link

I love this image from Tony Ryans blog. He also shared it in his ULearn presentations …. it has so much to say at so many levels!

it reminds me of our school vision which is also visual rather than lots of words.

(note - link is to our new school website I am working on so is very much a work in progress.  If you go to here you will get to our public site.)

source

The ECE people will roll their eyes skyward and go “ha - now he gets it!” but I love this from Bruce Hammonds:

Scientists are driven by their curiosity to explore and explain things that attract their attention. In this respect they have much in common with any two year old, except young people do not have the need to ensure their findings stands up to inspection.

The message is clear for educators, we must do everything to keep alive the curiosity and openness to learning of our students. We need to tap our students innate gifts,interests, talents and dreams and then to encourage them to dig deeper into what attracts their attention.

At the beginning of learning, and science, is curiosity, and with curiosity is the delight in mastery - the joy of figuring it out that is the birthright of every child. One scientist said to another ‘What we can’t tell then that it’s so so much fun’ A Nobel prizewinner said ‘We were like children playing’. It is, as another said, ‘a rage to know - the acute discomfort at incomprehension’.The so called scientific method is not as scientific as you would think and is more a process of enlightened trial and error.

If teachers were to be aware of: the importance of passion and curiosity in learning; the need to explain as best we can; and the process of science, a curriculum would ‘emerge’. As well, creative teachers can provide their students experiences with the potential to attract their student’s attention . As educationalist Jerome Bruner wrote, ‘teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation’.

These ideals are at the heart of our vision for our school at Outram.

Our vision is a completely visual one and all about sparking the intellectual curiosity and passions in us all as learners. This means the adults AND the kids.

We have the things we already know and can do, our previous skills, our toolbox of skills, our shadow.  All very useful and indeed essential as we go for gold, aim high and jump for joy and excitement.

Cool stuff - only wish I could lay much claim to it.  Well done those who have gone before at Outram.  My role now is to facilitate revisiting it all and seeing what it all means now, including the third of us who are new (families and staff) since the initial work was done.

And thats the fun bit

CORE have produced this series of videos looking at key issues in education.  I like this one from Sharon Freisen looks at the difference between Inquiry as a disposition and Inquiry as a Teaching Strategy.  This is a fundamental difference!

ALL those in the school need to be Inquirers and Learners.  Sometimes this will be together and sometimes it is more focused on teacher professional learning.

… thanks Jane for the link!

Life has been pretty frantic recently but a few wee moments (and things) have stood out:

• Having three experienced and skilled teachers apply for a Teachers Aid position at school. So what is it about our job now that is so hard people do not want to do it?
• We have a job for a new entrant teacher for the rest of the year that closes tomorrow and so far have ONE applicant. Is the price of petrol that significant that a 55km a day commute is puting people off?
• Life is short and very precious! We have two staff at the moment with sick family members. What DO you say at moments like these except you are thinking of people and wish them the best …?.
• The small incremental changes can also be profound. When I first started at Outram 18 months ago teachers often didn’t bring their laptops to school. Now the internet being offline is a disaster I have to solve RIGHT NOW THANKYOU!! classes are blogging; people are beginning to use iChat to share and celebrate - kids even iChat me in the office to ask for help during class if they get stuck on a technical question their teacher can’t help with; we have purchased a lot of new ‘equipment’. The interesting thing is people have not really noticed the changes and normal is now very different
• The political landscape is changing fast. I went to an STA training the other day on Principal Appraisal … those of you who know me will know it takes a bit to wind me up but by the end of it I was about ready to remove limbs from the presenter! The whole thing was soooo focused on assessment and goal setting - with no thought about the obligation/necessity to actually support or do anything to improve professional knowledge. This sort of thing is very destructive of the relationships between BoT and principal/staff as it promotes the message that the only thing that needs to happen is for goals/objectives to be set an magically they will be achieved …. nothing about structured and well thought out professional learning opportunities. Arghhhh!!
  We also have an election coming up and my reading of Nationals policy (who it would seem are likely to be the next government) is for more competition between schools and I believe it will be a very short time before we have national testing and league tables under their management. Scary stuff for those of us who relish and treasure our independence and ability to make professionally and educationally sound decisions free from political pressure in our own schools.
• Where have the last 10 years gone? In a couple of weeks our youngest, Alex will be 10 years old… thinking back on all the things that have happened in that time …. it only seems a short time ago we were discovering that that ‘odd’ feeling Jane was having wasn’t just a tummy bug. I sound like my parents …. another scary thought ….

But still it is the small moments that are the most meaningful. A hug from a loved one, the aha moment in the classroom, making a difference in peoples lives.
It is a privileged profession we are all involved in! Family still matters most! This life is not a dress rehearsal!

these are my notes from Marks presentation at L@S on 20th Feb 2008. Blogged on the fly so please excuse any spelling etc that is dodgey:
ref www.i-learnt.com/paradigm_competencies.html
schoolv2.net

Here are some quotes from Dean Fink the educational management author and from a paper published on the ICP website:

In my view, as a former school leader and now as an international consultant to school leaders, there is no such thing as ‘best’ practice that can be generalised to all contexts and all purposes…..

Search for the Holy Grail
Around the world there appears to be a search for the ‘holy grail’, of ‘best practice’. My attribution is that the technocrats, who seem to dominate educational policy, want to create lists of ‘best practices’ and use this list as a benchmark for the recruitment and assessment of future leaders. Since technocrats emphasise the technical conception of a problem or activity to the detriment of the human and the social consequences, the technocratic answer to the world-wide educational leadership crisis, therefore, is to search for a leadership template of ‘best’ practices. The lists that do exist around the world seem to require people of heroic abilities to lead schools. Since most of us are merely mortal, such lists merely promote guilt (at not being able to achieve everything on the list), martyrs (from trying to do everything) or compliant messengers (’I'm just doing what they tell us to do’- the Albert Speer defence).

