OMG folks I somehow got myself elected as a member of the local independent government primary school board.
I can't resist being involved again.
I am all agog finding out what it means for a Principal of this relatively new beast the independent government school. I hope that it is not another of those ill-founded changes to the Western Australian government school scene that will fall in a heap 5 or so years down the track. As a government school Principal I did not experience this independent status but nonetheless felt incredibly free to act in the best interests of the education of the students of my school community.
We'll see. Must not jump to conclusions.
Its all good fun!
May the Force be with you!
GD
Wednesday, 18 April 2018
Tuesday, 13 February 2018
Any questions
Hi readers! I've poured out a lot of stuff on this blog about being an effective school principal most of it based on many years experience as a professional educator including being a school Principal.
I wondered if any reader out there had a question about being a Principal. Just set it up on an email to me or as a comment to this post.
I will be up front always and only comment, help, advise if I can.
The title of this blog shows the great joy and satisfaction I got from being an educator and especially a school Principal.
I look forward to assisting or sharing based on your comments and queries.
May the Force be with you!
GD
I wondered if any reader out there had a question about being a Principal. Just set it up on an email to me or as a comment to this post.
I will be up front always and only comment, help, advise if I can.
The title of this blog shows the great joy and satisfaction I got from being an educator and especially a school Principal.
I look forward to assisting or sharing based on your comments and queries.
May the Force be with you!
GD
Tuesday, 6 February 2018
Banning mobile phones in schools?
The Australian Federal Government Minister for Education wants to ban mobile phones in schools. The main concern is that even quite young students are posting undesirable images through their mobile phones onto social media.
I viewed a response to the Minister from a leader of the secondary (high) school Principals of New South Wales. He felt the Minister's view was too extreme citing examples of how mobile phones are used effectively in some schools to enhance the learning program.
If you are a Principal reader of this blog let me and the readers of this blog know through a comment or two on this post how mobile phones are controlled and used in your school. Being a Principal is not a requirement to make a comment as you may be a school educator in another postition in a school.
I look forward to your comments on this important media tool that is seriously a part of the lives of our students.
May the Force be with you!
GD
I viewed a response to the Minister from a leader of the secondary (high) school Principals of New South Wales. He felt the Minister's view was too extreme citing examples of how mobile phones are used effectively in some schools to enhance the learning program.
If you are a Principal reader of this blog let me and the readers of this blog know through a comment or two on this post how mobile phones are controlled and used in your school. Being a Principal is not a requirement to make a comment as you may be a school educator in another postition in a school.
I look forward to your comments on this important media tool that is seriously a part of the lives of our students.
May the Force be with you!
GD
Saturday, 3 February 2018
Parents need to know
It is so vital that parents have a detailed insight into their child's school.
My youngest granddaughter has just commenced at a new primary (elementary) school and I am pleased to report that I could generally tap into the details I wanted online. Their website previously left a lot to be desired, but now has been updated to be very informative. I was pleased to be able to read the Annual Report and to peruse academic results comparable across Australia in like schools. I was also able to know the curriculum that will be used in certain learning areas, although I would have liked a more comprehensive statement across all learning areas in this regard.
I would also loved to have seen statements to the effect that the school will never let any child who is having learning difficulties fall through the cracks. Added to this could have been a reassurance that should there be learning difficulties the parents will be notified immediately and become part of the solution.
Another area that should have received more emphasis was how the wellbeing of each child is to be catered for.
I am hoping that the school publishes teacher profiles in the first weeks of school.
The website could also have given a calendar of meetings for 2018 for key bodies like the Parents and Citizens Association.
I will watch with anticipation how the school orients my granddaughter into what is a new environment for her.
Overt term 1 it would be useful if parents are guided to online access to school policies about each learning area. I am being kind: it is vital that this occur.
We Principals know that we are in partnership with parents in the formal education of their offspring.
May the Force be with you!
