My Take on “Put First Things First”

It has been 3 months after the June Holiday since we read “the 7 habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. I will attempt to share my reflection and also hear from my other colleague’s reflections on the habits written in the book – for me is on Habit 3: Put First Things First.

Learning how to Put First Things First addresses good time management which can be a real challenge for many people. Too often, our focus is on things and time, rather than on preserving and enhancing relationships and accomplishing results. So, Put First Things First also involves life management as well – knowing your purpose, values, roles and priorities. So, First things are things we, personally find most worth doing. Many of our activities are affected by two factors, namely urgency and importance. Most of us are driven by the concept of urgency and so urgency is our continuous focus. Such urgency usually falls into the category of “must be done” which may not be our highest priority, so this is Put Second Things First. But to really affect positive change in our lives, we need to reorganize the way we spend our time, to focus on the concept of importance – not urgency. And to live a more balanced existence of our lives, it is important to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is okay. There is no need to overextend ourselves. All it takes is realizing that it is all right – as cited in the book, pleasantly, smiling and non-apologetically say no when necessary and focus on the highest priorities.

So, what does that mean to me? Well, this reading urges me to understand myself better and become better at working out what relationships I should get into and what activities I should focus on. It prompted me to revisit my own purpose, values, roles and priorities. After much thought, I still stand by my decision that my family and my work are my two highest priorities and big things of my satisfied life. However, as I reflected on how I spend my time (say 2 weeks after the September holidays), I came to realize as shown below that I have not fully met my highest priorities. I am still reacting to urgent matters and managing one issue after another. 

Now that I know where I spend most of my time on a regular basis, next I considered where all these are taking me – the purpose. My purpose focused on two areas: Family and Work.

My life purpose spins around my family – I desire a sustainable deep, loving relationship with my family. As mentioned in last year’s reflection, to me, there is no conflict about work and family. In fact, I still find such constant juggling act in which parenting, teaching and leadership, in which each informs me of the other, and each also strengthens the other. I believe in this and was happy to see them confirmed this year when I wanted to play a part in my children’s learning journey and contributed by teaching them to think using methods that works well for them. But I feel that the challenge remains – for me to maintain this attitude that parenting, teaching and leadership complements each other as my roles and responsibilities grow.

My purpose at work as a middle manager is to ensure the learning of my students. And there is no better way to drive students’ learning than to develop the teachers who spend hours educating them every day. Hence, my role as a people developer is important – I am responsible to take holistic care of and to grow and develop my teachers (I will illustrate what I mean by growing and developing of my teachers in my later reflection). Last December’s reflection on the people developer – on the need to establish genuine relationship with teachers and setting of high expectations on the teaching and learning aspects of teachers remains relevant. However, my attempt with data-driven instructions as a cohort dean remains skeptical to teachers. “Just teaching to the test?” My belief remains unchanged, is that data-driven instructions provide information about how we teachers teach, assess and reteach. Such information will help teachers to rethink some of the ineffective teaching and implement new teaching. But this data-driven program I know I needed to give up this year as the teachers are not yet ready for its implementation. Instead, I will attempt to pursue the enhancement of teacher development next year by building on the observation and feedback cycle.

As I balance the Big Things in my life purpose and purpose at work, the reading also reminded me not to become overwhelmed, to start with some of the small changes instead of trying to take on everything at once. In this way, by taking up the responsibility guided by my purpose and values, I now will move forward and live by them!

Taming Our Intuition

Life presents us with many occasions to forecast. Often, we watched economist on television forecasting inflation and economic growth, publishers and producers predicting audiences, engineers estimating the amount of materials needed for a building. Even in our daily lives, we predict the arrival time for the buses and MRT trains, forecast our spouse’s reaction to a proposed move.

Such predictive judgments, such as those made by the engineers, rely largely on schematics, precise calculations and explicit analyses of outcomes observed on similar occasions. Others involve intuition. Such intuition draws primarily on skills and expertise acquired by many years of repeated experience. Today, one of my colleagues during the management meeting performed such rapid and automatic judgment and choices of what constituted the strength and weakness profile of our Normal Technical students. Such intuitive judgment was made with high confidence even when they are not based on any evidence.  Of course, such judgment especially in the profession capacity, are influenced by a combination of analysis and intuition. And yet…  I wonder if using intuition alone is sufficient.

How can we look at the descriptions of the strengths and weaknesses, allegedly written on the basis of years of experience with these “groups” of students? Personally I will evaluate the evidence by comparing the description to the norm for descriptions of normal technical students by professionals. I only wonder the existence of such a norm. Hence, it is important to start with actual profiling of the normal technical students so as to get a baseline of the norm strengths and weakness. Then, using our intuitive prediction compared to the norms that matches our professional impression of the evidence. In this way, the prediction which is still based on our intuition which is far more moderate and accurate than the first.

