The School Corridor Tatler

I am always full of admiration for teachers who attend holiday courses. Today I loved engaging a group of mainly deputy principals who are putting up their hands and saying: i want to lead a school and make an impact." If you create an environment for people to learn from peers, they share freely. During our session today, participants eagerly shared tried and tested strategies on how to build school libraries, how to manage safety and security at schools and so forth.  What I pick up during these presentations is that schools don't provide enough opportunities for SMT members to engage financial management issues at schools. Another oversight is that SMTs don't really study circulars and share their insights with the staff and themselves.  If we want to cultivate well informed principals and senior management staff, we need to expose them to the high level organizational and management structures and systems. This is what mentorship and sposorship are all about. I hope th...

For the past three years, we have been actively promoting independent reading at our schools.  In 2013, Colleen Diedericks, then the Foundation Phase Subject Adviser, and I implemented a Literacy Improvement Strategy in our circuit. The Literacy Strategy was designed to meet three objectives. THREE OBJECTIVES OF THE LITERACY STRATEGY Firstly, we wanted schools to explore and interact with research that sought to explain how schools themselves entrench low literacy levels because of organizational and classroom teaching problems. Secondly, we aimed to help schools expand their peer networks so that they could have access to more resources and support. Thirdly, we believed that a corporate book reading campaign would help to galvanize school's literacy improvement programmes and energise them to lift the reading levels at their school. That is how the Reading 40 Books Per Learner Campaign came into being. Let me give you an overview of the build up to launching the Re...

You are seldom disappointed when storyteller, Professor Jonathan Jansen takes the floor. Rapport comes naturally even on this typical winter's afternoon. Off we go with Jonathan to Namibia, meeting a few young people and community members whom he had engaged on his recent travels to our neighbour. We hear our neighbours are calmer, happier and more aligned although they too have a difficult past. Selwyn Page, Devine Fisher, Jonathan Jansen and Jackie Loos Before we know it, we are travelling south again, crossing the Orange River and land straight in Spear Land. We hear lessons drawn from the Spear incident interspersed with just an adequate dose of contextual information to aid understanding. The Spear outcry demonstrated that we are still a deeply wounded nation - so angry and volatile that we forego reason and debate. It highlighted the failings of our education system and the incident also made us more aware of the thinness of our democracy.   Jonathan and Simon, the Organiser ...