Alison Mooney workshop

Last week we attended a workshop in Gore with Alison Mooney- ‘Pressing the Right Buttons’. The focus was fostering relationships, understanding what makes people tick and become more aware of how to communicate in language that makes people want to listen and learn.

The teaching team worked through the tasks and identified their areas of strength. Playful, Powerful, Precise, Peaceful. We all became aware of how we work within our team and the perspectives we bring to this, which promoted great discussion.

We also took time to reflect on the students in our, school being aware of how different personalities can affect their learning capabilities.

Alison is a very talented speaker. It was an entertaining day,  a great way to start the term and set us up for the year ahead.

allisonmooney.co.nz

Pet day 2015

Mindsets

This week I was lucky enough to attend the Learning Network workshop on ‘teaching intelligent mindsets’ Carol Dweck, Guy Claxton and Jamie Fitzgerald were the speakers. The overarching concept of the day with all three speakers was how we approach tasks and how the mindset we have can impact on the outcome. E.g fixed mind set – in the face of setbacks – hide mistakes, growth mind set- confront mistakes and learn from them. Carol Dweck spoke about how specific focused praise can support learning. Rather than general praise, look at specific praise relating to the process and task at hand. Eg rather than saying good boy/girl you are so good at this, you are so clever. Think about making the praise focused to the task at hand. E.g. I can see you have really thought about your writing and included some interesting descriptive words to describe how the person looked… Children should experience a level of struggle with the tasks they are doing. “Easy is boring” and if the work is easy it means the children are not being challenged. ‘ Let us not pray to be sheltered from challenges and struggles but to be fearless in facing them’- Guy Claxton