Simon Cossey Professional Blog

  A very valuable short course. Thanks Michelle and Alida for the recommendations. I now understand about warning signs. I also feel more confident that, if needed, I could talk to someone who might need support. 

  Here are a few snippets that I took from the webinar along with my reflections.  Carol Mutch: Schools hold communities together as an anchor (keep people connected).  Principals and teams can become community leaders who step up in a crisis. Teachers become front line trauma workers.   Reflection: Communication is such a key part of this. Sharing timely information, reassuring people and giving practical direction to solve the problems, providing people with a focus.  Take the support offered to you. Be kind to yourself.  Reflection: I'm really grateful for the professional supervision offered by PES. I've had to be kind to myself by not expecting myself to complete 10 extra things while in lockdown. One thing might be manageable and I'm trying to include things that restore me.  Students will all come back in different places.  Share critical hope... So knowing your learner is really important. I like the phrase critical hope... to me, it speak...

Bruce D Perry just blew my mind!! I watched this video and it really resonated with me.  I've been reflecting on it and making connections and letting it really get into my imagination.  A few key points that I took from it:  Perry started his talk with this quote:  - The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born. William Inge - one of our strengths as human beings is our relational connectedness. Throughout our history this has been essential for our survival. Individuals don't survive. Groups/communities/clans/communities do survive.  - Growing up in a communal family arrangement, a baby would have ration of 4:1 adults interacting with the child. Now, in our early childhood centres we are lucky if we have a ratio of 1 adult to 6 kids.  - Today many people are living alone and many people are living in households with less than 3 people. Throughout much of our history, people lived in households with 20+ p...

  Leadership Training…  I chatted with Alida about how we could do leadership training online again in Term 4 and make it available for more students. We decided to include some of the Year 5 students and provide them with leadership training opportunities that would help them be successful as leaders next year, whether or not they are officially chosen as house leaders. I was really excited about the opportunity to have some of our Year 6 students pass on what they know to our Year 5 students. It makes sense to start this process before the new school year so we are ‘ready to go’ and we can benefit from our Year 6s ‘passing on the baton.’  In our first round of Meets, 12 students attended, made up of 5 current leaders and 7 Year Five students. Seven students were girls and 5 were boys. Year 6 leaders were able to discuss the good and difficult parts of being a leader. They also shared the leadership challenges we had completed together. Repeating this helped to reinforce...