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.