Food for thought: Testing our Mission and Vision

Dear all,

Hope you had a good week. It has certainly been busy with SISAC Cross- country, track and field and Safer Recruiting with Safeguarding level 3. Also we have had the opportunity to show off our school to Matthias a Cognita Head of School from Brazil, Ralph the Cognita Board Chair and of course our new administrators, Tania, Teresa and Brad who will be joining us next year.

Everyone is agreed that our world has been changing extremely quickly in the last 20 years with the onset of the world wide web and dramatic developments in technology. These changes have made the future far more difficult to predict and this alone has merited a reflection upon the objectives of education and the pedagogy we use in schools. We have raced through the knowledge and information revolutions and are now facing the challenges of educating students through concepts and skills. For 200 years education has been producing either employees for an industrial world or office workers for the services that support industry.This system has been successful because of the predictability of the future. However, this is no longer the case and we are waking up to the realization that education and schools are failing many children. It is not only the world that has changed but so have the children we teach. We have seen Generation x and Y pass ing through school and into adulthood and are now being challenged by Generation Z. Each one displaying different characteristics, having different motivations and demanding different stimuli to engage them. Hence schools need missions and visions that are practical, flexible and take into account uncertainty and dramatic change. Recent events in both the UK and the USA have taken many by surprise and may have triggered a movement that will further challenge our view of the future.

Hence this Food for Thought that is a bit different.I believe it is a good moment, in a year of reflecting about who we are, to look at who we are and who are students are becoming against the back drop of post Brexit and USA elections. It is hard to identity what is happening and what the consequences will be. But as teachers I believe we need to be thinking about these political events against the context of our mission and vision. 

Having just watched this TED Dialogue about Nationalism v's Globalism, I decided that it would be a good idea to encourage all of you to also watch it. I believe this conversation is incredibly relevant to all of us educators as we strive to predict where we are going in the future. You will hear interesting perspectives on statistics of today; about how positive our present story is; the challenges that have caused today's political upheaval: the potential lack of jobs in the future due to artificial intelligence; the need for a focused search for reality; a need for understanding our own identity;  the ability to discern truth and about how important our communities are to us. My hope is to have us all reflect upon the points being made by Yuval Harari in relation to us as educators at ISHCMC and our movement to disrupt education and redefine the school experience. On Monday, in our briefing, I will give you 5 minutes to express your thoughts to a colleague about the points emerging from this conversation, where we are going as a school and whether you feel ISHCMC is allowing you as a teacher to help students develop in a manner that will allow them to flourish in whatever the future world looks like. 

The dialogue is longer than my usual posting; it lasts an hour. However, it is very engaging and will empower you to discuss with students when they ask you about what is happening with politics today. It also breaks down into an introduction set of questions between Chris Anderson and Yuval Harari which lasts about 25 minutes on the overall theme of what is happening in politics today and why,  and it then moves into separate questions which you can pick and choose from or watch in shorter snippets.

I know you will certainly find plenty of food for thought. 

See you on Monday,

Have a good weekend,

Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: Are we all too gullible?

Dear all,

This week much of my inbox appears to have been filled with political outbursts against what is happening in the United States and Donald Trump's interpretation of events, facts and language. Following Brexit and the US Presidential election last year I believe it has become increasingly important to ensure that our students moving through ISHCMC are empowered to be able to determine what is true and what is not when spoken by politicians and the media. We have a duty to ensure that our students question what is being said and look beyond facile single line statements for deeper information and evidence. 

Hence, this week's Food for Thought is going to share a few pieces of information that have fallen into my mailbox this week that might help us develop approaches to learning in our classrooms that counteract soundbite news, misinformation and the lies that seem to be prevalent in politics these days.

The first is an eight minute TED, by Lara Setrakian, that focuses on how journalist can fix the broken news industry. At the end of the talk she gives strategies that could be used in the news industry to rebuild trust. I feel that you can build upon her ideas in your classrooms to encourage students to develop steps by which they determine the validity of information they are being fed by the news and social media.

One of the strategies that you have just heard from the TED was going deeply into information. Here is the link to the website that allows a greater understanding of news and would be a good resource for our students when investigating certain topics.

