Thanks to our People Makers

People Makers - Changing Lives:

My aim as a principal is to model the change and practice I want to see in others. 

In interacting with staff, students and parents I try to touch hearts, empower others and challenge them to see and be the best they can be. 

This to me is what it means to be a teacher - or as we think of it at Western Heights, a Parent in Place.

Many years ago, when I was a young teacher, Murray Ball wrote a book about teachers which he called "The People Makers". It was a great choice, to describe teachers that way, and more than ever before that is what we have become. 

My key task as a principal is to find the very, very best "People Makers" and sign them up to our WHS whānau, and then just as importantly, look after them so well that they never want to leave.

Our team of People Makers are all immensely talented, gifted and special people. Many of them much more so than they even realise. 

Our Western Heights Leadership Team recognise those talents and gifts in our People Makers, and give them freedom, time, training and the best resourcing possible to support them to express themselves for the benefit of our children and their colleagues. 

Next year our People Makers will each welcome a brand new class, of bright, beautiful, energetic young learners. Their mission will be to find the key to each child, and use it to unlock all their exciting potential. Easy to say I guess, especially as  one or two of those little angels will be anything but angels occasionally, and some will be less than eager to learn some of the time too. So what then?

Believe it or not, but the Beetles actually have our answer - when they sang "All you need is love, love. Love is all you need."

More than ever, kids need love. Their two most basic needs are to love and be loved. There are SO many distractions, so many things to get in the way that stop them from hearing, seeing and knowing that they are loved. 

If we can find a way to love each child and communicate that love in genuine ways and let each child love us back we've basically got the battle won. 

As a Principal all I'm really looking for in a teacher is three things - love for kids, passion for what they do, and integrity. 

Love is putting others first, seeing through the eyes of others, connecting with your heart rather than just with your words.

Passion is a fire inside you that will not be quenched no matter what the challenges, and there will be many.

Integrity is when there is no dividing line between word and deed. It's saying what you believe and believing what you say. It's also not saying that which could hurt or demean.

With those three to begin with, everything else soon falls into place. Learning is a fine thing, but learning is nothing without love. With love comes passion, and compassion; integrity but also justice; fervour, energy and hunger to do more.

Think back for a moment to a teacher who has changed your life. The beauty of our system is that we encounter many teachers during our schooling and all of us can point to at least one who touched, shaped, even transformed our lives. And why was it that, that particular teacher touched and inspired us? Love, passion and integrity were definitely key ingredients in the teachers who inspired me.

Time to sum it all up with a story:

Sociology students in Baltimore undertook a study of several hundred young children. For 200 of those children they concluded that the outlook was bleak. In fact they predicted that according to their previous research, the odds were so against these children that failure, poverty and crime were the only real possibilities for them.

Twenty five years later one of those sociology students, by now a sociology professor, tracked down 180 of those 200 children who were supposedly destined to fail. Of those 180, 176 were successful professionals - Doctors, Lawyers, Teachers and Business people. When interviewed about why they had succeeded "against all the odds", all 176 named a particular teacher who had changed their lives. When he interviewed that teacher and asked her her secret. She replied there was just one, "I loved them and they knew it."

When we do that we become true teachers . We change lives, because we  touch hearts, empower others and challenge them to see and be the best they can be. 

Murray Ball - author of 'The People Mkers' - and his dog, the inspiration for 'Dog' in the Footrot Flats series.