Bill Roedy did the 5th Anniversary and graduation speech for the Berlin School.

AMAZING!

Not that I was hearing anything new but it was great to hear these ideas from another voice.

Tips to success from Bill the cable guy.

1. The most important lesson is the need to creatively adapt!

2. Passion is what you need to have.

3. Go global go local you have to be there.

4. Take risks and break the rules.

5. Innovation comes from risk.

6. Failure teaches .

7. Don’t be afraid.

8. First on the battle field last to leave or quick to take blame and slow to take credit.

9. Bureaucracy is a killer of innovation.

10. Hard work trumps talent.

11. Stand up for tolerance and diversity.

12. Never accept no for an answer.

13. MASTER DIGITAL with a heart.

14. Have fun.

15. Make  a difference

These are very valuable tips that all too often we forget.

As a professional educator I watch and preside over success and failure on a daily basis.

What I have come to learn is that neither success or failure are really that easy to define.

What one person might see as failure may be success to another.

Maybe success and failure could be nothing more than arbitrary assignments.

What has come to light over the last 10 years of teaching is that those most likely to see themselves as successful believe that they have talent.

Those students most likely to do poorly don’t trust their own abilities.

Maybe we need to stop thinking in terms of macro/presented success and start thinking in terms of micro/personal/internal success.

This is something we aren’t teaching or evaluating with any great success today.

The obvious answers is like, no, love what you do!

And what if you are someplace in between?

My suggestion is always to find a diversion, a hobby, something that you do absolutely love to look forward to going to.

But you still have to go to work!

I also find it very useful to listen to others and their work experience, especially if they love what they do.

So where do you go for a little how-to workplace inspiration? BoingBoing.net

And what did BoingBoing point me towards, none other than an interview with Roald Dahl.

The advice is fantastic and transportable. As in you can use this advice in practically any career.

I particularly love the advice on keeping momentum when writing.

HOW DO YOU KEEP THAT MOMENTUM GOING WHEN YOU ARE WRITING A NOVEL?

One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, the you are in trouble!

Stop in stride, not at the end, and you always have a good start!

Maybe we just need to keep things simple and undercomplexify to be happy with what we are doing?

Good question and one that seldom, if ever, gets acted upon!

Once children leave primary school less and less attention is given to the engagement of the student and more and more is attention is given to assessment of the 1% of  information the student actually retains.

Maybe Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University sketch isn’t that far off

Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University the sketch!

So what do we really need to do to make education work today?

No we do not have to, or want to, eliminate rigor, reading, research the hours of labour over a question.

What we need to do is give serious thought to how to give the student ownership of what they are doing.

And by doing I mean an essay, a TV program, an installation piece, a lab.

Ownership is the key to academic success today and has been the key all along!

Only a handful of people ever figure it out and if you take a good look at those who do the best in University and after University it has a lot to do with ownership of what they engaged in!

I have no doubt that this idea of ownership applies to every level of education and is the key to primary school success.

Along the way we lose sight of the ownership variable.

I am teaching a group of girls at Zayed University who have taken ownership to the extreme and in the process are reaping wild success.

The project is simple, get the information of the day out to students.

In this case a hybrid system of blog and podcast is being used.

The project is called ZU60.

The simple remit is to provide 60 seconds of campus information to students every morning.

This is a student owned project!

The students collect, write, edit, record and upload it all and this has to be done for the morning rush!

The students OWN ZU60 and the results… listen and tell me what you think!

The key to success is ownership.