Lifelong Learner: 2016

Sunday, 11 September 2016

Relationships and Leadership

Open-to-Learning Conversations - Relationships and Trust

Viviane Robinson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_l5-HKIR1s

Viviane Robinson talks about the importance of trust when having open to learning conversations with teachers. I agree that trust is crucial to building positive relationships with staff. Teachers trust leaders on the basis of their implicit judgements of daily interaction, doing work, and how they treat people in doing the work. It is difficult to trust those they don’t see as being competent, or those who do not do the difficult stuff.

Viviane refers to education as being a team business, she goes on to talk about goal setting, and strategic resourcing. She talks about the importance of trust. The risks that team members will take is dependent on the way that leaders treat people. The teacher has the most significant impact on student learning, and the teacher is impacted on by the effect of leadership creating the conditions within the school. I think this is a really important point that we as a leadership team should keep uppermost in our minds to ensure we create an environment for positive growth in our teachers and school.

Results based evaluation is an unsatisfactory approach to the evaluation of teaching quality. The bottom line for leaders and teachers is the difference they make to student learning, not the students’ absolute level of achievement (p 89 reading). I believe this is an important point, which of course goes against the government National Standard tick box approach.

Saturday, 27 August 2016

Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck & Susan Mackie 29 August 2016

Today our leadership team attended growth mindset professional development led by Susan Mackie. Before the day we were given some of Dweck's youtube clips to preview.

The Journey to a Growth Mindset: Carol Dweck's Live Keynote Presentation

This year in our school wide PD we have read a few readings about Fixed and Growth mindset, which had primarily been a you are or you aren't. After watching some of the clips it was interesting to see that we are really often in the middle with some aspects. The challenge is to identify areas in which to change one's fixed approach.

The Science of Character is an interesting clip about ways that we can continue to cultivate our character.

Is what I am about to do a reflection of who I am and what I want to be?

watch your thoughts: they become words

watch your words: they become actions

watch your actions: they become habits

watch your habits: they become your character

watch your character: it becomes your destiny

frank outlaw

In preparation for the day we were asked to complete I WANT TO BE....

My response is that I want to be a teacher who is able to grow and inspire my students!

After taking 8 pages of notes from the day, some of the main points I want to reflect on are

What are my strengths? How can they be cultivated
Explore own mindset triggers - how to respond to everyday challenges and demands to help us become the people we want to be
How to foster success through growth mind practices - Give back zest for learning – develop abilities through effort, strategies, everybody can get smarter approach

The growth mindset approach is A tool to help students learn and as teachers we have to ask ourselves how to make that journey to a growth mindset successful. We are looking to probe for understanding rather than saying 'try harder'....ask what strategies have you tried? What will you try next?

1. Learn

2. Work hard, use strategies, seek help to learn,

3. Learn from mistakes