The Fish Philosophy

While usually a sceptic of such "warm fuzzy" stuff, this book really made me think.

The underlying philosophy has 4 "practices".

To begin to change anything, we have to change the way we speak about it, the way we feel about it and definitely the way we act about it day in and day out.
The four simple but powerful practices that are the The FISH! Philosophy are:
Be There
Play
Make Their Day
Choose Your Attitude

While these sound like common sense approaches, for the next week I caught myself thinking"they need to read the FISH philosophy" or "they have read the FISH philosophy" every time I went into a shop or had a meeting with someone.

This got me thinking. How can I translate this into our school? How many times do we arrive at school dreading the difficult parent/child/teacher that have an issue that has to be dealt with? How much of an impact does this have on our environment, which in turn has an impact on our students and consequently their learning?

Can we use the FISH philosophy to achieve our two strategic (learning) goals:

1. to lift student achievement by improving teacher performance
2. designing the curriculum through the use of inquiry

If all teachers (actually all staff) use the FISH philosophy, would student attendance increase? Would student achievement increase because everyone is having fun, demonstrating a positive attitude, making them feel special and focussing on being "there" for them?

While I would expect we would all feel we do our best to do this already, we don't concentrate on it explicitly. Next task: Leadership team to read - discussion to follow. Could this/should this be a priority or am I getting sidetracked from our current vision?

More information can be found at the link below:

http://www.charthouse.com/content.aspx?nodeid=1066