2012 Combined Queensland Principals Associations State Conference

Click on the State Conference link below to watch a video about the conference.

 2012 State Conference Video - click here to view it

Hosted in conjunction with our colleagues from QSP10/12SAA and members from the QASSP Ipswich Branch, our State Conference took place from Thursday 7th June to Friday 8th June at the Sofitel Brisbane.

The conference report will be published here as material becomes available from the presenters. Summaries from the keynote addresses are complete. All keynote and workshop presenters have been contacted and asked if they wish to provide any material from their session(s) to include here.

Click here to go to the gallery of photographs taken around the conference.

Keynote Addresses:

• Conference Opening - Julie Grantham, Director-General. Session notes. Audio recording.

• Opening Address - Hilary Backus, QASSP President. Session notes. Audio recording.

• Smarter Not Harder? It's Gonna Take a Breakthrough - Malachi Pancoast, President of the Breakthrough Coach. Session notes. Audio recording. Presentation file.

• Coaching: The New Leadership - Michael Hall, Meta-Coach Foundation. Session notes. Audio recording.

•  The Baker Extraordinaire - Tom O'Toole, Owner of Beechworth Bakery. Session notes. Audio recording.

• Education in the Age of Disruptive Innovation - Ian Jukes, international consultant. Session notes. Audio recording.

• Address - Sharon Cohrs, first breast cancer survivor to climb Mount Everest. Session notes. Audio recording.

• Gala Dinner Speaker - Ben Ikin, sports commentator and former rugby league player. Audio recording.

Elective Workshops:

• Canadian Perspectives: Then and Now - Paul Zernike and Gary Drummond. Presentation file.

• Leading to Inspire ... magical gift or practical process? - Glenn Searle. Presentation file.

• Ideas into Action - Chris Eveans. Presentation file. Paper. Instructional Leadership. Instructional Leadership 2. Instructional Leadership Tool. Ed Qld review.

• ...

 Click here to view the program.

The speakers included:

Malachi Pancoast is President and Founder of The Breakthrough Coach, a management consulting firm dedicated to working hands-on with school administrators at all levels. Mr. Pancoast has been helping organisations produce breakthrough improvements in performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction for over twenty years. He has been applying his Breakthrough Coach Management Methodology™ to his work with instructional leaders since 1998. His efforts in education have led to dramatic increases in employee satisfaction and retention, student achievement, and the productivity of administrative teams. To read more click here.

Tom O'Toole is a baker. He knows the taste of deprivation, failure and despair. A man who knows what poverty and being illiterate feels like. He also happens to know how to turn a failing little bakery in an isolated and dying country town with a population of 3,000 into a company with an annual turnover of $12 million, serving over one million customers per year. A bakery that has become one of the highest earning single bakery retailers in Australian History! To read more about Tom OToole, please click here.

Ian Jukes from the USA is the director of an international consulting group that provides leadership and program development in the areas of assessment and evaluation, strategic alignment, curriculum design and publication, change management and so much more. Over the past 10 years, he has worked with clients in more than 40 countries and considers himself an educator first and foremost. His focus has consistently been on the compelling need to restructure educational institutions so that they become relevant to the current and future needs of children. His mission in life is to ensure that children are properly prepared for the future rather than society’s past. As a result, he tends to focus on many of the pragmatic issues that provide the essential context for educational restructuring.

Sharon Cohrs from the Sunshine Coast, stood on the summit of Mount Everest on 20th May 2011 and in doing so became the first Breast Cancer survivor in the world to achieve this incredible feat. As a determined young woman, she is triumphant despite the incredibly hardships she had overcome, and now reborn, rejuvenated and with a new outlook on life, is ready to take on the world. Through Sharon’s experiences in life, from battling cancer through to the physical and emotional demands required to scale the world’s highest mountains, she will motivate and inspire all of us to overcome challenges and succeed in the face of adversity.

Dr Michael Hall from Colorado is a developer, researcher, coach, trainer and prolific author in the Cognitive Sciences having developed the most cutting edge new concepts in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and NS (Neuro-Semantics) today, the Meta-States Model, the Matrix Model, and co-developed the Axes of Change Model. He brings playfulness and humour to training and is known for his passion and integrity. He co-founded the International Society of Neuro-Semantics and The Meta-Coach Foundation.

