Mindblown

Below is the Video made for the Student Forum (Takingitglobal) at the Innovative Teachers Conference (Kuala Lumpur) last month. <br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=93cd39b0-2a6d-4a20-82f0-0f1b56da1948" target="_new" title="Student Statements">Video: Student Statements</a>

I was fortunate to attend the conference as a teacher/ observer accompanying our NZ student representative - Marcus Gibbs. Marcus was our NZ student representative in the Student Forum running alongside the Conference, and an excellent ambassador. I may be a little biased because Marcus is part of a group of wonderful students (aged 10 -17 ) that I’ve been working with over the past 2 years ,and latterly as part of a group working with the MS PIL Innovative Schools Pilot Project. The opportunity to participate at Kuala Lumpur has been ‘icing on the cake for us’ and I can’t thanks Pete Sommerville, Annick Jansen , Heurisko and Microsoft enough for facilitating the opportunity.

A large part of our MS PIL project objectives have focused on sharing Student Voice about necessary changes to schooling and the growing need of 21st Century learners to work purposefully on authentic learning tasks, with our peers, our teachers and our communities (local and global), as more effective partners in learning. Participation in the initial Takingitglobal student forum offered a perfect opportunity to involve some of the project’s senior students in discussion around these topics with students from all over the Asia Pacific region. Five of my students took part and ALL became engaged and made thoughtful and relevant contributions to the ongoing discussion. They all commented about the changed perspectives they have gained from making connections with students from such a range of backgrounds, and differing life experiences, (students were aged 16 -22) and we had many group discussions, which included the younger students, about the way schooling was approached elsewhere ie how their lives were surprisingly similar and how different. One deep discussion arose from the struggle many students indicated around the chance to receive a ‘good’ education, how it is not a right but a privilege to be offered rich opportunities for learning and facilitation by innovative and effective teachers. The students are still in contact with people across Asia Pacific that they have met through Takingitglobal and some are building strong friendships as a result of the connections they have made.

Marcus was chosen as our NZ student representative and was fortunate to meet face to face with 15 students from the Asia Pacific Region (selected from the forum) supported by 5 mentors as well as Michael Furdyk amd Katherine Walraven. The connections had already been made online, and to me (the not-very impartial observer :),the friendships appeared instantly. By Tuesday morning we were sitting in the Hotel foyer fiddling with my ‘broken’ brand new laptop and going over Anh’s detailed project proposal (Ahn was Marcus’ roommate from Vietnam, studying in Japan). We were joined by Anwar from Bangladesh and went exploring the markets together for the afternoon - Anwar turned out to be a great bargainer. We did our bit to support the Global economy and met up with Shobanna from Malaysia and Michael Furdyk on our return to the hotel.

Michael and Katherine played an impressive role as excellent hosts and mentors. Throughout the conference the students talked to me enthusiastically about their projects, their plans to make a difference in education (and in the WORLD!!!). All felt hugely grateful for the opportunity to meet together and more importantly - they felt affirmed, enthused and supported in their plans. Throughout the conference I was delighted by their interactions with each other. The way the students greeted each other (always like old and valued friends) and were extremely curious and tolerant about each other’s backgrounds, eccentricities and life experiences. The student forum ran separately to the Teacher conference but both came together for a question and answer session at the beginning of the conference and the student presentations concluded the conference. Marcus was one of three students chosen to participate in a daunting Q & A session with the full conference delegates and Malaysian dignitaries - he did a great job and made everyone in the NZ contingent proud !

Before leaving NZ Marcus and I worked on a short video to present to the student forum. The other students in our MS PIL Project (SPLICE) had indignantly pointed out that you didn’t have to be 17 to have an opinion !!!! Consequently they were very keen to have their voices heard at the student forum. So, several students worked on written statements and Marcus filmed them expressing their opinions. We threw an explanatory introduction in with Powerpoint and Marcus experimented with MS ‘Marvin’ to add a speaking character linking the bits together. Marcus organized an informal haka from the boys at the end as a challenge to “challenge our respected teachers”. It was so well received by the student group that after their project presentations to the conference delegates, the video was used to close the whole conference (and so, much to the ‘delight’ of the Australian teachers, … we finished with a Haka LOL).

