In his best-seller “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen Covey wrote a story to illustrate his 7th habit – sharpening the saw. He spoke to two woodcutters. One would rise early and get to work sawing down trees in the forest. He could rack up a large number of trees sawn down, but…
“Of all the things which nourish the imagination, humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it.” – John Millington Synge. Public conversation around what we need more or less of in schools is so predictable. Whether we’re on the sides of coding, decoding and teaching emotional intelligence…
Welcome back to Semester Two! We’re pretty determined to get you off to a real flyer this semester so we’ve devised a webinar experience that you won’t forget in a hurry and that goes to the very core of our educative purpose. Click here to register now for this opportunity to make Teacher-Student relationships your…
Next week! Yes, next Friday we run the Melbourne leg of our “Restorative Classrooms, Strong Classrooms” Workshop in Melbourne before taking it to Darwin on August 4th 2017. But consider this for a moment – a survey result out this week from the Australian College of Educators showed that more than 20% of Teachers considered…
The great Professor Sugata Mitra was again in Australia recently posing some big and provocative questions at the conferences where he was a featured speaker. Mitra is famous for his “Hole In The Wall” experiment in the slums of India where he proved that children can learn … even in a foreign language … even…
A quick message to our School Leaders as we emerge from the proven toughest part of the school year. Our challenge is to emerge with the right habits intact and with the less productive ones challenged. Are you ready to do what it takes to ensure strong staff morale through the remainder of 2017? Or…
I love to play cricket. I’m not particularly good, mind you, but I love it anyway. Being a park amateur at best means that my game has always needed work and the pull shot is something I always struggled with. So a coach told me to watch Ricky Ponting play the pull shot.Ricky Ponting is…
The most common metaphor we hear at Real Schools is that teaching these days is like spinning plates – there’s just so much to do! And while we all know that good work, like teaching, probably should be taxing – there’s something making the job of keeping those plates intact harder than ever before. It’s…
A couple of weeks ago we launched our “Restorative Classrooms, Strong Classrooms” workshop to be held in Melbourne. Then we got excited and a week later launched it at the other end of the country in Darwin too. The response has been just a bit awesome. Our analysis of this powerful statistical display (ok –…
It’s true that Australian Teachers are pressed for time. The impact of workload on those who sustain the system again hit the media last week in examining why so many Teachers are leaving the profession in the first 3-5 years of what should be a rewarding career.While we bemoan a lack of understanding and action…
Wowee! Term 3 has been flat out for us at Real Schools delivering enormous value to our Partner Schools – and we know it’s been a busy time at your school too. For us, that has left very little time and focus for things like running some public events. You see, we sometimes forget that…
I’ll start exercising on Monday. I’ll enrol in that yoga course once the kids leave home. I’ll start a family when we’re financially secure. I can’t begin my diet until I get Christmas out of the way. I’ve got so much admin to do that I can’t focus on what really matters at school.Like all…
When exactly do we win the war? If indeed we have an enemy in these bullies and if we therefore need to be anti-bully, then how would we know that the bullies have been vanquished? It sounds silly when put like this doesn’t it? Which is why we need to take back the national conversation…
I use this picture for a note-taking postcard about “Committed Teachers” when we run Real Schools Professional Learning. Commitment is a difficult thing for us educators to talk about and we often get a bit touchy or defensive when questioned about how committed or dedicated we are. Fair enough too! The problem is not our…
Dear Australia’s Principals, There have been some beautifully penned letters by Australia’s Principals this week who are determined to let their students know that they aren’t going to be defined or judged by this week’s NAPLAN results. Personally, I hope you are able to apply the same logic to yourselves. The designers of the NAPLAN…
I do a fair bit of reading about Teacher Stress. It’s not chiefly because I want to complain or even advocate on behalf of any particular Teacher that I know. It really isn’t even so I can “see I told you so” to anyone who might want to throw rocks at the apparent holidays or…
I read a wonderful sign on a wall recently of a quote attributed to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper that I think applies intimately to the current schools challenge in Australia. And there are examples of the wreckage caused by this thinking all around us. The concept returned to my attention when I read the blog “It’s…
We don’t allow just any old Tom, Dick or Harry (or Angela!) to guest host our webinars. The good news is that Ange is far from ordinary and she comes with a message that is critical for today’s Teachers and School Leaders. In fact, if we don’t start looking after ourselves as educators soon –…
Along with other “big words” like Respect, Responsibility, Empathy and Excellencethat are often hijacked as meaningless values in our schools, Trust is a concept that we find to be equally aspirational and elusive. As with our values, the answer to this conundrum is often that Trust hasn’t been collectively defined. We simply don’t yet know…
Did you wake up this morning on the treadmill, wondering how you got there? Did you wake up accidentally eating half a grapefruit as opposed to the usual Coco Pops? Of course you didn’t. A change in behaviours like these requires a choice and making a choice requires thought. There are, of course, a myriad…
I read an interesting piece this week about confirmation bias and how important it is to the FBI. Apparently, they train their agents to notice conformity and prejudice in themselves before they even commence to look for clues, evidence or facts relevant to any new case. Confirmation bias is the very human habit of only…
When things are tough in a school or in a Teacher’s classroom, support is the mechanism that leaps to mind as being the most appropriate. That support can take many forms including mentoring, coaching, release of disruptive students, peer observation, professional learning and online courses. Of course, sometimes all we need is a chat with…
Do we have to “feel” motivated before something important can be done? Can we “fix” student motivation with an entertaining speaker? Does “fun” alone motivate our students to think more, to do more or to be more? Well, you can probably tell by the rather leading nature of these questions that I think we’ve gotten…
This week, a revamped MySchool website was launched alerting parents to various chunks of data related to NAPLAN test results, finances and the wonderful variations within your cohort of students and their families. With it, comes the usual avalanche of media pieces appropriately titled, such as: The Top 20 Schools In Your State. Your Kids…
Almost everybody remembers the movie Groundhog Day. It’s one of those flicks that, true to it’s message, seems to appear with monotonous regularity in our lives. It’s certainly one that I frequently stumble across during a Sunday afternoon session of channel surfing. In the movie Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, is stuck in the American…
