Message from the Principal
You are invited! Keynote presentation on ‘Changing the way we do change’
Constant and unrelenting change is one of the few things that we can guarantee about the future. Some staff at our school have given me feedback that as an organisation, we need to manage change better, and I agree.
Our goal of being an adaptive organisation is also explicit in our vision statement, which states ‘as an agile school, we collaborate and innovate to make a difference in the communities we serve and lead’. This agility and the ability to co-create change is grounded in our ambition to become a ‘learning community’ where never-ending cycles of inquiry and collaboration are the way we do business at KGV. In the times ahead, all organisations will need to do change well if they are to be adaptive, iterative and responsive.
We are excited to have Canadian learner-centred design expert Cale Birk at our school on our professional learning days on 13 and 14 August 2018. Cale is a co-author of a new book ‘Changing change using learner-centred design’ (Birk and Allen, 2017). He has already started working with us on a process to identify some of our current improvement goals that have emerged from our staff, student and parent stakeholder surveys.
Highlighted in the book are ‘seven reasons why change is needed and why we must rethink how we do change…’
- Current ‘school reform’ efforts are often inadequate to the scale of the task to prepare our young people for the challenges ahead in this century;
- Prepackaged programs are easy to implement, but provide little long-term impact;
- Many change programs are seen as ‘flavour of the month’, implemented by management and often fail;
- It is possible to have a great idea, but no one will ‘buy-in’ to the initiative;
- Doing change well is often the differentiating characteristic of successful organisations;
- Schools that engage in collaborative enquiry often enable educators to connect with increased enthusiasm and passion;
- School leaders need to develop their skills in designing learning experiences, not solutions. The leader becomes the facilitator for collaboration, not the authority figure with solutions.
(From ‘Changing Change’ (2017), Cale Birk and Charity Allen, PBL Consulting)
In August this year, Cale is going to facilitate this ‘Learner-Centered Design’ process as we look at our KGV improvement goals for the 2018-19 academic year.
I invite our parent community to our school from 8.00 to 10.00am on Monday 13 August to listen to Cale’s keynote address on the learner-centred design model. The model is applicable to any business or organisation that would simply like to change better. There is no cost to attend, so please come to the keynote address and join us as a learning community!
Please click on this link to register for the Cale Birk keynote address.
Kind regards
Mark Blackshaw
Principal
King George V
