A series of blog posts looking at the key themes within education. Comparing the similarities and the challenges that education faces in Nigeria and the UK.
How well does your school celebrate success? What sort of things do you do to ensure that you celebrate the achievements? Do you just celebrate academic achievement or does your school measure other success?
I will spend some time in this post looking at how our Nigerian partner school did this. First off I must say that I was absolutely blown away by the welcome that we received when we visited the school, the students, staff and community actually treated us like royalty which was lovely yet a little bit overwhelming. One of the first things that impacted on me whilst walking round the school is that they sure know how to celebrate. I believe that celebrating success whether it is getting a good grade on a test, winning or playing well in a sport or even demonstrating something like excellent behaviour is an integral and important element in developing a well rounded young person. Through celebrating what kids do well we help build their self esteem, we help them identify skills and attributes that make them successful and we help reinforce positive behaviour.
The first thing I thought was awesome was that every time visitors came to the school they showed off what they were good at, some people would say that this is a bit false and you are only being shown what they want you to see however I think it is only a positive thing, for one thing it is a really warm welcome and creates a buzz for the rest of your stay. We were welcomed to the school through the celebration of music, G.S.S Karu has a welcome song that they sing to all there visitors, they celebrate the talented singers and musicians that the school has, in fact they follow this wth the second song which is all about their school. (Yes a school song, I loved this, you can read about this in an earlier post, students singing about how proud they are of the school was brilliant!)
We then were treated to a series of celebrations; we saw students show off how good they were at dancing, the students at the school then celebrated their culture and heritage by playing traditional music and taking part in some of the tribal dances that told stories of their culture. It made me a little jealous and scared as I thought about what traditional dance we could do when we returned the visit, all I could think of is the birdie song!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRYuWAoqJYw
Then we had students celebrating their talents in basically anything you could think of, it was like watching Nigeria has talent – from cheerleading, wrestling, poetry reading, acrobatics and drama, I am not sure what else they could have shown us. It basically made me reflect on how my school celebrates success, I believe it is something we do well, it is part of our core values as a school but I came away thinking we still have a lot to learn. I would love to hear about how you celebrate success in your school? Is it a British thing? Are we too modest? Many of our students don’t like to celebrate because it isn’t cool, is there a culture in some schools or here in the UK that it is not cool to be good at things?
I leave you with a clip of some students being told their house had came second in sports day (that is right they didn’t win but it reminded me of what a team would be like winning something like the world cup.)
Great post, thanks. I wonder if staff could model celebrating their own successes more, then students would learn how to go for it! I’m off to Tanzania in July to set up links for our primary school.