Category: teacher development

For a generation of women in the 60’s Julia Child took the fear out of cooking.  She is famous for her live television moments when things didn’t quite turn out as planned.  What made her so endearing to fans was the undaunted way she handled mistakes.

The most memorable episode was Julia flipping a pan sized potato pancake.  She said, “When you flip anything you must have the courage of your convictions.”   She then gave the pancake a big flip.  It caught on the lip of the pan and fell on the stovetop.  She quickly patched it up and said, “The only way to learn to flip things is just to flip them.”

Just flip them.  I find that phase a mantra of fulfillment.  For me it means having the courage to take a risk and be okay with the outcome.  Too often we seize upon the idea of perfection as the truest measure of success ignoring the noble efforts when the flip didn’t quite make it.  Sometimes a little catastrophe is a lesson and a liberation.  

I can’t think of a more appropriate environment for a little catastrophe than school.  For many children the flip will not make it.  They have to learn how to patch it up and more importantly they have to experience the lesson of patching it up.  

The best teachers will encourage their students along this path by making room for mistakes.  Mistakes should be understood and part of the norm in learning anything. If students are comfortable in sharing their mistakes they will have the courage to “just flip” even when they are uncertain of the outcome.   

Most of what we plan to do turns out differently.  It takes humility and courage to continue when things change.  

If the only vision you had of yourself came from the social mirror your view would be like the reflection in a crazy mirror at a carnival.  The view would be distorted and out of proportion.   The social mirror is often a projection of the concerns and weaknesses of those giving the input rather than a true picture of what you are. 

Author Stephen Covey writes about a classic story of a self-fulfilling prophecy.   The story is how a computer error in England incorrectly programmed student’s grades and IQ’s.   The error was not discovered until five months into the school year.  What was discovered demonstrates how critical it is that children believe they are capable.  The scores of a lower achieving group of students had all gone up.  Their teachers had treated them as thought they were bright.  The teacher’s energy, hope and optimism reflected high individual expectations for each of these students. 

The teachers reported that during the first few weeks of school when they saw the usual methods of teaching were not successful they changed them.  They believed that their students were bright and when things were not working well they figured it must be the teaching methods.  For this group of teachers apparent learner disability was nothing more than teacher inflexibility. 

Small interventions can make a big difference in learning.  Geoffrey Cohen a psychologist at the University of Colorado has found that telling students that their intelligence is under their own control improves their effort and performance.  If students believe they possess the ability to work hard and make themselves smarter they will be smarter. 

As schools and government examine how to increase academic achievement and where to spend their dollars they must not ignore the most critical component in learning -the attitude of the classroom teacher.   They must keep in mind that small influences in children’s lives can have very big effects.   Ambitious reforms are still important but children who have successful learning pictures in their heads will be better equipped mentally to try, and to succeed.

Failure to achieve is intimately connected to a child’ self-image and ideas on self worth.  To change this paradigm you must as a teacher believe that although a child may have failed in the past he can succeed in the present.  A failing child will continue to fail if his teachers continue to remind him of his failure.  To break the cycle of failure the student must first have a caring nurturing relationship with his teacher. 

When you as a teacher refuse to label your students you will see them in fresh new ways.  Your view can help them become independent, fulfilled and capable of doing satisfying work. 

Goethe taught, “ Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can be and should be and he will become as he can and should be.”

Anyone involved in education should become excited at the prospect of injecting this kind of positive energy into a system that many regard as broken.   Administrators, parents and teachers must dedicate themselves to providing a network of support and renewal for all teachers.  Their job is too important not to do this. 

Have you ever been so rushed to get someplace that you didn’t have enough time to stop and get gas?   It’s ironic that the most necessary thing could be the very thing you neglected. 

Many of us rush through the day neglecting ourselves the same way we neglect our gas tanks.  When you consider the consequences that come from little things it’s easy to see there are no little things. 

As teachers you are caregivers and nurturers but who nurtures you? 

The answer is you.  You have to make a dedicated plan to take care of yourself first.  Just like the emergency instructions on every air flight to fit the oxygen mask over your own face first in life you must also make sure your breathe first. 

There are four dimensions of renewal that should become part of your day.  The first is the physical.  Caring effectively for your physical body you need to eat well, get sufficient rest, and regular exercise.  Making excuses about building wellness only ensures that at a critical time you will run out of gas. 

