I have just had 5 days off in Canberra- to dream, wander in galleries, eat, spend quality time with my daughter and SLEEP, SLEEP, SLEEP!
5 days in another place- with emails, twitter, face-book, voice messages off and it was so good!
The thing is- sometimes you lose your perspective and start looking at the wrong things too closely. I needed the top of the mountain again and it is back. I can see clearly again and look in 360 degrees around and see what is REALLY happening.
I wonder how often that happens in education? At the moment many of my colleagues are busy preparing for NAPLAN and the kids are all down there in the details and missing “big picture learning”. They are missing the connections between the “bits” of skills they are learning and therefore their understanding of what they are learning is suspended in the education-sphere with no anchoring strings and connectors to the real world.
We are in serious danger of having an education system that has totally lost its way- missed the view from the summit -missed the big picture. The lack of forward planning, goals, guiding philosophical principles is unfortunately delivering results well beneath par.
This lack of direction and narrow vision has filtered down to children and we now see increasingly large numbers of children who experience education as joyless, meaningless and have little or no motivation to learn.
My teachers at ICE are needing to spend increasingly large amounts of time on motivation and re-kindling dreams and helping awaken children to their amazing, innate possibilities.
We need some leaders (preferably drawn from the teaching community), who can re-inspire, reinvigorate and reinvent our education system so ALL kids feel they can learn, ALL kids experience the joy of success and ALL kids have their curiosity and learning hearts reignited!