Lead Like A Pirate - Week 2

Prompt #2
LEAD
Pick one task that takes up an inordinate amount of your time. Apply this LEAD acronym and reflect on how you can change this.

LEAD

Leverage Systems - the systems we create have to make sure we focus back on our core business, the children.  We were spending a lot of time doing assessments and evaluating the results.  I challenged the staff to look at all our assessments and tell me the ones that were making a difference to the children.  From this we were able to cut our assessment schedule in half.

Evaluate the Impact - the impact has been now teachers now have more time and can really focus in on the children and looking at their strengths.

Activate a Team - it was easy to activate the team around this as they felt they were assessing for the sake of it and it had no real value.  

Delete, Delete, Delete - by deleting a lot of assessment it has had the benefit of reducing the time I was spending looking at this assessment and ensuring the staff had followed our assessment schedule.

I now need to look at other things we do in the school and apply LEAD to them

Lead like a Pirate

I have just finished reading Disobedient Teaching by Welby Ings, where the author talked about the transformative powers that teachers who think and act have, to now reading Lead Like A Prirate where the authors in the opening chapter talks about passion and how that makes schools come alive. Both books talk about people and how they are the most important thing, not National Standards and testing, it is people.  I have chosen Promt 1 to reflect on as it is about people, myself and everyone in our school.

Prompt #1 Choose one of the passions that Beth and Shelley share (pg 5/6) and reflect on it. Do you share the passion with them? Why? Why not?

'We are passionate about instilling the belief that every educator has the power and the ability to help students - even the students whom others have written off - accomplish amazing things!

As a Catholic Educator I believe that the students 'whom others have written off' are the ones we should be looking out for.  Catholic school were orginally set up for this purpose and we need to get back to this as we have a lot to offer these students.  

This can be the hard path to take, as from personal experience a lot of people question why you are allowing them into your school.  

My passion is around ensuring everyone gets a quality education and a great start to life.  I am paasionate about making sure these children have a great experience so they know that there is always some there for them and hopefully later on in life they see the Church as a caring safe place they can turn too.

So in summing up I do share the passion Beth and Shelley have and I believe we have to give the students who everyone else writes off a go. 

I will finish with this Maori proverb,

He aha te mea nui o te ao
What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
It is the people, it is the people, it is the people

Learn Create Share

I have been reflecting on our curriculum and how 'Learn Create Share' fits in to this. 

I thought I had the Learn and Create part sorted but have been working on the Share part.  I believe the 'share' has been hard for me to grasp as I struggle to share my own learning on things like Blogger.  

I came to the conclusion this morning that maybe I had not got the 'Learn' part as my struggles came from me not learning new ways to share my learning.

As a principal I am supposed to lead the learning, so I need to do just that, as I see how powerful 'Learn Create Share' is for our leaners.

I have now come to the conclusion that Learn Create Share drives our curriculum not the other way around.

The sharing is the part that makes this so powerful, as you have used your new learning and shared this with everyone.

And the journey begins

I have not blogged before so I am starting this journey as I encourage the staff and students to become bloggers.
After visiting the Manaiakalani Trust in Auckland I saw how blogs were a great way for our students to share what we they are learning with their families here and around the world. I witnessed the children getting excited about people commenting on their work, children sharing ideas with each other and children wanting to learn more about their world.
I believe this is one tool we can use to truely engage our students in their learning.
Now we start on this exciting journey.

I have lookresearched why we should blog and found this link to a good article on why to Blog, have a read and see the benefits of blogging.

http://howtostartablogonline.net/why-blog/

Manaiakalani Outreach Programme

What is Manaiakalani Outreach Programme (MOP)?
"Manaiakalani Outreach is an opportunity for school clusters to partner with Manaiakalani Trust (MET) to embrace the 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy along with its digital infrastructures and affordances. Outreach focuses on New Zealand school children, their families and whanau in challenged, stressed and isolated communities, particularly but not exclusively, in decile 1 and 2 school areas."