"News Deeply is an award-winning new media company dedicated to covering the world’s most important and under reported stories. Our journalists and technologists create in-depth digital platforms that serve as a hub of news, information and analysis. By fusing rigorous reporting and cutting-edge information design, we make a complex world easier for our readers to understand.

At News Deeply, we’ve pioneered a model we call “Impact Publishing” – a combination of high-quality content and proactive community management. Our platforms unite an audience of policymakers and domain specialists, connecting those who are most intimately involved in the topic at hand. Through interactive dialogues, virtual events and live convenings, we advance the conversation, leading to a more engaged public and better-informed policy decisions.

We believe that even the toughest issues can be made accessible in a clear and compelling format. In a crowded and complicated world, our platforms separate the signal from the noise, surfacing vital information and key trends on issues that matter, deeply, to the state of our world today."

Finally, this article suggests ways that teachers can address fake news which came to prominence in the US elections and through social media may become a bigger political tool for Generation Y and Z.

" Since a recent Stanford study showed that students at practically all grade levels can't determine fake news from the real stuff, the push to teach media literacy has gained new momentum. The study showed that while students absorb media constantly, they often lack the critical thinking skills needed to tell fake news from the real stuff."

Wishing you a relaxing Sunday,

Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: Taking control of the time we have

Dear all,

It certainly felt like our first week back after Tet was immediately up to full speed with lots of activities and learning taking place in and outside of our classrooms. Our two visitors from Lebanon certainly enjoyed their time at ISHCMC and will be taking a lot of ideas back to their school. As with so many of our recent visitors their comments support that we are walking the talk with our vision for education, and that we are certainly a welcoming school, that engages and empowers its community in a clearly articulated mission. They were most impressed with our willingness to collaborate and innovate with our programmes.

To be able to deliver on our mission means that we all have to work hard which makes ISHCMC a busy school. Last week, immediately after Tet, we had two sets of sports tournaments, age group sporting fixtures, PYPx with parents and creative arts trips across neighbouring countries. Providing opportunities and a range of experiences for our students is very important in helping then discover who they are and who they can be. However, it is also important that we don't get caught up in a cycle of saying that we are busy and feeling that we do not have time for ourselves. As this 11 minute TED by Laura Vanderkam explains there is plenty of time in a week, 168 hours to be precise, it just depends upon how we prioritize. She's discovered that many of us drastically overestimate our commitments each week, while underestimating the time we have to ourselves. She offers a few practical strategies to help find more time for what matters to us, so we can "build the lives we want in the time we've got."

I want to follow Laura's TED by sharing an old TED, but only a 2 minute summary, by Robert Waldinger. I have shared the original version before. This links perfectly with the need to identify what makes us happy and needs prioritizing in our week. Waldinger talks about his work with the longest longitudinal study of people and what actually made them happy and successful. There are certainly learning's from this work that may help us prioritize and create time in our week for the important things in our lives.

As you all know I believe that mindfulness also brings us peace and clarity in our busy lives and that it is important that we give our ISHCMC students an introduction to mindful tools that will help them take control of their lives in the future. As all studies indicate, to be able to deliver mindfulness it is important that we ourselves understand and practice mindful behaviour. Hence, I want to share this link to an excellent website that provides all the information that you will need to understand the holistic nature of mindfulness and how it benefits people. This site focuses on a Zen approach to life which in turn is about mind and body control. This is not religious per say, but rather a further alignment with the key ingredients of our mission, in that it encourages a healthy diet that provides energy to engage with our lives whilst empowering us to be healthy and strong, both physically and mentally.

Finally, just wanted to share some sad news, that most social scientists probably already know and that is  Hans Rosling died last week. He was famous for his desire to ensure that our vision of our world was  fact based.  The BBC Four programme that made Hans Rosling such a widely known name was his classic 200 countries, 200 years, in 4 minutes. If you haven't seen it before please watch as it can be a great tool for helping students understand our world today.

Have a good Sunday,

Yours

Adrian

Food for Thought: Engaged or Compliant........what are your students?

Dear all,

Hope you are all having a good weekend. This morning I feel that a haze has at last been lifted from inside my head and that I am truly back in HCMC.



