Our Head of Early Years Shares His Thought on LQ - Love Quotient
Michael Drake, CEO of Cognita Asia, was talking with our middle leaders about lessons he has gained in leadership. He shared many insightful things, however what it all came down to, the secret sauce so to speak, was love; lead with love. This hit home with the team, not just for its importance for us as the leaders in our school, but also for how we approach education.
As a forward thinking and innovative school, we do a lot of talking and modeling around what education will look like in the future. You have probably read that anywhere from 65-85% of jobs that will be available in 2030 do not exist today; you only have to go to the bank or to get a Big Mac to see how jobs that we grew up with do not exist anymore - they are being done by a machine.
So the question is what should we be doing to make sure our children have what they need to be successful ? Stay with me - there is a link with jobs disappearing and love.
We talk a lot about love, care and respect being the basis of what we do. It was nice to have this validated by some thoughts on leadership from the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma . He is talking about a matrix for leadership in a ‘new’ world and it is centred on love. He goes onto share his thoughts on developing three quotients to be successful: intelligence, emotion and importantly, the love quotient. Without a balance of all three it does not matter how smart you are or how socially aware you are; if you do not come from a basis of love you may not be as successful as you could be.
What impact does this thinking have on education ? Intelligence and emotional awareness can, and is, being replicated by machines; what machines or artificial intelligence cannot replicate is approaching our lives from a perspective of love. My take away is, it is not just coding and robotics that we need to be teaching our children to be successful in the future, it is that to be successful and to help bring about change for good we need to be aware of the importance of LQ - the Love Quotient.
As the HSBC advertisement says: ’The intelligence we value the most is not artificial'.
Friday Freebie
Finally we know that 90% of the brain is developed by the time children are 5 years of age.
This knowledge also reminds us of the incredible opportunity we have with young children, to support their development by being aware of the impact every single word or action has on their development.
A very simple example is the look on your face when you interact with a child; what your face conveys to the child will help shape how they feel about themselves, their image of themselves as reflected in the face of someone who cares for them. This image is a very good collection of things we can do with our children to promote healthy development.
This link will take you to the full article which has some interesting ideas to consider.
