One of my most challenging weeks in education.

It is quite hard to know where to start in blogging about the last week here in Tunis. Last Friday we closed the school early due to information that there was to be some sort of protest activity outside the American Embassy, which is right across the road from the school. As we said our good-byes to each other around 1.00 p.m. no one had any idea what would eventuate.

We were to find out later that around 2 p.m. the protest turned ugly and crowds of people lead by the salafist group smashed their way in to the outer areas of the embassy and then unbelievably moved in to our school, destroying first all of the surveillance equipment and then setting on fire our lower elementary classrooms. What followed next were crowds of young men from the local neighborhood, who seized upon the opportunity and also entered the school looting everything they could lay their hands on.

Calls of help were made by our own school guards who were obviously outnumbered to police, the fire department and the Tunisian army. What was most disturbing was their reaction—it was three to four hours later that they arrived on the scene, way too late to do anything.

On Saturday morning, the leadership team arrived at school to assess the damage—5 classes and one library completely burned out, 7 more smoke-damaged and every other space in the school a mess with upturned tables and gear thrown about. It has been unbelievable! So much destruction.

The week has seen everyone trying their hardest to pitch in and clean, sort and redistribute everything. Makeshift classes are being put together and we will prepare to re-open soon. Emotionally people are all over the place, with many tears being spilt.

It certainly will go down as one of my most challenging weeks in education. 

Being multi-lingual?

The end of another busy school week in our new place has come and gone. So much to think about and plan for. Together with the rest of the leadership team, we joined with the Board in a day and a half’s retreat, which was very well facilitated by consultant David Chojnacki. I love these things! Time to “chew the fat” and work out where we are all heading.

An interesting topic came up in that when the Board members were asked about what competencies they would want their children to have mastered by the end of compulsory schooling, one of those listed was the ability to work in a language which is not their native tongue. This is new for me, coming from basically a monolingual country such as New Zealand, but as I looked around the room at a collection of highly skillful and intelligent adults who all work on a world where speaking two or three languages competently enough to function successfully is the norm.

I would have to agree with them—in this part of the world speaking only English is certainly not enough? Will being multi-lingual be a requirement for our children’s future?

Whew! What a big change!

It is really hard to believe this but Dave and I have now been living in Tunisia, North Africa for a month. We arrived on the 7 Aug and actually haven’t looked back since that day. If you are not too sure where we are, Tunisia is on the north African coast wedged between Algeria and Libya.

What I am amazed about is how quickly we have assimilated into this lifestyle. When we arrived it was extremely hot, almost furnace-like, however this week it has definitely cooled which is more to my liking.

Our welcome here by the school personnel was quite remarkable; we were met at the airport, taken shopping and handed some start up currency. It really did seem that nothing was too much trouble. They were and are all great.

Our new house is lovely with plenty of space. It will be great when our own furniture arrives but this might not happen until Nov/Dec.

One of the other new teachers, a young girl called Tiffin lives across the road and guess what she likes  to run… we have been running together at 5.15 a..m

This big change feels good at the moment. It will be interesting to see whether this feeling lasts. I have lots to do at the school, so will need to get my best change management hat on….. not rushing at the moment, just working on those relationships.

An external evaluation!

We are expecting an ERO review this term! While many of us have been through this process numerous times now, it still somehow has the effect of creating a “oh my!” feeling of insecurity and nervousness in the pit of my stomach! Why is this? My reaction has caused me to reflect on how people in general react to any form of evaluation.
There are those who confidently move through an evaluative process without hesitating, with a “take me as you find me” approach and then there are those for whom any form of evaluative comment, no matter how small, rattles their world. On our staff, we have both ends of this continuum and many who are in between.
For me, the control freak aspect of my personality certainly shines out in this context, so in order to maintain control, I tend to over-prepare! Our last set of ERO reviewers wanted to take a photo of the sets of well-ordered and organized documents that we had laid out for them upon their arrival. Little did they know, it was really all about me feeling in control of the process.
Evaluation is good for us! Especially external evaluation! I know this, time to calm the nerves and get on with it!