How did we get in this mess? I think site-based management is part of the problem. In the name of local decision-making, school leaders must now make sure the school is clean, the urinals repaired, the buses running on time, and that the cafeteria is making a profit. These tasks are easy to put into lists of ‘best’ practices and easy for inspectors to assess. I don’t deny that each of these is an important and necessary job to ensure the effective operation of a school, but do high priced and highly skilled educator have to do them?

The second part of the problem, as I see it, results from government’s placing the big educational questions of what students are to learn, when they are to learn it, how we know that they have learned it, and how teachers should teach it in the hands of bureaucrats and their academic advisors, who may be well meaning but haven’t been in a real classroom in years (see Fink, 2001). Many leaders in schools, however, have bought into this paradox of decentralised management decision-making and centralised educational decision-making. It is easier to arrange to have the roof repaired than to work to improve that mediocre teacher who is too good to get rid of but not good enough to inspire real learning for students. At least the roof is a tangible legacy of one’s leadership.

Well then, if a list of best practices isn’t the answer to leadership development, and a leadership template is a ‘technocrat’s dream’, what is the answer? This may sound heretical, but others can do most of the ’stuff’ that presently consume school leaders’ time and these ‘others’ can probably do it better. When one sees the kinds of tasks governments have downloaded to schools in the name of local decision-making, it is no wonder that government officials in some countries, such as Britain and the United States, are now considering non-educators to be quite suitable to be school principals. If all that the advocates of this policy want are ‘number crunchers’, ‘paper pushers’ and ‘intellectual accountants’ then they are on the right track. If, however, they are serious about students’ learning, I believe this policy is misguided. At the same time, unless school heads see themselves as educators and find ways to reinvent themselves as ‘leaders of learning’, then I suspect the new breed envisaged by some government officials will conduct the business of schooling more efficiently, if not more effectively.

Leaders of Learning
The only rationale for educational leadership, as far as I am concerned, is to attend to those things that enhance students’ learning. This means finding other ways to cover managerial functions. At the same time, I would suggest that governments (national and local) develop a coordinated approach to leadership succession planning that combines the recruitment, development, induction, and ongoing support of educational leaders based on the ‘learnings’ that ‘leaders of learning’ will require in various contexts over time. In a recent book, ‘It’s About Learning (and It’s About Time)’, my colleagues Louise Stoll, Lorna Earl, and I (2002) argued that:

‘Leadership for learning is not a destination with fixed co-ordinates on a compass, but a journey with plenty of detours and even some dead ends. Effective educational leaders are continuously open to new learning because the journey keeps changing. Their maps are complex and can be confusing. What leaders require for this journey is a set of interrelated learnings looking at school leadership in a holistic rather than reductionist way. These learnings can be deepened, elaborated, nurtured, abandoned, and connected and related to other learnings as the journey progresses.’

We suggested seven sets of ‘learnings’ for leaders of learning that we think go across time and space and apply to all educational leaders. These learning are:

*understand learning;
*critical thinking;
*contextual understanding;
*political acumen;
*emotional understanding;
*making connections; and,
*futures thinking.

These learning provide the connections that join the stages of the ‘leadership pipeline’ (Charran et al., 2001). In other words, I would argue that schools and school systems need to identify, recruit, train, select and in-service leaders, based on their ability to acquire and sophisticate these ‘learnings’.

General Shineski, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, in his challenge to his army colleagues, declared that: ‘If you don’t like change you’re going to like irrelevance even less’. Just as 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Iraq and elsewhere have forced the American military to question long-held traditions and practices, so then educators must examine traditional shibboleths and reinvent itself for a new age. Systems of ‘hire and hope’ and ‘list and insist’ are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Educators can no longer look in the rear view mirror of ‘best’ practice to prepare our leader to create schools that will help our students to adapt to a very different society from the one in which most of us came of age. We must look to a more creative, imaginative and forward looking view of leadership based on what leaders will have to learn to function successfully in a world in which the old rules don’t apply.

challenging stuff …. but oh how true!

This is an amazing resource - for teachers of all languages and levels. The site contains masses of scanned books that you can search, browse and read.

Their Mission:
The mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to excite and inspire the world’s children to become members of the global community - children who understand the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas — by making the best in children’s literature available online.

The book in the image has text in Spanish and English on facing pages and would be a good one for using if you were teaching the language. Picture books are a great way to share any language …

You can browse through the book in the same way you read a real book. There is a whole project focused on sharing quality books that sits behind this site. Well worth a look!

http://www.childrenslibrary.org/

Thanks to Jane (my wife, who is a Speech language therapist - and is now a convert to Bloglines!) for finding this ….

another gem from Lifehacker. I have to get my hands on one of these!

The Eye-Fi secure digital memory card adds Wi-Fi to any camera and supports automatic wireless uploading to your computer as well as tons of different web-based photo sites, from Flickr and Facebook to Picasa and the open source Gallery2. You just plug the card into your camera and set up wireless access from your computer, then snap pics like normal. Whenever you’re in range of your wireless router, Eye-Fi will automatically upload the pics; if you’re not in range, Eye-Fi will upload them when you are (it’s also a regular 2GB memory card). The Eye-Fi will set you back $99, but it’ll also rid you of the cord and cradle clutter of your traditional sync tools.

This would be soo cool for little bodies, and much easier on the hardware than plugging and unplugging cables!