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Paul is the principal of a public primary school at one of Sydney's Northern Beaches. In his early 30's, Paul has been a pricipal for a number of years and his students think he is a real CHAMPION!
Q: How did you get started?
A: I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember, but when I got good marks in my HSC thought I should consider something else. I put down Law on all my Uni applications but at the very last minute changed them to teaching. It was what I wanted to do.
I actually started my teaching career as a high school art teacher but very early on decided I wanted to work with students with special needs. My first appointment was to a school with a lot of students with learning difficulties, so I went back to uni and retrained as a special education teacher which enabled me to teach students from kindergarten to year 12. I have always had a preference for working with younger children, even as a high school teacher I worked mostly with junior years.
Q: What is your favourite part of the job?
A:
My
favourite part of being a teacher is obviously the joy of working with children.
Working with children with special needs often means the gains can be slower
and harder to notice but they are there and it is a great experience to know
you have been a part of that development.
As a Principal you get to be a part of a team of people who are all working
together to improve chances for kids. I am a big believer in the importance
of the role of the teacher and as Principal a big part of the job is working
together with teachers and providing them with opportunities to develop themselves
professionally. It is the Principals role to make sure teachers are valued,
supported and encouraged. There is a lot of satisfaction in watching people
develop and get involved in the life of a school.
Q: What is the biggest challenge you have faced?
A:
I
probably can't name any one single challenge, I have a tendency to be attracted
towards challenges and am constantly finding myself in new situations that are
always challenging. I have specialized over the past few years in working with
students with behaviour difficulties which can be very demanding work at times.
Sometimes one of the greatest challenges can be trying to find out what is going
to make a difference for a particular kid, what can I do to get them interested
in school and in learning. Trying to keep up to date with kids and be able to
provide them with the motivation to learn can be very challenging the older
you get.
I suppose my age has also made my professional life a little challenging for
me. I got a consultancy job at 27 and was a Principal when I was 29, which is
pretty young for inner city schools. I suppose that has made me work harder
to show people that age doesn't always equal experience.
Q: Where do you hope to be in 5 years time?
A: Tough question. If someone had said to me five years ago that I would be a school principal I probably would have laughed. I am thoroughly enjoying being a school principal and I think schools are very exciting places to be at the moment. Given that I have just started as Principal of a new school I will probably still be there in five years, but to be honest I will be likely to be getting itchy feet by that stage, and also I believe that 4 or 5 years is about the right time to move on. I will probably look to being Principal of a bigger school.
Q: Who are your role models?
A: There are a lot of people I admire for different reasons. I have worked with some incredibly talented people whom I model myself on, and there have been some teachers I can still remember who influence the way I want students to think of me in 10 or 15 years time. But my greatest role model is actually my father. Growing up he always encouraged us to go after whatever we wanted to do and he would support us. I think he might have been a bit before his time in the boys and girls equality thing, it didn't matter what we wanted to do, there was no pressure that it had to be a traditional male profession. I am also hoping I have inherited some of his personal qualities. He is patient, calm under pressure, an incredible listener and a great thinker. He is often still the person I will ring up and say "Dad, this just happened, what would you do?". He has an incredible understanding of people, which is one of the key skills you need to be a good teacher and a good leader.
Q: How do you define success?
A: Success is about being proud of what you do and knowing that you have given it your best shot. Not everyone can be number one and not everyone is going to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for what they do. Success doesn't necessarily have to be about work, nor is it necessarily about position or money. I get a lot of my personal satisfaction from my work. I have a lot of friends who wake up every day and dread going to work, they see it as a means to an end. I think that is sad, I love going to work. I am doing something that I love and something I believe I am good at, that makes me feel successful.
Q: What are your ambitions?
A: My ambitions are really about achieving my best and being happy with what I have achieved. That includes not only the positions that I hold but more importantly the things I achieve in those positions, the differences or improvements that are made for students learning. I sometimes feel that being ambitious in teaching is frowned on, its like you've deserted the classroom. I don't believe that. I also don't believe that being ambitious is a selfish thing either, if you are good at what you do and work hard to achieve then you are making a difference to the education of children, no matter what position you hold. There is also a part of me that wants to prove that teaching is a real profession that people can make a long term career choice about. That it's not all about the holidays!
Q: What is your inspiration?
A: People I meet every day inspire me. I have recently worked in a school for students with severe intellectual and physical disabilities. The Senior Assistant in the school was a single parent with three boys, one of whom had a severe disability and attended the school, she lived with her elderly mother, was treasurer of the P&C, worked voluntary hours at the school and still came in every day smiling, cracking jokes and making me laugh. People like her inspire me. She enstrusts her child to me 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year. I would like to be able to give to her son the commitment as a teacher that she gives as a parent.
Q: What is your idea of the perfect day at work?
A: I heard a teacher once say, "School's would be much better places without kids". I couldn't think of anything worse. A perfect day for me would mean that I got to work nice and early, got through all the annoying mail that piles up on your desk, went and visited classrooms and got to be part of kids learning, all my meetings went successfully, played handball or sat under a tree with some kids at lunch, and at the end of the day watched everyone go home smiling. That might sound like a dream, and it may be. For me a real perfect day can involve even one of those things happening, because it means we are moving closer to the place we want to be and that something successful happened today. I think it is important to go home everyday celebrating some success.
Q: What advice do you have for guys out there who are starting out?
A: When you think about it, work dominates an incredible amount of time in your day or week. I think it is important to think carefully about what it is you want to do and not be influenced by things like peer pressure, traditional expectations, glamour and money. At the end of the day, it's about how you feel about yourself. When you are doing something you want to do and something you are good at, you feel good, you feel successful. Sometimes you can find that success in some really unlikely places.