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Stuck in Punxsatawney

Stuck in Punxsatawney

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 town of Punxsatawney and no matter what he does, he keeps waking up in the same place on the same day.  Director, Harold Ramis said that in filming the movie he always imagined that Phil spent a total of around 10 years in his own recurring hell.

That was until a study, using Gladwell’s theory that it takes 10,000 hours to master any skill, looked into how long Phil must have really spent building expertise over the Heimlich manouvre, the piano, ice scuplting and so on.  It turns out that the magic number is around 12,403 days.  That’s around 33 years!

The lesson for us is that it always takes longer to achieve mastery than we think it will.  Our students need time to master skills and concepts before moving on.  And so do we.  In our haste to complete the endless list of prioirities schools are beholden too, we’ve forgotten to master any of them.

It’s the very reason you can’t book Real Schools for a single PL event.  We work inPartnership, over the long term, through a variety of modes – with a clear bias for mastery over event based Teacher PL.

What does your school prioritise?  What are you building mastery over?  And what could you sacrifice to ensure that you start to?

Free WEBINAR – Unlocking Student Motivation

It’s a very real question that far too many Teachers are posing for it to be a myth. “What happened to Student Motivation?”

While it’s always been a challenge to harness the attention of students who’d rather be outside having fun, they now have a plethora of distractions to keep them from the critical task of learning.

 

Register here for this “don’t miss and completely FREE” opportunity on Thursday 16th March at 3.30pm AEDT

The online world, issues with peers, physiological conditions, family circumstances, resilience and self-esteem all contribute in their own ways to make the task of improving motivation one that is complex and ever-changing.For that reason, it stands to reason that some of the old methods of getting in an entertaining speaker or running a “team building” event are letting us down. 

In this webinar, we’ll be matching very real, practical and implementable strategies to the challenges of:

  • increasing engagement and on-task behaviour.
  • capturing the attention of today’s distracted students.
  • elevating and rewarding higher levels of effort.
  • choosing instructional modes that are productively preventative … in preference to “putting out spotfires”.

This Real Schools Webinar is aimed at Teachers, School Leaders and Administrators of all phases of learning.