Despite our Best Intentions

This post feels pretty self-centered but I'm hoping it will help me process what happened, make peace with it, and move on. I'm not sure why folks would visit and read my blog but if you find that today doesn't do it for you...please ignore it. If you find that you've felt this way too, maybe we'll share a connection and make some sort of progress together. Here's my story...

Once upon a time there was a group of friends. This "crew" liked to do a lot of things together but they liked to play alone or with other friends too. Every few weeks the "crew" liked to get together and talk about what they had been doing, share new ideas, and problem solve. Some people hated their meetings, some people loved them but they all had to be there.

One day, a friend brought the idea of going on bike ride to the group (a note, anyone who knows me will know that his idea is totally fictitious as they know my feelings towards bikes). Some of her "new" other friends had gone on a bike ride once and it sounded like fun. The first friend brought the new friends to the meeting and asked them to tell the crew about the bike ride. Everyone in the crew listened politely and clapped when the new friends finished. The first friend asked the crew to think about the idea and to let her know what they thought of it. She told them she really liked the idea but wanted to make sure there were no major objections or reasons to avoid a bike-ride in the near future.

As the weeks passed the friend waited and waited but no one said anything about the bike ride. The first friend thought that everyone must be very busy and figured that they must have liked the idea of a bike ride too; they had all clapped for the visiting friends and no one had said a word about not liking the idea since then. The first friend went ahead and made plans with the new friends for everyone to go on a bike ride together. She was very excited and started sharing the news with the clan that the bike ride was on its way!

At the next gathering of the clan, the first friend was surprised to hear that some of the friends were NOT happy. They said that they never had a chance to share their own ideas and that they would have NEVER just gone ahead with an idea like the bike ride without more discussion with the whole clan in the past. This friend was angry with the first friend for not listening enough.

The first friend was surprised and saddened to hear this news. She thought that she had asked for feedback and assumed, since she hadn't heard anything, that everyone must be OK with the idea. She tried apologizing for not listening enough but she wondered why no one had come to talk with her. She worried that the crew didn't trust her and couldn't figure out why they hadn't said something before. She also wondered how many of them were also mad about the bike ride and how many of them thought that it was a fine idea too. It was hard to know if she had really messed up or if the angry friend was just frustrated with other things and blaming them on the bike ride. The first friend felt sad that the angry friend was feeling left out and so angry.

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Looking at this story, I'd like to offer the following advice to the "first friend" in hopes that she will find ways to smooth things out with the clan without taking too much of this on herself.

• Perception is reality, the first friend didn't do enough communicating to make people feel comfortable with the "bike ride. Even if she thought she had asked for feedback, if people didn't hear/remember this invitation it's like it never happened. She will have to find other ways to ask and do it multiple times to avoid angry clan members.
  
• It's possible that bike ride is just the tip of the iceberg and perhaps communication on other ideas was inadequate when she thought it was OK. That may explain why the angry friend was SO angry over what seemed like a small issue.
• When people are stressed or feel otherwise threatened, they are not always great about volunteering information or ideas...until they explode. If the "clan" is under stress from other things they have going on, they may need EXTRA encouragement to volunteer information and to support new ideas.
  
• Change is hard. If the first friend is communicating in ways that are different from the way it's been done before, some members of the clan may have a harder time adjusting. The first friend needs to remember that and maybe make some effort to do things "the old way" to help people with the transition.
• Sometimes when people get mad about a "bike ride" you have to do a lot of sifting to see what it is that they're really frustrated about. There is no guarantee that the other parties will ever agree that their ACTUAL frustration is about anything BUT the "bike ride" but they won't be satisfied with any changes to the ride until you've satisfied the ACTUAL frustration. It's OK to talk a lot about the bike ride as you work around the rest of the issue but it's also OK to call a spade a spade and get to the root of the issue.
• Sometimes, good intentions and well laid plans aren't enough to keep you out of hot water. There is a certain amount of risk that a person assumes when suggesting new ideas. The first friend may not like the angry response but it's OK. As long as she keeps trying and improving (see above) the crew will likely warm up. Many of them are likely already OK with the "bike ride" and those who are not may never be satisfied. It's OK for them to be angry sometimes.
  

Whew! After all that, let me just tell you how much I'm looking forward to that bike ride next week!

New Adventures

Since my last post, everything has changed. We're not in Sweet Home anymore, I have a new job, Grandpa is living with new challenges in a new space on the coast, and my egg layers have been reduced by one. My remaining chickens now enjoy a new coop in Corvallis and continue to give us sweet eggs even though they don't get to run free like before. Since we've all been in a frenzy of transition I feel like I've been holding my breath for what the new normal will look like. I feel relieved with many changes, challenged in good ways by others, and still uneasy somehow for how things will all settle out.

A huge part of this transition has been starting a new job. Instead of bouncing from school to school I now have a home base with a staff of 40ish and about 400 students who depend on me each day. I have felt my shoulders rising to my ears with tension as I navigate these new challenges and I try to maintain a steady calm through the turbulence.

