Page 21 - Mini-Module 1

4. “Yelling and shouting”
"The first year I just did enough to calm things
down and stress ‘This is the way we behave in
this school’. I suspended a lot of kids. But I was
very, very careful about the way I acted, never
yelling, because I knew everyone was watching
to see what I’d do. And yelling and shouting
was the way it had been done there before.
But now the teachers felt they couldn’t yell and
shout any more. I was doing all that modeling
work with the teacher and the kids
together. The men who used to yell and scream
slowly realized that they couldn’t behave that
way any more" (Principal). (Groundwater-
Smith and White 1995 p.114).

5. “Three Learning Areas”
Schank’s (2000) idea of the school / college /
training centre of the 21st Century (which is
right now!) is that it would not have any
classrooms. Rather it would be designed
around three learning areas. The computer
learning work station, the talking/social
learning area, and the learning by doing active
zone. This design for a ‘virtual’ school is
described in the illustration on the column on
the right (Schank 2000).
Under this system of education, even
traditional content offerings will change, and
lifelong learning will focus on subjects such as:
● Stress management
● Getting along in groups
● Communication
● Cultural literacy
● Health
● Math as needed
● Life decisions
● Business skills
● Daily physics (how things work)
● Philosophy of life

Whether your dream of what a school should be is a revolutionary as Schank’s or
as small as wanting a school without yelling or shouting, the key to exciting
leadership is to have a vision and to work towards its achievement. Make time
each and every day to ask yourself, what progress have I made towards my
dream today? If you’ve never thought about what your ‘dream’ is, now’s the
time. During the blue skies Programme make discussing and clarifying your
‘dream’ the top priority with your peers and Sponsor.

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