Reflections
1. I’ve had several emails from students I met in KL and worked with, who would like to keep in touch and share their work with me. This is a great feeling and it makes me wonder if the natural need for young human beings to connect with a teacher-type mentor to affirm and critique their work CAN possibly be addressed globally. Anyone know of any working examples ???
2. During the teacher conference we all had a great time collaborating on an inquiry project in mixed teams. I was very fortunate to work with 4 innovative and dedicated educators (it was an Innovative Teachers conference, duh, so no surprises there) ; Terry from Singapore, Sutima from Thailand, Amanda from Canada and Jin from Korea. We enjoyed working together immensely and were very pleased with the unit of work and resources produced, so as a result we’d discussed collaborating again on a future project of some sort. At this stage some of us have connected up through Facebook, so it will be interesting to see what we can share from this point.
3. A highlight of the conference had to be getting to know our NZ contingent: the 4 innovative Teachers chosen to represent their colleagues globally. Deirdre, Jo, Michael and Michelle. As part of the conference each country’s teacher representatives were judged to select one teacher to represent their nation at the world conference in Brazil. The judging consisted of a brief interview and examination of a poster explaining their work. There was some competition among other contingents but, as far as our team was concerned, the prize was in being selected to attend at Kuala Lumpur. These guys were equally special educators and should be sharing their ideas and expertise around nationally! As a follow-up I’m hopeful we can organise a Waikato workshop to showcase their work and inspire a few more of our colleagues !

Samwise’s inspirational speech to Frodo, um, about the overwhelming changes we’re presently experiencing as educators and the reasons why we must continue to support each other,and persevere, despite the exhaustion, the despair, and the almost insurmountable obstacles we’re facing etc. Yep, one day all this angst will be just another story.

Can’t be certain, but I think Samwise teaches Year 6 - 8 and (going by his state of exhaustion), Mr Frodo is either Year 10 or New Entrants.

Instructions for Effective Viewing: Shoulders back, head up, suck that stomach in (more), affect a noble stance, gaze bravely into the distance, and hold the hair drier at arms length to get that heroic, windblown look.
Note: Video is 2.17mins

Some video footage of students planning and reflecting on their work whilst making their “You’ve Got A Message” video. Raw- ish footage gathered during the one-day-workshop, and after completing most filming .
Interesting to Note ;
The way these initial ideas were transferred into their video work.
The way the older students included, affirmed and guided the younger ones - this created an effective working atmosphere with a comfortable family feel to all group work. The older students felt empowered and focused well on task responsibilites and leadership, especially learning to listen to all group contributions. Overall, this had a powerful effect on the confidence of all students, the most obvious effect being the difference between younger students infrequent/tentative suggestions at the beginning of the week, and the increased frequency and depth of thought displayed in their contributions by the end. Quite a case for planned project collaboration across age groups. Don’t scoff - they did ALL offer something of worth to their groups and all commented on how much they enjoyed working together. They’re thirsty for more !

Note Video is about 8 mins.
“The Making of .. You’ve Got A Message”

Teacher Responses
The following is a nice, narcissistic ‘warm fuzzy’ - 3 mins of teacher’s responses immediately after watching the student’s video, finishing with an affirming 3 min interview with Eric Frangeheim - who offers some great insight and further challenges for the students.
Note Video is about 6 mins

“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” Shel Silverstein (1930 –1999)

Are we listening ?
To make sane and informed changes in our systems and practice, we need to gather detailed, and ongoing feedback from those most affected ; our students, our teachers, our parents, our wider community. If you want accurate and current information about our weather – step outside. If you want accurate and current information about our learning, and teaching practices - step into our own classrooms, listen to the parents, listen to the teachers and for goodness sake - listen to the students.
Student Voice
While there’s no doubt (in my mind) that it’s beneficial to gather student insight about teaching and learning, gathering student voice is a relatively newish concept, and it’s important to reflect on how well we do it. Consider what we usually do when we want to find out information about student’s thoughts and feelings - we tend to ask the adults around them. And when we want to find out student’s thoughts and feelings about their schooling experiences - we ask the student leaders ie. those that are succeeding brilliantly at school, and presumably enjoying the experience. We seldom hear directly from the muttering masses, as Adam Fletcher explains in his blog.

