Page 29 - Microsoft Word - Thinking like a wallaby 14DEC16.doc

Already, there is some Ant-thinking happening here. By offering to help the teacher, we
are sharing the problem with her – but, of course, we will only do this if she wants our

help. If she doesn’t we stop right here - maybe later on she will ask for our help. But, if

she is happy for us to help, we need to look at why this problem has come up – what led

to it? Why are the parents disagreeing? We need some Elephant-thinking! In real life,

this particular problem came about because the school was in a farming area and, for
many years, all the school children had come from the farms or the little town that

provided for the farmers. Then, a whole new group of families moved in, living in tents

and caravans and having very different ideas about how to live, work and play.

The old families and the new ones were all good people – it was just their ideas that

were different. The farm families wanted the children to learn the same way that they

had learned by reading books and listening to the teacher. The new families wanted the

children to learn in new ways that involved more adventure and trying things out. So
that helps us to understand a bit about what created the problem.

When we use a little bit of Worm-thinking, we can
look at the problem from a different point of view and

there are some special points we have to think about

in a problem like this. There are some things that

schools are simply not allowed to do, so we have to check the laws and the
government’s rules on what children can and cannot do in school grounds.

Step 2. Look for solutions

Now that we know the history of the problem and the different points of view, we need
to think what the next step should be. It could be that this problem, or something like it,

has occurred in other schools. This is where we could suggest to the teacher that she

could use some Spider-thinking – checking the ‘web’ and asking other teachers. And we

need to think of both lots of parents’ points of view. In other words, we have to do some
‘research’ – that means looking for information.

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