GD
My youngest granddaughter has just commenced at a new primary (elementary) school and I am pleased to report that I could generally tap into the details I wanted online. Their website previously left a lot to be desired, but now has been updated to be very informative. I was pleased to be able to read the Annual Report and to peruse academic results comparable across Australia in like schools. I was also able to know the curriculum that will be used in certain learning areas, although I would have liked a more comprehensive statement across all learning areas in this regard.
I would also loved to have seen statements to the effect that the school will never let any child who is having learning difficulties fall through the cracks. Added to this could have been a reassurance that should there be learning difficulties the parents will be notified immediately and become part of the solution.
Another area that should have received more emphasis was how the wellbeing of each child is to be catered for.
I am hoping that the school publishes teacher profiles in the first weeks of school.
The website could also have given a calendar of meetings for 2018 for key bodies like the Parents and Citizens Association.
I will watch with anticipation how the school orients my granddaughter into what is a new environment for her.
Overt term 1 it would be useful if parents are guided to online access to school policies about each learning area. I am being kind: it is vital that this occur.
We Principals know that we are in partnership with parents in the formal education of their offspring.
May the Force be with you!
GD
Tuesday, 30 January 2018
Educating for the present and the future
Early in January 2018 I penned a post about STEM subjects. I've been reading some stuff and want to expand on this area.
One can think of a time in history when schooling was very classical and for the so called upper stratum of society. Gradually schooling came to be seen as a preparation for life inclusive of preparing for paid work that enabled one to satisfy the primary and secondary needs ( ......a bit of Maslow if my memory serves me.)
Technology was always there in various forms, but deductive reasoning tended over the eras to hold us back. Once inductive reasoning became dominant we surged. The industrial revolution was a big change. Eventually came electricity, anaesthetics, the telephone, combustion engines, cars, radios, aeroplanes, teletype machines and then in rapid succession: plastics, TV, computers, antibiotics, the internet, smart phones and more recently carbon fibre and robotics. I'm sure to have missed something but you get my drift.
As my readers know I became a teacher and eventually a school Principal, hence this blog. I can recall in the 1970s much talk of students being educated for jobs that at the time did not exist. However there was no sense of urgency as we were only then becoming caught up in the exponential advancement of modern technologies.
The very urgent catch cry today is that we are educating our young for jobs that are yet to come into existence or have arrived but will become rapidly more sophisticated.
Today I listened to a talk to the National Press Club of Australia with the topic being about a report: "Australia 2030 Prosperity Through Innovation"(I suggest you Google this.). The speaker noted that the report found that education (schooling) was a basis for innovation yet he indicated that Australia is falling behind comparable countries in science, maths and literacy. He stressed that this needed to be addressed. I have done so at length in previous posts with my underlying theme being a 'no gaps' approach to learning. This means in core subjects like maths and literacy ensuring that students do not move on to the new learning until they have mastered the prerequisites for it. I know of a few others who are of the same view, but worry that schools having to meet the demands of government sponsored compulsory testing in science, maths and literacy are under pressure not to be able to set up a 'no gaps' approach. Enough of this : see the previous posts for further very detailed information. You will see stuff about NAPLAN testing. Its not all bad news as the speaker had a lot to say about STEM subjects and recognised that schools are on to this including learning experiences in computer coding.
The speaker indicated that Australia needs to work hard to catch up to comparable countries as an innovator. He was optimistic and provided several case studies of Australian innovation including the just nominated Australian of the Year, Professor Michelle Simmons, who is leading a world class team to develop a quantum computer, which would cut down the time for solving various problems by a huge amount. He also indicated areas for improvement other than schools if Australia is to catch up.
We can return to the time when the horse and cart were replaced by the car. Now we see big companies like Rio Tinto using a fleet of driverless ore trucks in their iron ore mines in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Someone thousands of kms away a few persons controls the trucks.
They have just announced that they have over ten years moved one billion tons of ore with this autonomous haulage system (Harvey Ben, "Rio's driverless trucks reach one billion milestone", The West Australian, 30 January 2018, p42)
We have seen for years robots doing a lot of the assembly line jobs for car manufacture.
My big concern is that we may see a new literacy deficit looming in the computer IT area in schools. Can we assume that all kids will master the intricacies of coding?
