Prime Highlights
- Minister Dana Morris Dixon summons school leaders to adopt new and bold approaches towards increasing student achievement.
- She underscores that innovation involves leadership, instructional planning, and programs, and not technology.
Key Fact
- Addressing Jamaica’s School Leadership Conference on August 4, 2025, Minister Dixon appealed for trial and learning from success and failure.
- She cited growing educator curiosity about AI and its potential in reshaping teaching and learning.
Key Background
Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information for Jamaica, Senator Dr. the Hon. Dana Morris Dixon called for a more imaginative approach to school leadership, calling on principals and educators to seek out creativity in order to build student achievement. Speaking to the School Leadership Conference in St. Ann, she discussed the role bold decision-making plays in determining better education outcomes.
Dixon, the minister, held the view that school administrators too often refuse to implement new strategies because they fear failure. She did acknowledge, however, that progress is often a product of experimentation and discovering what will work and what won’t work. Pressing a culture of experimentation and adaptation, she argues that schools can unlock more successful paths to students’ achievement.
She also indicated that innovation is not limited to technology itself. Instead, it needs to include leadership types, teaching methods, and programme planning that cater to the specific requirements of the students. Her message was simple: real learning achievement emanates from getting the students more prepared than when they entered school, and the school administrators taking the initiative to initiate this change.
Reflecting the growing interest of educators in artificial intelligence, the Minister noted the huge turnout to a current AI seminar at the University of the West Indies. The interest, she further noted, shows willingness among educators to embrace new-age technologies and integrate innovative learning solutions into their teaching strategies.
Lastly, Minister Dixon highlighted the need for leaders to adapt to shifting education needs, assuring assistance from the ministry in propelling innovation in schools. She called on principals to create solutions that best fit their particular school environments so that students can enjoy the benefits of forward-thinking leadership and innovative practice.