Ken Whytock Flickr via Compfight cc

Just wanted to share this train of thought because it is useful for defining how we approach one of the three key pillars of our mission and also a section of our walk through data. The question compliant or engaged is particularly important when put into context of schools preparing students for the 21st century and their future. The work of Yong Zhao clearly identifies that one of the most important changes that has taken place in the our modern world and that education needs to address is that there is a declining demand for compliant employees as technology can easily replace these workers. What has emerged is a world where students need to be creative, innovative, flexible, problem solvers and life long learners who are prepared to be entrepreneurs and employers in the future. The importance of having engaged as part of our mission is that without this characteristic students aren't embedding their learning and understanding and able to utilize this to develop new thoughts. However, as this article from Mindshift points out there is more to being engaged that sitting in class quietly and getting on with a task. There is a lot to learn for all of us from this article, at all levels in our school about how we develop our classroom practice to further embrace our mission.


“Everything we know about the neuroscience of learning is that emotion drives cognition,” he said. But even if a student is behaving and feels good about it, if he or she isn’t actively making meaning out of the information, then active engagement still hasn’t been reached.
When Almarode visits classrooms he looks for eight different qualities that indicate students are engaged.
1. Does the activity, strategy, task, or idea allow for the student to personalize his or her response? Can they bring their life experiences into the activity and make it their own?
2. Are there clear and modeled expectations?
3. Is there a sense of audience above and beyond the teacher and the test? Does the activity have value to someone else?
4. Is there social interaction? Do students have an opportunity to talk about the learning and interact?
5. Is there a culture of emotional safety? Are mistakes valued because they are an opportunity to learn?
6. Do students have opportunities to choose within the activity?
7. Is it an authentic activity? This doesn’t mean it always must connect directly to the student’s world, but it should connect to reality.
8. Is the task new and novel? If kids are bored, it’s hard to see engagement

To complete this week's Food for Thought is a short 8 minute TED that might provoke additional thinking and links student engagement with teacher magic. When you watch it, it could easily be dismissed as irrelevant to our context as it is about urban schools in the USA. However, haven't you ever wondered why you see teachers teaching the same content, using the same pedagogy and yet the outcome for students is different. I have heard administrators in the past call this the ' je ne sais quoi' quotient that some teachers have and others do not. What makes this TED's conclusion interesting is that this teacher trainer believes that by getting to know what makes our students tick and their cultures, ie knowing who they are, then all of us can engage our students equally as well.

And finally wanted to share something different that links with our study of positive emotions and our reflection on compassion. I was reading some of the thoughts of the Dalai Lama over the vacation and came across this passage. I think it has a great deal of relevance to our thinking about how we redefine education and the school experience:

"Our modern educational system fails to provide sufficient education about compassion. The time has come to transform this whole system. Society is formed through its educational system, but the educational system does not transmit the deeper human values of compassion and kindness. Then all of society lives with this false view that leads to a superficial life, in which we live like machines that don’t need affection. We become part of that. We become like machines. That is because today’s society is based on money. A society that is based on money is aggressive, and those with power can bully and behave cruelly to others. This situation produces growing social unrest. A society that depends on money has problems that reflect its beliefs.

In reality, affection and compassion have no direct link with money. They cannot create money. Therefore, in a society in which money is the priority, people don’t take these values seriously anymore. People in positions of leadership, like politicians, have emerged from within a society that depends on money, so naturally they think like that and lead society further in that direction. In this kind of society, people who value affection and compassion are treated like fools, while those whose priority is making money become more and more arrogant."
Have a good Sunday,

Yours
Adrian

Food For Thought: Looking forward to a great 2017 at ISHCMC

Dear all,

Hope you have all had a fantastic vacation and are ready to set ISHCMC on fire for the second half of the year. You can afford to blitz the first three weeks we are back because we have Tet looming at the end of January. 