Burgess writes (Burgess Melanie, "Strong jobs growth in STEM, tech", The West Australian, 31 January, 2018. p19) that research from Seek job finder site shows increasing advertised positions in jobs like:
In the information and communications industry the jobs increased for computer operators, software engineers and cyber security professionals.
The above information was tempered by the fact that mining and trades were the top-performing industries in the job market.
Thus one can see from the above areas where the jobs growth has arrived. The relatively new Australian National Curriculum fortunately has Digital and Design Technology sections containing learning experiences for students.
Other areas where humans just have to get about finding solutions are in food and water supplies for a growing world population. Maybe, dare I say it, the World just has to ask how many people can it support?
Imagine a world where humans are required to work less and less owing to technological advancements yet each person is living a lot longer because of medical advancements. Imagine being a teacher when thinking students confront you with this issue.
You are probably exhausted reading my all too shallow statement about the future. I am of the view that as a school Principal I would need to be on top of all this information if I am to truly lead a modern school community. I would also need to bring my staff members along with me. Teachers have regularly been criticised as persons who move from school to teacher training then back into schools without developing a broad knowledge of the wider world of work. At least the contemporary teacher is well versed in the world of computing and understands its value. However many teachers fear science and maths as it was not to their liking at school. The speaker mentioned above indicated that many teachers of school mathematics have no formal training in that area. As long as I have been an educator we have been short of maths teachers. If we are to meet the demands of the future we may have to pay trained maths teachers a higher rate to join the teaching vocation. The Local Hero in the Australian of the Year Awards for 2018 is I am pleased to say a very innovative maths teacher who now has a world wide web and You Tube audience.
Finally I observe that is has never been easy to convince secondary school students that they are learning this or that in readiness for the world of work whatever that will be for them. Teenagers tend to want more immediate and observable goals. It requires splendid teachers to convince their charges that what they are learning now will benefit them in the future.
While being up to date as best we can about the future we as school community leaders need to be sure that our students are happy and safe in the present. As they grow and develop they have many questions and often some of these become issues. The wellbeing of our students day by day is paramount.
As I noted in my previous post on STEM subjects I would want my school community to have a very strong and compulsory ethics program that runs the ethical ruler over some of the issues of the here and now and of the future. We are still managing to kill each other in the hundreds of thousands in all sorts of hideous ways. We still have millions of people dying of hunger. We still have the fundamentalist intolerance of various religions and races and all the consequences of the hatreds that they breed. We still pollute our Earth with reckless abandon and the developed nations utilise the majority of the resources available.
Oh boy I am weary just thinking about all of the above but I cannot resile from what it means for me and you as school Principals. We have to be on top of it all.
May the Force be with you!
GD
One can think of a time in history when schooling was very classical and for the so called upper stratum of society. Gradually schooling came to be seen as a preparation for life inclusive of preparing for paid work that enabled one to satisfy the primary and secondary needs ( ......a bit of Maslow if my memory serves me.)
Technology was always there in various forms, but deductive reasoning tended over the eras to hold us back. Once inductive reasoning became dominant we surged. The industrial revolution was a big change. Eventually came electricity, anaesthetics, the telephone, combustion engines, cars, radios, aeroplanes, teletype machines and then in rapid succession: plastics, TV, computers, antibiotics, the internet, smart phones and more recently carbon fibre and robotics. I'm sure to have missed something but you get my drift.
As my readers know I became a teacher and eventually a school Principal, hence this blog. I can recall in the 1970s much talk of students being educated for jobs that at the time did not exist. However there was no sense of urgency as we were only then becoming caught up in the exponential advancement of modern technologies.
The very urgent catch cry today is that we are educating our young for jobs that are yet to come into existence or have arrived but will become rapidly more sophisticated.
