Written by James Podsiadly, AFL Max.
James’s session at this year’s Summit puts words to something they see every single day at AFL Max: movement isn’t a break from learning. It’s how learning happens. Traditionally, classrooms have been built around the idea that stillness equals focus. Sit up straight, hands still, eyes on the board. But ask any teacher who’s run a lunchtime game or taken a class on excursion, and they’ll tell you the opposite is often true. The kids who come back from twenty minutes of running, problem-solving and working as a team are often more settled, more switched on, and more ready to learn than the ones who sat through it.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s biology, and it’s exactly what James unpacks in his session: movement drives the neurochemical and physiological changes that underpin focus, memory, emotional regulation and motivation. We don’t need to be scientists to see it play out. We just need to watch a group of Year 5s tackle a team challenge and notice what happens to their concentration for the rest of the day.
Resilience, teamwork, leadership, mental health. These are the concepts every school wants to build in their students, and they’re also the hardest to teach from a page. A child only really learns teamwork when a game falls apart and they have to work out, with their teammates, how to fix it.
This is the idea behind every AFL Max program. Their curriculum-aligned excursions, sports days and overnight camps are built around giving kids a physical, social and emotional challenge to work through together. Using the AFL Max venue as a vehicle for delievring topics in a fun, engaging way, they can build skills from bouldering challenges, interactive screen games. inflatbales and so much more.
James’s session asks educators to rethink where movement sits in the school day: not as a reward after the real learning, but as the pathway to it. An excursion, an incursion or an overnight stay can all be genuine, embodied learning experiences, built around the same outcomes a classroom is chasing, just delivered on your feet instead of at a desk.
That’s the shift we’d love every educator at this Summit to walk away with. Movement isn’t competing with learning. Done well, it’s one of the most powerful ways to deliver it.
