• Ideas And Challenges For Creating An Inspiring Environment In Schools

• Tony Ryan

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Zest Practice

Hindsight Insight ForesightAha!!

Insight before Information What insights

will you experience

today??!

Systemic Zest

•Don’t teacher-proof the system. Instead, trust and support teachers to be outstanding

•Do a Finland. Stimulate pride in the profession

•Encourage the best and the brightest to become teachers

McKinsey and Company report: How The World’s Best Performing School Systems

Come Out On Top

• 2003 and onwards analysis of OECD’s PISA assessment in literacy and numeracy

• Three interrelated sets of policies and practices continued to emerge. The most successful systems:

1. Get more talented people to become teachers

2. Develop those teachers into better instructors

3. Ensure that their teachers deliver the best possible instruction for every student in the system

1. Love your employees2. Connect peers with purpose3. Capacity building prevails4. Learning is the work5. Transparency rules6. Systems learn

• An inclusive vision with schools, communities and corporate groups working together

• An evidence-informed, rather than data-driven, profession

• Strong schools helping their weaker peers

• Sustainable leadership that spreads and lasts

School-based Zest

1. Inspiration (arm tattoo)

2. Initiative (Google office)

3. Inquiry (mobile phone)

4. Dialogue (ear sculpture)

5. Serendipity (Travelling Wilburys)

1. Inspiration

IF by Sarah Perry

Start-up inspiration??

•How inspired are you at the start of the day?

•In what ways do your classrooms say ‘Come On In’??

•In what ways does your school say ‘Come On In’ (for you, and for your students)??

Inspirational Educators

• Are enthusiastic and invariably optimistic

• Use critical thinking, creativity and imagination

• Consistently GOIMO

• Are able and willing to scrutinise their practice

• Pay respect to their own well-being

• Deeply believe that they make a difference

The Ripple Effect of teaching: Every teacher contributes to the world, every day

Education systems will only ever utilise their power when each teacher accepts responsibility for his/her contribution

Everyone counts. Every One.

The difference that you make

• Organise a daily Welcome Committee

• Inject some inspiration into assemblies

• Invite inspiring people to address your students

• Develop sister school relationships in less developed countries

• Remember that you’re modelling what it means to be an adult!!

Practical Ideas for Inspiration

The 20% policy??!

2. Initiative

• Some of the 20% results

• Google Wonderwheel, Google Squared, Google Wave......

Where’s the bear in your school??!

•Work out your version of the 20% policy

• Find out what students (and teachers) achieve outside school hrs; and promote it

• Set up Genius Bars at lunchtimes

Practical Ideas for Initiative

3. Inquiry

Coming right up??

•Goodbye laptop. Hello mobile computing

•Social media leading to collective intelligence

•Connectivist learning theories and practice

•Students already have opportunity to generate their own inquiries via mobile

•The issue? Very few know how to advance their learning with the technology

•The internet as a brain

•Processes for utilising collective intelligence

•Brain implants for online access

Teacher inquiries??

•What inquiries are taking place in your school this term?

•How specifically do all teachers in your school further their learning each day?

•What is new in each teacher’s thinking in the past 3 months?

•What will be different or enhanced in each teacher’s practice by the end of 2010?

Student inquiries within a specific unit

Q. What do we already know about this issue?

Q. What are our questions?

Q. What learning steps will we take?

Q. What and how will we research; and is it useful in answering our questions?

Q. How will we share our findings?

Zestful inquiries!!

• Generate interest with a provocative intro

• Give your inquiry units some exciting titles (name them after a movie or a piece of music)

• Choose some powerful songs as background music for some of the learning time

• Design an icon or general image to represent the inquiry

• Find a metaphor for the inquiry

Thinkers Keys

42

43

The Hippo Roller

•Focus on solutions, not problems (only listen to solutions)

•A school must be evidence-based. Develop long-term inquiries about ‘Zest Practice’

•Provide students with processes for resolving issues

Practical Ideas for Inquiry

4. DialogueEither / or

Both / and

• Small talk. Mindless banter; gossip; trivia; inconsequential

comments

• Big talk. Proactive dialogue; solution focus; challenge; reinforcement of quality

practices

Encourage quality dialogue

• The quality of everyday teacher dialogue will determine the level of professionalism in a school

• Two critical skills in dialogue: listening and paraphrasing

• Explicitly teach students to listen in conversation

• Paraphrasing? Listen first...

• Then pause

• Then begin with: “So, you’re saying that....”

Coaching each other

1. What do you need to achieve?

2. What’s happening right now?

3. What could you put into action?

4. What will you put into action?

5. What will be the process for implementation?

6. How will you keep this going??

Adapted from ‘The Leadership Coaching Guide’

•Staff meetings to feature teacher dialogue

•The development of dialogue protocol (eg 2Q’ coaching models) for professional discussions

•The encouragement of Professional Buddy systems

Practical ideas for Dialogue

5. Serendipity

• Share narrative about the release of genius in everyday life around the world (eg Piano Stairs)

• Give spot prizes eg bottles of bubble bath; ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs

• Loosen up. Serendipity rarely occurs when you’re too serious

• Look for the inspiration in routine events

Practical Ideas for Serendipity??

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• tony@tonyryan.com.au • May the rest of your year be full of zest

• Thank you