Today I listened to a talk to the National Press Club of Australia with the topic being about a report: "Australia 2030 Prosperity Through Innovation"(I suggest you Google this.). The speaker noted that the report found that education (schooling) was a basis for innovation yet he indicated that Australia is falling behind comparable countries in science, maths and literacy. He stressed that this needed to be addressed. I have done so at length in previous posts with my underlying theme being a 'no gaps' approach to learning. This means in core subjects like maths and literacy ensuring that students do not move on to the new learning until they have mastered the prerequisites for it. I know of a few others who are of the same view, but worry that schools having to meet the demands of government sponsored compulsory testing in science, maths and literacy are under pressure not to be able to set up a 'no gaps' approach. Enough of this : see the previous posts for further very detailed information. You will see stuff about NAPLAN testing. Its not all bad news as the speaker had a lot to say about STEM subjects and recognised that schools are on to this including learning experiences in computer coding.
The speaker indicated that Australia needs to work hard to catch up to comparable countries as an innovator. He was optimistic and provided several case studies of Australian innovation including the just nominated Australian of the Year, Professor Michelle Simmons, who is leading a world class team to develop a quantum computer, which would cut down the time for solving various problems by a huge amount. He also indicated areas for improvement other than schools if Australia is to catch up.
We can return to the time when the horse and cart were replaced by the car. Now we see big companies like Rio Tinto using a fleet of driverless ore trucks in their iron ore mines in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Someone thousands of kms away a few persons controls the trucks.
They have just announced that they have over ten years moved one billion tons of ore with this autonomous haulage system (Harvey Ben, "Rio's driverless trucks reach one billion milestone", The West Australian, 30 January 2018, p42)
We have seen for years robots doing a lot of the assembly line jobs for car manufacture.
My big concern is that we may see a new literacy deficit looming in the computer IT area in schools. Can we assume that all kids will master the intricacies of coding?
Burgess writes (Burgess Melanie, "Strong jobs growth in STEM, tech", The West Australian, 31 January, 2018. p19) that research from Seek job finder site shows increasing advertised positions in jobs like:
- Maths, stats and information sciences;
- Environmental, earth and geo sciences;
- Biotechnology and genetics.
In the information and communications industry the jobs increased for computer operators, software engineers and cyber security professionals.
The above information was tempered by the fact that mining and trades were the top-performing industries in the job market.
Thus one can see from the above areas where the jobs growth has arrived. The relatively new Australian National Curriculum fortunately has Digital and Design Technology sections containing learning experiences for students.
Other areas where humans just have to get about finding solutions are in food and water supplies for a growing world population. Maybe, dare I say it, the World just has to ask how many people can it support?
Imagine a world where humans are required to work less and less owing to technological advancements yet each person is living a lot longer because of medical advancements. Imagine being a teacher when thinking students confront you with this issue.
You are probably exhausted reading my all too shallow statement about the future. I am of the view that as a school Principal I would need to be on top of all this information if I am to truly lead a modern school community. I would also need to bring my staff members along with me. Teachers have regularly been criticised as persons who move from school to teacher training then back into schools without developing a broad knowledge of the wider world of work. At least the contemporary teacher is well versed in the world of computing and understands its value. However many teachers fear science and maths as it was not to their liking at school. The speaker mentioned above indicated that many teachers of school mathematics have no formal training in that area. As long as I have been an educator we have been short of maths teachers. If we are to meet the demands of the future we may have to pay trained maths teachers a higher rate to join the teaching vocation. The Local Hero in the Australian of the Year Awards for 2018 is I am pleased to say a very innovative maths teacher who now has a world wide web and You Tube audience.
Finally I observe that is has never been easy to convince secondary school students that they are learning this or that in readiness for the world of work whatever that will be for them. Teenagers tend to want more immediate and observable goals. It requires splendid teachers to convince their charges that what they are learning now will benefit them in the future.
While being up to date as best we can about the future we as school community leaders need to be sure that our students are happy and safe in the present. As they grow and develop they have many questions and often some of these become issues. The wellbeing of our students day by day is paramount.
As I noted in my previous post on STEM subjects I would want my school community to have a very strong and compulsory ethics program that runs the ethical ruler over some of the issues of the here and now and of the future. We are still managing to kill each other in the hundreds of thousands in all sorts of hideous ways. We still have millions of people dying of hunger. We still have the fundamentalist intolerance of various religions and races and all the consequences of the hatreds that they breed. We still pollute our Earth with reckless abandon and the developed nations utilise the majority of the resources available.
