I had a great day yesterday at the It’s learning conference in Bergen and today I have taken some time to look over my RSS feeds. I have a lot of smart people on my “must read and follow” list and today it was an article by Ewan McIntosh that caught my attention. I’m happy to say that he will be attending our conference at Sandvika this fall, I’m really looking forward to what we will accomplish there this year. The 10 rules below go well with what Michael B. Horn said at the it’s learning conference yesterday. See previos blog post. Here are the 10 rules from Clayton Carson a Principal of a Primary school on the East coast of Australia. They also reminds me of what Chris Lehman Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA said at ISTE Denver 2010 last summer. What I really like is this: We have to be humble by the task – don’t say “i know the answer to this”. Also ideas must live in practice. If you say your school is about innovation or life long learning and you don’t have a policy that shows it. Then you probably only have some teachers who are doing it. Then it probably is happening by luck.
Ewan McIntosh writes this about Clayton Carson:
He’s one of these people who is at once totally down to earth in the way that he runs his school and talks about learning, and inspirational to the point of bringing your aspirations up to stratospheric levels. Way back in January, at an education research event supported by the PiL programme, he outlined 10 “Claytonisms”, rules by which he and his school live in order to sustain engaging learning with the students:
- Mutual trust, between leadership and teachers, teachers and students, parents and the community.
- Deal with data, not emotion, to improve learning.
- Operate with a clear vision, one that everyone knows
- View the parents and community as your employers, listen to them, work with them, respond to their concerns in your actions.
- Admit that perception is reality – what they say is the way it is.
- Develop two great, ambitious projects every year – students don’t want lots of small projects that last days; they want beefy projects to get their teeth (and their brains) into.
- It has only happened if people know about it (my personal fave). If a tree falls and no-one sees it, did it really happen? That’s probably the wrong question. If a tree falls and no-one sees it, does anyone care? Absolutely not. You need to share great learning out to the world. If you and your students aren’t proud enough to share it then it probably wasn’t worth learning.
- Every teacher is a leader – empower them to be one, (and support those who are not harnessing that opportunity).
- Do it well.
- Just do it. (similar to John Hunter’s “Don’t Think Too Hard. Just Try The Experiment”
via Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Learning.