Over the last few weeks people have asked me how I am liking my new job. Often, they ask as I've been hustling down the hall on my way to or from a melt-down with a student. Many days they ask on a day when I haven't had a chance to eat my lunch, fill my water bottle, or go to the bathroom and when I know that I'll be staying at work a few hours extra to get caught up at the end of the day.

Each time, I chuckle and tell them how much I'm learning. It's TRUE. I'm learning and getting better and figuring things out each and every time I interact with staff, parents, and students.

When I tell people this, when I explain how I'm liking it and how much I'm learning, I notice that my voice sounds tired but still positive. I hope that my honest answers will encourage them that it's OK to be tired but that they can still be upbeat. I hope that I can be both a peer and a role model as we all navigate our profession and the challenges of our greater world.

The last year that I spent somewhat on the periphery of teaching taught me SO much about our profession and SO much about myself in all the ways I did and didn't manage in it before. I'm aware at how much I took on in the past and I'm aware of so many things that I missed. I notice low-hanging fruit that seem to easy to reach, and appreciate how much more complicated it looks from another vantage point. I see how resilient and how courageous our students are each day and I want to smooth out the road ahead of them in any way I can.

I'm learning, through all this, what my place is. I feel more confident than ever that my place IS in education and it IS with students and teachers. I am hopeful that this year will help me learn more where my strengths can be best used in the future and that the doors will be open when I arrive there.

Reflection and Personal Check-Ups

With my job as a "New Teacher Mentor" I get the opportunity to guide my beginning teachers through a process of reflection about their practice. Reflection is difficult, not just because it's hard to make time to do it, but also because it's sometimes simply uncomfortable. As a mentor I've been trained to use subtle tricks of communication to put my teachers at ease and slide into the process of examining their practice. When I do it right, it's super fun to watch them unwrap problems, beam at newly-recognized successes, and strip away the layers of details that muddled their views before.

Interestingly enough, it's amazing how easy it still is for me, the facilitator of reflection, to avoid reflecting myself. Though I would gently chide my teachers to convince them of both the necessity and benefits of reflecting, I am often really unlikely to take my own advice.

Today, I arrived early at a meeting and needed to kill some time before going inside the school. Not liking to sit idly, I dug out a rubric (a scoring guide/evaluation tool kind of thing for the non-teacher types) for mentoring skills that I've toted around for months in my bag. It was AMAZING was just a few minutes looking at the rubric and reflecting on my professional practice did for me! Challenges that seemed nebulous before suddenly had clear next steps and tentative next steps I was already taken were affirmed. Even better, as I looked back at my old notes (scrawled in the margins of my rubric) I found myself being re-grounded in my own professional growth and renewed in the process. So, this little epiphany was quite a happy little shot of goodness for me and it got me to thinking...why don't we reflect a little more often in the REST of our lives?

The lack of a "rubric" for life is really no excuse to not reflect. Really, just creating an evaluation tool for our own lives would be a pretty worthwhile task. More than just setting goals and checking our progress, a scoring guide could help us evaluate our life decisions and actions in the big picture ways. I wondered for myself, what standards or values would I be looking for in my own guide? For teachers, we look at the ways that they're managing their classroom environment, creating engaging lessons, and developing their skills outside of the school. As a mentor I look for the ways that I use questioning to inspire real thinking, ways I appropriately instruct when necessary to better equip the teachers, and collaborate on problem solving to move my new teachers along. My skills in each of these areas would give me an overall picture of how I'm developing. So as a human being, what are the skills that are essential and that I could evaluate my days with?

With the preponderance of free time I often have now I have lots of opportunities to do exactly what I choose. Oddly enough, this wide-open opportunity is daunting and I sometimes worry that I'm somehow not honoring myself, my skills, or the opportunity that I have with the way I spend that time. Eg. sitting around checking for new things happening on Facebook...probably not the best use of time. I wonder how geographic location, social surroundings, age, and physical condition may affect the criteria we chose to evaluate ourselves with. With all that in mind..here's a beginning rough draft for my rubric for life (my life in this case) and the "standards" of good person-ness that I might be able to check myself with.

• Responsiveness: How aware am I of what's happening immediately around me and what is my response to it? Do I respond with love, patience, wit, despair, frustration, selfishness, etc. This could be HUGE...like all the way down to what foods I chose to put into my body.
  
• Inquisitiveness: Do I actively seek out new things to learn and explore or do I stick to what I already know. What new skills have I gained recently? What uncomfortable situations have I explored? What was my courage in leaving my comfort zone?
• Physicality: How does my physical self and my physical space help or hinder my other goals? Is my body itself and the environment around me (home, car, community) support my other actions? Am I paying adequate attention to these aspects of my life so I can have the freedom I desire in the other aspects?
  

So when I started this posting I thought I would create a huge long list and then ultimately combine or whittle down the list but for now, those 3 are all I can come up with and they seem so immense. Like any good rubric, I would have to break each of those three areas into specifics and spell out what each of them looks like at a beginning, intermediate, and advanced level but look at what a tool I may already have? In being able to NAME what I want my words, actions, and decisions to be about, I'm already half way there! Maybe, if we take the time to just name it, reflection doesn't have to be so illusive after all. Maybe a self-check-up IS within our grasp.