So the scene is set; the seed has been sown. Now there is just the patient task of nurturing our ideas; feeding them with love, watering them with time and giving them plenty of sun as you tell different people about it :)
Analogy aside, inspiration hit me like a tonne of bricks after seeing "The Greatest Showman" where I couldn't get over at how much P.T. Barnum's life story was a blagh blagh for leadership (can't think of the word right now but didn't want that to be a blocker for the rest of my post!). It made me think of my friend who has just opened a Cafe here in Palmy. She used all of the leadership tools, skills, dispositions and attitudes to bring her vision to life! I also had a thought to contact Freyberg High school, our local high school within our CoL, to see if they could help us out. The universe heard my plan and organised everyone's schedule around this impeccably! After listening to my friend's talk, we unpacked some of her messages together on a shared doc. It was so beautiful what the kids really tuned into. I was so proud of the connections they made. I was even on the verge of tears...
Next, we were joined by the Head boy and girl and the Deputy head boy and girl from Freyberg. Well, I wasn't crying before, I was now. The leadership messages these young adults shared was energising. Wow! Below is the image that they shared that helped them to remember what to do when you needed to speak in front of an audience.
A super inspiring morning! I finished the session with the comment: "leadership is not some sort of magic super power that when we find out about, we keep and hold onto it. As leaders, we need to spread the message around and create more leaders!"
So, spread this message! He Whakatauki: Inā kei te mohio koe ko wai koe, I anga mai koe I hea, kei te mohio koe, kei te anga atu ki hea - If you know who you are and where you are from, then you will know where you are going. At Russell Street School, Leadership has been a concept we have been loosely following for a number of years. We have a belief that by the time children are Year 5 and 6 they will all have an opportunity to develop leadership through a responsibility in a specific area. Some areas we have improved are
So what might this look like?
As we have increased our understanding of leadership, there is a real need to analyse what this looks like at Russell Street School (leadership team, teaching team, support staff team and learners)
and thus a focused inquiry into exploring leadership is called for. My personal growing view is that leadership is about facilitating change towards a vision. It's not just about organising and doing stuff. This is "managing". Think about this for a moment. What's your vision? What is the "future you", you picture in your head when you close your eyes? My growing opinion is that we might have multiple visions for ourselves: our vision for our families, our homes, our jobs, our bodies, our minds, our lifestyles, our souls, our weekends., you get the picture. These visions are our "why's", or our "purpose". For these visions to become a reality we need to make purposeful efforts towards them otherwise we are just scrambling around "doing stuff". So what's your why? Hautūtanga is a form of Leadership, it’s when every person is supported to discover their own true talents, skills and passions. So they can confidently captain their own waka as they explore the world around them.
Kia ora koutou! I feel I have not been able to blog in ages! It's ok, I know none of you missed me. You've all got your own lives and own selves and own families to get on with, I get it. But I missed it. Welcome back to me.
A little bit of a 2017 windback / run down... The principal left at the end of term 1... I was promoted to AP for a term while the DP was acting principal etc... I learnt how shitty a job organising relieving is... honestly, all the teachers out there who organise relievers for their school - I take my hat off to you - that job sucks! I read The Hidden Lives Of Learners, Disobedient Teaching, Empower, Innovator's Mindset... A colleague lost a loved one... I led all the Kapa Haka and picked up all leadership extra appraisals... roll on term 3... Out of the frying pan and into the fire... from AP to leading the whole school with production... welcoming our new principal... term 4 we lost our DP and AP... AND... I didn't mention how crazy my class was? On paper, my class was a recipe for disaster... the amount of learners with extra challenges, outside support agencies... 2017 was an emotional, physical, spiritual and mental whirlwind. Hence why I haven't blogged properly in ages. For the full impact of the rest of the post, you have to click on the video! 26 seconds of epicness!
(Here's my new class name - Room 14 is "4Team" - bit of a smash up of Minecraft and iMovie)
Retreat 2018 / Pick your own Appraisal pathway
Among many things, our new principal led us through a session introducing a new appraisal system. The thinking behind the new approach came from an amalgamation of Empower, Innovator's Mindset and Katie Martin. You can read more of this thinking here.
This was powerful for me because it has helped the penny drop on a few wonderings I've been wrestling with for a while as seen here in some posts from 2016:
https://fuse711.blogspot.co.nz/2016/11/individualised-learner-profiles.html https://fuse711.blogspot.co.nz/2016/05/what-to-do-with-early-finishers.html "So like Simon Cowell says on Idol or Britain's Got Talent, choose a song and make it your own. Let's allow our learners to choose a task and make it their own." @fuse711 Exactly! So the whole "Pick your own learning pathway" was born. I don't know how it's going to work yet. It will work alongside an idea I want to try out from the "Walker Learning" program (see Lytton Street School) where they had a group of focus kids every day. The Walker Learning approach used this focus kid group for something slightly different but I want to use it in the following ways:
https://goo.gl/forms/nqiXGUJwg6wNs4uB3 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfQhO192zoHMYMKCMeMLFbscjZIy7ZkOK-gRSJLEkJEOcigjw/viewform |
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