The second dimension is the mental.  When you become a life long learner you enhance and enrich your own teaching abilities.  Stimulating the mind by learning new things will make you more alert and responsive.  By challenging the mind you will discover that you are able to solve problems with less stress.

The third dimension is the spiritual.  The spiritual invites meaning and purpose into your life.  It also reinforces your commitment to your own mission and values.  Paying attention to the spiritual means connecting to what inspires you, nature, music, art, literature, all help you cultivate a richer life.

The fourth dimension is the social and emotional renewal.  It means keeping and improving your relationships.  Honoring your relationships means you keep them in constant repair.  You attend to the courtesies, listen for understanding, keep commitments and sincerely apologize when you make a mistake. 

Renewal is a lifetime journey with a million little steps.  When you practice this you maintain and improve the things that will help you accomplish your work and other desires.   Your mind, body and spirit will help you realize your goals.  A happy and healthy life is the result of taking care of you first. 

What do you tell yourself? 

Almost every waking minute of every day you are listening to the same re-runs in your mind.  It’s recycled chatter about your life.   Perhaps you tell yourself that sometime in the future you can let go and relax, start changing, or be happier.  Maybe your re-run is playing over and over conversations about your fears and anxieties, or reviewing grievances and making past offenses stronger and more meaningful, instead of letting go.

Whatever it is that you tell yourself it’s not original material.  The sad truth about what you tell you is most self-talk tends to limit and restrict instead of liberate and expand. 

It’s difficult to not become a victim of your own thinking.  But once in awhile a story catches your attention and allows you to re-think the possibilities. 

Today I heard one such story on Good Morning America.  It was the story of a remarkable little boy named Mattie Stepanek.   Mattie died just three weeks before his 14^th birthday.  He suffered with an incurable disease called MDA, which interrupts normal functioning like breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.  Because of this Mattie lived on a ventilator in a specially equipped wheelchair.  But that’s not what is remarkable about this boy.  He was a self-appointed peacemaker and poet.   He is the author of seven books and become an inspiration to millions simply because he embraced the idea that every day is a gift and he made the most of it. 

On Saturday October 18 The Mattie J T Stephanek Park was dedicated in Rockville Maryland.   The park is a 26 acres recreational facility.    A peace garden with Mattie’s statue is open including benches with plaques and quotes from his books and speeches.  

You have to wonder how so young a boy could accept the severe limits of his short life and become such a powerful inspiration.   Mattie was an original thinker.  What he told himself was to seize the moment, seize the day and see what develops.  His body limited him but his mind ran through boundaries most of us will never cross. 

What you tell yourself is important because your thinking becomes who you are and it influences others.   As a teacher your influence is substantial.  Every day you have a captive audience of learners who can take their lead from you.  They are open to be inspired and lead into new ways of thinking.    Let what you tell yourself be empowering, tell yourself how important your job is.  Today travel with your students to Mattie’s website at www.mattieonline.com.   Who knows what they might begin to tell themselves.

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered, the point it to discover them.” 

Galileo Galilei

Are you leading your students on the path of discovery?  

The commitment to learning needs to be more than just obtaining competency in a certain subject area, it needs to be a desire to know more.   A teacher who leads their students into the unknown nurtures that desire. 

So what is the unknown?   It’s the great mystery of life, whether that is how the universe came into being or how numbers, order and sequence affect our daily lives.  Once the search begins the mystery unfolds.

The current bestseller list is full of titles that explore the mystery.

• The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, is about how randomness rules our lives.  The author explores how chance and probability affect our financial markets and our own individual choices.

• Change your Brain; Change your Life by Daniel G Amen.  The book gives instructions for conquering anxiety, depression and anger

• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.   The author devotes his book on the cognitive miracles of music.  It is a study about the pathologies of musical response and what they teach us about the anatomy of the human brain.

• The Power of Limits by Gyorgy Doczi.  Explores the discovery of patters in nature, and how these patterns are repeated again and again. 

• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  A book about how we think without thinking.  It explores our choices and how we come to make them.

All of these books give their readers something more to think about.  Perhaps that’s a good position for every teacher, give your students just a bit more to think about, give them a glimpse of the bigger picture help them become an explorer. 

