Last week's speaker was Lisa Burman, originally a primary teacher, but now an educational consultant specialising in Early Learning. Lisa spoke about her 120 years in New York, which started just a month after the World Trade Centre disaster in 2001. Her role there was as a consultant in a company called "Aussie" (Australian-US services in education). During her time with the company it grew from 60 to 350 consultants, 80% of whom were Australian. She moved into a borwnstone in Brooklyn and consulted with 3-4 schools, the most challenging of which was a "bilungual" school, wgere each class had two teachers, one using American sign language and the other speaking in English. She found some of the most effective changes were to change the environment from "cluttered" to "beautiful", and to introduce books into the classroom.
A lot of the ideas for all this come from Carla Rinaldi, one of the Thinkers in Residence in Adelaide, who comes from Reggio Emilia in Italy - one of the leaders in innovative educational practices. One of the fascinating aspects in what Lisa presented was the idea of young children producing their own books. We saw a video of a 4-year old "reading" his own book, which consisted of a series of pictures he had drawn, and then another video of two 7-year olds who read and talked about quite complex stories they had written. So, the program is about encouraging the children's imagination, and giving them a sense of "I can do this" - rather than criticising their shortcomings and failures.