My son Joal sent this on to me. It's interesting to see the growth of social media in India (and in Mumbai where I live).
Social Media Usage in India - An infographic by the team at IndianDad.com
If your teaching practice is not having an effect on your students' performance, you must change.How does Hattie propose that teachers change? For a start he advocates working more collaboratively and talking about teaching (not about curriculum, assessment and students).
Competition, not cooperation, lies at the core of the educational process. Cooperation, in fact, is usually associated with cheating.Life, however, is often not a competition. More often it is important to cooperate with others, and yet the Win/Lose mentality fostered in schools works against that. This is what I'm thinking about right now: if we know that the most positive way forward is Win/Win, how can we change schools to allow all students to win?
We inspire all of our students to continuous inquiry, empowering them with the skills, courage, optimism, and integrity to pursue their dreams and enhance the lives of others.Integrity is an important word that covers honesty and acting according to your values and principles. It is basically the value that we place on ourselves. If we act with integrity we walk the talk, and we are able to do this because we know we are in charge and that we can change the things we don't like. We can imagine something better and have a vision of what we can become. Stephen Covey writes about being principle-centered and says "You can't become principle-centered without a vision of and a focus on the unique contribution that is yours to make."
Even in the midst of people or circumstances that seem to ignore the principles, we can be secure in the knowledge that principles are bigger than people or circumstances. Even more important, we can be secure in the knowledge that we can validate them in our own lives, by our own experience.We never know what life will bring us, and a path that we thought was a good one can change overnight and we find the things we thought were important to us really count for nothing. What I have found is that it's very easy to get rid of things, it can also be easy to walk away from people, especially once we come to realize that those people are bad for us or for those we love. The things that remain are core values and principles, things you don't want to compromise on. Covey goes on to write:
The personal power that comes from principle-centred living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviours and actions of others, or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.Amen to that, I say.
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.This is why when you question a manager about a decision the response is often a negative one - their focus is on keeping busy and moving forward to accomplish a task that someone else has assigned to them. They don't want to deal with questions about why they are doing it. The leader is the one who can stand back and say "no this is the wrong direction - going this way won't let us achieve our vision." Leadership is so important because, as Covey writes:
We are more in need of a vision or destination and a compass (a set of principles or directions) and less in need of a road map .... an inner compass will always give us direction.Management is important, but, as Covey points out, efficient management without effective leadership is like "straightening deck chairs on the Titanic." Leadership is vital because without it the managers are simply doing "busy work" and getting nowhere fast.
"Begin with the end in mind" is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation for all things.He goes on to give examples about planning a trip first and then taking the trip second, or planning how to plant a garden first in your mind or on paper, and then physically designing and planting the garden. Covey writes that if we do not become responsible for our first creations then we empower other people:
We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people's agendas.I definitely agree with this - and this is something that we also need to teach our students that they need to start thinking and dreaming and creating their own futures.
We inspire all of our students to continuous inquiry, empowering them with the skills, courage, optimism, and integrity to pursue their dreams and enhance the lives of others.I'm so proud to be a part of this school!
You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.Last week it was one of my colleagues in the IT Department's last day. He has been given the opportunity to become a teacher in a school in the Middle East and he is moving there in a couple of weeks. Despite the fact that his last official day was Wednesday, I saw him in school on Thursday too, working on setting up an online course for our new teachers. He talked about his 8 years at ASB and how happy he has been to be a member of this community. He talked about the experience and memories that will stay with him for the rest of his life. He talked about how he has grown as a person and as a professional during the time he spent here. He referred to ASB as "a family".
They are fun loving. They live for the moment. They like bright things and happy people. They like to follow strong leadership as long as the leaders treat them nicely. They love a sense of humor in someone. They are very spontaneous. They are not very mindful of being on time. They are forgetful. They spend their money freely (don’t save much at all). They love to travel and have adventures. They love to be outside in the sunshine. They love being social and meeting new people.I actually agree with most of this, and I notice the word spontaneous is in there too.
We must look at the lens though which we see the world, as well as the world we see, and the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.This quote comes from the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". I picked up this book again recently and wondered if the habits apply equally to highly effective schools. However before I get onto that, I want to write about the difference between the character ethic and the personality ethic, which Covey also discusses in his book. The character ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living and that success comes from integrating these into their character. These characteristics are things like integrity, humility, courage, justice and so on (some of which appear to align well with the IB Learner Profile). Recently, however, the character ethic appears to have been eclipsed by the personality ethic, with public image, attitudes, behaviours and so on being more important to success. One of the joys of arriving at ASB last summer was our very first all school orientation meeting. In previous schools I'd had to listen to boring speeches about how "excellent" the IB or AP scores were (even when they weren't really very impressive at all in some places) and lots of hype about how the school was "one of the best international schools in the world" (which plainly wasn't true). Last year was very different. We talked about our core values. We talked about practice, perseverance and reflection. We talked about being thought leaders and change agents.