"We can't motivate our students without learning to motivate ourselves."
As an international education leader who has witnessed both wonderful and stale inhibiting school environments, I believe we need to begin with changing the mindsets of teachers/staff through constructive learning communities and than our students will benefit. In the 2nd week of April 2017, I and an international group of teachers and administrators visited the Finland educational system with Edu Tours to Finland.We were amazed by the collaborative professionalism the teachers and administrators at all the schools we visited projected towards each other. Their respectful cooperative school environment transferred to the students, where I witnessed firsthand how well behaved, responsible and academically motivated the K-12 students were.
In observing the Finland education system, I believe there are 3 key ideas that we must begin with our teachers and follow through with our students to create a cohesive learning environment. These 3 key ideas are: Adaptive Expertise, Emotional Stability and cultivating Individual Differences, which will influence the natural progression of learning.
First, is Adaptive Expertise, which I believe is essential to creating lifelong learners in a constantly changing global climate. As a principal in every new school I've joined, I would begin by observing the staff, their working environment and creating a non-threatening atmosphere through the building of trust. This would create the intuitive willingness to change an older philosophical system by asking tough questions, listening and engaging my staff on what is working at the school to begin isolating on the weaker issues. I would then mentor my teachers on how changing their measuring methods for academic outcomes, would produce consistent progress for tracking higher order learning. Adding consistently, scheduled and constructive professional learning communities in both horizontally (context/subject) and vertically (K-12 progression of levels), would begin changing their mindsets by inquiring my teachers to begin scanning their classrooms, guiding them to try newer approaches of teaching and exercising the confidence to creatively explore newer methods. Training them to give their students more responsibilities on how to self-plan, regulate, reflect and organize their time to progress to the next level of inquiry. This positive constructive guidance would motivate my team with instilling the love of learning with their students on making new discoveries on what interests the students individually and to learn to question other aspects of their discoveries to keep their students' mindsets constantly inquiring on inquisitive revelations.
Second, Emotional Stability, is key for both teachers and students to move forward on making the meta-cognitive connections. Some teachers and many of their students come to school: hungry, physically, verbally and environmentally abused. We, as educators and administrators must learn more about our teachers and their students on a personal level, so we can teach them the coping mechanisms to evolve in our school's environment and beyond, to step out of their inhibiting habitat. Student learning will only take place when students feel safe and can trust the school environment (Maslow's Hierarchy of Learning). Educating all staff with training and reinforcing it throughout the year on the local and global laws that protect students on having their rights to privacy and respecting it. Everyone in our schools, from principals to teachers, supporting staff and students must be heard and work in a cooperative manner as a team to allow students to feel wanted, heard and project trust in the system.
Third, is cultivating Individual Differences through motivation, since all teachers and their students learn at different time intervals & levels, process information differently and come from a variety of cultures and religious backgrounds. In a global world, schools are increasingly exposed to students with a variety of intellectual, creative, racial, emotional, ethnic, gender, language and religious backgrounds. It is imperative that we first engage the learners by motivating them to release their cognitive and creative abilities. The educator teams must learn to respect the variations of each of their students and know how to effectively stimulate their motivation to the next level.
Finally, I believe providing an enriching learning community environment with these 3 key ideas: adaptive expertise, emotional stability and cultivating individual differences, would create more confident teachers and students, who would use their cognitive and creative skills to their full potential. In teaching our teachers and their students the skills to constantly self-assess themselves, it would create life-long learners who would make a significant difference in our globally cultured world. "We can't motivate our students, without learning to motivate ourselves."
