“Would you want to be a student in your own class?” I’ve seen this question quite a few times. It’s a good one for sure and if you answer it honestly you can elicit some great reflection on how to improve your practice. What I’ve never seen is the follow-up question I am going to ask right now: “Would someone want to grow up to be you?”
I’m not talking about growing up to be a teacher, many will do that of their own accord or answering some other calling in their life. That would be growing up to work in the same profession as you. I’m referring to BEING you. What would your students describe your demeanor to be? How do they see you treat others? Are you easily drawn offsides or provoked into a reaction? Has anyone ever seen the lighter side of you; the one that tells jokes and realizes that just because you’re an educator you know a thing or two about enjoying life? What actions do you demonstrate that show you really are trying to make the world a better place? Do you ever act like something is beneath you? If we’re going to say things like “every kid deserves a champion” and we want all students to “enjoy thriving, productive lives in a future they create” shouldn’t kids be inspired by more than just our curriculum? Our practice should not be all that defines us. If it is, we aren’t educating the whole child.
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This week I had the great fortune of realizing I had made a mistake. Yes, I said I had the great fortune of realizing I had made a mistake, a significant one at that. I don’t know about you but I haven’t always been so willing to accept mistakes, particularly when others are pointing them out to me. It takes a lot to swallow your pride and own what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter if it was something you should have known better than or a mistake that happened by pure happenstance, it’s hard to know you messed up.
You have to own your mistakes though. It’s essential. It lets people know that you not only are you wiser than you were before, you’re trustworthy. The world around us has conditioned us to deflect things away from ourselves; to make sure that you protect yourself at all costs no matter the long-term repercussions. The big problem with this thinking is that if you don’t own your mistakes, your mistakes will eventually own year. This happens through either a lack of growth and learning (repeating the same basic mistake over and over again) or a compounding effect where one mistake leads to multiple others. Soon, you can’t keep up. If you will own your mistakes, and own them sooner rather than later, you’ll be amazed at the responses you get. You’ll move from the feeling of someone giving you corrective action to the people knowing you will correct your actions, with the likelihood you will never end up with that mistake again. Remember, people expect from you only what you give them. The world is not looking for people to be mistake-free despite what you hear, it’s looking for people who will grow from their mistakes. Start owning your mistakes now, otherwise, they’ll start owning you. I never was a big Twitter guy. In fact, until about 2 years ago I didn’t even have a Twitter handle. I didn’t even know what a Twitter handle was. I’m still far from an expert but I’m learning quite a bit about it. One of the biggest things that Twitter is teaching me is the power of leveraging your professional network. Twitter may be the most powerful professional learning I have had in quite awhile. It doesn’t fit any of the molds of a traditional professional learning by any stretch of the imagination, which is what I think I like about it so much. The best thing for me so far in the “Twitterverse” has been the Twitter chats I’ve partaken in. It’s amazing how many great ideas people have out there. From the Twitter chats, not only have my ideas been growing, my thought process is being stretched as well. The questions that get asked in these Twitter chats are not only thought-provoking, they’re sometimes really difficult to answer within 140 characters. I used to vehemently oppose the 140 character limit on Twitter. I thought it limited writing and killed deep thinking. I’m learning that is anything but the case. I’m learning how to be direct in my messaging while still providing insight and clarity. I could go on and on about why I’m loving my new adventure in my virtual PLN network but that’s only half the puzzle. Someone I’ve added in my PLN from one of these Twitter chats said it better than I can. Thank you @teresagross625. Yes, it’s time that we recognize these things as more than window dressing. They’re professional learning at its finest. Embedded with choice, novelty, variety, and tons of critical thinking these things are an innovative, 21st century way of growing educators. The chats I’ve been participating in include my own school districts chat, #LISDchat, the #IMMOOC chat based around George Couros’ Innovator's Mindset book and principles and #satchat.
Perhaps the best part about them is the flexibility they offer as well as giving you one of the greatest accountability systems you can have: you tweeted it and now it is out there for the world to see. It’s also been exposing me to the massive world of educators blogs where great ideas runneth over. Take it from someone who was vehemently against doing anything with Twitter. When used with purpose, like everything else, it’s an awesome tool that can truly spark your thinking, open you to a world of ideas, and allow you to grow your PLN. I’ve been reading the article pictured below (hat-tip to George Couros for tweeting it out) and it’s really been causing me to reflect quite a bit. When you read the headline, as an educator, you can’t help but feel indicted. After all, you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into your profession day in and day out in the name of helping young people maximize their own potential. The headline is slightly misleading though. It’s not an indictment of those in the profession, it’s a piece that really challenges the notions of what school should be and a little bit of an indictment on how the system is implemented. I would encourage any and everyone to read this article, I’ve linked to it HERE!! It’s a challenging read. The first point that really jumped out at me, though not first in the article, is the idea that school is an “unsuitable learning environment for many careers.” Unsuitable is a little too harsh for my tastes but I understand the idea. When I first read that subtitle I instantly had flashbacks to my own middle school years. I remember taking a class on typing.
