My new Principalship simile

Sitting in a Secondary Community of learning session today, listening to others tell their inspiring stories, this simile popped in to my head.

Principalship is like being a gardener.

We have to till the soil, plant the seeds, fertilise and water, and provide the trellis up which plants can climb. During the process we are continually weeding and pruning.

There is of course the decision about what sort of garden we are trying to create, and who decides.

Is it this?

Or this?

That's a decision to be taken by the community.

The qualities of leadership

Reading this week's 'Your Weekend' supplement in the Christchurch Press, a number of comments in the article 'Women who rule the roost' really struck a chord. The article records interviews with a number of women who hold leadership positions in business and the community, and their wisdom on the question of leadership resonates.

Raelene Castle, CEO of Sydney's Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs (NRL) team is quoted as saying:

"You need respect to succeed in leadership, It does not come with  title, it comes with your actions and how you do the things you said you would."

And:

She believes resilience if fundamental to good leadership. "What doesn't kill your career, makes you stronger". 

Naomi Fergusson, who heads the NZ Inland Revenue Department observes:

 "I learned to value my strengths and have the confidence to trust my own abilities to get things done."

And:

"None of us are perfect. We have our strengths but we also need to understand how to build a team. ...... I give clarity to the organisation and allow the people who work here to fulfill their potential. ... I just create the space for them to do it."

Knowing these things is the first step. Doing them is the challenge. As much as we might try, none of us is perfect. We all make mistakes along the way. Maybe it's our integrity that determines whether or not our colleagues are forgiving when we do?

 

Student voice and our educational future

Student voice is well recognised as important in the operation of our schools. I am however fascinated by the number of occasions in which it is not used. My intuition suggests that we are not good at collecting student voice.

As I formulate views on school and curriculum development, I have been struck by the need to value student diversity rather than squash it. This was reinforced for me during the recent address from Yong Zhao.

There are a number of students at Hornby High School who clearly value their own difference. They actively try to maintain their individuality, at the personal cost of regular conflict with the school rules, and so they are a target of the school discipline system.

I decided to meet with one of these students (I walked him to a local coffee shop and bought him coffee) and ask him why he does this, and what he would want from a school that would better prepare him for his future.

I interviewed a year 12 boy, asking only these two questions:

1. Why do you choose to dress the way you do, ignoring the uniform rules of the school?
2. What would school look like if it were to meet your own needs?

He made the following comments:

• We don’t acknowledge student differences
• We have too many rules, many of which don’t seem to serve a purpose
• We should be offering more individualised courses that meet student needs/’passions’ (he used that word without prompting
• “More people would attend school if they were doing what they love doing”
• We should have less of a gap between teachers and students, teachers need to “know more about their students”
• He would like more freedom, he acknowledged that we need some rules, but should have fewer, and more choice to specialise in what they love

When you think about it, there is nothing there that should come as a surprise. During a meeting with several staff about integrated curriculum, project based learning, connected curriculum (call it what you will) a colleague made this comment:

"I've taught in Year 7-13 schools for 18 years. As a profession we have been talking about this stuff all that time. It's time we did something about it instead of talking."

Yep. The moral imperative is clear, the mandate is there. Time to act!!!

The case for collaboration in schools

Frankly I couldn't have put it better than this:

Physicists just debunked one of the most promising candidates for dark matter


This is a collaboration of over 100 physicists. Who works alone today? Isn't it time we adapted not only work, but also senior assessment practices, to acknowledge this?

Producers, not consumers

It’s a funny old world this education thing, isn’t it. It’s easy to dart around chasing fads and trends like a school of fish. The challenges aren’t helped by the fact that as everyone has been to school we all tend to become self professed, albeit well meaning, experts.

The thing that matters most is that we remember the fundamental purpose of schools: to cause learning. Of course THE big question of the moment is to learn what? There seems to be general agreement that everyone needs basic literacy and numeracy. Beyond that, what? If we say science, which particular bit of science? If we say a language, which particular language? Maybe it doesn’t much matter. What we do seem to agree matters is that students develop good character (I’ve written on that before) and that they learn how to learn, unlearn and relearn, to be flexible, to stick with the job ( Art Costa’s Habits of Mind, those dispositions that characterise successful people in all walks of life).

Perhaps flexibility has become the watchword of the moment. I read a couple of weeks ago of the NZIER’s prediction that 46% of NZ jobs may disappear in the next ten to twenty years. Who knew when I was a student that we might not need tax accountants in twenty years time?

Have you looked at ‘Shapeways’ on the web? There on a web site is the future of small scale manufacturing with either small scale 3D printing on demand, or the delivery of 3D print files that allow anyone with a 3D printer to produce their own objects at home.

Who  even three years ago would have predicted the impact of Uber or AirBnB? More than ever before we are all faced with an absolutely fundamental choice about whether to be a consumer or a producer in life? And for this reason shifting school practice to encouraging students to be producers becomes ever more important. Producing that short film, that piece of code or that phone app, that art work or that short story, that 3D printed toy or that community campaign to get books into disadvantaged homes, these are all ‘producing something’.

I once read that the thing we fear more than being powerless is being powerful beyond measure. The ‘producer culture’, the ’maker culture’ is one way in which we can all exercise our power for the benefit of the community. Let’s put our collective effort into encouraging our students to do just that.

New thinking about learning and 'education'

Tonight I spent two and  a half hours with the senior leadership team of Hornby High School. I have been incredibly privileged to have been offered the position as their Principal at the start of term 2.

Now for a start, these are very talented people. The school is to be almost entirely rebuilt over the next two to three years, and so we are digging deeply into pedagogy in order to make sure that the architects give us a built environment that meets the needs of the pedagogy.

Some things that come to mind:

1. The national curriculum may be organised into learning areas, but that doesn't mean that the learning has to be delivered in discreet chunks that map onto those learning areas.
2. NCEA is not a set price meal but a rich smorgasbord, and like a good smorgasbord you don't have to eat everything on the table to satisfy your hunger
3. We all excel at things that excite us. As teachers we need to stop assuming that because we have a degree in a subject our students will be excited by it (when often we may not be either)
4. Young people care about their world (possibly even more than we older folk do). Give them an opportunity to solve real world problems, big problems, problems that matter.
5. Knowledge matters, but knowledge can be gained from anywhere these days. The online revolution has seen to that
6. Soft skills matter. No employer wants an employee who cannot work with others, an employee who cannot think creatively and critically, and NO amount of maths will give you that.
7. As a team we can solve problems that seem insurmountable when we sit alone.

There's a heck of a lot more, but that's enough to be going on with. Whatever we come up with, the community deserves an aspirational school, a school that makes them go wow!! A school that takes their breath away.