Greg’s Blog - principal (le?) learning

Following the leadership theme ….

The Ministry’s vision [of the new Curriculum is] that all students should be, ‘creative, energetic and enterprising’ and that teachers need to use ‘pedagogy that meet all student’s needs’ are fine words. And, of course the ‘key competencies’; now there is a phrase from the industrial age! These competencies have been presented as if the Ministry’ had discovered the ‘Holy Grail’.

I would’ve loved to have seen a vision where all students are given the opportunity to realize and amplify all their potential talents, gifts and passions. The desire to realize a talent creates the desire to learn (and to develop key competencies) and results in old fashioned stuff called knowledge and understanding. Education ought to about developing passionate learners driven by their innate curiosity - an education ensuring all students retain a joy of learning. One phrase in the ‘new’ NZ Curriculum, that needs to be highlighted, is that all students should be their own ’seekers, users, and creators’ of knowledge. This has aways been the premise of creative educators.

That so many students leave without a positive learning identity is the real problem we have to face up to.

……..

He believes that if principals are not able to fulfil their roles as curriculum leaders this is because of all the compliance and curricula accountability that has been imposed on them by the Ministry. If the Ministry spent more time working out how to reduce this compliance load this would free principals to get with being creative leaders, able to focus on teaching and learning.

Tomorrows Schools - or the curriculum that followed, and the ‘naming and shaming’ of the School Review Office ( even if it now ‘assess and assist’) has established a ‘big brother effect’ in our system. Devolving responsibility to schools, while at the same time creating a ‘low trust’ culture has led, to what one writer calls a a ‘corrosion of character’ - principals aways trying to double guess what is required of them by others. This leads to a ‘anticipatory dread’ settling on a school and with the news of an ERO visit an outbreak of folders outlining all the ‘evidence based data’ around school ‘targets’!

It is this bureaucracy that is blocking creative leadership.

SOURCE

Bruce has been providing good critiques of the NZC recently. As I have said before too, not much is new and we have to take control as school leaders adn make sure that anything we change is going to be BETTER and not just DIFFERENT. take the time to read this full entry in full.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Learning and Teaching, professional learning.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.