Firstly I think it is important to be clear on my views of what “5 a day” might mean.    I am looking at 5 things I believe are important to do or include within the average day.   That doesn’t mean all 5 have to happen every day;  life isn’t simple enough to make this a reality.    It is more about looking across the wider period of time, maybe a month or a term, and considering if these 5 things are regularly appearing, if something is too prominent or if something is being missed.    It is about seeking balance and not about creating a simple checklist to tick off each day.   I note that quite often where checklists are involved completing items from the checklist becomes the aim, rather than the checklist simply being an assistive tool to help with organisation of your task.   We need to keep focused on the actual aim, seeking balance in this case so a checklist can just end up detracting from what you are really trying to achieve; so no checklists please.

So my five things:

Fun or relaxation

Am going to start with the need for a little bit of fun or relaxation as in our busy lives this is often the thing that we miss out.   We often prioritise other tasks over having fun and therefore leave ourselves insufficient time to relax or enjoy ourselves, but it is important.   Think about something you enjoy doing or find relaxing such as reading, which works for me, or watching TV or playing with the kids and make sure you are doing it regularly.

Challenge

It is easy to get in a rut and to simple repeat the same tasks and activities week in week out based on habit.    The issue with this is that it leads to boredom and a lack of fulfilment.    Challenge is a key part to life and I therefore think it is important to regularly step outside our comfort zone whether this in learning something new, taking on a project, getting involved with a community group or whatever else you find challenging. There needs to be something that stretches you to go further in your life, and it should be something which you are doing regularly.   For me this is often learning something new, a project or trying to improve my fitness, which leads nicely into my next point.

Physical / Health

It is very easy as we spend more time at our computers and using technology to forget about the physical health side of life.  For those who have followed my posts you will be well aware of my difficulties in this area as I am not the most sporty person you will find.   That said I recognise that mind and body work together, so if I am healthy and fit I am likely to perform better in other areas.    As such it is important to make sure that you engage in regular exercise in a way that suits you whether this may be home exercising, a gym, walking the dog or, as is the case for me, engaging in CouchTo5K.   The main thing is to simply get active.

Purpose

It is all well and good to do things, engaging in exercise, or taking on a new work project or relaxing in the garden reading a book but in all we do we need to ensure we have purpose.    Why are you doing what you are doing?  Where are you hoping to go with things in the future?   The things that you end up doing have to purposeful so for me my physical efforts are about improving my fitness to balance out the time I spend at a computer or in meetings, and to hopefully be a healthier person.   In work I hope to support my school in the use of technology as an enabler, enabling students, teachers and support staff to excel in all they do.

Mindfulness / reflection

I list this last not because it is the last thing to deal with but because I think it has an overarching role to play.   I recently heard Sir Anthony Seldon refer to the need to stop and reflect and this is my final point.   We need to provide ourselves with the opportunity and permission to stop and reflect.  To consider how we feel, our worries and our ambitions; we need to be conscious of ourselves and be mindful.   We also need to stop and look back on our past, our environment, friends, successes and failures, and what we can learn from them.     Only by setting time aside to be mindful and to reflect can we ensure, as Sir Anthony suggested, that we are the best we can be.    This, however, is the one area I find the most difficult and one that I need to continue to work on.

Conclusion

Over the last six months I have had some significant difficulties, which I have considered blogging on however haven’t felt in the correct state of mind or correct place in my life to share, yet.   I have also more recently found myself to be very busy, and at times possible too busy.    As I consider the past six months and my 5 a day, I can see areas where I am making real progress, such as on my fitness but areas which, due to other things have taken a back seat including simply having fun and also setting aside time to reflect.   With this now in mind I have a better idea of the direction I need to take in the months ahead.   This can then help me in planning.

Hopefully the above 5 a day will help me to achieve the balance I believe is so important.

