Principal's Conference - 2012
The Principal's Conference was organized by EduExcellence and hosted by Welham Boys’ School from May 15 to17, 2012.This conference was the 12th edition since its inception in June 2009 at IIT Delhi. It is primarily meant to empower school principals to become more effective managers and leaders. Around 350 school leaders have attended this conference over the last three years and have been exposed to topics such as Self Management, Self Development, Legal and Financial Issues in School Management, Human Resource Management, Empowerment and Motivation, IT Applications and Transactional – Transformational and Instructional Leadership.
This year the conference at Welham Boys’ School was attended by principals from Haryana, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Delhi, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. It started on May15, 2012 with the lighting of the lamp followed by a welcome speech by the Principal. The conference Director gave a brief outline about the theme and agenda of the conference and this was followed by the inaugural address by Mr. Darshan Singh( Chairman, Board of Governors ,Welham Boys’ School).His speech was encouraging and thought -provoking.
The sessions on the first day were conducted by Prof. Harish Chaudhry of IIT Delhi. Giving concrete examples, he explained the tools and techniques needed to manage oneself before managing a team, in the most effective way.
Day two of the workshop started with Ms Anez Katre from the Doon School taking up a session on Dr Howard Gardner’s “The Good Work” which deals with the effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work – work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners – and to determine how best to increase the incidences of good work in our society. This session was followed by a session on “Effective Leadership” by Dr. Peter McLaughlin (Headmaster of the Doon School).
Post lunch, the session was conducted by Mr. Vimal Kishore (Chartered Accountant) and a visiting faculty from IIT Roorkee. He touched upon the financial and legal issues related to schools and sensitized delegates about them .The delegates were taken to Camp Red Stone situated 15 km away from school, for an overnight stay.
Day three of the workshop started with an attempt to put across the role of Information Technology in supporting teachers and parents to create a better future for the children. It was taken by Mr. Lalit Jonwal, a post graduate from IIT Roorkee and IT consultant to many schools. This was followed by sessions on Leadership and Differentiated Learning by Mr. Madhav Rao .He emphasized that the way forward to meet the students’ need for learning is to promote differentiated instruction in schools.
One of the major challenges in the classroom is that we have students of mixed ability. Mr. Sandeep Srivastava, a social entrepreneur and post graduate from IIT -Delhi and Insead- France, was of the opinion that in order to “live up to your dream”, convert mixed ability classes into same –ability classes. He calls the school which follow this model the “Good School”.
Ms Gunmeet Bindra, Principal Welham Boys’ School conducted a session on “Philosophy for Children”, which is a mode of building an aptitude for critical thinking in students in their early years by replacing the instructional mode with the query mode. The conference concluded with a grand valedictory function where Mr. Taquir Hussain ( Head of HR , ONGC-Dehradun) was the Chief Guest.
Similar conferences are being organized at IIT Delhi, Australia and US for Principals, Vice-Principals, Owner -Managers, Coordinators, Deans and Head Teachers responsible for implementing the School Agenda by EduExcellence. Delegates to the conference were happy with the content and felt it was a worthwhile and enriching experience.
