NASDAP Conference 2015

Thoughts from Conference

I had been looking forward to this year's Deputy Principal's annual conference.  The theme for this year was 'Disobedience - Jump out of the safe zone'.  The idea being that we should be avoiding getting comfortable in our roles and how our schools sit in education.

The conference was extremely well attended with approximately 350 senior managers from around the country.  The bi-annual conference is a nationwide event covering all the regional areas.  This year was held at Skycity.  

During this conference there was a consistent theme about questioning the perceived limitations of schooling, curriculum and traditional assumptions around education.  This was, naturally, a theme eagerly grabbed by our key note speakers.

I very much enjoyed the speech by Mai Chen who presented an excellent summary of education from the perspective of a parent.  Her story of immigration to New Zealand as a six year old and inevitable rise in Law whilst inspirational was grounded in the nitty gritty of life. 

Mai presented her notion of 'disobedience' as deliberately avoiding getting too comfortable with life.  That when we're overtly familiar with our surroundings and systems that we should "choose which tiger to throw a stone at".  

Nathan Makaere Wallis was another keynote speaker who I found to be excellent.  I have already posted a entry on his ideas (click here).  For me Nathan's core message was about getting young people to cognitively process their ideas/actions/words prior to decisions.  He illustrated this well by describing sitting with a young person and going through the 'game' of "what would you do if insert idea happened?"  The notion being that rehearsal.  [Nathan is coming to speak at the college on the 22nd of next month].  
  
The third keynote address I enjoyed greatly was by Steve Maharey (former Education Minister and current Vice-Chancellor of Massey University).  He presented a very good synopsis of what are the key characteristics of those students who will thrive in the future (critical thinking, self management, collaboration, innovation etc).  

This post relates to RTC #4. "Demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of personal professional practice - ii. participate responsively in professional learning opportunities within the learning community." And ERO's School Evaluation Indicators Domain 2. "Leadership promotes and participates in a coherent approach to professional learning and practice."

Forward Thinking on Education

Theme of this years conference - "Ideas, Innovation and Inspiration"

Re Thinking Educational Spaces

Mark Osbourne (former DP at Albany Senior High) presented on re-envisioning how schools could be set up without traditional physical constraints.   They created the high school from scratch and could do what ever they felt would be best...

The tried to think of how physical spaces effect relationships and learning. 

They created some interesting spaces. 
They rethought the idea of traditional
learning spaces. 

Larger open spaces for learning.
[shopping mall cafeteria style learning?]
60% off all the classrooms in NZ are over 40 years old. 




The question that we have for use at Waihi College is not so much lamenting the building we have.  But to consider the influence of the environments we establish in our classrooms to aid learning for our students.  Some interesting discussion that could be had here. 


Mark highlighted that statistically in classrooms "80% of the questions we ask in schools have alreadly got the answers" and he challenged us to think about our education being centred more around

 

 

 

Tony Wagner - The Global Achievement Gap

 

There are three cruicial changes...

1.  Knowledge is a commodity - it is free like air or water.
2.  What the world cares about is not what you know but what you can do with that knowledge, and,
3.  Any job that can be routine is rapidly being offshored or automated.