Dear all, As we have been working on compassion for the past two weeks I thought that this article from Mindshift on empathy might help to build our understanding and to see the importance of empathy in our classrooms as we encourage the growth of learning skills that are applicable in the 21st century. "Like other aspects of modern life, education can make the head hurt. So many outcomes, so much important work to do, so many solutions and strategies, so many variations on teaching, so many different kinds of students with so many different needs, so many unknowns in preparing for 21st Century life and the endless list of jobs that haven’t been invented.What if we discovered one unifying factor that brought all of this confusion under one roof and gave us a coherent sense of how to stimulate the intellect, teach children to engage in collaborative problem solving and creative challenge, and foster social-emotional balance and stability—one factor that, if we got right, would change the equation for learning in the same way that confirming the existence of a fundamental particle informs a grand theory of the universe?That factor exists: It’s called empathy."
Here is reminder of why we do Mindfulness each day. It is only a few minutes and centers around children in Australia explaining why they find mindfulness so important each day. The programme they are following is called Smiling Minds and you might find the information available on the website useful for your understanding and teaching each morning.
Hope you are having a good long weekend, you all deserve a break.
Thought that I would keep this Food for Thought short and related to the big news of the week, the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States. There have been many articles written questioning how this could have happened so thought that I would share this TED interview which took place ahead of the election. You may be asking how does this link to ISHCMC and why should I care. Well, during this interview with Jonathan Haidt a leading social psychologist,' Can a divided America heal?' it becomes apparent that the characteristics portrayed in this election relate closely to normal human behavior and that with the declining influence of the 2nd WW generation we are now moving into the era of the baby boomers. Near the end of the interview Haidt refers to ways that people can address the polarization that is taking place world wide, and I think this links to our work with positive emotions and in particular empathy and compassion. When reflecting upon his arguments I felt that if the world was full of schools practicing mindfulness, positive education, and looking towards breaking the old authoritarian model of education we could avoid some of the problems that appear to be emerging on the political horizon. I hope watching this might also equip you with a few answers for when our students want to talk about the election and how Donald Trump managed to win. It might be an interesting interview to share with some of our older students in I&S or ToK or MUN club, as it does raise lots of questions about our next decade and international relations and politics.
Finally, this week also marked the passing of one of my favorite musicians/ philosophers/ social commentators, Leonard Cohen at the age of 82. I only grew to understand his work recently as I became more mature in my life and thinking. Discovering I liked Cohen's work, writings and thinking so much shows me that although we may think we know who we are at different phases of our lives we won't really know till we are nearer to its end. If you don't know much about Leonard Cohen here are two articles about him, this one from Rolling Stone is about his career, and the other from Brain Pickings is more about the predictive nature of his writing.
Have a good Sunday,
See you all on Tuesday, we will have a briefing at 7:15 in the MPR.
Having recently re-watched Jamie Oliver's TED Talk about teaching children about food and working on the new campus design with its large science garden that we hope will be a mini farm producing organic vegetables and herbs for the food technology class and the cafeteria I thought it appropriate to be sharing a couple of articles and videos on this topic.
The first video is a TED that I feel asks some good questions that could be used to develop our garden community. Although about low income urban schools in the USA I think that a great deal of the talk is transferable to ISHCMC as an international community. This type of thinking links beautifully with our work on 'who we are' and the community strand of the Cognita Way. Again, like mindfulness, building a community garden could provide a calmness that many of our students require as well as time for students to work along side their parents and teachers at weekends. My goal would be to start work on a community garden on the roof of the language building as soon as possible so that we could use this as a pro-type for the garden at the new secondary campus.
Secondly, this article on children eating their produce has lots of excellent links that will make us think deeply about what we are doing and why we should make this an important initiative for ISHCMC.
Do kids who grow kale eat kale?
It’s back-to-school time in the United States, and for countless children across the nation, it’s also time to get back into the school garden.
Tens of thousands of American schools have some form of school garden. Many are located on school grounds and others are run by external community partners. Most are connected to the school’s curriculum. For instance, seeds are used in science class to explain plant biology, fruits are used in social studies to teach world geography and the harvest is used in math to explore weights and measures. Some even incorporate food from the garden into the school lunch.
As a researcher and an activist, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade working to promote a healthy, equitable and sustainable food system. Through this process, I have heard bold claims made about the power of garden-based learning to meet these challenges.
School gardens claim a variety of benefits.
Given the enthusiasm that surrounds garden-based learning today, it’s worth taking stock of their overall impacts: Do school gardens actually improve the education and health of young people?
