Principal at the coal face
Submitted by Mike.
on 2010-03-03 01:52 PM.
My conversation with Sholto Bowen, Principal of Huntingtower Co-Educational Day and Boarding School in Australia
Sholto taught at St Stithians in the 1980’s and it was obvious then that he was destined to be a legendary Principal. He surely is! And what a loss to South Africa!
Sholto and I have corresponded over all these years and he knows of the work Learning To Lead is doing in South Africa with regard to human energy being the key determinant of human performance. He agrees that high energy learning spaces leads to high energy teaching and learning!
He wrote to me as follows:
I said to my whole staff there are two things that are paramount:
1. The expectations that they have of their students and
2. The energy, passion and love that they express every day in every lesson and, in fact, in every contact that they have with students. Every contact is a “teachable moment” and the values and thoughts they share can be uplifting (high energy) or “downshifting” (low energy). The students, the staff and the whole community will feel this energy level and respond accordingly.
Another thing that we emphasise is the picture that every teacher holds of every student. If a teacher is interacting with a student and saying all the “correct” things like – “you can do it”, or “you will be fine” … it is all meaningless if the teacher is holding in his or her own thought that the child is “an idiot” or “useless” etc. The child sees through this immediately. The thought is more powerful than the words. In that sense thought is energy.
I believe this is our challenge – to genuinely hold in our thinking the highest model of every child that we can possibly create and then expect them to achieve this high standard. Anything less dooms the child and the school to mediocrity, or worse.
If a teacher does not LOVE the children they are teaching, their work is in vain. If the teacher really loves the child the love does the teaching.
This may sound a little utopian, but I believe that if we don’t have “utopia” as our goal, how will we ever achieve it?
Another perspective from a Principal at the coal face?!
http://www.huntingtower.vic.edu.au/
