The School Corridor Tatler

Today Eugene Daniels, gave a powerful talk at our SMT forum about the deep change we need if we want to turn schools around. Eugene Daniels's message is clear: Let's teach beyond teaching to targets. Let's teach to each child's dream".  If children do not succeed, adults have to take responsibility for the children's failure. This is a 360 degree turn, flipping traditional thinking that blames the child for not achieving. Eugene Daniels having a meaningful conversation with our school leadership teams You must experience Eugene Daniels to benefit from his evidence-based talk about deep change. Besides drawing on literature, Eugene's shared how he is implementing the model of deep change and he gave us a few practical tips on how schools can deepen their own transformation.  These are a few of the insights that I gleaned from the talk. We must learn to do things differently. We should move away from doing more of the same. If we don't l...

The day I reported to Fish Hoek Education Circuit office as my new workplace, I should have smelt a rat when I saw the truckload of bags with a blonde head moving into the building. My goodness, I remember thinking, is this what I was going to morph into?  The bags plonked themselves on the floor in the conference room and in their place, stood Colleen, my new colleague, the Foundation phase subject adviser that I would be working with for the next six years! As time passed,  I realized THE BAGS are the South African curriculum in motion. Over the years, THE BAGS, like our curriculum, adapted to the change, without losing their volume, though. Their contents writhed and grappled with the change from plain Jane NCS and its Gazette, 29626, that prescribed the requirements for progression in the GET band, to CAPS Gazette, 34600. Where Colleen went, THE BAGS followed. It was during our circuit meetings that these BAGS dominated our space. When it was Colleen's turn to...