1. Blog about an educator or mentor that has inspired you and maybe helped shape who you are now. What impact did they have on your life?

Professor Angus Hikairo Macfarlane

I first met Angus when I was Principal at a little rural school, called Galatea, near the Urewera Mountains. Angus, niece Nancy was Deputy Principal and that is how we made the connection,

Angus took professional learning for the team; his message stuck and we had a different mindset about behaviour.

Later on as Principal of Taupo Primary School I asked Angus to work with us again. We spent the day at the Marae learning how to improve our manner and attitude when working with our students . Ka Hiwa Ra, the book Angus wrote had a profound effect on me, and to this day I still have in my head when thinking about managing students. 1. Get them in. 2. Get them on with it. 3. Get on with them

4. Get them out.

His stories are punctuated with great care, humour and most of all a love of our tamariki

Wow I just read the article on the Core Education site where Mark Osborne a talks about a Maker Culture...making something yourself that is a solution to a problem, You can access his article here Discover    Then I watched the vimeo   https://vimeo.com/139988334 and listened to Kimberly Barrs and how she uses a Maker Culture in her classrom. So exciting to see such authentic learning and all the students so engaged.
And scary at the same time. I am thinking about resources, teacher capability, in my case Principal capability. This is compelling. I will be sharing this with the team and as Kimberly advises I will start small...I suspect some of the team will be ready to start big.

Comment on "Taking the Risk

#edblognz
So I am learning to link to link to another persons blog and make comment. I chose Ruth Duke - Norris  Taking that risk
I found the blog inspiring, and a reminder to  myself that we are always learning. You sound very confident Ruth, you remind me to enjoy the challenge and to be a little more patient with myself. It takes time to learn and experiment and I am always in a hurry which spoils the challenge and the fun of learning.
New resolution for a new term, slow down and bit, learn more, add more depth and enjoyment to the job.

Over the last term our leaders team rated ourselves against the leadership component of the ERO Evaluation Indicators. We did pretty well, and we think we were honest. Just as a precaution against over optimism on our part we are going to get our teachers to rate us also.
Two key areas we identified for improvement were formative practice, including student voice and systematic community consultation.
We have delivered professional learning, time to observe, time to practice and researched the pedagogy of formative  practice for many years so its disappointing to find that we still have areas where thinking is summative and students are not actively participating and co-constructing learning. In saying that there are many areas of excellent practice, however as long as some students are not getting the best deal then we still have a great deal of work to do. I wonder if any leaders out there can give suggestions for a break through with the remainder of "die hard" thinking! How can we move forward from this point?
The second area we marked down was with systematic community consultation. We are really good at being with our community, sports, hangi, Kapa Haka, parent evenings and so on but we had to face the fact that its a bit ad hoc. One way around this would be to create a calendar of consultation activity and adhere to it, The  only reservation is that maybe this could become plastic and not real. What do others think?
Whew! this is my first blog in this forum. Not sure  if I am on track or not, but here goes.