Principal’s Message

Dear Students, Staff, Parents and Caregivers,

Welcome back to semester two. I trust you have had a great semester break and spent some meaningful time with your loved ones and families. Our first five weeks of the term have been so busy with information nights, excursions and incursions, sport events and fund raising activities.

I must acknowledge the great work of our students, staff and parents involvement. I thank every staff member and student who has taken roles and responsibilities with these activities resulted in outstanding outcomes. I am also looking forward to an exciting semester two, which is planned to be full of teaching & learning activities of progressive education.

Our sole focus is our students and supporting them to learn in an environment where they feel confident and secure. They gain the skills and values that will shape them to become active and productive citizens. At Sirius, we are committed to providing that environment.

One of the core values we stand for is being ‘inquisitive’ here at Sirius College. We are always curious, wanting to understand more about the studies and all the phenomenon surrounding us. That is how we build deeper knowledge into what makes pupils understand well and how students can achieve their full potential. I encourage my students and colleagues being inquisitive and more often using “Why?” word to seek a reasonable explanation.

Inquisitive people aren’t satisfied until they investigate a question or a subject for themselves. They will not be happy to sit back and just accept. They research, read, compare, look at all possible sides of a ‘story’, and make up their own minds. They are not afraid of failing.

SMART FAILING

Mistakes and failures are keys to learning. They make our brain begin to compile information about the experience and grow bigger. While the brain returns close to its original size after the learning experience, it retains new neural pathways by taking in new information, compiling the key takeaways from trial and error. Making mistakes matures the brain, resulting in more efficient synapses and fundamentally altered neurons. In short, failure can actually make you smarter. But not all mistakes are the same.

THREE KINDS OF FAILURE

Preventable: These are a sign of insufficient training or knowledge and can be avoided by filling the gaps.

Unavoidable: Here the complexity or uncertainty of the task makes mistakes quite likely and the trick is to learn from small mistakes to avoid bigger ones.

Intelligent: These failures are at the frontier of learning, where mistakes are essential to gaining new knowledge and moving forward.

HOW TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN DIFFERENT TYPES OF FAILURES

Frame the work accurately. Encourage truth-tellers. Be humble about limits. Invite participation. Set boundaries and hold people accountable.

We all need to create cultures that allow for intelligent failures at the frontier.

We need to set up experiments for the purpose of learning and innovating – and that means planning to fail.

When our children observe us doing so, they are more likely to accept failure and learn from it, to listen to feedback and try to perform better the next time.

Acknowledgment: “The Power of Failure” by Donna Orem in Independent School, Summer 2018

Warm regards,