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes | Video on TED.com

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes | Video on TED.com

Creating the Future of Learning

Picked this up from Core Ed--very interesting
http://blog.futureofed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020_forecast.pdf

Being Connected

Now that our school has grown to almost over the 700 mark, I have been finding it increasingly difficult, in fact down-right impossible to connect with every student. Long gone are the days when I could confidently say I know and recognise every one of them by name. However of late, I have had a go at “connecting on line” with our Y5/6 kids who all have an on-line learning journal. What a great concept! The children are using their learning journals to post an archive of their learning e.g. a photo or a movie of something that have been working on, then they enter a reflective comment about what it is all about and how they are going etc. Their teachers can also comment as can some chosen peers. For me, as the principal, reading and making my own comment on these has become quite insightful, suddenly I feel in touch with that student and most importantly I am now getting kids coming up to me saying “ thanks for contributing to my journal”. The task is not that onerous, but the rewards seem far-reaching. The power of technology!

What we measure flourishes!

Having attended APPA’s breakfast seminar yesterday where a panel provoked the audience to reflect upon “where are we with educating Maori kids?” and “why aren’t we doing better?” I certainly went away with some thinking to do. What caught my attention the most was the idea that in many schools, our’s included we measure the success of a Maori student’s progress by measuring them in a very “white” space. We want them to be the same as every other student in our school—literate and numerate—this seems ok on the surface. However we should also want them to be successful in their ‘maoriness”. We want them to be confident connected actively involved lifelong learners as Maori kids, (this sounds familiar). The trouble at the moment is we don’t focus on this, we focus on where they are as readers, writers and number-crunchers.
My thoughts are that for all kids—maori and non-maori, the narrowness of being measured in literacy and numeracy is exactly that—narrow. It does not tell the whole story—it does not reflect the student’s capacity to live in the real world. What we measure flourishes—we must balance our measurement structures! Lots of food for thought!
My next step is to talk to our maori kids—what does a successful maori kid look like? I will be interested in what they tell me.

Negotiating or Bargaining?

I recently attended a 2 day course on the power of negotiation. It was an interesting experience firstly as my fellow course goers were all people who work outside of the education world—this in itself can be refreshing. Secondly the content was of interest in that everyone’s nature tendency when placed in a situation requiring negotiation, most people resort to “bargaining”. My thoughts were how true this is and how destructive it can be. The situations where you “sell” something to employees for instance with the pay-back being less of something else, in other words you bargain your way into getting others to do something they don’t want to do.
According to the course provider, negotiation is much more about both parties understanding each other’s perspective and working together to reach solutions. Is this unrealistic? I’m not sure. I do know that over my years as a principal I have done quite a lot of bargaining—is this ok? Lots of food for thought.

That sense of care

What an age since I have contributed to this blog!! Time to get going again. The start of 2011 has been an interesting one for me as I experienced for the first time a very real health scare. All is well but it certainly was a challenging couple of months.
Looking back now it was a time when I got to actually experience that sense of belonging to a workplace where care and support for each other is valued and lived out in a myriad of small but not insignificant ways. Although at times such as this, it is the love and support of one’s family and closest friends that matters most; it was indeed a heart-warming experience to feel the care of colleagues and work-mates as well.
As a school leader, I have always known that fostering this sense of care within the school staff is important, but in all honesty, I am not sure how high up the priority list I valued it. My own experience has now taught me that actions do speak louder than words and visits, phone calls, texts and emails matter when a staff member is not themselves. Parents under stress, can also appreciate that call that I might once have left justifying to myself that someone else will be implementing the care. In a big institution this can be demanding, however not impossible, where there’s a will there’s a way! Lots of food for thought.

The little things don't really matter!

Gosh doesn’t a massive event like the Canterbury Earthquake suddenly jolt everyone back to that which is truly important which family, friends and colleagues—ha tangata, ha tangata, ha tangata! This week at school we should all be going a little gaga—the IT has been down most of the week, we are shifting all of the resources around the school to make way for a big new build, the school production which sees 700+ kids all participating on the stage is only a week away and it hasn’t stopped raining!!! However, I would have to say in light of events down south, everyone has remained calm, smiled there way through the week and above all propped each other up. There is something uniquely special about groups of adults working alongside each other, for the benefit of the greater good. Well down team!