Promoting school gardens
School gardens have become a favorite strategy of prominent advocates in the “Good Food Movement.” Both celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and First Lady Michelle Obama have been vocal supporters.
Nonprofit and grassroots groups, who see these gardens as a way to provide fresh produce for the food insecure, have forged partnerships with local schools. Then there are service-based groups, such as FoodCorps, whose members spend one year in a low-income community to help establish gardens and develop other school food initiatives.
Philanthropic organizations like the American Heart Association have also sponsored the construction of hundreds of new school garden plots.
Taken together, upwards of 25 percent of public elementary schools in the United States include some form of garden-based learning. School garden projects are located in every region of the country and serve students of all ages, ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic classes.
Many proponents go even further, suggesting that garden-based learning can inspire a variety of healthy changes for the whole family, helping to reverse the so-called obesity epidemic.
Others, like Edible Schoolyard founder Alice Waters, argue that experience in the garden can have a transformative impact on a child’s worldview, making sustainability “the lens through which they see the world.”
Sure, gardens can help
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that garden-based learning does yield educational, nutritional, ecological and social benefits.
For example, several published studies have shown that garden-based learning can increase students’ science knowledge and healthy food behaviors. Other research has shown that garden-based learning can help students better identify different types of vegetables as well as lead to more favorable opinions on eating vegetables.
In general, qualitative case studies of garden-based learning have been encouraging, providing narratives of life-changing experiences for children and teachers alike.
Do gardens improve the intake of fresh foods and fruit?RubyDW, CC BY
However, when it comes to actually increasing the amount of fresh foods eaten by young people, improving their health outcomes or shaping their overall environmental attitudes, quantitative results have tended to show modest gains at best. Some of the most highly developed school garden programs have been able to increase student vegetable consumption by about a serving per day. But the research has not been able to show whether these gains are maintained over time.
A lack of definitive evidence has led some critics to argue that school gardens are simply not worth the time and investment, especially for lower-income students who could be concentrating on more traditional college prep studies.
The social critic Caitlin Flanagan has gone so far as to say that garden programs are a distraction that could create a “permanent, uneducated underclass.”
There are no magic carrots
There is no doubt that the power of garden-based learning is sometimes overstated.
Particularly when describing garden projects in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, popular narratives imply that a child’s time in the garden will rescue her from a life of poverty and chronic disease.
I call this the “magic carrot” approach to garden-based learning. But as we all know, there are no magic carrots growing in the school garden.
For gardens to effectively promote learning and health, they must be supported and reinforced by the community as a whole. Surveys of school garden practitioners show that garden programs have serious potential to enhance school and neighborhood life – but only if certain conditions are met.
Notably, school gardens are most successful when they are not held afloat by a single dedicated teacher. Instead, multiple involved stakeholders can ensure that a garden doesn’t dry up after only a season or two.
For example, participation from administrators, families and neighborhood partners can turn a school garden into a dynamic and sustainable community hub.
Many experienced practitioners have also shown that garden-based learning is more powerful when its curriculum reflects the cultural backgrounds of the young people it serves. When children of Mexican descent grow indigenous varieties of corn, or when African-American youth cultivate collard greens, the process of growing food can become a process of self-discovery and cultural celebration.
In other words, if kids grow kale, they might eat kale, but only if kale is available in their neighborhood, if their family can afford to buy kale and if they think eating kale is relevant to their culture and lifestyle.
Creating valuable green space
As my own research has highlighted, there are organizations and schools across the country that incorporate garden-based learning into broader movements for social, environmental and food justice.
These groups recognize that school gardens alone will not magically fix the problems our nation faces. But as part of a long-term movement to improve community health, school gardens can provide a platform for experiential education, create valuable green space and foster a sense of empowerment in the minds and bodies of young Americans.
If you are treally interested in school gardens, having chilsdren know more about food etc here is an excellent site: http://edibleschoolyard.org/
Finally, I want to share the link to Deepak and Oprah's 21 day meditation series for those of you who like to do a daily meditation but need something different occasionally.
A Message from Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey
It’s
not too late to enjoy Creating Peace from the Inside Out: The Power of
Connection from the beginning! We encourage you to join us and take advantage of this
incredible journey.
All
meditations remain available online for a total of five days. Simply log in here and select the appropriate day
to catch up easily.
