Sizzle in Schools

One day I was called by Stuart, a manager within “Business in the Community? to go to a meeting at the local council offices. “We have a project you might be interested in?he said (which was code for “How much free time have you got?. As you can imagine, the thought of a late night meeting with council officials and senior executives from large local businesses filled me with a buzz that I had never felt before. Actually, when I think back, I could hardly feel it at all!

That night, as my eyes began to need support from my conscious mind to stay open, I heard the following phrase “this time we are really going to make an impact in our schools? and it was Kevin, the Education Action Zone’s new Director. It was said with such passion and congruence that my unconscious mind woke up and the rest now forms part of our history.

For the last twelve months my colleague Jayne and I have been working with the Zone to help deliver projects to schools that really make a difference to the quality of the children’s development. For our part, a training company, mainly delivering events for large corporate businesses, we have seen that many of the issues the schools are faced with, are replicated in business. The key difference is that teachers don’t have easy access to new learning methods or help with their own personal development .

The Vision Matrix uses a simple model to look at any training or change initiative, it was derived from a study by Robert Dilts “Changing Belief Systems?

Robert Dilts portrayed his model like an archers target, the centre being VISION, the next layer being beliefs and values, then skills and capabilities,Behaviors and on the outside, environment. He used this model to describe how individuals are affected from different levels of change; in addition he found that this could be even more powerful if applied to groups of people within organisations.

If you make changes in a person’s environment from changing their desk position to adding a new coffee machine it will have an effect on them, but what you will notice that this becomes “second nature?after a very short period.

Dilts said “if you want to get increased effectiveness in your changes, you need to move down within the model, the deeper you go, the more sustainable the change? and I am sure that you will recognise that in your organisation. (Also I only have 600 words in which to do this)

Most training or change initiatives enter the Dilts model at the “skills?level and we hope that people will work differently when they get back to the office, this is often not the case and is because a skills change requires belief in the reason for change and if that is not tackled the money will be wasted.

In the schools we started with Vision and have now taken 5 schools through a “Vision Day?which creates a much bigger BUZZ with us and the schools!!!

Our reputation from training trainers within companies has led us now into the next level ?applying those skills to teachers.We will be working with 20 teachers from the zone this year and we are looking forward to the BUZZ.