The above picture is now one of my favourite pics of all time. It shows my great mate, Martin (he’s really ‘Bucko’ but I’ll stay in formal palate for you) and I in the Long Room at the famed Lords Ground in London gazing at a rather nondescript Thursday morning cricket match.
Just last week we were actually there, lucky enough to be in the UK for another amazing friend Ben’s (his real name!) wedding and Ben was kind enough to ‘pull a few strings’ and get us into this little geographical patch of cricketing history.
I love cricket. And walking into the Long Room sent an almost physical shiver down my spine. A good shiver. It was all of joy, wonder, nostalgia, privilege and gratitude in one physiological reaction. It got me to thinking.
What sort of a shiver down the spine does your little geographical patch invoke? What feelings does your school invoke in staff, in parents, in students and even in former students? There’s more than one kind of spinal shiver and we need to occasionally ask whether our schools invoking the right kind. Is yours?
Everything we know about School Culture, and indeed School Improvement, tells us that wrapping a positive emotion around work and learning more deeply embeds its value. We’d do well to examine and focus on the feelings we create in the people we aim to serve and transform.