Tag: education

Two Years Abroad pt. 3 – Learning & Leading (and finding my groove)

Featured ~ Peter LeBlanc

Learning about the community and the leadership work and finding my groove as the new principal of the Canadian Section of SHAPE IS.

For Part 1 of this multi-part series, click here.

For Part 2, click here.

On July 2, we watched movers load our possessions, one by one, into a 40-foot shipping container.  The Department of National Defence took good care of us during our move. We packed nothing. We moved nothing. We loaded nothing. The Canadian moving crew was amazing.  Once packed and loaded, we spent one full week in temporary accommodations in Canada. We stayed local so that we could walk to the house, now empty, to take care of our two cats, before jumping on our flight.   I also chose to store my car instead of having it shipped overseas. 

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Two years abroad – Pt. 2 – Leading Towards (our departure)

Featured ~ Peter LeBlanc

Two years abroad – Pt. 2 – Leading Towards (our departure)

For Pt. 1 – Leading Up, please see my previous post: 

Upon reflection, coming home from work on that Thursday night in December seemed a little surreal. That morning, Kelly and I were looking forward to a laid back 2-week break. We had both been working very hard during November and December. That evening, we were thrust into the unknown. Things changed and moved quickly.  We had mountains of information to review. We began exploring what living in Belgium might look like. And, of course, we looked at one map after the other, tracing the distance from our new home to places like Paris and London and Brussels and Amsterdam!

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Two years abroad – Pt. 1 – Leading Up (to the opportunity of a lifetime)

Featured ~ Peter LeBlanc ~ 6 Comments

This is the first of a multi-post series outlining the unique experience I just completed as principal of the Canadian Section of the International School in Casteau, Belgium. This school is operated by the Canadian Department of National Defence and is part of a school campus that serves the children of military and NATO staff who work on the NATO military base there. 

I hope you enjoy it. 

Leading up (to the opportunity of a lifetime)!

I am one month home after a two-year absence. I left the town of Orangeville, Ontario to assume a school leadership role that was unique. By unique, I mean that only one other Canadian principal can claim the same job. In July 2019, I began my role as the principal of the Canadian Section of the SHAPE International School. This school is operated by the Canadian Department of National Defence for the Canadian Armed Forces. It is housed on the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe base in Casteau, Belgium. SHAPE, as it is commonly known, is one of two of NATO’s Allied Command Operations headquarters.

Continue reading “Two years abroad – Pt. 1 – Leading Up (to the opportunity of a lifetime)” →

It takes a village…

~ Peter LeBlanc ~ 2 Comments

Helping handsMy wife and I live about 15,000 kilometres from my in-laws. We have great ways to stay connected. We phone, we Skype (note, this is now a verb), we follow each other on Instagram and Facebook. But my sister-in-law also uses Tinybeans, a closed sharing network designed primarily for parents to share moments in a child’s life with family and friends who can’t be along for the ride at every moment.  It is also marketed as a means of capturing the story of your child’s ‘growing up’.

‘Canadian’ Uncle Peter and Auntie think it’s wonderful!   While I was catching up on previous posts early this morning, there was a video ‘starring’ my 2 1/2 year old nephew.  Here he is, as is pretty typical for a toddler, playing with buckets of water.  He’s filling them; he’s dumping them.  Sometimes, he’s watering the plants with them.  He’s asking questions. He’s wondering things out loud.  And, this morning, HE’S COUNTING THEM. OUT LOUD. AND WONDERING IF THERE ARE ANY MORE. Although this activity isn’t prompted, it’s immediately supported by his Mum.

I capitalized this interaction because it is a terrific example of the perfect blend of play and learning. It’s self-directed but supported. It’s interactive and social. Mother and child are talking about water and buckets. But it could be anything. When my son was my nephew’s age, it was hubcaps.

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, along with their friends and family – both near and far 🙂 are a wonderful, knowledgeable support network. They will foster learning in this child (as well as his younger sibling and soon-to-arrive cousin) because they all recognize the importance of social interaction as part of learning.

But not all children have this network. Not all children are surrounded by an accessible, knowledgeable and supportive adult group.  And not all parents or caregivers have this knowledge base nor have the opportunity to spend this kind of quality time with their child(ren).

This raised some questions in my mind. Questions to which I wish I had answers.

So I leave it to you… Please comment, question, ponder or even answer some of these in the comments section.

