The Success Zone

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 [...]

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. [...]

6. Ignoring the brain Not knowing much about the brain and how learning is expressed in the brain is very much like trying to navigate without understanding your map. We’ve been educating systematically now since the early 1800s, yet only in recent years has the call to understand the brain, as it learns, gathered any [...]

5. Judgement and Assumption Your brain is particularly ‘wired’ to present you with what you are expecting to see. It is wired for assumption: If you are about to buy a brand new red BMW, it is amazing how many red BMWs you see. When you label students, when you give them what you think [...]

4. Playing the approval game – being best buddies with the students A common pitfall of the young and the new to teaching is to play the approval game. The behaviour that emerges with this need for approval is often over-friendliness to the students, wanting to appear to be ‘one of them’. The mistaken strategy [...]