Let’s get real... all of us, at times, are confronted with the complex contradictions of the interconnected, interdependent systems in our world.
An essential question for the future of education is how we help students to reflect on, deeply understand and respond mindfully and compassionately to real-world complexities.
With the growing interest in social and emotional learning and mindfulness today, it is especially timely to show how these can combine with skills in understanding systems and complexity to establish a cognitive and affective foundation for global citizenship.
Respect for Self. Respect for Others. Respect for the Environment.
While we know these are things we learn significantly in our homes, embedding them into daily teaching and learning, with open minds and empathy, helps to develop kind humans who can work toward a better future. Affectionately referred to as the '3Rs', these values live within our community.
Where our school values represent what we believe, Compassionate Systems is how we put them into action...
A Framework for Compassion; School Values in Action
In an ever-changing world, the unpredictable future we face, without doubt, requires compassion and collaboration. It is equally valuable that young people engage fully in the vitality of their own lives, intellectually, socially and emotionally.
At Woodleigh, we use a range of tools informed by a ‘Compassionate Systems’ framework, that is being used at both the level of classroom innovations and collective leadership levels to shape an even more regenerative school culture.
We conceptualise compassion as an essentially systemic property of mind: to cultivate compassion is to be able to appreciate the systemic forces that influence people’s actions. It is the capacity to hold paradoxes - to see and sense the larger system with all its interdependence and interconnectedness and all the unintended consequences of human behaviour - without judgment but with real care for the system and everyone involved in it.
A Future Home of Something Great
While year levels are linear and horizontal in structure, Homesteads embed a vertical culture encouraging connections across the School. Homestead is the ‘family’ unit of the student school experience. In other words, Homesteads are...