  • If the above-mentioned kind of ‘pre-school’ learning is important, what role can public education play to support a child’s early learning?
  • How can educators get out into communities to work with new parents?
  • How can education or early learning systems get to where they are most needed?
  • Will a fostering of life-long learning in schools impact the next generation of children as these ‘life-long learners’ become parents and/or caregivers?
  • When I go back into a school as a principal, is there something I/we can do to support the early learners in our community before they get to school?

Or add your own.

Questions to ask PQP pt 1&2

~ Peter LeBlanc

Later on today, I will be speaking with candidates from OPC’s Principal Qualifications Program Parts 1 & 2 about my journey as a connected school leader. I always find it funny when I get asked because I don’t see the ‘connected’ part as a separate part of my role. I see it as integral to what I do.

The School Level Leadership pillars of the Ontario Leadership Framework talks about the importance of building relationship and of nurturing a collaborative culture. I find it critical to reach out to the education world beyond your building. If you don’t, think of the expertise your missing.

To the candidates, I’m sure you’ll have some questions for me. And I’ll be happy to answer them.  But I also have a series of questions for you as you think about school leadership as a possible next step in your teaching career. There is really no order of importance or perceived insight to these questions. This is the result of a 30-minute ‘brain dump’. Others may choose to add questions in the comments. You may choose to reflect on them publicly there as well. I look forward to meeting with you today.

Peter

Food for thought

What will the critical skills be in the world for which we are preparing our students?

Whose world are we preparing students for?

What technology do you think people are using?

Are you technically proficient?

Are you prepared to be an agent of change?

Can technology have a positive impact on student learning? If so, how?

Can technology have a positive impact on your work? If so, how?

If you’re looking to be a lead learner, are you connecting yourself to a world of learners?

What about the Ontario Leadership Framework? What pillar(s) might connecting be able to enhance?

What tools would you expect staff to be able to use?

What tools would expect students to be able to use? What tools do they use?

What’s different about the world in which we live now in comparison to the world in which you lived when you where in school? What’s different about your classroom, both physically and pedagogically, and the one you were in as a student?

Guest post – “Learning? Thinking? Or thinking to learn?

~ Peter LeBlanc

Cheryl Van Ooteghem, the Principal of Program, wrote a piece in late August 2014 about the important role that we play as parents to model how we ‘make our thinking visible’. I asked her permission if I could include it here. She said ‘Yes’. 🙂

“Learning? Thinking? Or Learning to Think?

Everyone sends their child to school to learn. Or do we? Do we send our children to school to become programmed robots who simply regurgitate facts and formulas, or do we send them to school to learn to think?

Learning is not about committing ideas to memory. Learning is about exploring ideas and building on our understanding of the world. Remember your two year old child who never stopped asking “why”? They were learning to make sense of the world around them. Learning is about problem solving, generating ideas, analyzing facts, critically evaluating decisions and asking questions to make sense of things. David Perkins in Smart Schools (1992) says that “learning is a consequence of thinking”. Scores on a test (depending on the test) are not evidence of learning.

I know as a parent, I often said to my children; “think about it”, “think for yourself, or “what do you think?” For those of you with pre-teens and teens, I’m sure, like me, there were plenty of times you wished you knew what they were thinking (well, maybe not all the time)!

As parents we need to model thinking and learning for our children. Instead of saying “I don’t know” or “because I said so”, we need to share our perspectives, insights, ideas and misunderstandings with our children. We need to share how we plan, organize, make a decision and seek clarity at home or at work. We need to share our thinking with our children so they can develop their own ideas and learn how to think.

When our children offer a differing opinion, we need to value what they have to say, instead of allowing it to become a “because I said so” power struggle. We need to ask our children this simple question; “what makes you say that?”, and listen – really listen. We need to have them explain and share their thinking with us. Even when their ideas are very different from ours, we need to give them their voice, and then offer ours with an explanation as to why we think that way.

Tonight when your children come home from school don’t ask them what they learned today or what they did. Instead, ask them what made them think today. When they look at you as if you have two heads and have completely lost it, ask them more questions. Push them to think. Together, we need to encourage them to question what they see and read on the internet, we need to model for them how to make informed decisions, and we need to prepare them for jobs not yet created.

Excited, interested energy is learning, because that’s when thinking occurs; that’s when children own their learning, and that’s what going to school is all about.”

