1 Modern schools Here are twenty words to sum up what modern schools should be about. While you can quibble with them I think they sum things up rather well!
2 Curiosity This is a corner stone of our English programmes. Leadership Freak does a great blogpost on this. 3 Inquiry learning A great mind/shift article on things to keep in mind when moving into inquiry methods. 4 Staff meetings Some great advice here about making staff meetings more relevant and engaging (its solution focused stance got me). 5 Leader's responsibilities This is cool list of the five ultimate responsibilities that leaders have.
Where are we and how did we get here? Those are two pretty cool questions. They came to mind when I was asked to do a presentation to the staff on the state of mentoring at the school. So I came up with a PowerPoint for my allocated time of about 10 mins. Coincidentally, that's about my own attention span for this kind of thing. It's always sorta fun to do this kind of existential stock take from time to time.
Where are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? Was the next bit and so I tried to do all three things in my allotted ten minutes. I wanted to make it fun too. Not being entertained during a Monday afternoon staff meeting is not an option as far as I'm concerned. Too much earnest gives me a headache. As a concept, Monday after school staff meetings can be brutal! Why do we do it? That's just another question btw. Actually...why do we have an afternoon meeting straight after school, at the start of a week? Is there any one out there who thinks that's a really cool idea? That's the best time? We're spost to be creative people, right? Why can't we programme it into a school day? A couple of my schools did that (Friday morning was popular) and did away with Monday after school. Hmmm - I'll leave you pondering that for a bit. After the meeting I needed to come home and blast some music and so I did and here it is - an A M A Z I N G version of Little Wing by John's second son. Enjoy this - it's special!!
