I started this blog a year ago. I have to admit, I was skeptical that it wouldn't be worth my while, but I committed myself to at least giving it a chance. With that year now under my belt, what have I learned from this experience?
The biggest take away is how blogging has made me really become a thinker again. Thinking about things was never really an issue for me, elaborating and clarifying those thoughts was. Pre-blog, many of my reflections were just an unorganized, chaotic mess that I would often struggle to remember in the first place. Blogging brought about not just a way to organize my thoughts, it brought a way for me to extend and reflect my thinking while hopefully inspiring others through my own words and thoughts. The second take away; blogging saved me from trying to become a "know it all." Instead, blogging has given me a chance to re-frame that mindset into becoming a "learn it all" and "learn from it all." The latter of those two might be greatest thing to come of this journey when it's all said and done. Being a blogger has opened me up to a world of other bloggers as well garnering important feedback from those who read and challenge my thoughts. I also enjoy the public accountability it gives me. It's out there for the world to see and I think it's made me a better professional and person. Finally, it's a great way to measure personal growth and evolution in your own thought process. I enjoy reading old things I've written. I enjoy seeing things that I have grown or shifted my thinking on since writing. It's helped me realize that your thinking does evolve and that the worse thing you can do is dig your heels in on something just because you thought that way in the past. The bottom line: start writing your thoughts, reflections and challenges down. Share them with others. Watch the growth that comes both personally and professionally and above all else, get excited that your work just might be the missing piece that someone has been waiting for.
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Life is messy, but you already knew that. If you have kids (or work with kids) you live it every single day. The good news is that messes are able to be cleaned up. Some messes require more of a cleanup than others. No matter what though, no mess is so great it cannot be cleaned up.
No matter what your messes are in life, you clean them up. But is that where you stop? Why not turn your mess into a message? It's amazing what you learn when life gets messy. It's also amazing how many of us encounter the same messes in life. When we don't turn our mess into a message we miss a great opportunity not only to reflect upon our own struggles, we miss the chance to bring what we learned from the experience and share it with other so that they can grow with us. Remember, some messes are harder than others to clean up. Much of that depends on your personal preference. Think about your house. You have chores that you despise and things that you really don't mind doing. What fits in each of those categories is different for each one of us. Some of us like to vacuum, some don't. No matter what it is, the messes that you handle well can and should be turned into messages that will help and inspire the rest of us. The greatest teaching and learning tool that we have is our interactions with each other. In a world where you need to be a "learn it all" and not a "know it all" we have to create messages from our messes. What messes do you currently have or have recently cleaned up that need to become messages? Once you've figured that part out, share them and do it face to face where possible. Before going on vacation, a long weekend getaway, or even just to a day-long meeting, many people will set their out of office auto-reply up on their email. Well, I'm thinking of doing this permanently. No, I'm not resigning my position or going completely off the grid (but we've all thought about doing that before), I'm thinking of doing some of my more "daily" functions that don't require strict confidentiality etc. outside of my office next school year. Specifically, I'd like to find a teacher or teachers that would allow me to come into their rooms as a shared space.
I've tried this before with using flex spaces and other types of areas but the disconnect between the pulse of the school and myself still feels the same. I want to go into classrooms, possibly even when their in the middle of something. I don't want to distract or take away from the learning, I just want to see what that days to my perception and understanding of the school environment. Will I feel or view things differently? Would it do anything for the way a teacher views an administrator? Hopefully, I will get some takers for this little experiment of mine. Soft skills are all the rage right now. I'd probably even describe them as existing in that "buzzword" category. You can Google "employers soft skills" and come back with thousands of news articles about the soft skills that employers say they want to see in the 21st-century employee. What are those skills? Communication, emotional intelligence, patience, persistence, perseverance, adaptability etc.
Soft skills? More like essential skills. The name soft skills just carries too many implications of these skills being secondary or complementary skills. These aren't just skills you pair with your knowledge of website design, engineering to make yourself a more complete professional, employee or anything else. These are often times the skills that allow people to be distinguished in a crowd. They're a part of why a cool and collected Kennedy beat a sweaty-mess Nixon and why Mondale could only laugh when Reagan said he refused to exploit, for political purposes, his opponents' youth and inexperience when asked if he was too old to be President. None of the skills are revolutionary. In truth, these skills are no newer than Oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. What seems to be new is the attention they're receiving for their perceived lack of existence in today's modern world. That's where schools, and, more importantly, governing bodies that right learning standards come in. Our standards reflect words like analyze, evaluate, compare and many others taken right from Bloom's Taxonomy. The thing is, with the emphasis being so much on the Bloom's verb, little time is given to the development of these essential skills. Let's take adaptability for example. What if a course was designed so that in the middle of a really long project, we scrapped everything and started over from scratch and going in a completely different direction? Yes, I know this might cause a small (or large) explosion in the amount of email and phone calls you receive so you would want great communication (an essential skill) beforehand. But ask anyone in any professional capacity how many times this has happened to them. I bet they run out of fingers and toes to count on. We could go through countless more examples with each of these so-called "soft skills" but I think you catch my drift at this point. We need to stop marginalizing these skills by name and we need to start writing standards at the state level that reflect these skills being embedded in the learning process. |
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January 2020
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