Nothing Compares to the Thumb Print of God

Today, my academic team had our first official meeting.  We went through 6 hours of marathon meeting trying to define the school, which practically defines what we like Life Academy to be.

We started to get to know one another followed by a prayer meeting, then, vision casting by representatives of the board and put those ideas into writings using "educational language."  

Amazingly, with the active participation of the team members, we were able to write the mission and vision statements of the school, define our graduates attributes and verbalize our educational philosophy.  We also threshed out some academic work and assignments, went for a school facility tour, individual consultation, and even partial review of curriculum.  I also had interviews with two pairs of parents applying for their kids education with our institution.  

Summing up today's work in two words would be "amazingly productive."  What was supposed to be an at least three months of discussion and processing, ended up in 6 hours with everyone fully satisfied with all of our meeting outputs, which allowed us to have a clear direction for the coming days.  

Truly, today is another day of miracle as we see the thumb print of God in the result of our meeting.  To God be all the glory!

LIFE Academy 

Mission: We are a global innovative learning institution that partners with families in providing transformative education to help build holistically developed Christ-like influencers.

Vision: Through global innovative education, we envision our learners to be wise, holistically developed Christ-like servant leaders who love God and others with a commitment to make a positive difference in the world.

Blessing Upon Blessing!

The Lord truly blesses His people.  I have never thought I would be changing gadgets successively this month.  For the past years, it has been my practice that I would give myself a birthday gift and a Christmas gift.  So, it takes time to really save some money for my personal gift.

This practice of giving myself gifts started when I was still a teenager, when a counselor told me that money earned and placed in a bank is not yours, but the bank's.  Unless you enjoy part of your hard earned money, they are not yours.  This principle is simple, in order for you to say that the money you earned is yours, you need to spend some for yourself.

Looking at many people trying to save money and depriving themselves with the material blessings God has given them has made me think this philosophy or principle.  I was convinced that this is really true.  In order for me to proudly say that this is my hard earned money, I have to spend some of it for myself and not just put everything in savings for the rainy day.

I have witnessed people who died of starvation only to find out that the person has save hundreds of thousands of pesos under her bed.   I also remembered one time my mom was complaining that she is spending much of her SSS retirement money.  And I have to remind her that she has indeed retired, and such money was supposedly be spend for that purpose.

Some might look at this principle too much, but again, money saved in bank can also connote that money is controlling you.  While money spend wisely for some personal pleasure is you controlling money.

As my iPhone 4 starts to become very slow, I was forced to replace it with a new one, with Pavs convincing me to go for the Globe iPhone Forever Plan.  After being convince to take such, I tried the whole month going from Globe branch to branch but there were no stocks available.  Finally, December 24, I thought that there would be lesser people in Manila, and indeed, I was able to get one.

And comes today, my new MacBook Pro arrives to replace my old MacBook Pro who served with me for the past 4 ½ years of ministry.  

I praise God for new gadgets, I believe God would use these gadgets again for my ministry especially to establish communications with my flock as well as make my work more productive in many ways.

This is truly blessings upon blessings... Thank you Lord for your continues blessings!

Not God

Church leaders should actually be good spiritual leaders.  They are men who Christians look up to, seek guidance and respect their God given authority over the church.  But, we also need to understand and be reminded that it is not necessarily that whatever they want or say is already equivalent to God's will or what God wants.  Spiritual leaders are only human leaders and not God Himself. 

As believers of God, it is our personal responsibility to discern the will of God in our lives, and not just rely on counsel of godly men. Knowing the will of God is the result of our relationship with Him.  

Therefore, church leaders can affirm or confirm God's will through their counsel, but to solely seek God's will through counsel of spiritual leaders is definitely a NO!  We cannot put such important responsibility of seeking God's will in the hands of people, especially if it involves personal decisions, directions in life and our service for the Lord.  

When we looked at the Bible, there were times when God allowed lying spirits to be on the mouths of Israel's prophets to deceive and punish disobedient leaders.  In the same way in our generation, there would be times our discerning of God's will might not conform with the opinion of godly spiritual leaders.  

Therefore, it is better to put our relationship with God first, and discern the will of God rather just being lazy and just rely on the council of our spiritual leaders.  These leaders can be good spiritual leaders but still, they are not God. 

Productive and Better

As my class continue our journey in improving teaching, we focused on Kholberg's Experiential Learning Cycle.  We carefully discussed a more dynamic way of chopping the lesson to several learning experiences that hopes to maximize individual learning experiences.  One topic or content is divided into Activity, Analysis, Abstraction and Application.  

Activity - is a dynamic way for learners to interact and bring out their presuppositions on the particular topic.  In this way, we can already remove teaching things they already know.  This is to remove repeatitions as well as boredom from the learners.  