This is a long Food for Thought, but i would really like everyone to read through the articles and watch the videos. I want our work with students on positive behaviour, language and thinking, through mindfulness and our own control of negative thinking to be an area of focus for the second half of the year. If we are going to make a difference to our students, that counters the constant bombardment of negativity that they receive from the press, media and reported news, I believe it has to be deliberate and consistent across the School. This effort cannot be haphazard or random and needs all of us to contribute and reflect upon our own modeling. If we get this right we will all feel better and ISHCMC would be an even more special place to work and learn.

The more research that appears regarding positive behavior it becomes obvious how important this is for both ourselves and our students. In this article from the Huffington post, How Complaining Rewires Your Brain For Negativity, a logical rational is created for looking on the bight side and avoiding taking the easy route of thinking negatively about events that occur in and around us each day. this article concludes by giving us strategies to find the positive in our everyday lives. As we continue to understand positive emotions it would be a good exercise to try to think positively and not complain and to try and be more grateful for what we have in our lives.

This second article from the NY Times builds on the Huffington post article and challenges us to take better control of our thoughts and stop allowing negativity to dominate how we see our daily lives and the world about us. 

Kathy Osborn

"Here’s a New Year’s challenge for the mind: Make this the year that you quiet all those negative thoughts swirling around your brain.

All humans have a tendency to be a bit more like Eeyore than Tigger, to ruminate more on bad experiences than positive ones. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that helps us avoid danger and react quickly in a crisis.

But constant negativity can also get in the way of happiness, add to our stress and worry level and ultimately damage our health. And some people are more prone to negative thinking than others. Thinking styles can be genetic or the result of childhood experiences, said Judith Beck, a psychologist and the president of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. Children may develop negative thinking habits if they have been teased or bullied, or experienced blatant trauma or abuse. Women, overall, are also more likely to ruminate than men, according to a 2013 study.

“We were built to overlearn from negative experiences, but under learn from positive ones,” said Rick Hanson, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley."

Why for you:

Why for our students:

Wishing you all a great 2017 in which you all flourish,

Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: Reason why school needs to be redefined

Dear all,

As we move in to the last week before the winter break I'd like to thank you for all the hard work and effort that you have contributed towards making this another good semester for student learning, engagement and empowerment this semester. We have continued to investigate how we can redefine the school experience for our students. We started with a new 4/5 class room area which has certainly increased the possibility for collaboration and connectivity between students and teachers and provided a first insight into the new learning environments that will dominate the refurbished primary and new secondary campus in the not so distant future . Our year long inquiry into 'who we are' links perfectly with our second step on the road to becoming a Positive Education school, and is raising some interesting questions for us to solve. Gaining a deeper understanding of the 10 positive emotions has helped us look more deeply into ourselves as we search for self awareness of who we are as educators at ISHCMC. Of course there has been so much more that just these few examples but I selected these because of their focus on the individual and their contribution to the whole. I believe this is a key constituent that under pins a redefinition of education. We have to be looking at breaking the industrialized conveyor belt model of education and making it about individuals and what is best for their social, emotional and intellectual being. This includes all our stakeholders.

The readings in this week's Food for Thought are quite long and hence I am sharing them with you ahead of a vacation. I will not be writing another Food for Thought until the 8th of January.. The aim of this weeks Food for Thought is to provide further depth of understanding as to why it is time for school's to be redefined. These two article do not directly talk about education but are fundamentally linked to the need to redefine the purpose of school.

Arizona Parrot Flickr via Compfight cc

The first is an easy to understand economics article, 'The American Dream, Quantified at Last,'  which looks at the economy of the USA and how it has changed and the impact of this on the psychology of society. It touches on Trump's electoral victory, the potential ways forward and the challenges that lay ahead. Overall it is positive but again clearly makes the point that we are living in a changing world and cannot take for granted the same economic prosperity and growth that have for the most part prevailed since the 1880's.