Oh boy I am weary just thinking about all of the above but I cannot resile from what it means for me and you as school Principals. We have to be on top of it all.
May the Force be with you!
GD
Monday, 29 January 2018
Feeling safe at school
In this blog I've written a lot about student wellbeing and in my list of school effectiveness criteria it is number 1 (see previous posts in this blog).
In my local newspaper today there are the the details of a comprehensive report tapping into whether students of non government and government schools in Western Australia feel safe. While it is reported that most do there are still worrying numbers who don't.
Every student when they enter the school gates each day should feel safe and respected. It must be part of the School Development Plan (see other posts in this blog) that the wellbeing of students be regularly measured and the results acted upon immediately if there are students who feel unsafe and not respected. With a nation-wide emphasis on student wellbeing in school there are devices for such measurement out there in internet land. I am sure also that graduate Schools of Education in Australian universities would be only too happy to devote time to assisting schools to research the wellbeing of the students.
Across Australia students are returning to school for the commencement of the 2018 academic year. Principals will be giving a special focus to students new to their school such as the little ones up to those entering their first secondary (high) school year.
Student wellbeing has its frontline in the classrooms and effective Principals will be educating their teachers to recognise this responsibility daily and giving them tools to ensure wellbeing. This attitude needs to be part of the school culture where 'culture' is defined as the way things happen around this community.
A special thought is given to Principals who are having their first day in the job. How exciting and challenging. I am reminded of the story of the person saying to their partner that they had butterflies in the stomach and felt too ill and unable to go to school. The partner replied: "My dear you have to go as you are the school Principal."
May the Force be with you!
GD
In my local newspaper today there are the the details of a comprehensive report tapping into whether students of non government and government schools in Western Australia feel safe. While it is reported that most do there are still worrying numbers who don't.
Every student when they enter the school gates each day should feel safe and respected. It must be part of the School Development Plan (see other posts in this blog) that the wellbeing of students be regularly measured and the results acted upon immediately if there are students who feel unsafe and not respected. With a nation-wide emphasis on student wellbeing in school there are devices for such measurement out there in internet land. I am sure also that graduate Schools of Education in Australian universities would be only too happy to devote time to assisting schools to research the wellbeing of the students.
Across Australia students are returning to school for the commencement of the 2018 academic year. Principals will be giving a special focus to students new to their school such as the little ones up to those entering their first secondary (high) school year.
Student wellbeing has its frontline in the classrooms and effective Principals will be educating their teachers to recognise this responsibility daily and giving them tools to ensure wellbeing. This attitude needs to be part of the school culture where 'culture' is defined as the way things happen around this community.
A special thought is given to Principals who are having their first day in the job. How exciting and challenging. I am reminded of the story of the person saying to their partner that they had butterflies in the stomach and felt too ill and unable to go to school. The partner replied: "My dear you have to go as you are the school Principal."
May the Force be with you!
GD
Wednesday, 24 January 2018
Faith in the Principal
My children are through school long ago. Now their children, my grandchildren are in the hands of two Principals, three grandies in a school in one state and one grandie in a school in another state.
I have to trust these Principals and having been a Principal myself I guess I am super sensitive to how the schools look after my grandies academically and as whole persons, particularly their wellbeing.
I have an older grandie now in young adulthood. He struggled at school with some form of difference in how he processed information delivered to him. I was by his side constantly assisting where I could and when he would let me, without pressure from me. His school must have felt at times that I was a bit of a thorn in their side but all I wanted was for him to have optimum opportunities. In the main the school utilised me as home backup. There were many occasions when I looked at the written output in various subjects and had a sinking feeling that the school was not supervising the output closely enough. This became very evident in the final high school graduating year as my grandee and I worked hard in a tutoring situation in maths. I used to be appalled at what he was allowed to present in his maths file and it suggested to me that a teacher had decided that at this age the student should accept full responsibility for their learning. That is all very well for a competent, confident student, but not for one who had the information-processing problems of my grandee. Anyhow there was a happy ending to the maths when the teacher, having marked my grandees final input in year 12, rang me and said that I could sit down with a congratulatory drink as the lad had passed his maths.