Ned Hermann

I was recently involved in an exercise where a group of us assessed our own thinking preferences via the Ned Hermann brain dominance instrument (HBDI www.hbdi.com/ Many will know this as the colours self-assessment method, whereby your result is either strongly blue ( logical and analytical), yellow (creative and holistic), green ( structured and sequential) or lastly red ( relational and emotional). Although there is a lot more to it than this simple analysis, the results do actually point to the manner in which you prefer to think, react and act. Of the 4 of us involved, we all agreed that the pictures created of each individual were quite true to form. We enjoyed discussing together what this all meant for ourselves as a group—our strengths and where we might be lacking. The exercise was facilitated expertly, so that no-one style felt superior or inferior to the other—always a concern with these types of activities. In fact the conversation around how when under stress a person resorts to acting even more within their preference drew out information that was insightful for us to understand about each other. Great stuff!

Leading Change!

Constantly I am reminded that real change happens in a school setting only when everyone buys into whatever the proposal is to be. At present we are revisiting where we are all at with what we call the Powerful Learning process (our take on Inquiry). The teachers are all at different stages in their own understanding and therefore implementation, with only a few feeling really at ease and comfortable with what we are trying to achieve. This week’s PD session seemed to go round and round with not that much progress, only a lot of talk. Frustrating as it is, I need to remind myself that this is good—the talk is progressive, everyone is involved and I am confident that the end result will be a good one. Engaging everyone’s ideas can be long-winded but it is worth it!

Sir Ken speaks

Success at last!

Isn’t it great when a few majors all come together and actually work!! At school recently some of our critical “change management” steps have been implemented successfully and it’s all worked well, even better than I would have predicted. Each of the events have been a long time coming with lots and lots of effort going into building up our capacity to enable this to happen. It is a delight to see it all come to fruition. All of our kids have led their very own student-led conference, sharing their learning with their parents without their teacher being present. To us this was a major line in the sand—after years of talking about moving the locus of control in our classrooms, this proved that it can actually happen. Secondly our mid year reports went out on-line this time, rather than in the traditional hard copy—another smallish step, which has very big ramifications. Thirdly our trial group of 6 classrooms are striding ahead with our new e-portfolios, another exciting venture.
In all of these cases, the greatest thing is the excitement that they have generated with the staff—they are their successes and the desire the loudest of accolades.

Great PD for all

We had an absolutely fabulous PD session at school last week, focussing in on ensuring that everyone (30+ teachers and a couple of TAs as well) were comfortable making movies for themselves. Everyone, including myself, was put in the position of the learner, given the equipment required, a purpose to choose from and most importantly 12 support people who were students from our Y6 classes. You could almost feel the tension in the air as our enthusiastic AP set up the experience—no group work today, no excuses—everyone was to make a 100 second movie in the 3 hour slot and everyone had to push themselves into a situation where they would be stretching what they already knew. This meant that the technically able had to learn something new and the more reserved of us had to actually do it—for some this was a first! The kids were amazing—patience plus!
Lifelong learning was really to the fore—perseverence when things went wrong, risk-taking for everyone in front of each other, support that was just in time and heaps and heaps of laughs and fun! At the end of it all, it was smiles all round and lots of people feeling very very proud of themselves.
On reflection it was an interesting adult learning experience—not so much talking, lots of doing and creating—interesting to consider when one thinks about our students experiences in the classroom.

