Bill Spooner grew up in the Cairns of the 1960’s. His father, deciding that Sydney was no place to bring up children moved the family north in January 1960. Bob Spooner was Cairns’ first specialist physician and a pioneer in many areas of tropical medicine.
Bill and his sisters went to Edge Hill Primary School. Bill then went to Trinity Bay High School and attended Cairns High for years eleven and twelve attending The Southport School on the Gold Coast.
In 1973 he graduated from the Queensland College of Art and completed a Post Graduate Diploma of Teaching in 1975.
Bill taught secondary art at local high schools before moving away from the class room to work in careers education, senior schooling and as an adviser to schools and teachers in curriculum development. This gave Bill the opportunity to broaden his educational interests and to work at the cutting edge of education at a state, national and international level.
He has been actively involved in many professional and community associations and projects, all designed to further the cause of education and to further the ties between schools, parents and the business community.
In 1997 his career saw a major change when he resigned from Education Queensland and set up Bill Spooner’s Coaching Academy having decided that he could make a greater contribution to children and their parents by working in the private arena. Bill has a passion for motivating children to learn, to achieve success and happiness.
He has five children ranging in age from 41 to 11 and lives with his wife Noeline and three younger children at Lake Placid.
I honestly believe that every child is born a genius. That every child is gifted in some way. No child should ever be given any reason to doubt his or her self worth or ability to achieve.
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101 ways to help your child with school |
Welcome to my little book. I hope that these words of encouragement will assist you in some small way in the greatest task of your life; the raising of your children. School and education take up a major part of the lives of children. As a parent of four children ranging in age from twenty-six to eight months and as an educator for twenty seven years I have had the joy and privilege of spending a lot of time with my own children and with the children of other people. This, along with working as an adviser to teachers, has given me the opportunity and time to think about learning and how to motivate children to learn.
I have often wondered why it is that babies and very young children embrace learning and development with a natural joy and exuberance and so many older children are turned off by learning, or at least by learning what the society requires them to learn. As educators and parents, we tend to put the blame for our anxiety about their apparent negativity on our children. I believe that instead of asking what is wrong with the children we should be asking what is wrong with us and what we can do about their anxiety.
Kids soon learn that education is not always about learning, but that it is a competitive sorting and grading process. A process of elimination. They change from being the active participants of learning that they were as little ones to be unwilling, passive recipients of learning. Children may feel that they lose control of their learning and have it imposed on them. The preoccupation can be with right and wrong. A black and white approach to life and too often the emphasis can be is on what is wrong. The world is in actual fact an ambiguous place.