Dear all, I know that everyone is working hard and sometimes this takes away the time neded to reflect and appreciate each other and all the good things that are going on around us. Walking around school it never ceases to amaze me the excellent teaching that is taking place everyday and how engaged and excited our students are about learning from you all. Thursday and Friday's blue skies certainly added an extra level of energy to many students alighting from their transport on the front gate. This weeks Food for Thought builds on last weeks on Purpose. If for some reason you didn't manage to watch the video last week I think it would be good if you went back and took a look, because getting the balance between self and others is central to happiness. This week I have chosen to share a couple of articles and a TED on the topic of compassion. Thinking about this took me back to a Bridges event, a Dialogue Towards a Culture of Peace, involving Grade 11 and 12 students and Jose Ramos Horta, President of East Timor. During the question time he was asked what is the most important characteristic that all Presidents should have. His answer was immediate: Compassion. He went on to explain how important compassion was for our world if we are going to enjoy sustainable peace. Drawing on his wise words and other readings I believe if we are to maximize the potential that we have as a staff we too need to recognize the importance of compassion, which means having empathy for each other, whilst being prepared to notice and take action to help others who may need our assistance. This refers to those both in and outside of our community.
Compassion is an action not an emotion.
This first short article is taken from Bigthink.com. "Empathy is a gateway to compassion. It’s understanding how someone feels, and trying to imagine how that might feel for you — it’s a mode of relating. Compassion takes it further. It’s feeling what that person is feeling, holding it, accepting it, and taking some kind of action. In metta orloving-kindness meditation practice, one can silently repeat phrases to others as a way of acknowledging them and our own interconnectedness. It’s easy and highly portable. When I’m on the train, I silently repeat phrases like, “May you be happy; may you be safe; may you be at ease; may you be free from suffering,” to the passengers, particularly those who look like they need it most. This plants the seeds of compassion, and we can find ourselves acting in compassionate ways that never would have occurred to us before. As it turns out, this ancient practice has some amazing scientific discoveries to give it cred."
The second provocation is an old TED talk in which Daniel Goleman talks about compassion. He ends his talk with the quote" I am optimistic, all it takes is the simple act of noticing."
To end, here is a link to an outstanding post from Commonsense media about all of us teaching social and emotional learning. The article looks at compassion and ends with a list of apps that are already in common use and can be used to further develope SEL across a long list of subject areas.
"Building SEL (social-emotional learning) skills such as compassion requires face-to-face interactions, meaningful discussion, and reflection. Edtech is no complete substitute for that, but there are tools that can supplement the development of character in the classroom and at home. According to the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, compassion is:
the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another's suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering.
While some tools focus specifically on compassion, the websites and apps you use daily (in all subjects) can be used to promote concern for others. You don't have to stop using the tools you love or toss out your lesson or curricular plans to start developing SEL. Below we have included some tips, tools, and actionable ideas for seamlessly integrating compassion and life skills-building into your content classroom"
Dear all, Much of last week was a bit of a blurr for me and I apologize for not being myself, but the lack of holiday and long airflights disturbed my equlibrium. None the less, on Friday watching our Grade 10 students fully engage with our guest poet, Ly Doi, bought me back to ISHCMC and why it is so good to be back in school. Raising awareness of banned books and censorship is such a powerful tool for empowering our students. To have our students directly engage with a poet who is fighting to create a freedom to express oneself in the country where we live, is an incredible opportunity for our students. Our Grade 10's will definitely remember this experience, and hopefully recognize the importance and sacrifice that a person like Ly Doi has undertaken to protect the rights of others. The first of this weeks Food for Thoughts supports the feelings that I have had for over a decade being an administrator in international schools. At the weekend I was sent this TED talk featuring Adam Leipzig, he talks about our purpose. He asks five questions of the audience that help them get a sense of their purpose. I suggest that when you watch this video you answer, as the audience did. Experience, and reflection upon growing behaviours in international schools have taught me that Leipzig's conclusions about thinking about our purpose in terms of others rather than ourselves are quite true. Stopping to identify our purpose will help us better understand who we are and what we are doing within our ISHCMC community. Knowing that we are happier when our purpose is not about ourselves but others should make us more reflective about our work place relationships. See what you think.
This talk by Terri Trespicio touches on a topic that I have been discussing with members of SLTA for a while; passion. No, not passion about something you love. Rather the idea that we keep asking students to discover their passion by giving them time to explore things that they might like to do. The big question for me is whether passion is the right word to be using for this important time.This talk answers this question for me. I now believe even more that we need to be reducing our use of the word passion. We should be looking for other words that can go with time; like problem solving, challenge, exploration, discovery, uncovering. These provide freedom for students to find out more about what they like or dislike without creating an expectation that this will become your passion for life. After all, how many of us can honestly say what our passion is even as adults.