Analysis - is proving the accuracy of learning presented by the learners as a result of the activity.  This involves asking various probing questions.  The process is to prove and clarify if they were really clear or have actually understood what they have presented, and not just a wild coincident guess.  

Abstraction - is focusing on what the learners do not know.  After the two previous learning experiences, the teacher chops off all data the learners already know and just focus his or her presentation on the parts of the content that the learners do not know.  

Application - is the application of new learning with the learners presuppositions and create an actual action output.  The only way to know that learning has occured is through the application of the lesson.  

When we use this format in teaching our learners, we create a more dynamic way to present a lesson that would continually captivate the learners' attention on the lesson.  

The discussion today has fully captivated my students as well.  It has made our day's discussion move everyone to another level of thinking and preparing oneself to present dynamic lessons to their flock.  

So guys... is this what I am thinking?  (",)

Work Adjustment

It has been months, since I last worked like a cow.

Yes!  I just got back to full work, and though my new workplace is not fully operational, it seems my youthful energy has been missing.  I have been exhausted daily and off to bed around 10 pm, which I felt that it was a miracle, since I usually slept 12 am since May.  Maybe this just goes to say that when God puts you on an assignment, He also provides all the necessities for you to be up to the challenge. 

I do praise God that after four days of work, I was never late and miraculously got up at 5 am for work.  My travel time from Binondo to Ortigas is a price I need to pay.  Actually, the worse part was the travel from Ortigas back to Manila, where the traffic was really hell and exhausting.  

I do enjoy this new work though there are some pressures because of new challenges especially with people but so far, God has been very patient with me in this opening journey.  

In just 4 days time, we were able to accomplished a lot and we had already prepared for next week's list of task.  

Is this really work adjustment?  Maybe not.  

When it is God's work, He adjusts everything for you!  Praise Him! From whom all blessings flow!  

APPOLICIOUS!!!

It was an APPOLICIOUS experience!

For the past years, I have been busy advocating and conducting faculty development trainings on the Apple product integration to the basic education curriculum, particularly the iPad.   And this has finally paid off today!

I praise God for the learning journey in integrating technology to our education curriculum in order to make learning more fun, exciting and most important of all, deeper for our students.  As we use technology integration in the different subject areas, it has allowed students to be keen on researching facts and data by themselves.  It has allowed students to become reflective learners, which results to better critical thinking skills, better opportunities for processing learning, and innovate with wonderful and creative outputs.

These years of advocacy has now been recognized by Apple as I receive their appointment as one of the official consultant for Apple Philippines on Educational Integration from the representative of Apple Singapore.   This involves free further trainings to even better equip myself in the conduct of professional development seminars for educators in our country and hopefully in other parts of Asia.  Though this would be another addition to my new responsibility as School Principal, I do believe it would better enhance myself as an educational leader as technology has started to reshape education in our present generation.

 I think the most important perks would be my designation is official and I am authorized to use the Apple logo with my name card... Now, that's COOL!  :D

Hitting the Lesson Target!

Learning objectives as I have personally observed are the most neglected area of the lesson plan.   Surprisingly, some teachers do not know how to write learning objectives and worse, they  do not even know why they were there in the first place or interprets such objectives in a wrong way.

Some teachers are so comfortable with customized lesson plans, which has been handed down or prepared by publishers that they would just jump to the content and the teaching strategy of the lesson without bothering to read and comprehend the learning objectives included in the lesson plan.

Learning objectives are actually guide for the teacher to deliver the precise content demanded by the lesson.  But when these objectives are neglected, there is a big possibility that the teacher would be teaching something that is not actually what the lesson is all about.  Or the teacher could be concluding the lesson with another idea rather than the real intention of the lesson.

Like a lesson about the story of David and Goliath.  Possible learning objectives can include bravery, trust in God, not to look down on young people, conquering your giants, God uses anyone He wants... and so forth.  You cannot target all of these possible learning objectives in a 20 or 30 minutes lesson, but instead, you need to pick only one that you would want your students to learn most.

A particular topic can have hundreds of possible learning objectives, but because of the limited amount of time and the target of the lesson, you cannot accommodate all the possible learning outcomes.   And that is the job of learning objectives, to point to that very objective what you want your students to learn from the lesson.

As many educators would say, objectives must be written in SMART format: Simple, Measurable, Attainable, Reasonable and Time-bounded.  It sounds easy, but actually, deeper thoughts are needed in formulating such learning objectives to come out with a precise learning target.

It is highly suggested that each lesson must include 3 learning objectives at most, and such objectives must include a progression in the thinking level of the students.

Learning Objectives help teachers hit the target!  So, when we give importance to the learning objectives of our lessons, we give importance to the life of the students we mold out of our lessons.