However, providing opportunities for as many as possible to offer their thoughts, observations, suggestions, opinions and experiences etc about a process whilst they’re immersed in it must be regarded as beneficial to both those intending to improve the process, and to those experiencing it .
How can we fail to gather this wealth of rich and authentic information - and act on it ?
Let’s acknowledge that;
1.) Students have their own unique and valuable perspectives on learning and teaching (and school in general),
2.) Acknowledging, evaluating and acting on student insights and suggestions is beneficial to the process, and
3.) Students benefit from the opportunity to become more actively involved in shaping their learning environment – they have more ownership of it and therefore should become more engaged with it.

Over the years plenty of student voice has been gathered worldwide (just check out You Tube). All information is useful, but being parochial creatures, we tend to pay more attention to information affecting us by the immediacy of it’s location eg. A close-up shot of water lapping against our french doors has more of an emotional impact than an aerial shot of the flooded plains we’re living on – and it tends to provoke a more immediate response.
“Crikey !” We think. “Time to roll our sleeves up and move about with some urgency!”

Our Student Voice Project (Some of the nitty-gritty details)

With the above thoughts in mind (and after an insightful cafe conversation with Dr Sharon Friesen - who affirmed thoughts about student voice and shared some work senior Canadian students had done), I proposed a project to the Principal’s group in our Learning Community. Over the course of a week in May I worked with 27 students representing the local College, the Intermediate and four contributing Primary schools (14 students from Years 9 –13, and 13 from Years 6 –8).

We’d begun the work the previous year with a full workshop day; getting to know each other, working in mixed groups and becoming used to sharing ideas in a comfortable atmosphere. This preparation was essential as students were largely unknown to each other and ages ranged from 10 to 17 years. The students then participated in activities designed to provoke discussion around their values and beliefs about learning and teaching (used some excellent ideas from Dr Julia Atkin’s work – which I’d used previously with teacher work groups).

After much discussion (reviewed at our second workshop day) 10 questions and ideas were chosen - which the students wished to explore further. Students shared ideas on each of these (by then they’d become fairly confident and comfortable with each other) and then sorted themselves into mixed age groups to focus on a particular question/idea. They fed their ideas back to the group at regular intervals and at some stage we discussed how they’d like to use their ideas to make a difference.

There was real excitement (and some cynicism), at the thought of actually doing something that could make a difference. Not surprisingly, almost as soon as they had a clear purpose, we had motivated and purposeful action ! By the end of the day scripts were being planned, film schedules were organized (and signed off) and they were organizing when and where to meet each other (txts exchanged etc). My role became purely facilitator ( organizing venues, booking interviews, providing taxi services with rostered on Principals, charging cameras, guiding research, facilitating discussion, suggesting shots, supporting, nudging, affirming, questioning and critiquing etc).
Summary
The process itself confirms for me that whenever we provide purposeful and authentic contexts and opportunities for learning, we’ve got students hooked. When we provide plenty of encouragement, affirmation and sensible &timely feedback, as a natural part of the process, we get so much more from our students. In fact, they surprise themselves.

In this case, over four days students wrote the song at the start, wrote and performed their own skits, wrote scripts, arranged costumes, conducted surveys, researched facts, constructed graphs (oops- we know LOL), made powerpoints, developed and applied technical skills, collaborated, negotiated, problem-solved, filmed to a tight schedule, did voice overs, contributed to the editing process and applied every key competency. Students completed work after school and in the weekend – because they wanted to.

