Travel can be very inspiring when it is focussed and with purpose. My journey as part of the Premiers PWC Educational Leadership Scholarship certainly gave me the opportunity to expand my thinking, expand the possibilities and envisage a future for education and more importantly build an approach in which to action a deep learning journey for our wonderful school.
“Its a simple task to make things complex, but a complex task to make them simple”
At Oregon University I had the privilege to interview and spend time with Professor Yong Zhao of “World class Learners’, and listen in to research discussion with his PHD students. Again it was another lightbulb moment for me, realising this was my ‘real world adult connection’ and the academic partner, as an educational leader I needed and our school needs. Our conversation was light, refreshing and enriching around the ‘action’ needed by schools to create learning environments that fostered creative, clever and critical problem solvers. It was also imperative that school leaders and schools contextualised the learning environment and structure for their student and community mix. The stakes are high, because “it matters” and it is very important that we are a school of the future and that our students are given every opportunity to be ‘world class’.
‘There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves’. LB Johnson
The culmination of the interview and discussion with Yong, ended in him offering to be our ‘mentor’, our Academic partner in the journey to our ‘future’ school. Our team of teachers will meet online with Professor Yong, collaborating, discussing and mentoring our vision. This will enable us to share our journey as an experiment within the contexts of NSW public school scenario and the wider community. How do we revision within a large educational organisation with its restraints and system requirements. It many ways this will be a ‘project’ for teachers and school leaders.
Our school Strategic Directions read like this.
- Future 21st Century skills for our students
- Teachers are world class leaders in learning
- Real world connections
Ocean_Principal-Leading Beyond the Swell 
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