The need for reflection

Sir Anthony Seldon’s keynote began with a breathing exercise where he encouraged all in attendance to get involved, providing all a moment of mindfulness.  This was a bit of a departure from the normal start to a presentation which might highlight the key questions of the session or the key topics.  The purpose of this activity was to highlight the need to stop and reflect.   Sir Anthony also suggested the need for us to stop and ask “am I being the best I can be?”    This message is one I believe strongly in as our fast and frenetic lives often mean we are focussed on getting things done and checking off tasks from our to-do lists, simply moving from one activity to the next.    In education things can get particularly busy as is evidenced by the continued discussions as to workload.   The issue with this is that we don’t have time to reflect on our core values and on what really matters, on being the best we can be.    Without time to reflect we may be very busy however we may be having little impact or may simply be doing the wrong things.  In order to address this we need to provide ourselves both the permission and time to stop and reflect.   I will admit that finding the time isn’t necessarily easy but we need to prioritise and provide ourselves regular opportunities to reflect.  I also think there is value in doing this to model best practice for the students in our care.   Otherwise all they will see is their teachers rushing from task to task, forever busy, and for them this will shape their view of what is normal.

Trust

The session on leadership by Michael Buchanan included mention of trust and the need for leaders to provide their teams the “permission to be themselves”.    I think this needs to permeate through the culture of a successful school to include formal teams such as departments, but also informal teams and all the way through to how teachers lead the students in their care.

In Alex Beard’s session he referred to the need to try and remove things from teachers where they don’t have an impact on teaching and learning going on to suggest that such time might be used to develop technology skills, understanding of cognitive science and subject expertise.   To me this links to trust in that the most obvious thing to remove, or at least the thing which appears most obvious to me, is any task of an administrative nature which is related to accountability.   If we trust teachers we wouldn’t need as much of the paperwork and data to prove that what needs to be done was being done.

Professional Learning

Cath Scutt’s session focussed on the status of the teaching profession.    She quickly identified her concern with the idea that we need to “raise” the status of the profession in that this creates a “deficit” model.    It suggests that there is something wrong or deficient.   This is similar to the concept of Professional Development which has always for me suggested a deficit;   I have therefore always preferred the term “professional learning”.   For me the key issue here is the need for a culture in education similar to the Japanese term Kaizen, or continual improvement, as mentioned by Alex Beard in his presentation.    We should be seeking to improve, or better learn, not because there is a deficiency, but because we have to if we want to be the best we can be and if we want to enable our students to be the best they can be.

Networking

The session focussing on Hattie’s research into visible learning highlighted the importance of teacher self efficacy to student outcomes and also on the need for “teachers who are learners.”   I believe technology can help with both of these issues.   Take for example twitter.   It allows for discussion and sharing of ideas, for us to question our own practices and ideas.    I think as a tool to both self reflect and also to search out new solutions, twitter is excellent.   It also allows us to stretch beyond our own local context and connect with different educational institutions with differing age ranges, focal areas, internal structures and from different parts of the world.    This can only help us both in being more self aware and in being learners as well as teachers.

Conclusion

The third annual Bryanston education summit was an interesting and useful event.  The above only briefly summarises some of the key points of the pages of notes I found myself coming away with.   I suspect as I have more time to reflect other points will likely surface for me.   One area which I haven’t mentioned for example is the impact of technology on student outcomes.   The provided Hattie data indicates 1:1 laptops only have a minor positive impact on student outcomes however, as was suggested in the session, there is a lot of context to be considered in this.  This is something I will likely discuss in a blog post in the near future.     For now I will conclude that my key take away wasn’t a particular leadership approach or curriculum model or learning model.   The key message I heard from sessions was a need to focus on softer aspects of education, on reflecting, on trusting and on working together to ensure the educational experience we provide is the best it can be.

I enjoyed this years event and now hope to be able to put in practice some of what I have learned.   I look forward to next years Bryanston Education Summit.

A recent visit to a school however casts this whole subject into another light and highlighted a potential benefit I hadn’t really considered.     I was talking with students about the apps they use in school and the group of boys I was talking to where confidently and excitedly describing various apps which they used in different subjects.   It was then that one student turned his iPad so I could see it and pronounced that he used HeadSpace.     He apparently found he got stressed or distracted at times and that the HeadSpace app on his iPad allowed him to take time out and refocus.   Here we had a student using technology to help with focus and distraction.

