W ELCO M E F RO M T H E P RI N C IPAL
The new year in Australia began with catastrophic fires that ravaged the east coast, destroying lives and livelihoods, towns and communities, forests and wildlife. On the Australia Day long weekend, as Wenona’s staff and students were excitedly looking forward to the new school year, Australia announced its first confirmed case of COVID-19. Although we didn’t know it at the time, the contours of our world were about to change dramatically. As we settled in to Term 1, countries other than China began to report infection rates and mortalities. Stories about the escalating situation in northern Italy began to amplify. As the weeks progressed, concern grew about what tomorrow would bring, about the health and safety of our loved ones, and about our ability to live the lives we love. No amount of leadership training or experience can prepare a school for the most serious health crisis the world has experienced in a century. In February, Wenona formed a Crisis Management Team, drawing on talent, expertise and capability from across the School community. This enabled us to act quickly and to respond decisively as the crisis unfolded. But the sheer unpredictability and overwhelming speed of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that unlike challenges we’ve faced in the past, there was no sense of déjà vu. COVID-19 is a generation-defining crisis. It has been impossible to respond as the School would in a routine emergency by following plans drawn up in advance. The still-unfolding crisis requires decisive leadership, agile decision-making processes; useful, accurate and current information; and collaboration. We don’t do drama at Wenona. Our staff and our students strive to uphold behaviours and mindsets that embody the School’s values of courage, strength, grace and wisdom. Like Marcus Aurelius and the stoic philosophy that underpinned his leadership, we recognise that our control as a School is limited to what we do, think, choose, desire, and fear. Put simply, we can only ‘control the controllables’. When COVID-19 first hit, we came together as a community, in part because we trusted in the advice and guidance of our political leaders and health experts. This informed our response to crisis management and enabled us to pivot rapidly into solving the problems that were in our control.
This included listening and responding to the needs of our community; safeguarding their health and safety; and supporting the pace and scale of teaching and learning innovation as we prepared for Wenona’s distance learning program, the Athenaeum Learning Pathway (ALP), in anticipation of the Governmentmandated closure of the School. Early on, we recognised the importance of assessing the crisis from multiple vantage points, anticipating what could happen next before acting. We are well versed in the practice of ‘pause-assess-anticipateact’ at Wenona, and this certainly helped the Crisis Management Team to maintain a sense of calm as the situation changed. But the collaboration and network of support from educational leaders across the globe has also proved invaluable. As the crisis escalated, school and tertiary education leaders from different countries came together via Zoom, webcasts, podcasts and Twitter to help each other navigate the pandemic. Together, we offered dialogue and debate, pragmatism and reason, bringing our experiences to bear while accepting new insights as they emerged. As you will read in this edition of Upon Reflection, Wenona is a community that is committed to listening and learning from others and growing in knowledge and leadership. I am proud of the achievements of those who have undertaken Fellowships, Seeding Grants or engaged in further study over the past year to improve their practice or accelerate their learning, benefiting their own professional development, as well as the development of the School and our students. But I am also incredibly proud of the stoicism of the Wenona community – our staff, our students and our families - who have adapted to profound change with calm, courage and character despite facing extraordinary personal and professional challenges. COVID-19 is the first time that much of our world has faced the sudden, unseen, and unremitting fear of an easily spread and deadly infectious disease. The crisis continues to test our leadership, but our courage, strength, grace and wisdom will help us to emerge stronger from it. As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus once said: “Skilful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.” I commend this edition of Upon Reflection to you.
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