Tenacity and Commitment

"Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground."  Mary Kay Morrison

This quote sparked thoughts about the 80 year old oak tree that grows in my New Zealand garden. Its tenacity and commitment resulted in a huge tree with a beautiful thick trunk, sturdy branches and tens of thousands of leaves, all of which come down in the autumn.  One branch has grown around the thick rope of the child's swing that has been there for many years.

The genetic instruction of the acorn was to grow, reaching upwards and downwards, using the soil, sun, air and rain to ensure that the tree survived.

We don't have genetic instructions to grow a trunk or branches or leaves.  Our genetic instructions are to meet the needs of survival, belonging, power, freedom and fun.  

We choose behaviours to get what we want which is aimed at meeting those needs on a daily basis.  Our soil, sun, air and rain is the nourishment we need in our lives to continue to grow as people.  

In classrooms, that nourishment is vital for the growth of each child to blossom.  In schools where internal control psychology is the basis for all decisions, the nourishment is evident.  


Some schools have been working to implement the ideas of Choice Theory for a long time.  Sunshine Beach State School in Queensland, Australia began its journey 20 years ago.  Koraunui School in New Zealand has been training people in Choice Theory and its applications for more than ten years. It takes tenacity and commitment for a school to continue on this pathway.  

Sometimes the climate produced by the governing bodies does little to enable schools to pursue with the tenacity and commitment needed to match their own quality world pictures. Seemingly endless barriers are put in the way of quality, and schools struggle to keep up with barrages of change. 

It will be the ones that hold their ground that will win through and provide the sort of education that all children need and deserve.  




BE PART OF OUR GREATEST GATHERING EVER!

We are finally able to give you details about the William Glasser Association International Conference scheduled for 6th to 9th June 2012 in Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

1. This is the First International Conference organised by the new William Glasser Association International
2. The location is Dr. Glasser’s home town.
3. As Dr. Glasser is no longer able to travel beyond Los Angeles, this gives us a special way to honour him and his work.
4. We have made a special effort to keep the registration fee and the accommodation fees at the lowest levels ever.

Join us in celebrating Choice Theory around the world!

1. To allow us to finalise our deposits with LMU it is vital to the success of this conference that we get as many early bookings as possible.
2. We are asking you to pay your conference fee now.
3. The early registration fee is $300 (ending 31st Jan 2012).
4. The conference fee includes registration, all presentations and keynotes, breakfast, lunch and dinner Thursday to Saturday inclusive and including the Saturday banquet.
5. If we do not achieve our target deposits by the end of January we will need to reconsider our options.
6. If, for any reason, the conference is not held your fees will be returned to you.
7. Important: Do not pay for any flights until you receive a receipt from the conference committee and a clear go ahead from us to book flights.

For all information about this conference
including payment links
visit WGAI site

Happy Australia Day

I was interested to hear this morning that Geoffrey Rush had been made the Australian of the Year. A very worthy recipient for such an honour. A quick look at the media and a survey in one of Sydney's papers showed that not everyone agreed.

When he was interviewed he said he was humbled by the award.  He spoke about being in the company such amazing people - the other nominees- who were passionate about what they were doing and how he was changing his perception of what it is to be Australian.  As we know, more knowledge - from significant others can often change perception.

His hope as Australian of the Year is to bring about a shift in perception about social issues through the arts.  He particularly wanted to inspire young audiences.

I got to thinking how it would be to mingle with these people.  They all have a quality world and have different pictures and yet they have similarities.  As we believe that all motivation is from our quality world pictures and how we attempt to live our lives to get what we want, to meet one or more of our basic needs  of Survival, Belonging, Power, Freedom and Fun.

Geoffrey Rush said that his chief drive was 'a professional calling'.  Perhaps this could describe what other nominees thought about what they do.  Perhaps the sense of a professional calling is about meeting all of the needs by what we do.  Perhaps it is about the values we hold as people who can make a difference for our fellow human beings.

Making the difference

A young mum who, with her husband had taken over the family farm, put in a nutshell the difference between schools that adapt the philosophy of internal motivation versus external motivation.    

She had grown up on the farm and was used to the daily tasks of farming. 

She said “It is so different now, being a farmer instead of a teenager on the farm.  When I was growing up I just did what dad told me to do.  Now I have the responsibility of the decisions and I love it.”

This is the essence of the Glasser Quality School classroom.  In a school where external motivation is used, the students do (sometimes) what the teacher tells them to do.  In a school based on internal motivation the students take responsibility for their choices and do the work because it adds quality to their lives. 