National Standards

Whilst I have been working hard to not spend unnecessary time and energy around debating the pros and cons of our new national standards, it seems that it is a hard topic to escape from. I have been in 3 principals’ meetings this week where it was the only subject of discussion and visitors to our school today asked me outright for my opinion. So what do I think?
As always in debates such as this one, there is merit on both sides of the coin. While I join with many of my colleagues in my nervousness about the consequences of such a system, in my own personal experience as a school principal the concept of standards (or a more favourable word—expectations) has actually resulted in overall school improvement.
Yes it is true that the experiences in the UK and the US are not great and all of us should take heed of the lessons to be learned. Yes it is true that the standards will not be totally valid nor 100% reliable—this is exactly why they should not be called standards. However, having lived with our own school-based expectations for the past 10 years and having reported using a 5 point scale, based on these expectations, I would have to say that there have been some positives around this practice. While our own system was definitely not a “pure science”—it did trigger 2 positive consequences—the simple act of naming where each child was at, sharpened each teacher’s practice and the use of the generated data affected the manner in which school-wide decisions related to resourcing and funding were made.
If only a version of this experience could occur across the country, then all of our children would be better for it. However and this is a big however, this would need to occur within an overall positive learning community, not one where all of the participants are polarized around opposite points of view. What a shame all of the various stakeholders across our very small country could not have got together to work out a way forward. Let’s hope that there is still space for this to occur.

A Graduation Experience

Participated in my own capping ceremony yesterday and what a great time we all had. It is interesting to reflect upon the experience, especially the question of whether all that pomp and ceremony is relevant in this day and age. It would be easy to say no, there is no connection in today’s fast-paced, digital world to the historic rituals of trencher donning in gowns and hoods. However after participating in such an event, I would have to say that for a brief period of time to engage oneself in this world of academia was indeed a thrill. There seemed to be something really heart-warming about following the traditions of those who have gone before, engaging in a context that has survived many a year. It caused me to reflect on the importance of the rituals we follow in our school—such events as assemblies, welcomes, farewells and traditions that have become embedded into the fabric of school life. They do have their place; they form a sense of timelessness and security for students and adults alike. This is a good reminder to reflect upon the next time a school practice is terminated just because we’ve being doing it for a while. Traditions and rituals are about belonging, not to be under-rated in importance.

Adult Learning

What a fabulous example of effective adult learning I experienced on Fri/ Sat at the AppleITSC Conference here in Auckland. The 2 days sped by with my engagement on full steam for the whole time. One could not help but reflect on what it was that made it such a successful learning experience and how this could or should impact on future adult professional learning experiences that I organize here at school.
Firstly there was a well balanced combination of input from experts and thought-provokers, time to experiment and “get ones hands dirty” so to speak and also time to chat and network with others around you. Catering for different learning styles was well managed and balanced within the physical set up of the space provided. Large bean bags, circular tables and the like were mixed together with couches and singular seats to cater for all. Keyboards and i-phones clicked away as others spoke acknowledging the fact that engagement does not always mean silent eye contact.
Sessions where the learners could make their own choices as to what they wanted to focus on were the norm, allowing everyone to pick and choose their own learning needs. Most importantly experts were on hand to provide support and advice whenever required. This was done for even the ignoramus types like myself, who may have been too embarrassed to ask in other contexts.
Congrats to the organizers, it was time well spent! I will think hard on it, when planning our next PD.

Developing resilient students

Back to blogging finally! As I have been experiencing the merry-go-round ride of trying to sell ones house, I have also been reflecting on the importance of resiliency as a valuable human competency. That ability to pick your-self up when the going is not so good and keep on task or stay focused no matter what appears to me to be in high demand and of extreme importance in today’s world. When I think about those around me who seem to be making a success of life, I am in awe of the sense of resilience that they seem to have as an embedded characteristic—how is it developed? And why do some people seem to have more of it than others?
At our school, we are intentionally going about ensuring that our students learn how to be competent citizens of the future world—we focus them on what we have called the qualities of lifelong learning—questioning, making connections, persevering, sets goals and plans, reflects and takes risks. But what about the ability to be resilienct—some of us are wondering whether it is missing. Is it something that can be taught?
At our high decile school, we often observe the phenomena of “helicopter parents” those that hover so closely over their children protecting them from all that could do harm. Are these the same children who never get to participate in the experience of having to be resilient. I am interested in a book written by New Zealand authors, Tania Roxborough and Kim Stephenson, Raising Resilient Children, however before that I need to practise what I preach and be resilient and sell my house!!!