Report the Positives More Than the Negatives
A few weeks ago, a highly regarded high school in Melbourne, Victoria, had to deal with a media avalanche after a nasty fight that occurred outside their school went viral. While the video was confronting and I felt a significant level of concern and sadness for the students and families involved, I also had another issue that was bugging me, and it has for some time. This incident brought it to the surface again.
It seems that schools are under attack at the moment. The high school at the centre of the furore, which has a stunning reputation for inclusive, creative and innovative learning, now has to rebuild its brand at the hands of the media who had no regard for the real story. The staff and students at this high school have a right to feel aggrieved by the way they have been portrayed from well outside the school’s fence by a ‘click bait’ hungry media. They are not the only ones making life hard at school. I’ll get to them later.
Right across Australia, thousands of schools are continually innovating and providing students with deep learning opportunities that inspire their students to dream big while also equipping them with the tools to realise this ambition. This is no easy task. Yet do we hear stories about this? Not often enough. These schools need to be celebrated and promoted in an effort to raise the educational bar right across the country. The media needs to do much, much better in reporting on our
schools. Our teachers need to be inspired and affirmed by media stories that highlight best practice because ultimately, they take responsibility for the learning of our children. Teaching is no easy task and our teachers need encouragement, not discouragement.
To get the ball rolling in this space, teachers need to be bold enough to share the work they are doing across their network that is making a difference. After all, they are the experts in this rewarding endeavour we refer to as teaching. Create an avalanche of the ‘gold nuggets’ by giving the media some news they can’t ignore. Schools can be incredibly creative about how they do this via the multitude of social media platforms that are utilised.
Finally, parents have an incredible role to play in this space. A parent’s role is not to fuel the fire when things inevitably go wrong at a school. When you put a large group of children together, sometimes things go wrong, and it’s possible it could involve your child. Don’t catastrophise the situation by marching down to the school and giving all involved a mouthful. That parental phenomenon of bagging the school didn’t exist a generation ago and shouldn’t exist now.
Take a deep breath, try and understand the situation and consider whether your involvement will be helpful. This calm, considered approach models behaviours that will reward you many times over in the years to come as your child and other students learn to model the example set by the adults they look up to.