My Belief on Learning_ Additional Two Viewpoints

The luxury of the one week school holiday enabled me through my reflection to continue considering questions on learning. I started off last Thursday’s blog by stating my own brief on learning as I asked questions about the nature of our students learning ─ on what is important for them to learn, about who can learn well and why and about effective strategies for enhancing my own learning and that of helping our students. My goal for such an exercise is to identify ways I could use to explain on the need for a change in teaching and learning. I needed to consider what the change means to me and clarify for myself so as to strengthen my belief on how and what change(s) will affect my teachers and students.

Previously, I spoke on my beliefs on learning based on own personal experience as a parent and my outside working experience. Today, I will like to consider two more viewpoints on the need for change in teaching and learning – the nature of information and technology.

During my school days, the textbook was one of the most important sources of information and additional information meant going to the library. Largely, the nature of information available to us all seemed fixed. Nowadays, the rate of information change is increasing drastically. In additional, the ever-growing amount of information available to all is incredibly different from my schooling days. Hence, such change in the nature of information translated to our students learning in school as shifts from being told to remember and repeating of information to being able to find and use information.

Another significant reason I see for the need for change in teaching and learning is due to technological advancement. When I began my work as a teacher 7 years ago, I believed wholeheartedly in technology as an agent of change to the teaching and learning. At that time, the Internet explosion appeared to be the single most important change I could imagine. I was pretty sure that technology was the silver bullet for learning. Luckily for me and our school, my school leader adjusted my view. He reminded everyone that technology should not being used for technology’s sake. The excitement over the “latest gadget” sometimes clouded on what we are getting our students to learn. Now, I came to see that pen and paper still can be the best tools in the classroom, depending on what we want our students to learn. I also came to see the promise of technology that would address the challenges faced in our current teaching and learning – on finding and using the vast amount of information, collaborative learning, and communication – often not effectively done without technology. I also believe that the baseline ICT skills is one competency (an increasing important one, though often brushed off as trivial by students as well as teachers) among the many skills which I considered as equals that students need. I still believe wholeheartedly in the power of technology to support teaching and learning. Our school has seen success stories highlighted during staff time by our effective teachers using technology (videos, Google site, mobile carts) to its utmost potential. But technology is not, nor should it ever be, the sole focus or end goal of our students’ learning.

So, I have considered what change(s) in teaching and learning means to me, what should be the next step?  …. to be continued.

Values and Character – Why we must teach?

A recent Teacher’s Day card from a student got me to reflect on the case for teaching values and character.

So, how should schools teach values and character?

But before we can respond to that question, surely there will be teachers who would ask, “Whose values?” In this time and age where people holds different values, it seemed impossible to get agreement on which ones should be taught in schools.

Luckily for us, our Ministry of Education did not stay officially neutral on the subject of values. In 2010, our Education Minister Heng Swee Keat during the Work Plan seminar emphasized that values and character development are at the center of our education to prepare our students for a future which he describes as ‘more volatile and more uncertain’ – where he cited as examples of the escalating problems in society such as the riots in Britain, of man like ex-President Nathan who step forward to risk his life for our nation.

Now in all schools, there is this common goal – be the role of values’ teacher and character builder of our students. Of all the problems that have fueled this concern, I see none has been more disturbing than the alarming increase of youth violence in our country in 2010. Moreover, such youth crimes often carried out by kid-next-door youths seemed to combine new lows in brutality with seeming lack of conscience or remorse, some even continue to act defiantly.

I feel that in today’s society, there is a widespread, deeply unsettling sense that our youth are changing – in ways that tell me much about us adults as a society. And these changes are reflected not just in the violence of our teenagers’ behaviors but in the everyday speech and actions of our youth inside and outside school as well. Students described as ‘student leaders’ coaxing a birthday male student to wear a signed bra and run around the school. Student putting urine into a fellow classmate’s water bottle as both he and the rest of the class watched him drank from the water bottle. What is the problem that resulted in such values deficiencies? Some teachers would say from troubled families, others blamed the mass media and also the internet. Indeed, I think that such reasons are why schools must now get involved in our students’ values and character building education.

Not surprisingly, many youths growing up in this kind of media and internet culture are stunted in their moral judgment. Simultaneously, increasing affluence in our society has resulted in greed and materialism which is also engulfing us. Money increasingly drives our society and shapes the values and goals of our youths.

The most basic kinds of moral knowledge, moreover, seem to be disappearing from our common culture. Luckily for the students of our school, the situation is not that bad.

Nevertheless, I believe that schools must do what they can to contribute to the character of the young and the values of the nation. As for me, I will continue to play my small part, starting from all my classes with two goals whenever I teach: to help my students excel academically and to help them develop good values and character.