The document discusses strategies for creating an inspiring environment in schools, emphasizing the importance of supporting and developing teachers to improve teaching quality. It presents practical ideas for fostering inspiration, initiative, inquiry, dialogue, and serendipity among educators and students. Additionally, it highlights the collaborative efforts of schools, communities, and corporate groups in enhancing educational outcomes and sustaining leadership.

1. Zest
Practice
• Ideas And Challenges For
Creating An Inspiring
Environment In Schools
• Tony Ryan

2. Best Practice
Next Practice
Zest
Practice

5. Aha!!
Hindsight Insight Foresight
Insight before
Information What insights
will you
experience
today??!

6. Systemic Zest
• Don’t teacher-proof the system. Instead,
trust and support teachers to be
outstanding
• Do a Finland. Stimulate pride in the
profession
• Encourage the best and the brightest to
become teachers

7. McKinsey and Company report: How The
World’s Best Performing School Systems
Come Out On Top
• 2003 and onwards analysis of OECD’s PISA assessment in
literacy and numeracy
• Three interrelated sets of policies and practices continued
to emerge. The most successful systems:
1. Get more talented people to become teachers
2. Develop those teachers into better instructors
3. Ensure that their teachers deliver the best possible
instruction for every student in the system

8. 1. Love your employees
2. Connect peers with
purpose
3. Capacity building
prevails
4. Learning is the work
5. Transparency rules
6. Systems learn

9. • An inclusive vision with
schools, communities
and corporate groups
working together
• An evidence-informed,
rather than data-driven,
profession
• Strong schools helping
their weaker peers
• Sustainable leadership
that spreads and lasts

10. School-based Zest
1. Inspiration (arm tattoo)
2. Initiative (Google office)
3. Inquiry (mobile phone)
4. Dialogue (ear sculpture)
5. Serendipity (Travelling Wilburys)

11. 1. Inspiration

13. IF by Sarah Perry

17. Start-up inspiration??
• How inspired are you at the start of the
day?
• In what ways do your classrooms say ‘Come
On In’??
• In what ways does your school say ‘Come
On In’ (for you, and for your students)??

19. Inspirational
Educators
• Are enthusiastic and invariably optimistic
• Use critical thinking, creativity and imagination
• Consistently GOIMO
• Are able and willing to scrutinise their practice
• Pay respect to their own well-being
• Deeply believe that they make a difference

22. The difference
that you make
The Ripple Effect of teaching: Every teacher
contributes to the world, every day
Education systems will only ever utilise their power
when each teacher accepts responsibility for his/her
contribution
Everyone counts. Every One.

23. Practical Ideas
for Inspiration
• Organise a daily Welcome Committee
• Inject some inspiration into assemblies
• Invite inspiring people to address your students
• Develop sister school relationships in less
developed countries
• Remember that you’re modelling what it means
to be an adult!!

24. 2. Initiative
The 20% policy??!

25. • Some of the 20% results
• Google Wonderwheel, Google Squared, Google Wave......

29. Where’s the bear in
your school??!

32. Practical Ideas
for Initiative
• Work out your version of the 20% policy
• Find out what students (and teachers) achieve
outside school hrs; and promote it
• Set up Genius Bars at lunchtimes

33. 3. Inquiry

34. Coming right up??
• Goodbye laptop. Hello mobile computing
• Social media leading to collective intelligence
• Connectivist learning theories and practice
• Students already have opportunity to
generate their own inquiries via mobile
• The issue? Very few know how to advance
their learning with the technology

35. •The internet as a
brain
•Processes for
utilising collective
intelligence
•Brain implants
for online access

36. Teacher inquiries??
• What inquiries are taking place in your school this
term?
• How specifically do all teachers in your school
further their learning each day?
• What is new in each teacher’s thinking in the past
3 months?
• What will be different or enhanced in each
teacher’s practice by the end of 2010?

37. Student inquiries within a
specific unit
Q. What do we already know about this issue?
Q. What are our questions?
Q. What learning steps will we take?
Q. What and how will we research; and is it useful in
answering our questions?
Q. How will we share our findings?

38. Zestful inquiries!!
• Generate interest with a provocative intro
• Give your inquiry units some exciting titles (name
them after a movie or a piece of music)
• Choose some powerful songs as background music for
some of the learning time
• Design an icon or general image to represent the
inquiry
• Find a metaphor for the inquiry

40. Thinkers
Keys

42. 42

43. 43

44. The Hippo Roller

46. Practical Ideas for
Inquiry
• Focus on solutions, not problems (only
listen to solutions)
• A school must be evidence-based.
Develop long-term inquiries about
‘Zest Practice’
• Provide students with processes for
resolving issues

47. Either / or
4. Dialogue Both / and

48. • Small talk. Mindless banter;
gossip; trivia; inconsequential
comments
• Big talk. Proactive dialogue;
solution focus; challenge;
reinforcement of quality
practices

49. Encourage quality
dialogue
• The quality of everyday teacher dialogue will determine the
level of professionalism in a school
• Two critical skills in dialogue: listening and paraphrasing
• Explicitly teach students to listen in conversation
• Paraphrasing? Listen first...
• Then pause
• Then begin with: “So, you’re saying that....”

50. Coaching each other
1. What do you need to achieve?
2. What’s happening right now?
3. What could you put into action?
4. What will you put into action?
5. What will be the process for implementation?
6. How will you keep this going??
Adapted from ‘The Leadership Coaching Guide’

52. Practical ideas for
Dialogue
• Staff meetings to feature teacher
dialogue
• The development of dialogue protocol
(eg 2Q’ coaching models) for
professional discussions
• The encouragement of Professional
Buddy systems

53. 5. Serendipity

54. Practical Ideas for
Serendipity??
• Share narrative about the release of genius in
everyday life around the world (eg Piano Stairs)
• Give spot prizes eg bottles of bubble bath; ‘Do Not
Disturb’ signs
• Loosen up. Serendipity rarely occurs when you’re
too serious
• Look for the inspiration in routine events

55. tonyryan.com.au

58. Best Practice
Next Practice
Zest
Practice

59. • tony@tonyryan.com.au • May the rest of your year
be full of zest
• Thank you