The student’s intention was for their work to spark discussion about effective teaching practice and they believe they’ve succeeded. The video has already been viewed by 170 teachers as part of our local Teacher’s Professional Development Day, links to it are posted in the National “Time for Innovation” Online Conference and in our local community TV site . They’ve written to the local paper to encourage their community to watch it, and we recently planned and presented the first lecture of the semester to the 2nd Year intake of ‘teacher trainees’ at Waikato University, as part of their Professional Practice paper. Others viewed the video and discussed it in online classes.
We’d be very pleased for you to use it to provoke discussion in your own learning communities. So, help yourself - we simply ask that you acknowledge the source and the work involved.
DM Dyet, June 2008.

Highlights for me
The song at the start - written and sung by students.
Editing hours of very dodgy film footage - and finding some real gems.
Working with Dave Owen - Director of Wavelength Media - Who contributed so much of his own time , accompanied with liberal helpings of technical advice, expertise, some unexpectedly late nights and immense patience.
Anton explaining what we need from teachers and the CIA. Grant working beautifully with a 9 month old baby. Christina and Lexie in period costume. Tamara’s group powerpoint. An hour’s footage from the Old Folks home. The mixing bowl. The goldfish. Patrick and Chicayla explaining how we need to become apprentices and work in the community. Liza’s consistently insightful comments. Each student’s individual contributions. The amazing off-camera conversations. The senior students interactions with the junior students. Purangataua and Marcus’ txt messages.The song at the end by Pekerau school’s choir - chokes me up every time. All in all - great fun (which is learning as it should be).
Note - the Video is just under 30 mins.
.
“I think teachers should really listen to what we have to say…” Nicholas aged 10.

My most humble and sincere apologies to all people who have been kind enough to add their comments to posts in the last 4 weeks (time since I’ve been posting). With a click of a button I accidently deleted ALL COMMENTS while trying to remove the first wordpress one - aaargh - and apparently they’re irretrievable … That’s everything on any post in here. All welcoming, insightful, challenging (insert any number of ingratiating descriptions) carefully composed contributions - gone. Dammit - my ego is suffering dreadfully, I’ve been collecting them like merit certificates. “Pride goeth etc”. I may sulk for some time.

“The winds of change blow through our minds,
They call to kith and kin and kind,
To gather strength and linger where,
Our visions, hopes and dreams adhere
To conscious thought and weighty plans
That tilt the platforms where we stand
And skew aged vantage points to view
The stirring landscape of the new.”

Welcome to the threshold of the 21st Century – “The stirring landscape of the new”. A blank canvas for writers of Science Fiction and a much vaunted destination for futurists. It’s a place of promise, of great change and new beginnings, but more substantially, it is the evolving environment our children must grow to maturity in.

We accept that advances in technology are immense catalysts for societal change, (ask any sci-fi reader), and we are, without doubt, experiencing exponential change on a global level. Great news for all techie help-desk personal, but what implications does it have for people in the business of education? Well, for starters it means we’ve reached a place where we need to step out of the classroom for a moment and confer. We need to consider our present position, to examine emerging opportunities ,and ultimately, to re-consider our direction. It’s time to stop and think, and ask a few questions – and we are. In fact, many of us are throwing our arms and eyes heavenward fairly regularly .

The Shift
If I could choose just one question from the list I hear most often, it would be;
“How can we possibly prepare our students to thrive in a world that is changing so fast we barely recognize it?”
The question itself tells us something about our discomfort, it hints at powerlessness. We are accepting that our society is changing dramatically, but also presupposing that we have no part in this change, that the whole thing is totally out of our control. That it will happen to us and not as a result of us. We’re even fearfully assuming some kind of apolcalyptic change when we could be planning for a welcome re-genesis. In short, change scares us.

So, let’s consider shifting our vantage points. Couldn’t we simply be asking how we can manage this change to our best advantage? We’ve already recognized the increasingly urgent need for change in our present system of education, so what if we decided to use this opportunity to take control of the process and become active designers of a newish and more effective version of an education ‘system’?

Well, we have exactly that opportunity. The advent of the new New Zealand Curriculum provides a chance to examine our traditional practices, to examine context and content, to discuss what applications we would keep from earlier systems and what we could sensibly discard. Here’s an opportunity for our profession, as a whole (rather than as pockets of isolated educators within random timeframes), to examine what evidence we presently have about learners and effective learning environments, and use current pedogical understandings as an informed basis for change in our communities. We have an opportunity to establish ‘systems’ that don’t simply pay lip-service to popular phrases such as ‘seamless education ‘and (that old favourite) ‘lifelong learners’.

