Why External Rewards Undermine the Motivation They're Meant to Build — and What Actually Works Instead
Send us Fan Mail In this delayed release episode, Kurt openly talks about that one student going unnoticed and the busy teacher trying to deliver her best within the system. He talks frankly about an uncomfortable teaching experience and student experience, which thankfully has a warm GLOW ending. She wasn't defiant. She wasn't disengaged. She was sitting under a table, drawing animals, in a classroom that had spent two years rewarding her for sitting still — and had never once as...
12 Apr 2026
Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - Adding a Layer to the Play - What Twenty Five Years of Watching Children Learn Taught Me About Flow & What the Research Confirms
Send us Fan Mail It starts in a sandpit. A child building something important. A question dropped in like a layer — not an interruption. And flow happening without anyone announcing it. In this episode, Kurt traces the pedagogical move he learned in early childhood education — joining the play before adding the teaching — and follows it all the way through to a practical flow architecture for primary classrooms: trivia challenge to group research to real audience presentation. He brings in th...
4 Apr 2026
Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - The Fight to Belong: The why behind the THRIVE framework...
Send us Fan Mail The student who fights you and the student who disappears into silence are doing the same thing. They are both telling you they don't yet belong here fully enough to risk genuine learning. In this episode, Kurt draws on thirty years of observation — from the babies room in long day care to Year 6 in primary school — to make the case that every disruptive behaviour, every act of resistance, and every quiet withdrawal in a classroom comes from the same place: a need to be seen,...
29 Mar 2026
Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - What Year 4 Taught Me About Flow
Send us Fan Mail In 2024, I asked thirty Year 4 students what was stopping them from focusing. They didn't mention the work. They didn't mention each other's behaviour. They listed assemblies, Harmony Day, incursions, bell times — and their own friends. Then they told me exactly what to do about it. This episode is about what happens when you let students diagnose the conditions of their own learning, what Flow Theory says about why they were right, and what one honest conversation in a three...
21 Mar 2026
Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - The Weight of Hope
Send us Fan Mail 'Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - Episode 2' Reflecting on the Early Years Learning Framework and its critiques - Belonging sounds warm. But belonging always involves power. And in a school where families have moved countries so their children can succeed, the hidden curriculum of belonging is one of the most complex things any teacher navigates. This episode is about what students have to set aside to feel safe enough to learn. And what one classroom looks like when the t...
21 Mar 2026
Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5 - The EYLF's philosophical intent
Send us Fan Mail "Plot Twist: It's Series 1.5" Kurt promised Series 2. Kurt did not deliver Series 2. What he delivered instead is arguably better — a deep dive into the research that unravelled one framework and grew a better one. In this honest, occasionally self-deprecating opening episode, he introduces Being, Belonging and Becoming, the concept of Becoming by Design, and a new framework called THRIVE that he's pretty confident isn't named after a corporate wellness program. Series 1.5 be...
8 Mar 2026
Season 1 - The Grand Finale: When Flow Meets the Storm
Send us Fan Mail Want to immerse yourself in a deep, reflective professional (or personal) development journey after this episode? Subscribe here. Want to help keep this work going? Your support helps Kurt and his small research team continue creating meaningful, practical content for educators. Or perhaps you simply want to buy him a coffee to say thanks for the chat. You can do that here. Seven episodes. Seven conversations about purpose, learning, leadership and the quiet ripple effects te...
7 Feb 2026
The Ripple Effect — Why Adult Regulation Shapes Learning Culture
Send us Fan Mail Want to immerse yourself in a deep, reflective professional (or personal) development journey after this episode? Subscribe here. Want to help keep this work going? Your support helps Kurt and his small research team continue creating meaningful, practical content for educators. Or perhaps you simply want to buy him a coffee to say thanks for the chat. You can do that here. After a busy first week back face to face with students and his Stage 3 team, Kurt squeezes out a...
25 Jan 2026
Identity, Belonging, and Equity — Who Learns the Rules of School (and Who Is Left Guessing)
Send us Fan Mail Want to immerse yourself in a deep, reflective professional (or personal) development journey after this episode? Subscribe here. Want to help keep this work going? Your support helps Kurt and his small research team continue creating meaningful, practical content for educators. Or perhaps you simply want to buy him a coffee to say thanks for the chat. You can do that here. What if the most powerful thing a teacher leaves behind isn’t a lesson — but a sentence? In this episod...
18 Jan 2026
Assessment, Feedback & Motivation — When Measurement Hurts Learning
Send us Fan Mail Want to immerse yourself in a deep, reflective professional (or personal) development journey after this episode? Subscribe here. Want to help keep this work going? Your support helps Kurt and his small research team continue creating meaningful, practical content for educators. Or perhaps you simply want to buy him a coffee to say thanks for the chat. You can do that here. What if assessment isn’t neutral — and never has been? In this episode, I unpack how grades, rubrics, a...
11 Jan 2026
Designing for Flow: Why Entry Points Matter More Than Perfect Lessons
Send us Fan Mail Want to immerse yourself in a deep, reflective professional (or personal) development journey after this episode? Subscribe here. Want to help keep this work going? Your support helps Kurt and his small research team continue creating meaningful, practical content for educators. Or perhaps you simply want to buy him a coffee to say thanks for the chat. You can do that here. In this episode of Grow Your Flow & Glow, we move to the practical heart of the work: learning desi...
4 Jan 2026
Behaviour Isn’t the Problem: Flow, Regulation & the Hidden Curriculum
Send us Fan Mail Want to immerse yourself in a deep, reflective professional (or personal) development journey after this episode? Subscribe here. Want to help keep this work going? Your support helps Kurt and his small research team continue creating meaningful, practical content for educators. Or perhaps you simply want to buy him a coffee to say thanks for the chat. You can do that here. In this episode of Grow Your Flow & Glow, we look beneath behaviour to the learning conditions that...
29 Dec 2025
'Learning That Doesn’t Hurt' - Grow Your Flow and Glow - Series 1 Episode 1
Send us Fan Mail Want to immerse yourself in a deep, reflective professional (or personal) development journey after this episode? Subscribe here. Want to help keep this work going? Your support helps Kurt and his small research team continue creating meaningful, practical content for educators. Or perhaps you simply want to buy him a coffee to say thanks for the chat. You can do that here. What if the problem in our classrooms isn’t student motivation — but how learning feels? In this openin...
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