The Shifting Thinking Conference

First, let me acknowledge that I love conferences! I love the luxury of having days set aside just to mingle with other people with similar interests; the stimulation of being exposed to different expertise, different environments, different world views, different experiences; the discussions; the sense of new possibilities and perspectives; and the revelation that there are so many other people in the world who care about the things I do.

Shifting Thinking was like that, and with the extra bonus of being a bit outside the square. I came away at the end of the two days feeling a bit excited about the conversations we had begun, and a bit unsettled by some of them, a bit frusrated about the sessions I didn't get to.

The best of it
The Day 1 highlights for me were Jennifer Garvey-Berger's conversations about the nature of change and the four thinking tools she introduced us to.

The Day 2 highlights for me were Perry Rush's session, called "Who says schools have to look the way they do?"  and the group session with parents from local schools, called "Who are the experts?" (I'm glad I read the synopsis, because the title almost put me off.) As it turned out, two of the people presenting this session had children in the same class as my youngest,  so we had a considerable amount of shared experience to draw on.

And in between, no less exciting was the opportunity to visit Te Papa Tongarewa's new interactive Our Space with Diana-Grace Morris, to explore the interactive map, an interactive multimedia feature called simply "The Wall" and the High Ride.  It was great to see our little group of middle aged respectable educators (me included) squealing like kids with the excitement of exploring and creating. Woo-hoo!

The whole conference had a real buzz to it, with an exciting combination of willingness to challenge existing mindsets and positive attitude.

And the rest
The only exception was the second speaker on Day2, Cathy Wylie who didn't really seem to get the point of the event. Where other speakers used the opportunity to reflect on their own professional and personal journey, on tools for creating collaboration and positive change, and on mapping out the way forward into the 21st century, Wylie gave a muddled, negative and inaccurate address that added nothing of value. She'd obviously not prepared properly and seemed to have only covered about half of her material, so maybe the good stuff was yet to come. Although she's positioned herself over the past 20 years as an expert on the New Zealand version of school self-management and community ownership, Wylie really doesn't ever seem to have got the point of the reforms, and this address bore that out, with inaccuracies of fact, and very little evidence of analytical insight or fresh or original thinking.

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always had
The lesson I suppose is that we all have to work with what we've got - and shifting the mindset of the system as a whole will need us to engage a large number of practitioners in all kinds of roles who don't understand, or don't have the energy or the insight to look beyond what they have always had. So part of the challenge will be how to re-frame those people and those characteristics in our own attitudes and practice that are currently "part of the problem" in ways that allow them to become "part of the solution".

So how do we learn to stop doing what we've always done, in search of what we've never had? It's not easy. Perhaps the first step is to practice stepping out of the comfort zone and doing things differently. This is one of the things Jennifer Garvey-Berger challenged us to think about - but that might be a separate post.