The Success Zone

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 [...]

  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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Free Webinar: An introduction to Success Zone Classrooms This free webinar provides 60 minutes of insight into a brain-based approach to managing student behaviour. It covers a range of behaviour management techniques that are based heavily on neuroscience, exemplary teaching skills and coaching methodology. Placees are limited, and registration is via this link: http://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=721871136 Presenter: [...]

9. Pride over humility The ‘proud professional’ might experience an angry student swearing at them. The mind state of this persona interprets the misbehavior as a personal attack, and responds strongly from the Red Zone.  Often, this sort of teacher will seek punishment and retribution applied from middle or senior school leadership. In other words, [...]

8. Playing favourites It is easy, as a teacher (and as a parent or leader), to socially and emotionally reward those who meet your expectations and conditions. It is also just as easy to be socially and emotionally distant from those who don’t. This is a form of conditional respect (do as you are told [...]

7. Being disorganized in your behaviour management Consider the recent major floods in Queensland and Brisbane (Australia).  In terms of the response from authorities and government, three key phases were apparent: preparation, the flooding itself and the recovery. In each of these phases observation, communication and action were present, providing clarity and autonomy in particular. [...]