I hope that you all enjoyed our annual Celebration of Cultures. It seemed to go exceptionally well. Thanks to the music department for the exciting start to proceedings and to all of you who kept students on time and organized.
This weeks Food For Thought starts with this video of Isaac Lindsky presenting at the Global Leadership Conference in 2016. Lindsky coins the phrase 'eyes wide open' to encourage us all to remove excuses from our thinking, shut out the negative thoughts and fears, and live a positive life. As you will see he has overcome challenges and through these discovered a way of living his life that would never have happened without the adversity he faced.
As you will probably have a little bit of time for reading during the vacation I thought that sharing this AEON essay might be of interest to many of you, Can school today teach anything more today than how to pass exams? The essay focuses on the Socratic view of education and learning and provides an interesting alternative to just focusing on exams that is very aligned with our thinking at ISHCMC. In fact the dream classroom scenario that initiatives this essay is not far away from many that I see when walking around our school. I think that most of you will connect with this UK authors view of how students should learn and what the end focus should be.
"To understand how this can be achieved, we need to remember something that Socrates drew our attention to long ago, but which in our eagerness to turn schools into engines of economic productivity we have forgotten, namely that education is a philosophical process. It begins with questioning, proceeds by enquiry, and moves in the direction of deeper understanding. The journey of enquiry is powered by critical reflection, discussion and debate. It leads not to final answers but to a greater appreciation of the limits of our knowledge, both of the world around us and of our own mysterious selves."
Wishing you all a well deserved break, Yours Adrian
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Dear all,
Thank you for all you work this week through the rain and our flooding. For those of you who haven't seen the water pouring into to building on Monday evening here is the short video which will give you some idea of the speed that the water entered the building and the difficulty that this caused us trying to protect classrooms.
Many might see what happened as a disaster and be depressed about it. Not in our case, even though in the middle of a regional Health and Safety visit we were able to demonstrate how close we are as a community with everyone in primary working alongside each other to tidy up; secondary maintaining learning through MyISHCMC and our parents being overwhelmingly supportive of the day's closure. As the work continued during the week, we have removed carpets, unveiled lovely tile work, know how to protect the school in the future, successfully re-settled EE4 and KG classes in new learning spaces and generally shown our ability to communicate effectively, work as teams, to be resilient in face of challenges, problem solve and be flexible. Great skills to be modeling in the 21st Century.
This weeks Food for Thought is a mixture of videos and articles for you to be thinking about and applying in your classrooms and at the 3 Way conferences this week.
When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges
"Amidst the discussions about content standards, curriculum and teaching strategies, it’s easy to lose sight of the big goals behind education, like giving students tools to deepen their quantitative and qualitative understanding of the world. Teaching for understanding has always been a challenge, which is why Harvard’s Project Zero has been trying to figure out how great teachers do it. Some teachers discuss metacognition with students, but they often simplify the concept by describing only one of its parts — thinking about thinking. Teachers are trying to get students to slow down and take note of how and why they are thinking and to see thinking as an action they are taking. But two other core components of metacognition often get left out of these discussions — monitoring thinking and directing thinking. When a student is reading and stops to realize he’s not really understanding the meaning behind the words, that’s monitoring. And most powerfully, directing thinking happens when students can call upon specific thinking strategies to redirect or challenge their own thinking."
When I watched this short video it made me wonder, could a parent sue us for failing to educate their daughter/ son adequately. Wouldn't it be an interesting world if schools that are failing to take into account or even recognize the changing world we sued by parents. Watch and make up your own mind how we would fair on his criteria.
Achieving our Dreams
With 3 Way Conferencing and " goal setting" this Tuesday, I thought that this video I was sent a while ago would be appropriate to have in our minds when we are advising students about their targets and passions. I am sure that there are many of our students who have dreams that are crushed by adults around them. This video is the story of a "16 years old girl, Laura Dekker who became the youngest sailor to circumnavigate the globe single-handedly. During her 518-day voyage Laura took on six-meter-high waves, extreme weather, dangerous reefs, disturbed sleep, cramped living conditions, food rationing and absolute solitude. She also kept up with her schoolwork. She ends her 10 minute talk by saying, " If you have a dream go for it, it might be hard, but the harder it is the more rewarding it is when you fulfill that dream." If we ware going to break the mold, redefine the system, then we must not hold our students back; we must let them have dreams and be their through positive words, encouragement and support to help them towards their goals.