Opening Ceremony - Julie Grantham and Hilary Backus.

Julie Grantham

• She talked about the great value of sharing knowledge and experiences at gatherings like this.
• "We have to look at how we can do it differently – we can’t get more time to do more."
• "We all bring something unique to the job and to here. In an environment of trust, sharing experience is essential to us as people and as principals."
• The reform agenda – success is what we do when we implement through a collective approach. There are no new focus areas – we are still on the school improvement agenda.
• "We are united in the pursuit of excellence – still the case for this term of government."
• There are reviews with any new government, but the core priorities still remain the same.
• Every student can learn and achieve. There must be an unrelenting focus on that in every school.
• The Australian curriculum implementation is a challenge – this varies across schools.
• Now have a new department name – Education, Training and Employment. This covers the journey from child care and kindy to employment – the full journey to adulthood.
• Independent Public Schools consultation is underway. There is a task force for the delivery of the training and skills agenda. There is a schools plan commission. There is consultation re a new secondary school in conjunction with James Cook University. More Prep classes each year. Scholarships for women to move into non-traditional industries.
• Anzac scholarships to go to Gallipoli.
• There is a real intent to reduce red tape. Please send in your ideas through your association. Ask: "What are we doing that adds no value?"
• EB negotiation has started.
• Move of Year 7 to secondary – still going ahead.
• There is a review of the Queensland Studies Authority and its new role with the Australian curriculum. Senior secondary consultation by ACARA is underway..
• Still aim to achieve 95% of enrolment of all 3.5 to 4.5 years into a kindy program.
• Central support – "we are there to serve you to make your lifer simpler. We need to keep trying for that. We need to be a full service sector to our schools – to add value to what you do in schools."

Hilary Backus

• 3 QASSP pillars – leadership, advocacy, and welfare and support.
• 2 new position papers:
  • A Head Start: Invest in Pre-Prep to Year 6 – Review considerations for primary school resourcing.
  • QASSP Priorities – increasing admin support and increasing middle management are the top 2, and there are 9 others.
• 2013 – the biennial ICP convention will be held in Cairns on 29 June to 4 July. Click here to go to the ICP website for more information and to register an expression of interest. We probably will not have this conference next year, but we will probably have a conference for other administrators in our schools.

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Smarter Not Harder? It’s Gonna Take a Breakthrough - Malachi Pancoast

