Paying for Performance

Fortune magzine this week had a coverage on Joel Klein's (New York City School chancellor) perspective for the need to incentivise the teaching profession. It is the same sentiments raised across different studies, like those from the research of Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation, that the key to the success to a good education lies fundamentally in the quality of our teachers.

A link is here http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/storysupplement/flyp_ibm2/

The need for quality teachers is certainly there, no matter which society we live in, and I am sure monetary incentives have been effective in drawing and retaining talents. But have we successfully found ways of motivating people to give their best other than monetary incentives? These are people skills which we need to learn in order to contribute in this area and are so varied that it is unrealistic to systemise.

Moral obligation

I came across this quote from Jay Abraham in a business book I was reading, and it got stuck in my head for a while. Although crafted for the business world, it certainly can be applied in schools, or whenever we are making decisions. The quote goes, "If you truly believe that what you have is useful and valuable to your clients, then you have a moral obligation to try to serve them in every way possible."

So what do we truly believe to be really useful and valuable to our pupils, colleagues, family or friends? Our lives will be great being mindful of this, and having the capacity to contribute to this end.

Dynamic calendars in sync

Information plays a large part in how we work. More specifically, clarity, ease and access of information allows for better decision making, at all levels. This week, I finally got to subscribe the school's work calendars to work in sync with my iCal on my Mac and my Calendar app on my iPhone.

What I thought initially to be something rather simple about subscribing and publishing took quite a few hours of my time to sort out. As I have already have been using iCal for years and getting it synced glitchlessly on my iPhone, I want everything from the school's calendar to be under the same software. In other words, I want it simple and I want it to be all under one big calendar, without the need for me to swop around different programmes to see, make changes, sync, etc. And after scouting the internet for a solution, I finally bought BusySync to get exactly what I wanted. $30+ is a steep price to pay for a tiny programme that sits in the System Preferences. But it gets the job done beautifully, all at the background. I am very happy with it and will not want it any other way.

By the look of it, the days of the Filofax calendars are dead. Dynamic calendaring offers so much collaborative potential that can improve the quality of both our personal and working life that there is no looking back.

Mindmaps in Management

I attended a sharing about mind-mapping in the classroom during the mini conference on Thursday and is impressed with the amount of work gone into inculcating this very useful tool into our learning environment. It is evident that we have confident and passionate people who believe in the merit of this and it is important that we drive this through with perseverance.

For mind-mapping to be successful in the classrooms, it must be as immersive as we can allow it to happen. Very much like how one's acquiring of a new language can be done so much more effectively with immersion. Teachers familiar with this tool have to use it whenever it is apt so that it will gradually be infused as part of the pupils' visual language.

When playing around with the recently acquired iMindmap software, I was researching online about the how corporations use mindmapping software in GTD environments. I stumbled onto this clip on YouTube about how mindmaps came into play for project management and immediately felt the need to incorporate this as part of my workflow.

With end of the year planning just around the corner, there cannot be a better time to start using this. Really wish that the all pen and paper mindmappers (including myself not that long ago) will give the mindmapping softwares a try. The dynamic way in which they can be revised makes it a truly useful tool.