I remember being told that typing was a skill that would make or break a grown-ups professional life during my lifetime. The fastest, most accurate typer would win the day. I’ve never forgotten the moment I was told that. I reflect on it often as I currently sit here and orally dictate everything to my computer for this blog post. The whole reason that typing story stuck with me is that I was being taught a skill of the world right now with the reason why being at least 5-10 years off in my future. This is one area that schools and educators must get away from. We have to stop answering the “why do I have to learn this” question with answers like such as “so you can grow up to be successful” Educators don’t need to turn into Nostradamus. It’s not about predicting the future at all. It is about designing learning experiences that generate the same number of questions as answers. To tell someone that they need to learn something so that they can become productive down the road based on the world of today will stagnate progress, limit creativity, and keep us stuck right where we are. Remember, we don’t even know how the world we are preparing them for will even look. The article advocates apprenticeships as a model for replacing traditional college. I think there is great merit here too for K-12 educators too, particularly with regard to lesson design. One of the questions I had for myself after reading was “how can we design learning experiences with an apprentice-like format?” When you consider the characteristics of an apprenticeship, you can see the value and power in this type of learning. It also makes us really think about things like can you read critically outside of traditional literary works? Could a skill like coding be considered critical writing or even the equivalent of learning a foreign language? The other point that really stood out to me was “grades distort our perception of reality.” The opening sentence of you can get straight A’s in school but nobody gets straight A’s in life seems highly erroneous to me. First of all, every school I am aware of calculates grades based on the system of averages. “Major” grades typically carry a little more weight than “daily” grades but overall it’s a system of averages. You can do very well on the vast majority of grades, fail one and still easily make an “A” on a report card. Several other erroneous arguments follow including citing how many times Colonel Sanders got his famous chicken recipe turned down and the number of businesses a successful entrepreneur has had fail. If anything, this is not an argument as to how school trains us to fail in life, but rather a great justification for how schools of the 21st century continually ask students to come in and make corrections or improvements to work that didn’t quite make it the first time around. Schools certainly don’t train us to fail. That would be counterintuitive. I don’t know any educator that got into this industry due to their love of failure. Do schools need to improve? Yes, everyone in every industry does or they will become obsolete. There’s a lot out there on leadership. TED Talks, books, articles, top 10 lists and more are easily accessible. Leadership has evolved over time away from titles to more of a personality. Anyone can be a leader at any time and any place is more the mantra these days. It’s a great mantra. However, the one thing you don’t read or hear much about is following. In fact, I would venture to say that most people reading this would list leader and follower as antonyms. This is the notion that I really want to challenge.
The premise I have is simple: great leaders are also great followers. How can you be both? Well, it’s situational. Great leaders are so aware of their own capabilities that they also inherently have an amazing grasp on their limitations or areas where they still need development and growth. A great leader knows when it’s time to defer to someone else’s area of strength. They know when it’s time to get behind someone. They utilize their unique skill set to empower someone else’s solution. They follow and contribute to the group even if it’s not their own, original idea driving the group's focus. Great leaders don’t just empower others or follow in their footsteps, they make sure that the credit goes to the appropriate place as well. Great leaders don’t “need their name in lights” or live for a headline. They get their greatest sense of joy and satisfaction from the successes of those around them, not their own personal gains. They would rather see their team win and be a “role player” than have a superstar performance going down in defeat. You can be a leader. You can be a follower. Knowing which one to choose and when to choose it is what sets great 21st century leaders apart from the others. What does it mean to be you? Have you ever really thought about these questions as they pertain to you? Yes, I realize you live them out on a daily basis, but have you ever taken the time to process this out? I’m not talking about your height, weight, where you live, where you born. I’m talking about you at your core. How would you define a family? Do you include grandparents, great grandparents? What role does a family play in daily life? What do you define as the “correct” way to raise a child? What are you views on spirituality/religion? How do you value individualism vs. collectivism? The list could go on and on.
The question of “what does it mean to be you” is one of the greatest starting points for building relationships centered on trust and understanding that I have ever been asked or asked of others. It’s a great starting place for those of you looking for a way in with that student, co-worker, parent or administrator you’ve been struggling to find a relationship with. Ask it, listen to their response and be prepared with your own. It builds a great shared understanding, it’s just not the only piece to the puzzle. You see, when someone shares what it means to be them, there are a few possible outcomes. You could realize that you have a lot in common with this other person. You could see a totally different perspective. You could also realize that someone has a totally different values and beliefs system than anything you would ever want to wrap your head around. The second, and maybe most important question in fostering a relationship built on trust is: “How will you respond to someone whose definitions and core values seem to fly in the face of what defines you?” First and foremost don’t have a knee-jerk reaction. Be committed to finding a positive outcome from this experience. Be humorously curious and avoid a “how could you think that way” attitude. Also, be subtle. When working through conflicting points of view you don’t want to draw attention to yourself or the other(s) involved. Particularly with students, you’ve got to remember that their life experiences have shaped their core values. Walking hand-in-hand with that is the fact that children often don’t choose all of their life experiences. Parents, grandparents or even a series of unfortunate circumstances can have a profound impact on how a child views him or herself. Relationships based on trust take work. A part of that work is being reflective with yourself. Take some time to consider what it means to be you and how you will respond to working with someone who doesn’t quite come from the same mold. If you’ll dedicate the time, you’ll see the fruits of your labor. |
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January 2020
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