• His website: http://www.the-breakthrough-coach.com/
• We need innovation and thinking in education – that is his focus – to improve outcomes by improving work by school leaders ands school secretaries.
• What is a break-through? On its own and left to drfit, things will improve by 5-15% each year. What happens when you make a break thorough – rapid improvement that sustains. Up to 500% in a year. Improvement is not accidental – it comes from thinking and innovation.
• Starts with how you set the goals – usually start with what you know how to do, and then get a small improvement. Need to commit to results before you know how to do it. "Breakthroughs live in language before living in fact."
• Examples:
• Cliff Young – long distance runner. In 1983 – showed up for the Sydney-Melbourne race at age 61 in work overalls and work boots. Usual age of competitors is less than 30. He started in a slow shuffle. He was way behind at first. He ran with no sleep. Others ran for 18 hours and 6 hours of sleep. He passed them on the 5th night and set a new race record. He transformed long-distance running - he tried doing something differently. What he cared about was the result, not in doing it the same as everyone else.
• 1961 – JFK spoke about the goal of sending a man to the moon. He was scoffed at by others who said that it could not be done. But the goal came first and then the action second.
• Special area of knowledge. Know plus Don’t know – you know about those. You use the Know stuff. You learn what you don’t know. Know gets bigger, and Don't Know gets smaller.
• The third area is what you don’t know that you don’t know – your blind spots. So you don’t look for it. This is where breakthroughs live. So spend your time in that third area. Need to ask good questions to get to that area.
• If you spend too much area there, you tend to check out – lights on but nobody home. So you often start doodling and doing emails, and you are no longer paying attention.
• You need to be present to cause a breakthrough. Practice being present.
• So for NASA to achieve JFK's goal, it had to be in that 3rd area of knowledge – zero gravity, miniature, telemetry, warmth – it was all about new questions and finding new answers.
• 1985 – Rotary Clubs – project to eliminate polio - Polio Plus. They are very close to that goal now. But they had to say it before they could start it.
• Joseph Lister – in 1865, most common surgery was amputation, with a 50% death rate because of infection. No research was being done to try to change that statistic. He decided to do it anmd so he worked on why blood clotted. Heard about Pasteur’s work on why wine putrified; he heated the wine to kill those germs = pasteurisation. Lister thought that the germs might be getting into the wounds and causing infection. So how to kill the germs without heating. Also heard about carbolic acid being used to kill germs in pastures for cows. Lister was called to treat a compound infection of a boy’s leg. Instead of amputating, he used carbolic acid on a rag to wash the wound. That method mended the leg and healed the wound. Took 6 weeks. Basis of modern medicine.
• "Chance favours the prepared mind" – Pasteur. So take that away from this conference – a prepared mind.
• Where do you want a breakthrough – it must be measurable and specific. JFK's goal was about landing on the moon, not about improving science.
• Thinking the unthinkable. That is what leads to breakthroughs. Say it before you know how to achieve it.
• ‘What’ is the question, and the ‘how’ comes second.
• If you live in the question, the answers are everywhere. Write them down. Don’t stop them from coming – no judging. Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before making the right filament for the light bulb.
• To cause a breakthrough:
  • Create the future by speaking it.
  • Marinate in the question.
  • Stay present.
  • Let the answers come to you.
  • Get things done through other people.
• Exercise in the room: Decide on an outcome that you would like to have a breakthrough in the next two days. Get beyond what you know to the third area. Once you have the ‘what’, then you can move to the ‘how’.
• So marinade in the question. Then worry about how to do it.
• Robert Kennedy’s 'why not' quote. "There are those who look at things and say ‘why’. I look at things and say ‘why not’?"
• Write (2 minutes):
  • I want to produce a breakthrough in …
  • A breakthrough in this area looks like … (describe) – has to be a number
  • I want to produce a breakthrough in this area because …
• The outcome is the important thing, not the process of getting there.
• Share the breakthrough with the others in pairs and trios.
• You should be committed to a result that you don’t know how to accomplish.
• So now marinade in the question.
• We need to re-invent education just to stay even with progress. Change is so fast that we are falling behind. Need to move beyond email to meetings and conversations.
• Could end up with two societies – educated and non-educated. Could lead to huge welfare state or a revolution. Need to bring everyone along to a good education.
• Pay attention to material that stretches you. That is where you might find the answers.
• Don’t check out – it will always happen at exactly the wrong time. Be present.
• Ask yourself the big questions today.
• Adding a smartphone adds 20 hours a week to your working week.
• In small groups, how do you check out? That will help you stay checked in, and can help others stay checked in.
• As you hear new options for causing breakthroughs, start an action list – To Be Done list, not a To Do list.
• Look at what needs to be done and who needs to do it. Don’t do their job for them. Make requests. If you do it for them, why do you need them?
• To cause a breakthrough:
  • Create the future by speaking it.
  • Marinate in the question.
  • Stay present.
  • Let the answers come to you.
  • Get things done through other people.

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Coaching: The New Leadership – Michael Hall

• Website: http://www.neurosemantics.com/

  

