Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Quiet Leadership Pages 49-55: Professional Reading

Quiet Leadership by David Rock: Page 49-55 Summary
- Tally of number of times looking at problems and not solutions this week
- How much leeway can we give staff who want solutions to baseline issues (duty)
- Are we a School that encourages teachers to do their best and follow thier passion?

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Digital Parents Group

I am still not sold on the name for the group, however as nothing better was available in the short term, its what we went with.  Previously we'd had a 'Digital Focus Group' which had met once a term in 2015-6.  Last year the group (which was concerned with BYOD policy and uptake) met infrequently and stopped mid yaer.  While this group was not started again an opportunity was made available for parents to drop in and see technology in action and discuss with staff.

Today the group had two session available to parents 9am-10am and 2pm-3pm.  There had been limited publicising of the event - it was via text message to parents twice.  The morning session saw the attendance of four parents, one BOT member, one new parent to School and two parents, husband and wife who had previously worked at the school.   We showed the parents the Beebots, Dash and Edison robots and discussed with them Computational Thinking.  I would rate this as successful although I would have liked additional attendance (also of note other mitigating factors were the weather was driving rain).  The afternoon session consisted of one pair of parents from the same classroom.   Again I re-worked the session from this morning.

While the numebrs were a little dissapointing I feel the start was positive.  The group has potential and enthusiam if the selected topics continue to be of interest.  We could also repeat the topic from today, as long as we advertised this clearly we would anticipate different parents would attend.  We didn't run an evening session as we were considering - its debatable as to how many parents would attend.

On reflection I feel the group has potential and would be an excellent source of feedback and ideas from parents, the key issue would be the attendance of differing parents and input.