Empowerment

Serena Lawrence talking in the meeting

What I want you to talk through is your inquiry sheet. As we do this, I have some questions that you could use as critical people, as stimulus to ask others questions.

Gerard Tully – Rector

You know, the more we can share, learn from each other, and also allow other people to have leadership roles and lead us, then that to me is great. If we look just at our little group this morning, actually Serena is leading the group, and she’s the least experienced teacher in that group but doing a fantastic job. And to me, she is the leader of the group, you know, and I’m just a participant in the group, as is everyone else there. The more we can share our collective wisdom, the better. The more engaged the students are, the less the problems around the fringes there are going to be, and the less misbehaviour or whatever going on. But you know, I think they’re all really interlinked. The terminology we’ve been using is “positive respectful relationships”, that’s what we’ve been focusing on. And I think if I was going to give an overall word, it’s about empowering young people. Getting them to the position where they determine their own future, they make their decisions, and it’s on a really solid base of good values, of good understanding about how they learn and about how they should manage themselves, and about how they can become the best that they can be. So there are whole lots of different ways to achieve the same end. Not just the way I’ve always used. There are other ways, and some of those other ways may work better. So to me, that’s empowerment for teachers too, and giving teachers permission to try new things. You have permission to take risks, go out, take the risk, and maybe fail, and learn from that just as we expect our students to learn.

Serena Lawrence – TiC Drama

I think last year, my first year as a facilitator, it was quite scary. Jeanette had to really encourage me into doing that because I was coming from that place of “oh, what are people going to see that I have to bring as” or, last year, being a third year teacher just out of my PRT status. But with the philosophy being that we work together, I think it’s a lot easier for people, rather than seeing me trying to force things on them, which is not how we see it at all.

Simon Fordyce – HoD English 

The sort of traditional PD model is that you have senior leaders sort of imparting knowledge and information. This model sort of turns it completely round. So that Serena being a third or fourth year teacher has got as much expertise and as much right to lead it as people who are seen as being traditionally the leaders of, ah, professional learning. And, I think, for a lot of schools, this model would be quite a change, as it was for us.

Serena Lawrence – TiC Drama

This is my third year as a facilitator, and one thing that I would really like the school to – well that we are working towards – is [for] a lot of other teachers in the school to move up to facilitators and be facilitators. I’m really looking forward to taking a back seat and empowering others.