• From their website: “Neuro-Semantics is about your personal development for greater meaningfulness, success, and contribution in life.
• In Neuro-Semantics we focus on the processes that will reliably unleash your highest and best potentials. We do that by enabling you to create the most enhancing and robust meanings that will then enable you to implement your best values into the actions that make up your performances. By modeling excellence in people who are actualizing their highest and best we continue to create new models.
• Neuro-Semantics focuses on self-actualization for individuals, companies, communities, and nations. And because self-actualization arises from the synergy of meaning and performance, we use the Self-Actualization Quadrants as a model and tool for enabling self-actualization.”
• How do you rate yourself as a leader?
• Two of the many types of leadership: Executive vs managerial leadership.
• He talks about Coaching Leadership – "the new kind that we need today because of all the changes that are going on all around us and even in us. With the speed of change, we have to operate from Continuous Improvement in our methodology, strategy, tactics, and even in our theoretical foundations about people, learnng and assumptions.
• We need a new type of leadership because of all the changes in people. They want to be empowered to tap their own potentials and to be their best selves. Today, leading the minds and hearts of people requires enabling people to tap into their own human capital.
• We need to be flexible, current – different from command and control leadership, now obsolete.
• How experience is structured. He is a modeller. Asks how things work – if we can figure out the structure, then can replicate it.
• Wanted to understand resilience. How do some people have it and some don’t.
• Started in 2000 to model expert coaches. From that created meta-coaching, then asked what is the psychology of coaching? Deals with the psychologically healthy, ready to take on challenges of life. They are ready to embrace change – has enough ego strength to face the challenges of making more changes.
• Led to human potential movement – Maslow, Carl Rogers, etc. How to unleash potential? Planting the questions that begin the questioning. 
• If I am self-actualising, and I am involved in an organisation, can we have self-actualising groups to bring out the best in the people? What is the leadership that will make that happen?
• A leader is a person who brings out the best in others. Communication, support, questioning. Lead by coaching.
• If you want to lead in the 21st century, you have to exercise the highest level of leadership - self-actualising leadership. This is in contrast to the commnand-and-control leadership of the past.
• You lead the minds and hearts of people best by coaching, by leading people to tap into and unleashing their highest and best potentials. You lead best by empowering people to tap inot their intellectual, creative, emotional, and relationship capital.
• Leadership is functional, intentional, and situational. Leader who is self-actualising can get rid of the ego stuff and let others lead where they are best at it.
• Command and control = lead for compliance. Want more than that.
• Coaching – enabling people to unleash their highest potential.
• To get people to want to follow, to want to be a part of it – have to win their hearts and spirits.
• The role of a leader is to create leaders – Jack Welch. (Not to create followers).
• Paradox of leadership – power with people, not power over people. Leader empowers them.
• How to do that? How to engage people? What is coaching?
• The leadership question:
  • How do you lead minds and hearts?
  • How do you win buy-in from people to your organisation's vision and values?
  • How does leading differ from commanding-and-controlling?
  • How do you get people to want to be a part, to follow, and to be fully engaged?
  • How do you lead with words and narratives?
• Coaching since about 1992. Different from the old helping professions – therapist, consultant. Expert knowledge lies with the person being coached, not with the coach. Coach is not the expert; the client is the expert. Coach can’t diagnose. Coach’s expertise is process, enabling that, empowering that. The expert content lies in the client.
• Is that not the heart of education? To draw out, not to out inside of them.
• Coaching is a methodology that can be used in leading. Pre-supposes: client has the answers, resources, just does not know they do. Process of facilitation – to enable the person to discover those things.
• Coaching:
  • It is an intense, focused, personal and sometimes fierce conversation. It differs from the conversations of consulting, teaching, training, mentoring, therapy and hypnosis.
  • It enables you to lead by asking questions and exploring with a person their current thoughts and feelings.
  • It enables you to lead by setting frames which then win the hearts and minds of people.
  • It enables people to feel cared about, honoured to be a part, and empowered to step up to collaborate.
• Coaching is a conversation, a special kind, not a chat. It is an exploration.
• Need to establish trust with the client – develop a close relationship.
• Frame = interpretive scheme that enables understanding. Need to be on the same channel with each other.
• How do you lead by coaching? It depends on what you mean by "coaching". And there are a lot of conflicting definitions these days.
• In Meta-Coaching, we define coaching using 7 distinctions:
  • Communication (Conversation).
  • In-depth communication (Self-reflexivity).
  • Change / Transformation.
  • Results / Performance.
  • Systems / Holistic.
  • Self-actualisation / Unleashing.
  • Facilitation.
• Models for Coaching Excellence:
  
  • Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
  • Meta-States.
  • Matrix.
  • Axes of Change.
  • Benchmarking; KPI
  • Self-actualisation Quadrants.
  • Facilitation.
• Change / transformation (purpose of coaching) (generative change, not remedial).
• Results / performance (very practical – look to get results that can be measured in some way).
• Systems / holistic (mind/body/emotion inside a body system inside a family system inside a business system – what frames drive you to behave).
• Self-actualisation / unleashing (to make actual your best self) (most people sell themselves short – I could never do that!).
• Facilitation (to facilitate the 6 processes above).
• What is coaching? 
  • It is a conversation that gets to the heart of things. Communication (framing) (you never know what you’ve communicated until you get a response from them = the meaning is the response you get = helps to re-frame).
  • It is an in-depth conversation that works with the unspoken things in the back of the mind. In-depth communication (when two people talk, what is in the back of the mind might not get said = need to know what the person thinks about what has been said) (not solve the problem, but find out what has been tried and how it was evaluated, etc) (the presented problem is usually not the real problem = if it is handled with grace and care and love, then they will go with deeper problems).
  • It is a mind-body conversation that works holistically with a person's whole system.
  • It is a transformational conversation that facilitates change in a psychologically healthy person.
  • It is a facilitative conversation that works at a higher or meta-level to a client's experiences and to the processes of discovery and change.
  • It is a conversation that both implements changes and measures the change.
  • It is a conversation that unleashes potentials so that a person can become fully who he or she can be.
• Meaning shows up in the body as an emotion. Does that meaning create the problem and cause you to be dysfunctional. The person is never the problem; the frame is the problem – would cause problems for anybody with that frame. The person is more than that meaning frame.
• Definition of meta-coaching – it facilitates individuals and organisations to mobilise theior internal and external resources as they unleash and actualise their potentials to a visionary outcome.
• Meaning and performance axes graph (can also be found down the page at http://www.nlpconference.co.uk/articles_details.php?article_id=11). Move up the meaning making axis as we learn more and get older.

• Some people live in the Performance Quadrant – athletes, musicians. Under stress, they do more stuff which leads to burn-out. Need to start reflecting and create meaning and move to Quadrant 4.
• Dreamers live in Quadrant 3. Under stress, they dream more ideas and don’t do anything. Fall into a pit of disillusionment – never perform.
• People move to Quadrants 2 or 3. Best is to blend the two. "If I have an idea, I start to act on it." Synergizing meaning and performance. Moves to Quadrant 4.

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The Baker Extraordinaire - Tom O’Toole (Breakfast Speaker), Beechworth Bakery