Getting ready for ‘Friday’ afternoon

~ Peter LeBlanc

A principal colleague of mine shared an analogy for describing the passage of time in a school year. A former principal had passed it on to her. She treats each school year like a week and assigns each month a ½ day. September is the equivalent of Monday morning, October is Monday afternoon; November equals Tuesday morning, etc…
We have arrived at Friday. As a matter of fact, Friday afternoon is right around the corner.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, here are a few reminders to help get through ‘Friday’ before the weekend is upon us.

1. Be at your best. Joe Atherton, a mentor of mine, once told me that I needed my best teaching in May and June. Students need engaging, relevant activities all year long. But this is crucial now. Cross-curricular, challenging, engaging and interesting should be your buzz words.
2. Keep yourself at your best. We have difficult jobs. We have high expectations of ourselves as individuals and as a profession. We move at a quick pace. To maintain that, we need rest, exercise and healthy choices. Know when to work hard but know when to stop.
3. Be diligent and vigilant. Many students struggle with the pending end of the school year. They are going to miss friends, miss structure, and miss routine and, yes, some of them will even miss us. They show that struggle in many different ways. A common one is to push behaviour boundaries. Be diligent in your commitment to remain fair and consistent in your expectations. Be vigilant when supervising students in your classroom, the hallways, the yard and other common areas. Take advantage of the relationships you have built up all year with our students. They know you; you know them. That’s important to remember.
4. Be OK with the idea that you probably didn’t complete all the things you set out to complete. The wonderful thing about our curricula in Ontario is that it is built on ‘Big Ideas’. If you fret over the small menu items, you’ll go mad. Let it go. Focus on doing less, but doing it better.
5. Be prepared and plan for the minutia. Remember that there are responsibilities at year-end (report cards, OSRs, packing/preparing for cleaning, etc…) Don’t let them creep up. Plan to tackle some of these tasks ahead of time. Set a schedule for each small task.
6. ‘Friday’ tends to be a busy day. Keep everyone informed of what’s going on. This helps everyone (students, parents, staff, community) manage ‘Friday’ a little better and manage it together.
7. Have fun. Learning new things as well as reflecting on past learning should be a celebration.

This is by no means a ‘Words to live by’ or ‘Seven critical things every educator must know’, but just the ramblings of a teacher who has been through ‘Friday afternoon’ from the classroom and the office almost a dozen times each. I hope, if you got this far, you found it helpful.

FFTF enters the blogsphere

~ Peter LeBlanc

For several years now, I’ve been forwarding an item on a weekly basis to school and Board colleagues entitled the ‘Food For Thought Friday’ (known from here on in as the FFTF). This artefact is often an article, a video or a blog that is intended to cause the reader to think about their own educational practice or to start a conversation.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of blogging and, in my ‘other life’, have managed a non-educational blog for years. Yet, the idea of putting myself ‘out there’ in education has always been intimidating to me. What finally pushed me over the edge was a subtle word of ‘encouragement’ from a senior administrator with my own school board in a very brief F2F conversation last week about Canadian administrators one should follow on Twitter. I also look at some of the classes in my own school with students blogging about their learning and feel a little embarrassed that the students are fine to put their learning ‘out there’ but that the principal has cold feet. That doesn’t wrk any longer.

The FFTF will now be part of a weekly blog post. If that’s all I do for the time being, so be it. If all it means is starting a larger conversation for a few people, I’m happy with that. If, at a future point, the blog becomes a place for added transparency in my practice, that’ll work too.

This also opens the weekly FFTF up to ‘the world’. Feel free to comment and discuss at your leisure.

Peter

December 6th, 2013 FFTF: I was discussing the uses of Twitter as a tool to learn and connect professionally. This is part of the same conversation referred to above that finally pushed me to get the FFTF onto a blog (almost one full year after my initial commitment to do so). The Superintendent and I agreed that one of the first things needed for a successful venture into the Twitterverse was to have appropriate people along for the journey. I was funny how as a school and a system leader, we both had George Couros at the top of our list of people to follow. George’s post entitled “Our Thinking has to Change” challenges some outdated perspectives on our role as teachers, particularly as it applies to current and emerging technologies that we use with our students. It also highlights the importance of our relationships with students and how that must adapt to encompass the tools of our ever-changing world.

http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/4278

Happy FFTF, everybody.