In his all-boys school there was a bit of an attitude that boys needed to act like men. When a child is in year 4 he is still boy and not a man. My grandee suffered some fairly concentrated bullying because he was not a quick learner and I felt the school let the bullies get away with it. The ultimate irony was when one of the bullies received a citizenship award. At one stage he was harassed by another student to the point where he pushed the other student away. Being fairly tall by this time his hand contacted the other student's face. I was summoned to the school to meet with the Deputy Principal who rather aggressively told me should there be another event like this my grandee would probably have to leave the school. I held my cool, while seething underneath, and explained that this was the only occasion my grandie had done anything like this in his now several years at the school. The Deputy was smart enough to see where I was at and conceded my point.
Enough with the anecdotes but you can see how much one has to trust a Principal when one hands over one's loved ones. The Principal of my grandie's large K-12 school was too far removed from my grandson's plight and in my view had not set up satisfactory feedback contacts to those who he had delegated to look after my loved one. I believe that every Principal, no matter how large the school, should let his staff know that he needs to be briefed about students who are struggling in whatever way and that it should not be let go until it becomes a serious issue.
As Principals we do not own our students in the sense that the parent does and we must always respect this and act accordingly. We have such a massive trust placed in us and part of our brief is to live up to this honour that has been bestowed upon us as the leaders of school communities.
May the Force be with you!
GD
I have to trust these Principals and having been a Principal myself I guess I am super sensitive to how the schools look after my grandies academically and as whole persons, particularly their wellbeing.
I have an older grandie now in young adulthood. He struggled at school with some form of difference in how he processed information delivered to him. I was by his side constantly assisting where I could and when he would let me, without pressure from me. His school must have felt at times that I was a bit of a thorn in their side but all I wanted was for him to have optimum opportunities. In the main the school utilised me as home backup. There were many occasions when I looked at the written output in various subjects and had a sinking feeling that the school was not supervising the output closely enough. This became very evident in the final high school graduating year as my grandee and I worked hard in a tutoring situation in maths. I used to be appalled at what he was allowed to present in his maths file and it suggested to me that a teacher had decided that at this age the student should accept full responsibility for their learning. That is all very well for a competent, confident student, but not for one who had the information-processing problems of my grandee. Anyhow there was a happy ending to the maths when the teacher, having marked my grandees final input in year 12, rang me and said that I could sit down with a congratulatory drink as the lad had passed his maths.
In his all-boys school there was a bit of an attitude that boys needed to act like men. When a child is in year 4 he is still boy and not a man. My grandee suffered some fairly concentrated bullying because he was not a quick learner and I felt the school let the bullies get away with it. The ultimate irony was when one of the bullies received a citizenship award. At one stage he was harassed by another student to the point where he pushed the other student away. Being fairly tall by this time his hand contacted the other student's face. I was summoned to the school to meet with the Deputy Principal who rather aggressively told me should there be another event like this my grandee would probably have to leave the school. I held my cool, while seething underneath, and explained that this was the only occasion my grandie had done anything like this in his now several years at the school. The Deputy was smart enough to see where I was at and conceded my point.
Enough with the anecdotes but you can see how much one has to trust a Principal when one hands over one's loved ones. The Principal of my grandie's large K-12 school was too far removed from my grandson's plight and in my view had not set up satisfactory feedback contacts to those who he had delegated to look after my loved one. I believe that every Principal, no matter how large the school, should let his staff know that he needs to be briefed about students who are struggling in whatever way and that it should not be let go until it becomes a serious issue.
As Principals we do not own our students in the sense that the parent does and we must always respect this and act accordingly. We have such a massive trust placed in us and part of our brief is to live up to this honour that has been bestowed upon us as the leaders of school communities.
May the Force be with you!
GD
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