• He dressed as a baker and did an Ocker-style presentation, with illustrations from his business and lots of one-liners about success in business and in leadership - some of these are listed below.
• It's all about customer service, and about keeping in touch with your dreams.
• The “Dream Takers” at school, and accountants and bankers, will tell you it can’t be done.
• He moved into Beechworth 28 years ago – a dying town at that time. It is now a vibrant tourist town.
• There are now 6 bakeries in the company.
• He reckons that their product is no different – the people are the difference.
• Does a lot of training. people say: What if you train them and they leave? I say: But what if you don’t train them, and they say!?
• SHIT = simply how I think. Gotta think positive.
• In every disaster there is an opportunity.
• At age 28, his wife left him. Counsellor said that he had to think about where he wanted to be in 5 years’ time. Told him that he had to start investing in himself.
• You become what you study – study happiness, and don’t watch the news.
• It is so easy to be negative. To be positive, you have to get off your bum and do something.
• People say: "It’s hard! But go to some other countries and see what is there. Not many people are leaving Australia and going to East Timor."
• Have an attitude of gratitude.
• Behind every successful man, there is a surprised mother-in-law.
• I hold my wife’s hand, because if I let go, she goes shopping.
• Rules #1 and #2 … - take care of the customer – happy customers come back.
• Staff are told that if they would not buy it themselves, they don’t sell it.
• Every pie is a customer.
• I can only grow my business one loaf at a time.
• Don’t mix up 'simple' and 'easy'.
• All the customer wants is for you to look at them and thank them – it is so simple that we often miss it.
• Only when we continue to raise our goals do we give ourselves room to grow. Write down your goals and date them.
• Drop everything for the customer.
• The winning race horse is not twice as good as the 2nd place-getter. It is just that little bit better.
• The greatest sickness is loneliness.
• Success is 5% technology and the rest attitude and psychology.
• Quality and service are remembered long after the price is forgotten.
• Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
• It looks different from where the customer stands.
• “I’m in business to serve the customer.”
• The staff are in charge of first impressions – them and their families.
• Culture is taught, not bought.
• When you are placed in charge, take charge.
• If you’ve finished learning, you’re finished.
• The grass might look greener over there, but that’s often where the sewerage is coming out.
• Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone. He had a Pyjama Day to get the staff out of their comfort zone.
• It is so easy to talk the talk; it is so hard to walk the talk.
• When opportunity knocks, get up and answer the door.
• Train them, don’t blame them.
• Don’t wait for the economic storm to pass; learn to dance in the rain.
• They have Kinder month in August. Kids come in and make a biscuit and a load of bread, with their name on it. Kids then get their parents to buy from him rather than from the supermarket. At their Santa’s Christmas Bakehouse, they made and decorated 800 biscuits in 2 hours.
• Have to keep investing in yourself.
• He did courses at the Disney Institute – management courses.
• Definite goals and burning desire – winners must have these two things.
• Set the goals and enjoy the journey.
• You can’t drift your way to success. You need a plan – a map – goals. (use the map to find your way).
• Hire for attitude and will, train for skill.
• The essence of all growth is the willingness to learn.
• Have enthusiasm. If you’re heart’s in it, the sky is the limit.
• You have to push the brand.
• They installed “smell fans” to blow the smell of baking into the street, but they have to turn them off if they burn something.
• There is no excitement in being average.
• Build bridges, not walls.
• Everyone smiles in the same language. If you are happy, tell your face. The day goes the way the corner of your mouth goes.
• Goals are dreams with a date.
• Goals do not matter if you are going nowhere.
• Pride is tasteless, odourless, but we can’t swallow it.
• If it is to be, it is up to me. I am responsible.
• Tomorrow’s success begins today.
• Climb as high as you can dream.
• have the 3 Ps: Product, Partnership and Passion.
• People can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.
• Everyone has a clean future.
• You can starve to death by reading a cookbook. You need to take action.
• Attitudes are contagious – are yours worth catching?
• The believers in this life pick up the prizes.

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Education in the Age of Disruptive Innovation - Ian Jukes

• Understanding the Digital Generation - www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecFizWZgIiA
• “Because of their exposure to digital technology, kids today really are different. “This generation has developed what we like to call a ‘digital cultural brain,’ a brain that has been profoundly, and I do mean profoundly, affected by the digital culture into which they were born,” says technology expert Ian Jukes. The real goal, he says, is not to install more and more technology, but to think more creatively about how each new piece of it can be used to further the real goal of 21st Century learning. In other words, they say, it’s really not about hardware at all: it’s about headware.
• From http://www.fluency21.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=1242 :

In our vast Information Age, change is a constant. Technological advances and our dynamic exponential times are showing us a reality that is, in fact, becoming history right before our very eyes. It’s amazing to think of how new technologies transform life and learning, and this is only the beginning. Truly, nothing short of a revolution is taking place in our working and learning lives.

In Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class, and in Teaching the Digital Generation: No More Cookie Cutter High Schools by Frank Kelly, Ted McCain, and Ian Jukes, each of these books deals in its own way with the concept of what we’ll come to know in this perspective as “disruptive innovation”. Through the years, rapid advancements in technology have constantly updated and rearranged the ways in which we go about our daily lives, by updating the things we use to live them with. This refers to gadgets ranging from phones, cameras, and computers to the services we use to obtain financial support, medical diagnoses, travel arrangements, sources of entertainment, and so on.

The list of what has been affected throughout our time by this phenomenon is endless. And because they have been affected, we have been affected significantly. One can’t help but realize that our world has changed drastically, and will it unrelentingly continue to do so. But is this such a horrible thing?

