- Wednesday 8 September 2010
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Time out for IPS principal
GORDON Terrill, retiring principal, with a specially crafted memory book made using recycled timber from Inglewood Primary School.
By Leon Gray-Lockhart
AFTER over four decades in education, Inglewood Primary School’s Gordon Terrill has decided to put his feet up.
At the end of this week, Gordon will be stepping down as principal of the school and cruising on into semi-retirement; a new role he is very much looking forward to.
“I’m finally going to get some renovations to the house finished and I’m going to spend some quality time with my grandchildren,” Gordon says.
“I do have some other more casual advisory work lined up, including helping out at a University of Auckland first time principals’ programme.
“I’ll be involved in appraisals for other principals too; I guess I’m just stepping back from the full-time side of things.”
A busy career
Full-time has definitely been the way of all things in his 41 years of teaching and school administration; a career that started in the early 1970s in Palmerston North, before other teaching stints in the southern Hawkes Bay.
Eventually, Gordon made his way to Taranaki, becoming principal at Welbourn School and then Norfolk School. He started at Inglewood in 2001.
“I was attracted to working at Inglewood Primary because it had intermediate-aged children and I believe having that age level in a school really makes a huge difference to the culture of the school.
“It allows the younger children in the school to have older role models around for a lot longer; the older kids benefit by having increased leadership opportunities and responsibilities too, which is great for pastoral care across the school.”
It certainly has been a busy decade for Gordon leading the 350-student, 15-classroom school and like all school leaders, he’s seen his fair share of change in the education sector.
Change is good
“I do have quite strong views on the direction of education in New Zealand, but above all else, I believe the curriculum and schools themselves must remain apolitical.
“Arguably, educators seem to be doing more and more paperwork as a means to satisfy political requirements.
“The teacher’s skill isn’t simply in teaching children the answers to set types of questions; it’s also in assessing using appropriate means, reporting and communicating findings, and using assessment to inform next steps.
“There still is this belief out there that children have to be using old fashioned books and pencils in order to be learning something, but people learn in all sorts of ways using all sorts of tools.”
Gordon sees hundreds of digitally savvy children all around him every day engaging with information technology in new and exciting ways. He also sees children being involved in the school’s REACH social development programme, while alongside, teachers guide and motivate rather than dictate and stand over children.
“This is how teaching is in the 21st Century and the experiences children have at school are so different to those of their parents and grandparents. We have to move with the times.”
Staying the same
Despite all the change going on around him, Gordon has always believed that the most important things to teach children are how to be able to adapt to change, how to be resilient and how to handle both success and disappointment; he’s been glad to be associated with a school and a staff that share this philosophy.
“We believe everyone should be given a chance, and then a second chance.
“As teachers it is important for us to understand that children are coming to our school to operate under rules that have been developed by adults that those children don’t know, so we have to be consistent and clear in our expectations.
“I’m still only down the road, and I’ll always be interested in what’s going at the school,” he says.