Old World Metaphor
For tailors & seamstresses; this is a chance to bravely unpick stitches, re- measure the fit and re-cut the pattern accordingly – with the realization that the finished garment may be fundamentally different to the original and will , without doubt, need ongoing alterations.

New World Metaphor
For techie geeks; this is a chance to run a new system on another platform - something that better recognizes and serves the needs of today’s users. A platform that considers the opportunities brought by emerging technologies , one that recognizes and addresses the needs of people living in an information-rich society and coping with such things as flexible specialisation in the workforce and changing social roles.

Sowing it up

We need to plan this carefully. It would be so easy to place patches over our existing systems and processes without examining their present, and future, functions and effects. It would be equally easy to rush at this and establish rapid changes without due consideration and effective consultation.

We must consider that everyone has an interest in sewing this up. We’ve always known that it takes a village to raise a well-balanced child and we recognize that both educators and communities know what is best for their students. It is obvious that our communities are increasingly aware of the need for 21st century change and are just as concerned about the future of their children as those whose business is education. We need to make time to listen to them, and to listen most carefully to those who are truly effected by any proposed change ; our students, their families and our teachers. Equally, we must nurture and encourage the innovative dreamers, planners, designers, developers and implementors abounding within our profession.

If we do, we have a wonderful opportunity to build something special for future generations : to plan, design, develop, and implement a more seamless system of educational policies and processes within and between our learning communities. ‘Systems’ which use available technology sensibly to support effective communication, on-going developments, day-to-day operations and collaborative programs, and ultimately : to support the development of an integrated framework effectively linking our individual learning institutions (schools), and our wider learning community ie. REAL learning communities. Communities where learning is truly celebrated and supported for all individuals.

DM Dyet May, 2008.

Apologies in advance. I pounded out this post to relieve myself after a week surrounded by the miserable and pessimistic. At the time it gave me some pleasure to mentally list unsuspecting colleagues under the following categories. Empathy and optimism have since kicked in .. but heck, sometimes it’s hard to resist.

Categorising the ‘Digital Immigrant’ Educator Settler Types

Settlers in a Brave New World
I like aspects of Mark Prensky’s Digital Immigrant/Digital Native allegory. After all, we are supposed to be in the midst of the biggest mass movement in our history, and the speed of it makes our last huge paradigm shift into the world of print and bookstuff, shrink into relative insignificance. We could say we’re all immigrants. As a society we’ve set sail - and we’re in the process of settling into a brave new world.

Yep, it’s just like an early episode of “Lost”. We’re arriving in our millions in Internet Land (the world through the windows), and we’ve begun to disembark. Some are still on the boats, plenty are milling about on the foreshore, many have ventured further by degrees into the interior, and some have even rushed forward eagerly to strike their claims and plant some corn. Other brave souls have sought each other out and formed expeditions that are blazing trails through unexplored territory. The reports from these intrepid explorers are that we’ll find a veritable digital utopia just a little further down the track.

I’d like to look at it through the eyes of one particular group – the ‘Digital Immigrant’ educators. You and me. We arrived with the rest of them and we didn’t all come voluntarily, many of us are conscripts. We’ve teetered down the gangplanks (clutching our file boxes of photocopied unit activities), gazing around in awe at the obvious changes to our environment and wondering what strange discoveries and dangers we’re likely to encounter as we move forward. We know there are ‘increasingly less’ of us surviving in the old world and we realise that our level of adaptation to the new environment, and our adoption of some necessary new skills (most as yet undiscovered) will naturally affect our level of survival in this new land.
We can already distinguish several distinct types of fellow settlers…

1. The Still Camping at Kororareka Settlers (NZ’s Plymouth Rock)
Those who were perfectly-happy-back-there-thank-you and are still kinda hopeful that the boat’s coming back. These guys spend a lot of time reminiscing about the old country which was so much better in everyway because life was simpler and students had standards and attention spans - they knew their place, their times tables and their initial consonants. Sigh, how things have changed. “Remember the good old days?- Give me a strap and a chalk board sonny, and I’ll intimidate some short term recall out of any student.”