• Book: "Understanding the Digital Generation: The New Connections".
• Change is happening all around us. Teachers face a fundamentally different kind of student, whose experiences are forcing them to rethink how they teach and assess their students.
• What we have to understand is that these 'new' students look the same as we did on the outside, but, neurologically, they are different. They mature earlier by several years, because of the exposure they have to digital world – a bombardment, in fact – enhancing visual learning and visual understanding and internal processing.
• Digital bombardment – they live in a 3-screen lifestyle – build deep modes of communications with one another. They spend up to 60+ hours weekly using one or two or three screens simultaneously.The low bandwidth in Australia is holding that figure lower than the US. It is estimateds to be 31 hours weekly online (25% up in last year) and 3339 texts each month (4050 for females). 228 hours per month on video games.
• 500 million downloads of Angry Birds since it went online. 500,000 videos are viewed each hour on YouTube. 72 hours of new video uploaded each day to YouTube (up 30% in the last year).
• What does all this mean? Why so much time spent interacting? Range of content is so wide – look at Gary Hayes’ social media counts website.
• What is taking place is not a passing fad. Digital culture has become the new normal. Affected every part of our lives. It has happened almost overnight. Fundamental and irreversible change.
• Educators must adopt social media in a meaningful way.
• Do they have any implications for you, for your family, for education? You might not like the trends. But as a society we have no choice but to engage with it and make sure that our kids use it responsibly and are affected by it positively. Hard for our older generation to fathom.
• Attributes of digital generation - click here for a table showing these.
• They want information quickly (that is what they have grown up with); we want to control the speed of supply. They have an internalised need for speed. Teachers do not have that. And the kids often have more and better ICT at home than at school. At school they have to power down.
• They give the teacher 15 minutes to get it and to show that they respect the kid in their world. Have to accept that the kid lives in the digital world and respect that. And education has always had problems with changes like this.
• Educators have to use smartphones and other personal digital devices as learning tools. Rather than banning them, have to show them how to use them appropriately. Banning them proves how far schools are behind the new generation.
• Schools have to prepare them for their future world.
• Digital learners – can do several things at the same time. They are not linear learners and linear problem solvers. Continuous partial attention = multi-task = time slicing our attention. We can do it when we drive a car. It is happening faster for the young people. Compare approach to studying at home in the past with how they work happily today.
• Young person: “I get distracted without my distractions.”
• John Medina – studies show that multi-tasking does not produce better results when studying or problem solving. So we have to teach them to single-task as well as multi-task. But they do not suffer noticeable cognitive defects when multi-tasking. Can’t remove their multimedia ‘distractions’ because they are to closely interwoven with their lives.
• Digital learners prefer pictures, sound, videos and colours before text. Used to use those things as a secondary source after the primary source of the text. 90% recall of 2500 images 72 hours after 10 seconds of exposure. 63% after 112 months. If new information presented only orally, 72 hours later 10% recall. % grow from 10% to 65% if you add a new image after the fact.
• Words complement the images.
• Kids know more about innovations than the previous generation – for the first time. They were born digital.
• Kids beat adults at video games – visual spatial skills are much higher.
• Digital age at the stealth level of awareness is causing a shift from written to visual modes.
• Digital readers read in an F-pattern. Teachers read in a Z-pattern. First thing on the website to be looked at are the images. Eye processes images 60,000 times as fast as text. At our core, we are all visual learners, as 30% of our cortex is for processing images. (They will never go below to the right on a page.)
• They prefer to learn just-in-time, not just-in-case.
• They will have 10-17 careers by the time they are 35 years old. Thomas Friedman. Not a sign of failure, it is the new business reality. Skills for work will be different from skills for life.
• Top 10 jobs in 10 years’ time do not exist today.
• So how do we prepare the kids for that world? Need to know what the world needs, and need to think globally.
• Now mainly use the just-in-case model of learning. There is a place for that, but the kids are different. They prefer, and need, just-in-time.
• That needs a completely different set of skills – developing skills to allow them to learn quickly just-in-time when they need the new skills.
• They are looking for both instant gratification and rewards, while we prefer deferred delayed gratification and rewards. Need both. Digital culture provides the information and rewards instantly. They want constant affirmation, attention, and the ability to distinguish themselves from others. So they have embraced social media as their own – are more available to their friends than to their own family.
• Video games demand a decision every .5 to 1 second, and they reward every 7 to 10 seconds. In classrooms, the figures are 35 minutes for the decision or to ask a question.
• Would your kids be in the classroom if they did not have to be there?
• Higher order thinking skills for the kids vs rote learning by teachers and for the tests.
• Very highly social generation, but in a different way from the way we think of social.
• They are in control in their digital world, so they want that in the classroom.
• Education and learning needs to become as relevant and as fun as video games. Will need to change the traditional stand-and-deliver model. Education decision makers do not understand this. They have no knowledge of the way that the world has changed for the kids. Play is now the work of the digital generation – wants to know why they are learning any particular thing.
• Scans show that their brains are different, so they think and process differently. Kids 3 or 4 years apart are different from each other – that is how fast things are moving.
• 40 years of research into how kids’ brains work are not being applied to how we educate the kids. Who has the learning problem?
• We have to stop preparing our kids for our past – we need to prepare them for their future.
• There is a place for traditional methods – how to transmit traditions and values. But the world has fundamentally changed in 10 years, and we need to take the time and effort to respect their world and their values. We need to find the balance between their world and ours.
• Change is hard, and we are struggling with the new generation – it has always been that way throughout history. There is nothing wrong with the kids; they are just different.
• Then played the gorilla video. Perceptual blindness = not seeing important things because we are focused elsewhere.
• www.fluency21.com – handouts.
• This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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Keynote Address - Sharon and Allan Cohrs

