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The Success Zone has just released its 2012 Educational Leadership program that integrates one-on-one development with leadership team development, mentoring and coaching. Based on the principles in the Success Zone book, and congruent with leading brain-based practice as outlined in John Medina’s Brain Rules, this exciting new program takes school senior leadership teams from good [...]

Performance Development & CoachingTM is a cutting edge school transformation program based on educational neuroscience, coaching methodology and a model of outstanding teacher practice.   Group 8 Education has a limited number of spaces available for the 2012 academic year in both Australia and the United Kingdom. Please contact John Corrigan if you would like to [...]

Ken Robinson is one of a growing number of champions for a new education. With elegance, he exposes how much we don't know about what we don't know. This ten minute animated extract is succinct, disturbing (for the system of education that we are trying to maintain) and very thought-provoking. What observations and thoughts are [...]

  As David Rock writes in Your Brain At Work, mindfulness has long had association with spirituality, even religion. Ask someone to describe mindfulness, and if they can, they’ll often make reference to things like meditation, Buddhism, prayer or perhaps being one with nature. Whilst all these involve, even promote mindfulness, they are not, themselves, [...]

Recently I wrote of the 5 hallmarks of a great listener. In summary, these were: Quiet mind listening Full observational attention on the speaker Listening for the speaker, not for you Absence of agenda, assumption, advice and judgment High self awareness Perhaps not surprisingly, great listeners are quite rare in our current world. Try counting [...]

Why are teachers so undervalued in today’s world, when, in so many ways, the profession should be the most highly valued? The Australian Federal government today released version 2.0 of the MySchools website. ABC news reports that “ the My School 2.0 revamp gives parents more information about school performance and reveals how much money each [...]

So you think you are a great listener? Test yourself against these five traits and see how well you do. Give yourself a rating from 1 to 5 on each trait (1 is rarely or poorly expressed, 5 is habitually and permanently a part of the way you listen). 1. Quiet mind listening Great listeners [...]

Reflect on Your Potential… Often, we plug away at our game, our job, our relationships without stopping to assess any corrections we could or might make. A bit like being in the trenches, head down, without ever coming up for air, and to see things as they are from some distance. Moments of reflection, whether [...]

10. Treating the classroom as a place where you teach, but not learn In comparison to other professions, teachers have been historically slow to change and adapt. Professional development, in widespread use only in the last 30-40 years, has tended to be after hours of off site. Teachers have come to see that where I [...]

We continue to develop our thinking around the importance of listening.  We have discussed previously that we are able to listen on four distinct levels (downloading, attentive, empathic and emergent).  What we have not understood previously is WHY do we have these four different levels (when we seem not to have an analogous system with [...]