The ‘Campers’ aren’t certain how they got here. They do, however, clearly remember signing on for a lifetime position with 12 weeks annual leave, short repetitive working days, minimal planning requirements, relatively good pay and plenty of autonomy – and they’re prepared to fight to retain these ancient working conditions (who wouldn’t).
“You want me to attend professional development sessions sometime in the three months I’m not in class? Sorry, can’t - I’ll be on holiday. They gave me all the training I needed before I took up the job, anyway.”

These types haven’t bothered to adapt at all. They’ve ridden out change before and they’re confident that this too shall pass. They don’t bother with windows in their flimsy dwellings, they can barely believe that such a land as this can exist in their world and they see no need to engage with it. They’re more likely to use wardrobes to explore Narnia, than windows to explore the Web. No point in venturing out into this strange new landscape, what could possibly be more suitable than the customs and resources they’ve always managed with ? They’re not budging. “Never mind. It’s only a job and we’ll be retiring in ten/twenty /thirty years anyway. At least some of our methods will live on in the student teachers we’ve managed to cynically indoctrinate”.

2.The Missionary Settlers
Those that go bravely amongst the natives with dictionaries. We can have some sympathy for these guys. Their souls are dedicated to the traditionalist teachings they were immersed in… and they are on a mission. They believe their role as an educator is to pour as much ‘knowledge’ into students as possible in the hopes that it will eventually reach the ‘understanding’ and ‘application’ marks invisibly etched on the side of student’s heads.

These Missionaries gather in their gradually decreasing staffroom-support groups to congratulate each other on their self-sacrifice and steadfastness in the face of change. These guys work hard. They stride exhausted (you would be too if you were the font of all knowledge), but purposefully across their classroom stage (their favourite spot) , employing the dusty strategies of their own distant academic experiences and deploring the limited engagement of their present day students.
They continue to line the natives up in straight rows (all the better to see the board they’re copying from, my dear) and provide generous amounts of felt pens, worksheets , OHT’s and boredom. The technology is arranged in straight rows and the natives are carefully instructed in the proper and correct use of every key and button – their recall of which is promptly tested, in case, in their later lives (at PTA Quiz nights) they may be asked how to do a mail merge in this particular out-dated word-processing programme.

Although educator missionaries are usually there for the right reasons they often refuse to acknowledge that their teaching is almost always for the test. Maybe they know deep down that that’s not what learning is all about, that’s just what schooling is about (and they don’t want to muddy the waters by examining the differences).
They’re actually hurt that other colleagues (the happy-clappy evangelists) dare to use other somewhat more engaging strategies and still seem to get their students to scrape past any testing–
“Humfph -They’re just buying the natives off. There can’t be that much fun in learning if you’re doing it right. Schooling has always been about self-control and suffering and … summative testing. Accountability, you know. I know I’m doing my job as an effective teacher when 50 % of my students can get 50% or more on a recall test or whatever that bell-shaped-curve-thing says.”
“There’s no place in schools for student, parent, or community input – what would ordinary human beings know about learning and assessment? We’re the experts!…and we’re not lowering our standards to allow any of these dangerous new ways in. The next thing you know we’ll have people from all over the place commenting on our student’s work and questioning the quality of our input.”

3. The Deserters (Gone native)
The educator immigrants prepared to abandon the customs and tradition of the old country and jump ship to join the natives. Much more exciting than the missionaries because of their enthusiastic and unquestioning acceptance of native ways. These are the (((kewll))) ones.

