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“Our careers, our companies, our personal relationships, and our very lives succeed or fail gradually, then suddenly, one conversation at a time.” Susan Scott
We are currently in a workshop entitled “Fierce Conversations” (where the above quote came from). The focus of the workshop (that I have obtained so far) is about the relationships and connections that we have with people; how we talk to them and how we move forward both personally and professionally, in a way that we build relationships and trust. Relationships, as I have always believed, are the foundation on which good schools and organizations are built upon. They do not necessarily make an organization great, but without them, excellence is less likely to happen.
I haven’t been blogging much lately. Honestly, for one time in my life, I feel that I have had nothing much to say. Now in reality, I always have an opinion on something, but just in the case of my career or my experience in education, I just haven’t felt the need to share anything, nor have I seen anything that has inspired me to write. It is not that there are not a lot of amazing things happening in our school division and around the world, but I have just tried to purposely disconnect for a bit. I have been thinking a lot about my job, the work I do, and my own personal life.
Last year as a principal, inspiration came seemingly every day when I worked with students and their stories affected me profoundly. This year, being in central office, I have been around students, and have seen different ones a fair bit. The problem is that seeing a mass amount of students for a limited amount of time has not created the same connection that I have always longed for in my life. The relationships are there, but they are just not as deep. I miss that connection often and have sometimes struggled with it.
It is not that I don’t love my job, but there has definitely been an adjustment. Any time I felt I needed a break from ‘office work’, I would get up, walk around, and go visit kids in the classroom. I have found now that I get up, walk around, and have nowhere else to go. It is just different.
Schools, I believe, are like no other business in the way we build relationships. Leaving a school or classroom, impacts people to a point where students, and sometimes families feel abandoned and hurt. I remember specifically students at my last school in grade 6 (the highest grade in the school), wondering how I could possibly leaving them. I told them that it would not matter to them since they were switching schools as well, but you could still feel that they were at a loss because the world that they had known was going to change. Although I think in a positive way of the relationships that I had built in my former schools, there is always a feeling of guilt when you leave, even if it is to do what you feel is right for your own life and family. Kids impacted me in a way that I could never imagined when I first started teaching and I miss seeing them every day.
As my career has moved quickly, and I have always felt that if I wasn’t busy, I would be bored, I noticed that I started to check out of many things outside of work. It wasn’t that I hated the things that I was doing, but I was continuously doing things, as opposed to sometimes just soaking in moments. Last year, I taught classes at a gym 6 times a week, refereed basketball on my nights off, all while running a school. I had no time for anything else. My blog posts in this year have focused a lot less on educational technology, leadership, and teaching practice, but a lot about balance. The term balance has always perplexed me as those who are seemingly successful aren’t necessarily ‘balanced’; they are focused and determined to be successful in what they are passionate about.
So this year, I have decided to cut back on several things. Reffing basketball was off the table. I teach classes at the gym only four times a week (as opposed to seven). When I leave work, I tend to not check my phone at all hours and I spend much less time working at Starbucks. This does not mean that I am not passionate about my job, but I just know now that I do not want to be defined by it. I love what I do. I love connecting with people, both kids and adults. But I also know that I needed to focus on things outside of work. I have spent more time connecting with friends, working on relationships, and just enjoying life outside of work. To be honest, it has been great. I had “blog-guilt” for awhile, but I promised myself when I first started that I would not write unless I had something to say. The guilt goes away.
So when we talk about the ability to have “fierce” conversations with one another, we always have to focus on our own readiness to talk. We have to look at where we are at as individuals. Are we at the point where we are truly ready to listen and empathize with someone else’s point of view? To get to that point, we have to look at our own situations and make sure that we are able to have those conversations.
In the workshop, the following quote (unknown) said it all to me:
“If you don’t like the conversations you are having with other people, look at the conversations you are having with yourself.”
We always need to be able to work on ourselves if we are truly going to be effective leaders. What I found from my lack of blogging lately is that sometimes the best reflection comes from saying nothing at all. We need to be comfortable with those breaks as well.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by renaissancechambara
I think that anyone who blogs and tweets, has written almost a seemingly mandatory post on the “Power of Twitter” (I know I have). Seeing the power of connecting and sharing with passionate educators is pretty amazing, yet can sometimes be overwhelming. As I have progressed in my own social networking, I have learned to tailor my social media stream to something that is more streamlined and beneficial to my own practice as an educator, while also ensuring that I take time away from the medium. Balance is essential. At one point, I woke up every morning to check my Twitter feed, and although I do check in at the gym in the morning, I rarely do that anymore. There is such thing as “too much of a good thing”.
That being said, whatever balance works for any individual and their needs is important for them to figure out, not me. When I do talk of balance though, I think back to Will Richardson’s post and think that we should, as educators helping our students navigate this world, include some component of social media into our own world.
“…the reality is that most of those folks who are concerned about kids needing balance are out of balance themselves, just in the opposite way.They’re not online enough, not reading, writing, participating, connecting and creating in these spaces as much as they need to be to fully understand the implications of these technologies for their own learning and for the kids in their classrooms. Lately, when I’ve been responding to people about the “balance” question, I go with “well, actually, you’re out of balance too, you know.” I get this kind of stunned silence. What a concept.” ~Will Richardson
What I have seen with many new administrators on Twitter that are finding great information (there is a ton), is sometimes they can “overshare” that information with their staff, therefore essentially making them hate Twitter before they are even willing to try it. For example, “Adminstrator A” finds a ton of links on Twitter, and sends every single great article they find to the entire staff through email, where there is sometimes information overload already. Eventually, staff see the emails and probably hit the delete button before they even look at the content. Although the enthusiasm is legitimate and the intent is positive, people get bogged down from email overload. The nice thing about Twitter is that I can go there when I need it, and if I take a few minutes, hours, or days off, it is still there running smoothly! You can go there when it works for you, but email can feel quite different.