As teachers, if we make all the decisions and always tell students what to do, they do not develop the sense of ownership and joy in learning that students attending a Glasser Quality School do.

In the daily tasks on a large farm, the owners would constantly be self-evaluating; the best way to achieve the desired results; the outcomes of their work; the amount that they have achieved and the work still to be done.  

These minute-by-minute decisions make the difference between failing and succeeding both on the farm and in the classroom. 

The Weather Rope

My older brother and I recently had a discussion about school journals that were a part of our reading program at school in New Zealand all those years ago.  He reminded me about a story that had made a huge impact on him called The Weather Rope. Perhaps it was the fact that we grew up in a farming community where the weather was always a topic of discussion "We need rain." Or "Wish it would stop raining so we can get the hay in." Perhaps it was the possibility of being able to control things over which we had no control.

The story told of a community that discovered a weather rope that hung from the sky.  All one had to do was to go and pull on the rope to get a change in the weather.  If the community wanted rain then the rope was pulled and hey presto there was rain.  Then if the rain was sufficient for the grass to grow, the rope was pulled again and there was the sunshine to dry up all the puddles.

This all went along very well until people started to disagree with what they wanted.  Some wanted it to stop raining so they could go to the beach.  Others wanted wind to dry the washing.  The gardeners wanted the wind to stop so that the roses would not be blown away.  The arguments began and people were pulling the rope so often and so hard to get what they wanted, that the suddenly the rope fell out of the sky.  People could not longer get what they wanted.

This is so true in life.  People have different wants.  We know that we are driven by what we want to match our Quality World pictures.  Our choices in behaving to get what we want may result, as in the story, in none of us getting what we want.

I have a favourite cartoon which depicts two characters in a stand off,  each with a rolled up magazine ready to strike .  The caption says "No way.  I'll put my magazine down when you put yours down."

I think if we both lay down 'our magazines' and negotiated, listened, supported- all the connecting habits, we would not lose our 'weather rope' and be more likely to both get what we want.

In the words of the Irish Blessing...

Quality Schools

In a quest for quality there are schools all around the world implementing practices that align with Choice Theory.  This is not an easy thing to do.  If we look at the conditions for quality we can see why this is difficult.


1.A warm, supportive classroom environment.
  
This is difficult when you are feeling out of balance yourself.  Someone once said " You can't give what you haven't got" If you are feeling out of balance then it is difficult to give that warm supportive environment so needed for quality work to be achieved. 


2.  Students are asked only to do useful work.

"We have the test coming up and I don't think that my students have had enough practice at doing those comprehension examples. We had better do more rather than that lesson I planned on setting up a class business."


3.  Students are always asked to do the best they can do.


It always seems that we put time ahead of quality work.  In a classroom where you have a range of learners  and learning styles; where some student complete work more quickly than others. It is very difficult to allow the time for students to do the best that they can.


4.  Students are asked to evaluate their own work and improve it.


This is the key to quality and indeed to intrinsic motivation, yet time taken to use this form of evaluation is not given.  Rather we tend to use teacher evaluation most often in our attempt to get the results that we want.

5.  Quality work always feels good


When the time is given to take something to a level of quality, when it is perceived as useful, when the classroom is warm and supportive and students are proud of their work, then it does feel good.


 6.  Quality work is never destructive


This photo was taken in a classroom in a New Zealand school recently. It demonstrates the quality work being done in this classroom.

 Henderson North School in Auckland

Revisit of Mental Health

In September 2005, Dr Glasser wrote a small booklet  entitled Defining Mental Health as a Public Health Issue.  The description that Dr Glasser gives for mental health - as opposed to mental illness is as follows.

You are mentally healthy if you enjoy being with most of the people you know, especially with the important people in your life such as family, sexual partners and friends.  Generally you are happy and are more than willing to help an unhappy family member, friend or colleague to feel better.  You lead a mostly tension free life, laugh a lot and rarely suffer from the aches and pains that so many people accept as an unavoidable part of living,  You enjoy life and have not trouble accepting other people who think and act differently from you.  It rarely occurs to you to criticise or try and change anyone.  If you have differences with someone else you will try and work out the problem; if you can't you will walk away before you argue and increase the difficulty.

You are creative in what you attempt and may enjoy more of your potential that you ever thought possible.  Finally even in very difficult situations when you are unhappy - no one can be happy all the time - you'll know you are unhappy and attempt to do something about it,  You may even be physically handicapped as was Christopher Reeve, and still fit the criteria above.