"For babies born in 1980 — today’s 36-year-olds — the index of the American dream has fallen to 50 percent: Only half of them make as much money as their parents did. In the industrial Midwestern states that effectively elected Donald Trump, the share was once higher than the national average. Now, it is a few percentage points lower. There, going backward is the norm.
Psychology research has shown that people’s happiness is heavily influenced by their relative station in life. And it’s hard to imagine a more salient comparison than to a person’s own parents, particularly at this time of year, when families gather for rituals that have been repeated for decades. “You’re going home for the holidays and you compare your standard of living to your parents,” Grusky, a sociologist, says. “It’s one of the few ties you have over the course of your entire life. Friends come and go. Parents are a constant.”
How, then, can the country revive Adams’s dream of a “better and richer and fuller” life for everyone? The solution has to involve some combination of faster economic growth and more widely shared growth."



maryturck Flickr via Compfight cc

The second article, which you can listen to instead of reading by clicking on the curio button, again looks at economic change. It is an essay from AEON magazine by James Livingston, who is professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Although the title may be off putting, F..k Work, , it asks the very important question, 'what if jobs aren't the solution any more?' In the past the solution to economic woes has been a move towards full employment but is this possible today and will it solve the problems created by a changing world? What happens if life isn't about your value as a worker? So many of the parameters that western society, in particular those that are structured around the protestant work ethic, has as foundations would now need rethinking with a new rationalization to why we exist. The essay suggests that it is time to rewrite our moral and ethical thinking about work and its place in society. Of course this change links with some of the concepts that we have been developing at ISHCMC based around the need to produced employers not employees, students who are creative and can innovate, are confident in their skills, resilient to face failure and make changes, flexible as life long learner and are able to recreate themselves depending upon their environment.

"These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down, along with most others."

There is lots to be thinking about as we move towards 2017. We know that technology has transformed our world very quickly, the question is can the world now adjust and counter these changes or are we entering an era of reactionary government pretending to empathize with the masses whilst protecting the wealth of the minority.

Wishing you a peaceful and relaxing winter break.

Have a good Sunday,
Yours
Adrian

Food for Thought: How much do we need to be happy?

Dear all,

The end of another very busy week at ISHCMC. I am sure that there will be a lot of secondary students as staff who worked on the excellent musical Honk catching up on a lot of sleep this weekend. I would just like to publicly congratulate all of you who have been involved in the recent productions, for the quality of acting and musical accompaniment  that you managed to encourage from our students and the obvious commitment and engagement that they all demonstrated through their performances.

This weeks Food for Thought is  bit a different, although it does tie very much with our mission and vision. The first part links to a website of a young (ish) man who has developed a sustainable lifestyle in California. When I trawled through his website and watched several of his videos it certainly made me reflect upon a number of things. Firstly, how happy he seemed and how this appeared contagious to those he met. Secondly, how little we really need in our lives to be happy. Thirdly, the importance of being positive and seeing good in the world rather than bad. Finally, the big question how much do we need to have a good and happy life?

This video captures many of my reflections. It is how Rob Greenfield tested out his simple theory that people are inherently good not bad.

In addition to browsing Rob Greenfield's site I would like you to take the time to read this interesting article  about how our diet impacts the environment. 

"Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” That’s what the French lawyer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who happened to have a deep love of gastronomy, wrote in 1825. A century later, a diet-hawking American nutritionist named Victor Lindlahr rendered it as: “You are what you eat.” I propose revising it further: Tell me what you eat and I will tell you how you impact the planet.

Most of us are aware that our food choices have environmental consequences. (Who hasn’t heard about the methane back draft from cows?) But when it comes to the specifics of why our decisions matter, we’re at a loss, bombarded with confusing choices in the grocery-store aisles about what to buy if we care about planetary health. Are organic fruits and vegetables really worth the higher prices, and are they better for the environment? If I’m a meat eater, should I opt for free-range, grass-fed beef? Is it OK to buy a pineapple flown in from Costa Rica, or should I eat only locally grown apples?

The science of food’s ecological footprint can be overwhelming, yet it’s important to understand it. For starters, in wealthy societies food consumption is estimated to account for 20 to 30 percent of the total footprint of a household. Feeding ourselves dominates our landscapes, using about half the ice-free land on earth. It sends us into the oceans, where we have fished nearly 90 percent of species to the brink or beyond. It affects all the planet’s natural systems, producing more than 30 percent of global greenhouse gases. Farming uses about 70 percent of our water and pollutes rivers with fertilizer and waste that in turn create vast coastal dead zones. The food on your plate touches everything."

Have a good Sunday,

Yours

Adrian