Ten Days

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…

Traffic Lights or Roundabouts?

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…

Social and Emotional Vygotsky

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…

Strength, consistency and teacher authority

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…

Staff Culture

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…

How would you like it?

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…

Roaring

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…

I’ve Got Anger Issues

Why do elite sportspeople and rockstars tell themselves that they’re the “best in the world” and visualise themselves “in the zone” before they perform?   The psychology behind it is remarkably simple. Human beings just tend to live up to the labels we apply to ourselves. They also live up to the labels applied by…

Your Human School Future

I engaged in some stimulating non-education reading over the break and thought I’d start 2024 with a book recommendation for you, particularly if your school is becoming a restorative one.   “Humankind – A Hopeful History” is by a fascinating author and historian by the name of Rutger Bregman. It captivated me.   That said,…