I recently interviewed a dear friend and remarkable Australian, Dan Collins, for my next book. Dan is a four-time Olympian and an Olympic medalist in kayaking. He knows a little about exemplary performance and he has a passion for young people reaching their potential too. Dan threw a rather large gauntlet at my feet…
Let me start by saying sorry to all the lovely people called Molly out there. I see you. However, I can reveal that my experiences with students called Molly have been subpar to my expectations of such a lovely name. Most Mollys I’ve met have shared the inclination to race home from school…
The human design is an efficient one when it comes to emotions – we don’t have any useless ones. Whether you like or dislike the feeling you’re experiencing, you’re feeling it for a reason. We feel fear when in the company of a dangerous driver because fear’s job is to keep us safe. …
You can call it an adversarial, consequential, blame-based, real-world or responsibility focused system of dealing with student conflict and wrongdoing if you’re really into faffing around with words to make an idea sound productive. But whichever way you slice it, variations on ye olde “crime and punishment’ model have been prevalent in Australian schools…
A study of traffic in the US state of Indiana highlighted by the World Economic Forum caught my attention recently. Effectively, they’ve led the charge on installing roundabouts instead of traffic lights at busy intersections. The upshot was that, “Overall, it has seen a 90% reduction in fatalities, 76% fewer injuries and a 30…
I feel for Senior Secondary educators who teach and lead young people who’ve never known anything other than adversarial, blame-based, rule laden or judicial models at school. Not only are they still stepping in as judge, jury and executioner every time their students experience conflict or make a mistake… they’re doing it with kids…
Two benefits of working restoratively that underpin my ongoing commitment to it are: The inherent strength and rigour. High expectations and teacher authority is embedded in my work. The precision of consistency I can achieve. It’s not just me. I thought I’d share both a secondary and a primary example of what’s possible in…
School Leaders and Teachers are at least familiar with the notion of School Culture. It’s also not lost on them that the culture of their staff is a subset of it. But do you know what your staff culture is? Do you know what you want from your staff culture? And do your staff…
My wonderfully wise colleague and former successful Principal, Brenda Quayle, alerted me to a post this week by Spectrum Gaming. In a nutshell, they applied some typical school rules to adults within another typical school context, a reward/penalty system. Here’s the report of the qualified clinical psychologist who headed up the experiment: This…
Thank you to the numerous folk who’ve sent messages asking what my “word” is for this year. To backtrack for a moment, I’ve invested in choosing a word each year to influence my conduct, decision making and mindset. And I’m a bit funky about it. I generally reject the usual corporate speak of words…