From Potential to Success – Dr Frank Dick

Dr Frank Dick gave the closing keynote speech at the Scottish Learning Festival last month and related the above title to our new Scottish curriculum – A Curriculum for Excellence.  There were  a lot of sporting analogies as well though with plenty of video clips to watch and relate coaching in sport to teaching in education.  It was certainly the most entertaining and interesting keynote/seminar I felt I went to over the 2 days.

It has taken me so long to get round to writing about it that I am not sure it will make much sense but I will give it a go (and leave out the education bits mostly).

• He started off by saying that people are valley or mountain people and it is mountain people who have the winning difference. 
• 3 R’s of coaching: 

1. You have responsibility for your own performance and should be the best you can be
2. You have responsibility for your own development and you should accept/seek coaching
3. You have responsibility for coaching other players/coaches

Not sure if I have that quite right but I can see exactly how it fits for teachers and in that sense I am not always very good at accepting/seeking coaching!

• Coaches should have double vision; focus on the dreams of today and the milestones of the future.
• Plan backwards; for example for London 2012 they will be thinking now what they want their athletes to look like 6 weeks before, 6 months before, 1 year before etc.

Winning is being better today than you

were yesterday, every day!

The above quote will be up in my classroom when I go back to having a class; for both me and the pupils!  The analogy he used was of coaching a kid who started off by coming last in 100m races and gradually got better by focusing on beating her own times, not thinking about beating other people.

He talked at this point about the reason to seek out competition is to make yourself better and that was about needing other people racing beside you to push yourself on (if I remember rightly).

You have to know what winning is to you!

At this point he showed a clip of Ussain Bolt winning the 200m in Beijing (he was there!) and pointed out he had easily won the race coming out of the bend and who was he racing against by then – well it was himself to get the new world record.

The clip I have put on has Steve Cram commentating and you can just imagine him jumping out of his seat with excitement; I watched another one with an American commentator and he could not have been any more unimpressed – there was complete silence in the last 100m!

• Coaching Process:

Be the light  (direct)

Fuel the light (coach)

Reflect the light (support)

Stand out of the light  (counsel)

The first two above were about giving pupils/athletes the roots to grow and the next two about giving them the wings to fly!

• Own – take personal ownership of every opportunity to make the winning difference
• Decide – take considered risks and decisions making and judgement calls to be the winning difference
• Do – just do it!  Act effectively and excellently

He also talked about not giving up until the end – I would love to show the kids in Malawi the clip below as each time I have been out and have done a sports day they have given up running in their race as soon as they see someone winning.

Cathy Freeman was also mentioned and I cannot remember the details of why but it was to do with the hype and controversy of the 400m final in Sydney and how she had to deal with that and run her own race.  I could not find the exact same clip which was of her being interviewed about how difficult it was at the same time as showing the race.

The goal of intellectual life is to enable the next generation to learn from what you have learned from and act on it!

You are there to make it possible for other people to succeed!

The teacher/leader is conductor of their own orchestra!

The three quotes above I will have on the staffroom wall if I ever become a headteacher!

He then showed a clip from the film Pay it Forward, which I saw years ago and sobbed my way through and finished off the address with:

If not you, who?

If not now, when?

Think of an idea to change our world and put it into action!