May update

Attended the Reframing the Future forum in Sydney May 18 and stayed on for the weekend - unbelievably beautiful weather, even went for a swim at Bondi.

The forum was good - lots of good contacts, interesting projects and deep thinking about networks. Now I just need to integrate that thinking and the focus on the RTF project, with what we already have underway with TROPIC.

Have tried the new observation sheets (amended by Michael in TAFE Tasmania) with a video and then with Sarah-Jane's class and Colleen's chat session. The sheets work well, a big improvement I think but a few minor changes needed.

This afternoon I'm off to Brisbane to meet up with Bob, Gillian, David and David to plan the training and discuss a few other things including the RTF action plan. A lot of discussion to fit into a tight timeframe. Then tomorrow we have our workshop with Neva.

micro-skills

Mary and Sarah-Jane ran a micro-skills session on Monday afternoon. About 12 teachers participated and all seemed to get a lot out of it. I liked the 'high five' idea (I'll pinch that one) - thumb representing 'be positive', then fingers: 'no blame' (one finger pointing at you means 3 fingers pointing back at me), 'don't be rude', 'commitment' and 'look after the little fella'. Similar to the one Phil from Outdoor Rec showed me but a slightly different slant, and drawing it up on the board was useful.

Getting each person in the group to give a brief description and demo of each skill worked well, then role plays were a lot of fun. Lots of good useful discussion too.

The other thing I wanted to mention was an article I read in the Weekend Australian, about the potentially negative effects of praise. The gist of it was, praising kids for being 'smart' has been shown to negatively affect their learning because they then tend to not make the effort when things get difficult. They can become 'addicted' to praise and reluctant to make mistakes. On the other hand, praising kids for effort or for specific things they do has been shown to positively affect their learning. Relates strongly to Descriptive Encouraging and shows we should do lots of it - works for adults too!

Today I gave a presentation based on the one I gave at AVETRA. Five people showed up, which is not too bad. Good chance to update a few interested people on what has been happening.