One of the things I have tried to implement with my staff and my own process is using Diigo to bookmark links and then send one weekly email to staff with some of my favourite articles. Not all of them, but usually two or three. Although I saw this idea on Twitter (of course), it was from Jill Gough’s PLC facilitator site where I started to actually envision what the site would look like.
Here is my process to share these great articles each week:
- Bookmark them using Diigo and make sure that they are public. I did this last year with Forest Green School, and am now doing it again with my new role as Division Principal. These links are some of my favourite articles of the week but I may not necessarily share all of them.
- Sharing some information for the week, I also add links with a short summary to the end of a blog post. Again, I did this with Forest Green School and am now doing it again on my new Division Principal blog.
- Send out one email on a consistent day each week with the information. I actually would not share any links besides this unless they were ABSOLUTELY imperative to send out before this date. As Principal, you need to be a defender of time for your staff. Sending a bunch of emails during the week is not helping that cause.
As for some of the benefits, you are obviously archiving some great articles in two different places (blog and Diigo) while also being able to have this great information shared with your staff, students, school community, and the entire world. If it is good enough to share with your staff, why would you not share it with the world? Staff can also easily find old articles if they are interested on your blog site, especially if you are thoughtful on how you categorize your links. You are also creating a space through your blog to have some great conversations on the articles as well. These are things that just do not work the same with email.
Hopefully as we progress, I will not even email this weekly post out as I am hoping more will subscribe to RSS feeds but it is important to meet people where they are at. If they are not comfortable with sharing comments, that is fine as well. As a leader though, I want to be open and transparent with my practice and role model that to my staff. ”Know the way, go the way, show the way.”
As the school year starts, I hope that some of these ideas that I have compiled from others and made my own, will help you move your staff forward in a positive and meaningful way. This practice can be done by any administrator/educator with whomever they work with, to start some great discussions in their classrooms and help facilitate this open learning. If you have any ideas of how this could be tweaked to become even better, I would love for you to share them!
After an emotionally exhausting yet exhilarating week, I saw our students have another year of Identity Day, said goodbye to our grade 6 students, and watched the school say goodbye to me. I shed a lot of tears this last week both privately and openly with my school community and heard some of the sweetest things from my students. Here are some of the things that were confirmed to me by our kids:
- Students need to continue to pursue their passions in schools. Watching Identity Day happen again, our students fully understood what the day looked like, and instead of being bored by the novelty of the day, they were more excited to further share the amazing things that they loved. What is extremely powerful about this day is not only watching students present what they love, but watching students looking at other displays and being so inspired by what they are seeing. When someone has the opportunity to inspire someone else with their passion, they become a leader. If I could suggest anything from Identity Day that I would change, it would be that we do it more. Seeing what our students achieve through personalized, passion-based learning is amazing. For two years in a row, Identity Day has been my favourite day of the school year. If your school is NOT doing it, they should.
- The smallest actions can have the biggest implications. One day I saw a young man in grade two having a terrible start to his morning. Instead of asking him what was wrong, I just asked him if he would like to do morning announcements that day. He immediately lit up and I have never seen him so excited. Now this happened a good three months ago if not longer, and today in the student led farewell to me, the student said the following thing that he remembered about me: “Mr. Couros always cares about you. One day when I was having a bad day, Mr. Couros asked me to do announcements and he really cheered me up. I love you Mr. Couros.” I immediately sobbed! This was something that I was not expecting but I think that too often we worry too much about what people will think or how they react when we say something nice to them, when we should just say it.This is not just for us as teachers to our students, but this is for us as people. We need to continue to write cards, send personal emails, make kind comments, buy slurpees for our students, whatever, to show that we care. It makes all the difference.
- When “discipline” needs to be done with our students, it should be with a comforting hand, not an iron fist. One student that had the opportunity to say something at my farewell has been in my office several times this year. We have worked really hard to get him on the right track and have had some amazing conversations. Although sometimes I feel frustrated and so does he, I always end my conversations saying to him, “You know I believe and think the world of you right?” Whatever he has done, I ensure that he knows I care.When he had the opportunity to speak today, he said, “Mr. Couros is fair. Whenever I am in trouble, I will always think of Mr. Couros.” What made many of us laugh at the implication that he made, I could feel that he genuinely cared about me. You see a lot of students who are in trouble in the office, and they end up hating the person dealing with them. The thing is, these kids need us and we need to do whatever we can to help them. The old “kick in the pants” mentality moves them further away from someone they need. We need to continuously show these kids, no matter what mistake, that we care about them. There is no other option.
As I left Forest Green School today, which was an amazing community, I have many memories of an incredible two years at the school. Moving into my new position next year, I know that the lessons that I have continuously learned from my staff, our parents, and especially our students, are lessons that I need to continue to draw upon and bring to other schools. What I have learned more than anything though in the last two years is that I need to be a learner, continuously growing and getting better for the kids I serve. Learning can be very messy, but if you are not moving forward, there are only two other things that you can possible be doing. I choose forward.
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