In the 70’s, despite their obvious middle-age they’d be the first in bell-bottoms, affros and sideburns . They have an innate drive to be ‘hip’ and ‘with it’. (Terms yet to be re-discovered in Antiques Roadshow episodes). Yes, these guys are superficially in touch with the natives. They don’t doubt for a minute that the kids know all there is to know about this new world and the bright, shiny tools that help them survive in it. .. and they don’t tend to question the applications the young natives put the tools to. That’s just how the natives live. Let them bombard each other with intimidating txt messages, let them post humiliating videos, we just have to accept that this is their world and since being connected is a part of it - they’ll be fine. Eventually they’ll just mutate into creatures with thicker skins.

For them it’s all about the technology anyway.
“ I nagged the boss until I got a centrino enabled vista wireless pod, 2 million gig, with remote access and CSS racing stripes etc. He/she gave it to me because she/he knows how great I am with technology. I just let the natives loose with it, they’re always on the net mucking around. I get young Holden and Ford to set everything up in my class. They find these funny-as vid’s in youtube and flick me the links for my Bebo site” etc.

These guys can’t be faulted for their admiration and enthusiasm for native ways but let’s consider our role as educators and temper it with a little reflection – maybe some of the customs and traditions of the old country are worth keeping. At the very least they provide some kind of familiar structure to both immigrants and the emerging natives. Like that charming old idea of the educator pre-identifying the learning intentions in an activity. Not just giving our students a spade to play with (because it’s shiny and we like the look of it too) – but encouraging them to experiment with the tool until the wielder knows the basics principles of it’s use, then helping them discover that they can, for example, use it to help plant and manage vegetable growth and there’s possibly other useful spade applications that we haven’t thought of yet, but they might. Some of them may even prefer the fork.

There’s both wisdom and foolishness in tradition… and in change. Don’t we need to examine these new tools as educators and consider all useful applications ? Just because the natives have matches doesn’t mean it would occur to them to make a fire hot enough to melt the ore they’ve been gathering from the hills and pour it into moulds to make useful implements. Heck, some of the natives I’ve worked with are more likely to raze forests. We have a choice, we can leave it up to time and experience or we can guide them into discovering useful applications as young learners.

It’s hard to tell which are the most concerning; the Missionaries- who hold stubbornly on to tradition, or the Deserters who abandon it all so recklessly without much thought as to what they are creating.

Still to come…
4. The Explorers – These guys are the ground breakers. Those that go boldly where not many people have gone before etc .
5. The New Settlers – Where are these new settlements and will the gatekeepers let us in ?
DM Dyet, May 2008.

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost. And all for want of a horseshoe nail. ”
–George Herbert —

My Dad used to recite this poem to us as kids (fairly irritating, as I recall) but he used it to illustrate that every action, or omission - no matter how small, has it’s consequences. To us it also illustrated just how easily things would slide into each other when they’re stacked up in the right sequence. We realised that just like the Babushka dolls and Domino trails we used to play with, you need to plan your moves carefully in advance. When you line up a sequence or procedure with forethought for the best effect, you’re more likely to achieve satisfying results. The catch is you have to be aware that every link counts. Each singular and separate part is needed to fit into and help build the bigger picture, no matter how insignificant it may appear to be on it’s own … and we skip steps at our peril.

For me it was the same with affecting change. I’ve always believed we can achieve seemingly unattainable goals by approaching them patiently and persistently. Proceeding step by well-considered step along planned trails with an eye towards our ultimate goal. Ahh - what a load of hogwash .

1. It’s easy to stand at the top of a hillock and look back over the muddy trail you took through the swamp - then map it. You can even convince yourself that that was the best and most direct approach, it doesn’t matter if you went from New York to Los Angeles via London - you still got there, didn’t you, and it’s ultimately achieving the goal that matters - isn’t it ?
2. It’s also easy to sit around the picnic table before venturing forward , before even dipping a toe in the muddy water, and carefully plan the route. But, it’s not so easy to follow those beautifully crafted instructions when your plans are covered in bog slime and you’re up to your elbows in Alligators.

That’s reality. Change is a messy adventure and we don’t like mess. We like concrete expressways with road signs and clearly marked distances to the next off ramp. People who want to blaze trails through unexplored jungles don’t usually choose an 8 - 5 job with good pension plans, extended holidays, a dowdy dress-code and clients that are younger than them. Except maybe Indiana Jones.