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In this session, we're going to think about our intense moral purpose and
the role that our own personal goals make in our planning process.
And again, we're going to stay at a pretty
high level in thinking about these goals, and we're going
to explore some of the thinking that people around the
world have done about what they think matters the most.
So, we want you to be thinking about what drives
you as a teacher and an educator, and what matters
the most to you and we want to persuade
you, if we can, that hard goals, that is difficult ones,
play a really important part in our ethical development as educators.
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a report really, a position paper, that
said we need to develop the treasures within.
And at the time they wrote it, it was
quite dramatically different than what many countries were doing,
which was to have a curriculum that covered pretty much exclusively
a knowledge base as opposed to a richer set of ideas.
And, in that learning, The Treasures Within, the big ideas
were that we should work together as educators
to think about how we could develop young people
who knew who they were as individuals that had
a personal and social identity that mattered to them,
and they called that "Learning to Be". That we need critically - and
certainly in our country of Canada, this really matters because we're so
multicultural - that we need to learn how to live together in ways
that are peaceful and productive and to know how to work in
groups and in teams.
That, of course, we learned how to know things, and
that's one important dimension that may have a rich knowledge base.
We also have some experiences with hands on kinds of activities so
that we actually learn how to do things and how to accomplish things together.
And that richness of four ways of knowing, doing, being,
learning to live together, become a part of what we do in school.
And it's very interesting some years later, to look at
schools, and see if that's really what happens in schools.
We love to go into schools and see to what extent these ideas are in place,
and the ones where these four ideas are in place,
we find to be very healthy places for young people.
The fifth dimension really comes from indigenous people around the world,
and I think it's a very, very long oral tradition.
And that is, that we need to learn
to live in a respectful way with the natural world.
And we're seeing more and more evidence that
educators around the world are taking from this
aboriginal and indigenous world view - the idea, yes
indeed, if we re going to have a world
worth living in, that we need to add that to the dimensions that we consider.
So, when you think about your own practices and your own planning, thinking
about to what degree these five dimensions are a part of your planning - we think,
and we have found, with educators in our province and
in the Yukon Territory, that these are very, very important ideas.
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A second idea
that we want to introduce to you in this session is
the notion of the difference between smart goals and hard goals.
In our North American context many, many, teachers have been in
developed or around the idea of tackling smart goals, and they are
often put in percentage terms - you know, try to improve your
readers, your young people who can read by 2% a year.
Try to improve this by 2% a year.
We don't know whether this is unique to our culture, but we
find that our educators are much more motivated by hard goals,
things that are really, actually, quite difficult and aren't 2% at a time.
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And, hard goals are those goals in your
planning, in your life, that you are heartfelt about.
You really, really can embrace these goals.
You're animated about them, when you talk about them
you come to life and people can feel your passion for it.
They're required in the sense of there's an inner conviction that you as a group
of teachers, and you yourself believe that you must do this, and they are difficult.
So, they are challenging, they're not just small and incremental. For our educators
in our setting,
these things - this notion really works and recently we
were in a couple of other countries, and there seemed to
be a resonation with this, you know, idea that perhaps we've been
too cautious in our desire to transform.
Because we think we're in a place in the world, right
now, where we have to, as educators, be a part of system transformers.
We have to move from the idea, which is more
of a fixed idea, that our school system is just
sort some kids out into intellectual or academic careers and
just kind of do a leftover job with everybody else,
to that now we need a system that is
about learning for all people, young people that we serve
and to quite a high level. So, we're just going to, very quickly,
share with you three hard goals that we have in our setting, that our networks of
educators work on and just to see
whether it makes any sense to you.
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Here's our first one.
We want to build classrooms, schools, learning centers where
every learner crosses the stage with dignity, purpose, and options.
For us, that means that they will graduate.
In some countries,
it may mean something else, but we think
it's passionately important that every learner gets a chance
to cross the stage, and that they have
options to move on successfully in life.
Here's another big goal that we find challenging.
We want every learner in our system to
leave our schools more curious than when they arrive.
This used to say, we want all learners
leaving our schools as curious.
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However, as a teacher pointed out to us, that's not very ambitious.
Curiosity, and the drive to keep learning, we believe,
is a lifelong learning strategy that's very, very necessary.
And where we live, we have a rich tradition of aboriginal cultures.
And so, in our culture, it's very important to us
that all learners develop an understanding and respect for aboriginal perspectives.
We think when we acquire an additional world
view, that that's a very rich way of learning.
And our aboriginal cultures have deep listening and storytelling built into them,
and we believe that's incredibly useful for all people.
So, what we'd like you to think about,
over the next little while, is your setting and
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One other example in our setting is we have decided,
and I know other countries around the world have done
this as well, that we want every young person by
the age of around ten to have powerful reading skills.
But, we've added an additional dimension which
we think, that we're really proud of -
and that is, we're trying to develop young
people as readers so that they choose to read outside of school.
So that they find some joy in the process.
So that emotional attachment to reading is something that's a lifelong ability
and competence and is built along with the skills at the same time.
So, over the next little period of time, we'd
like you to consider this notion of hard goals.
Think about your own setting, because we know the settings that you are in are
varied and different from ours, probably.
What is a hard goal that you can be passionate about and pursue over time?
And how could you find other colleagues to help you pursue them?
Because anything that we find in our
setting that's difficult really does require a team.
I think that you will find out a very
worthwhile thing to think about as part of your planning.
And I think that
next time you can look forward to
meeting my colleague, Judy Halbert, who's going to be
talking to you about the importance of
having learning models as part of your work.
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Dr Judy HalbertCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Dr Linda KaserCo-director of the Centre for Innovative Educational Leadership
Professor John MacBeathProfessor Emeritus
