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Today I started listening to a recording of the book From Good to Great by Jim Collins.

There was no particular reason to why I wanted to get my hands on this other than curiosity. I’d read several references to the book in material written by our executive director of schools, and just wanted to know what on earth all the talk about hedgehogs and buses was about and what on earth it had to do with the leadership of our system of schools. I suppose if I wanted to critique the ideas, I really could not do it without being properly informed; which meant learning more about Collins’ work.

So I got my hands on a copy of the recording from one of my favourite book stores (I could have bought the book, but I think I’ve got enough to read, what with trying to get through The World is Flat) and started to listen to it today in the car. Collins suggests that his book can be applied to any apsect of work or personal life.

If the beginnings of Collins’ work is anything to go by, he’s probably right. In the little I’ve listened to so far, I’ve been taken most by one of the earliest comments he made, namely:

Good is the greatest enemy of great

Suprisingly enough, I agreed with this statement from the get go. Not from my school experience, but from my experience elsewhere. The hardest thing is not to bring yourself/your classroom/your organisation up to a standard where you’re satisified, but to take it beyond that level. “Goodness” can be a comfort zone. Too many times people settle for good, and cannot see themselves out of it to move further forward to greatness.

Collins also goes on to talk about (something along the lines of - I’m sorry, I don’t remember verbatim) the need to relentlessly believe that you can succeed, while at the same time being able to honestly (and even brutally honestly) acknowledge what holds you back, what needs improvement.

It just seems to make sense.  Now I’ll have to listen to the rest of the CDs to see if I agree with the rest.

Imagine if we could empower every single student in our classrooms to relentlessly believe that they can succeed…  Now that really would be empowering…

I don’t believe it.

Not performance pay for teachers.  Really, seeing that idea rear its ugly head didn’t surprise me given the lengthy rumblings.  Also given how the federal government acted on “plain English” reporting (i.e. it employs the first five letters of the English alphabet), I’m not surprised to hear the proposal that performance pay would be ”tied to” (or, depending on your point of view, “used as blackmail to make school systems take it in order to get their…”) federal government funding.

What I don’t believe is that I agree with Alan Jones!

Many people either agree or disagree with Mr. Jones’ opinions, and one could suggest that he can encourage national debate on key issues.  But in his final editorial for the Channel Nine program, Today, he addressed the very issue of performance pay for teachers.  What’s more, I do believe what he says makes perfect sense.

At the end of the day, the problem is this:

1. What do we define as “performance” or “achievement” in the teaching profession, and,
2. How do we assess, report and reward such individual performance or achievement, especially that teaching is a collegial, cooperative, collaborative and inherently social profession.

Let’s also remember that teaching is just that - a profession, not an industry.  This is not to degrade one type of work against another, but simply to say they are different types of work that operate in different ways for different purposes.  If we must accept performance pay, does this mean that doctors will be paid according to the number of correct diagnoses, or how quickly a diagnosis can be made?  Some lawyers may adopt a “no win - no fee” approach, but remember, they can choose which cases to take.  Should we start paying our accountants according to how much of a tax refund they can get for us?  Is performance pay just another example in a long history of our profession being treated as an industry, thus “selling it short” yet again?  Surely, our classrooms are more than production lines.

As Jones said, we have no problem as teachers in being properly rewarded for doing our job to the best of our ability.  Just how you do that in a fair and just manner is extremely difficult to determine.  I seriously hope, especially in the Catholic sector, that our professional associations and system administrators address this issue with a Christian sense of social justice at the forefront of their minds.

The transcript of Alan Jones’ editorial is on the Radio 2GB website.  You can view video of the editorial on the blog idents.tv.

My thanks to our fantastic teacher-librarian, Judy, who first handed me a copy of the transcript of the editorial and alerted me to it.

Elsewhere, in reading my RSS feeds today, I found myself challenged to come up with my list of Web 2.0 tools that I have used, and would like to use in my teaching and learning.  The original post came from the blog of Doug Belshaw, and I do share a few of my favourites with him.

So, here goes… the Web 2.0 stuff I have (and would like to) use:

del.icio.us was probably one of the first Web 2.0 tools I used actively, as we introduced it into the school to replace the old library intranet pages of subject links.  Now everyone can contribute and share.  Brilliant.  Once I found that Mozilla had a del.icio.us extension with a sidebar, I loved it even more.

edublogs is another tool I enjoy using (duh, this is an edublog!).   The most successful learning use I’ve had so far is not my main class blog, but the reading group blogs through which students have regularly posted comments in response to text.  Never since we’ve started the blog have students tried to avoid writing the reading response.

I’m also interested in podcasting, and want to get it going in the classroom.  I’ve used Audacity to record podcasts (and music recordings - perhaps we can get it going in our school’s music room?) and posted the Learning 2.0 and Technoblog podcasts on Podbean.

Speaking of Learning 2.0, I’ve also used both wikispaces and pbwiki to make wikis.  One has been used in a classroom application, while Learning 2.0 has been for staff professional development.  Both are good tools.

I haven’t really used bubbl.us or Bubble-mind in the classroom because we have Inspiration, but if we didn’t, I’m sure we’d be on to those as well.

Then there are all the tools that I enjoy and/or use myself and want to get into the classroom, like Flickr, Google Reader, SlideShare, Scratch and YouTube (or TeacherTube, Google Video, etc.).  I was also alerted to VoiceThread today, which looks like a great product with amazing learning potential.

Well, if I really do get all of these into my classroom, I don’t think there’d be a moment in the day where we weren’t using Web 2.o tools.  I wonder how many I can integrate into rich learning next term?  Maybe I’ll get some more ideas at the CEC forum on Monday.