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Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Improvement vs Transformation



I'm being changed by change, its a place I relish professionally, and as I'm challenged to explore the impact of change on teachers, I realise that change is what defines my practice personally. At some point, I stopped worrying if I was doing it 'right' and started trying different approaches, that are based on a mixture of hunch, intuition, courage, and best practice. 

I've viewed Derek's video today on 'Improvement vs Transformation', and its really helped me to start locating my 'balancing place' amongst the shifting thinking of education in Aotearoa and further afield. I'm not sure if balance is the right word, for me, teaching has become about constantly looking for levers to destabilize practice, and yet if I hope to be taken seriously in my work, I feel that I should be providing anchor points. There's not a lot of 'anchorage' in my practice presently, I find it difficult to explain myself, but I know I'm 'onto something'. Maybe this ocean-going metaphor is useful, perhaps I spend a lot of my professional time 'at sea'...

Derek Wenmoth's short explanation and model helps to create an 'anchorage' of sorts, to refine my understanding, a set of 'coordinates' to locate myself maybe... linking improvement and transformation, and bringing together the best of centralized and decentralized systems into a 'networked' model makes sense of my thinking. 





It also makes me think about NetNZ, a new model for video-conference or online education for secondary school students, that is replacing the cluster model in the South Island of NZ with a 'next generation' model for sustaining online, video conferenced based learning and teaching. It does represent a 'networked' approach I think...