• She was the first breast cancer survivor to reach the summit of Mount Everest
• They were the first Australian-born couple to climb Mount Everest.
• She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007. She suffered from pain, sickness and depression.
• But she started living life. They believed in themselves and pursued their dreams. Everyone can do that.
• It was never about firsts – it was all about a journey from the bottom of the world to the top - emotionally and psychologically, not just physically.
• Multiple aggressive tumours. 3 major operations. She hated how she felt.
• Her motto became: Inspire, dream, believe. At the end of the day, I am aware that I will never live this particular day again. I am grateful to be alive.
• All their plans were changed. They now had to save her life. She had to take control of her mind. So she set goals, and gave herself the belief that she would survive, and then go and do whatever she wanted to achieve. "You look at things differently. You don’t sweat the small stuff any more." She takes on challenges and pushes her boundaries. She also likes talking to people.
• She talks about it to give people the strength to dream dreams and achieve them.
• She also believes that a cure will be found for breast cancer.
• She lost her father last year to cancer. He had encouraged them to keep going and climbing and do things.
• Used the mountains as her focus to get through – hurdles to hiccups to hoorays.
• Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds. (US Navy Seals).
• The mental and physical side were both hard. But she had to stay motivated. She put photos of mountains up around the house.
• Success does not come to you – you go to it.
• Visualised climbing to block out the pain.
• What is your Everest? Find out and achieve it.
• Allan showed her the importance of teamwork, perseverance, and teamwork.
• Book: “It’s not about the bike” – Lance Armstrong. Helped her to lift and move on.
• Started planning for Everest. Climbed several others in that area. Then they knew that they were physically fit. Then had to get mentally fit. Worked with Ken Dalton, a personal trainer and their friend.
• They have a climbing team of four people who are a tight group. Always use the same Sherpas. Acclimatised for several weeks. From Camp 3 to South Col at 8,000 metres to Camp 4. Had bad weather and went back to Camp 3. Decided to go down. Hardest day of his life – felt so bad about retreating.
• 10 days to get to Base Camp at 5300m. 3 days there resting. Then they went high and slept low for 6 weeks. Body needs to produce more red blood cells to carry more oxygen. Have to be able to sleep at Camp 3 without oxygen tanks.
• After the South Col, move into the Death Zone, where your body uses 1000 calories an hour. Can eat chocolate and lose weight!
• They spent 45 minutes on the summit in a beautiful day.
• It was the hardest day of her life and it was worth it.
• "It’s not the mountains that we conquer. It is ourselves." (Sir Edmund Hilary).

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