Galileo is remembered not just because he put forth the model of the sun-centered universe but also because he stood alone against the authority of the science of his day and of the church.   He represented the humble reasoning of one man and was strong in that conviction.  

For many teachers Friday is the best day of the week.  It means relief from the hectic schedule of early mornings and late nights, from emotional meltdowns with students and sometimes parents and struggles with learning and discipline.   You have to wonder is it possible to have that liberated Friday feeling on a Monday? 

It is but it requires a disciplined mind and a willingness to embrace a new kind of thinking.   Creating your day means you believe in the power of intentional thinking.  That you believe that the thoughts you have when you start your day will actually affect what happens.   This paradigm shift is a life altering change.  

The power of intentions already shapes what you do.   It also shapes the physical world around you.  If you intend to mow the grass, you eventually mow it and the grass itself is changed.  Intention means you have a plan or design in mind.  Your plan has an outcome.   The power of self directed intention is a creative process and you share it with everyone on this planet because each one of us has intentions for good or ill.   Your intentions are communicated through you interactions with others.  Your words and actions along with a multitude of non-verbal cues let others know what you desire. 

Imagine the power of this kind of thinking at work in your classroom.  You imagine a day in which students are excited about learning, a day in which kindness and respect become contagious, a day in which your colleagues are excited about best practices and share without ego or judgment.   This day allows for the best in education, because all those words in your mission statement don’t just take up space on your school’s website they are translated into actions.

Creating your day is not just idle daydreaming; it’s the possibility for a better today.  Before you dismiss this completely try it, create your own paradigm shift, imagine what you want  and then act as if it’s already happening.    

When you do this you become part of a growing movement in thinking.  You have changed the paradigm of what you see, how you think and what you do.  Your worldview has just expanded in an infinite number of ways.  

George Bernard Shaw said,  “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.  I don’t believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances that they want and if they can’t find the, make them.” 

The carotid artery is the largest artery in the human body.  It pumps blood directly from the heart to the brain.  You can feel it’s pulse if you put you hand on the left side of your neck.  It insures that fresh oxygenated blood goes to the brain first before feeding other organs.  All this happens every second without our awareness.  We never have to consciously monitor our critical body functions they run on autopilot.  Maybe because of this perfect physical system it’s easy for us to trust too much our own thinking.  We rarely edit our beliefs or recognize that our perspective is always limited.   No matter what position we can claim it’s unlikely we hold the complete picture.

It’s easy to let our thinking run on autopilot too.  To automatically reach for those familiar and comfortable thought patterns.  To make decisions based on that stored bank of information despite it being incomplete, like a research library except instead of having all the data from A to Z we have it only from B to R. 

Twenty years ago medical students were taught that once critical periods were passed in childhood the architecture of the brain was fixed.   Today doctors know through neuroimaging techniques like PET scans, EEG’s and MRI’s that the brain is constantly rewiring itself through experience.  When you think and do things repeatedly you create neural pathways that become deeper over time. 

This information is critical to self-improvement. It is critical to any organization that seeks it make itself better.  

As you think – so you are.  We are our thoughts.  If we accept a status quo that repeatedly makes the same mistakes we need to look more critically at what we accept.  Change is possible.  Our most vital organ the brain is constantly remodeling itself based on how we use it.  Through action or inaction our brain is changing all the time. 

Knowing we can literally create a new brain should bring excitement to anyone who teaches. New brain cells stick around when the best conditions are nurtured.  To create new cells and maintain them it’s necessary to move the body and engage the mind.  The heart and brain are linked physically to create this perfect system.

Teachers can use this model in the classroom to increase and protect the brainpower of their students.    First by changing their own brain patterns, the habitual ways of doing and thinking.  Second by providing the best environment in which their students can begin to do this also. 

Think of the simple adjustments.  Create time in the day to move, maybe call this your stretch zone.  Not only is this beneficial to students but teachers will see their own energy and focus improve.  Include in this stretch zone a place for mental movement with respect and kindness as the guide.  Allow for students to practice exchanging thoughts and beliefs without needing to defend their position, instead of debate they can learn to listen to each other.

Our two most vital organs the heart and the brain give us all the connection we need to be better.