For those that aren’t aware of HeadSpace, it is mindfulness and meditating app which, according to their website is “a personal meditation guide, right in your pocket”.   As it happens I have myself experimented with HeadSpace so when the student mentioned it, I was aware of what it was.

Technology is in my eyes a tool.   In my eyes it is a very versatile tool or even a “swiss army knife” of educational tools.    Like any tool, it is the use to which we put it that has either positive or negative results as opposed to the tool itself.    Put to the use as a tool to quiet children, keep them blindly busy or simply quiet then it will be no wonder that the outcomes will be negative, that students may find focusing difficult.   Alternatively, like with the pupil I met, it could also be used to tackle the specific negative outcomes that the above poor use might result in.   It could be used to positively support students in managing distraction and in focusing.

Would be interested in if any others are using Headspace or other apps in relation to Mindfulness in students.

My original plan having returned to the UK from the UAE had been to rent for a short period of time before then buying a house.    That short period of time turned out to be just over 2 years.   Looking back the two years disappeared in a flash.     Thinking a little harder I can identify some of the difficulties and issues which led to the elongated period of renting.   I can also remember the stress associated with some of these issues.   Sleepless nights have resulted along with arguments and heated discussions within the family and with individuals outside the family.    Taking a helicopter view and looking out over the 2 years, the issues got addressed and maybe therefore some of the stress was unwarranted.  It didn’t help and served only to impact on the health and well being of the family.

This week has also seen me reflecting with my team as part of the annual appraisal process.   On a number of occasions during discussions we have identified projects which we have felt have not progressed at the rate with which we had wanted.   These projects have caused stress and angst.    Looking at them though through a wider perspective we see that progress was made and that some of the factors which slowed or even stopped progress were out with our control.    It is only looking long term and taking all things into account that we see the limited progress as being reasonable given the constraints and other factors which existed.    In the short term, in the here and now, this isn’t appreciated and the progress is just seen as below expectation.   The stress and angst at the issues in the short term serve little purpose when viewed across the longer term, other than to impact on the health and well being of the individuals concerned.

As I reflect I have come to realise that in the short term there is lot we don’t know, don’t perceive or don’t appreciate, that we will come to more aware of when we look back across the longer term.   It is this that we need to be aware of.   That sometimes we over stress, over think and that this impacts on our well being.   We need to keep in mind that we will eventually view these issues over a longer time frame at which point it is likely that we will be able to appreciate things we can’t in the short term.    We should therefore be wary of our stress levels and of stressing out at issues for in the longer term all this is likely to achieve is damage to our health and well being.

For me as I continue the process of moving I will bear this in mind such that the next time I feel stressed I will take a step back and remind myself that in the long term, with the appropriate level of effort, things generally work out.

As the new year approaches my thoughts move to equipping my bookshelf with books for reading during 2017.   At the moment the first few books have been purchased and added and are as below:

• Essentialism, Greg McKeown (2014)
• The power of habit, Charles Duhigg (2012)
• Predictably irrational, Dan Ariely (2008)
• Herd, Mark Earls (2007)

The first set of books very much focus on behaviourism and on human habit which is a particular area of interest for me at the moment.

In addition I am also considering:

• Bounce, Matthew Syed
• Chaos Monkeys, Antonio Garcia Martinez
• Pebbles of Perception, Laurence Endersen
• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
• Mindfulness, Gill Hansen
• The Chimp Paradox, Prof. Steve Peters
• Being Brilliant, Andrew Cope
• The Obstacle is the way, Ryan Holiday

From the above all are new to me except for The Obstacle is the way which I listened to as an audio book during 2015.    These books cover perception which is another area of interest for me, plus introduce mindfulness which I find to be an interesting area and also creativity.

Should I go with all of the above this would form my initial 12 books for the year however I suspect that as I read through them additional books might be added.

I would welcome any suggestions or recommendations plus any reviews or comments on the above books.