If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress (Barack Obama)

Mmmmm - coffee

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything (George Bernard Shaw).

My current school changed from a horizontal form structure to a vertical one a few years ago. This meant a change to vertical pastoral Deans for this year. With the year delay between the move to vertical forms and vertical Deans, the two progressions were not in synch but I'm trying (really I am) to 'build a bridge' (not literally).

As far as I was concerned, this move was progress, from a bureaucratic/administrivia oriented system to a new more caring/nurturing vertical system.

Seems there are still (older) students and staff who cannot change their mindset from that past system and want to return to it.

I think that's a shame, but I understand it more these days. Long serving staff members have an investment in the school's past organisational culture that I do not have. 

I cannot stay in a school more than four or five years; I don't understand how people can remain in one school for their whole career. The school culture becomes more 'enshrined', more set in stone, for older staff, than it does for me.

Many of the students come from families that have not moved from the family farm for generations. Of course they despise change. 

But the world around them all has moved on, and it will not stop moving on. When the students leave a school they have become very familiar with, they will have to adapt or else. Change happens! Move on!!

Unfortunately, because they will not be literally moving on beyond the school, many longer serving staff no longer have that perspective, or the will to look beyond what has always been in place and embrace fresh thinking.

Horizontal forms? Horizontal Deans?

That horse has left the building, the genie has left the bottle. A good starting point is this great article about (shock horror) the end of schools as we know them!! 

Mmmmm - coffee!! 

I must plummet boldly forward (Greggery Peccary)

This is from Margie Warrell and her blogpost Motivation alone is insufficient.

It's 2015 and for some reason that date seems portentous - it's like a sci-fi   title, from a film made in 1972. 

So- it's 2015 and that time of the year when people set themselves up for disappointment: new year resolutions. 

According to Margie, 80% of new year resolutions fail by the end of January!! Even bearing in mind that 75% of all statistics are made up that figure is a sobering one.

I've never indulged in the new year resolution bizzo myself. Unlike my wife, I'm not a long term planner (or even much of a short term planner). I really understand why Paul McCartney sold Magical Mystery Tour to The Beatles based on a simple pie diagram (right) and why Pete Townsend  did the same amount of forward planning on Tommy.

It's a guy thing.

I often struggle with my goals for the year at school. When I was a Principal my first order of school business in the new year was to get the staff to decide them for me!

One goal/objective/aim is clear, so I've effectively jumped to step 3 on Margie's chart - some unfinished 2014 business - that final reach for the bunch of bananas: prep for a vertical dean structure at Woodford House for 2016.

My general goal/objective/aim for 2015 is to be more ambitious and a little less risk averse. I like Margie's first strategy point - what is it I want more of in my life? For a few years now my ambitious side has been dozing. Time for a wake up in 2015, I feel, and embrace a risk or two.