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