Because I am a connected educator, I am a better educator. I am active on Twitter for professional use, I listen to educator-produced podcasts, I read professional books or listen to them on Audible, and I read education blogs. These experiences not only enrich my professional practice, they also give me total control over my professional development. I can learn about the topics that are relevant to me, from educators I respect, and at a time that fits my busy life. Often these experiences have an indirect impact on my work in that I might be introduced to a new idea that I continue to research or I may read a post that reinforces the work that I am already doing, helping to build my confidence in the decisions I am making. Other times the impact is immediate.

Recently I was listening to AJ Juliani’s podcast, Scratch Your Itch, on my way to work where I was facilitating a professional development session for teachers. Juliani’s topic for that podcast was the power of storytelling. He said: Our brains pay special attention to stories, engaging more areas of the mind then when we hear or see facts. And when we learn a good story, our brains synthesize the neurochemical oxytocin. This helps us feel others’ emotions and empathize with them.

As I listened to Juliani talk, I was nodding my head as I drove. I have always had emotional responses to stories. They help me visualize, connect, imagine, empathize, and more. Incorporating more storytelling in my interactions with students, staff, and families seemed like a move toward being a more effective communicator. I realized that an opportunity to try this new idea presented itself that very morning at a professional development workshop for my staff.

I opened the session by announcing to the teachers in attendance that I had a story to tell. I described how one day that week I was in the computer lab helping a second grade class get started on their mid-year benchmark tests. I told the group that, as I walked around, making sure that all students were successfully working, I noticed that some students had single sentence with a fill-in- the-blank questions while others had longer, multi-paragraph questions. When I mentioned this to the teacher, she told me she had let the students know to expect tougher questions the more they answered correctly. She told them to just keep trying their best.

The teacher and I happened to be standing behind a young student who often struggled with reading. He receives special education services and has IEP goals for reading. As we stood there, watching his computer screen, a new question popped up...it was a multi-paragraph question. This young student whipped his head around to grin at his teacher. The pride on his face was apparent and contagious. He was truly seeing this testing session as an opportunity to show what he knew and greeted the challenge of a tough question eagerly.

I thanked the teachers in the workshop for their work to make mid-year benchmark testing as positive an experience as possible for their students, for framing testing as an opportunity for students to show how their hard work this year has paid off so far, and to help students set goals for improvement. The focus on my words was intense. More than ever before, I knew I had gotten the teachers’ attention with my story. They were able to catch a glimmer of the message I had been sharing for months about creating a positive testing environment for students and helping them set goals around their performance as a step toward improving results. They were connecting to my message.

I am so grateful that I clicked AJ Juliani’s podcast that morning. His words, like those of so many other amazing and forward thinking educators that I have the opportunity to learn from, are most definitely a large part of the success that I have experienced in my career. As a lifelong learner, I will continue to benefit from being a connected educator.

All You Need is Love

Well, not quite, but almost. Love is a requirement, a foundation, the place from which we start when we form a community, especially a learning community.

As a leader I would start by letting each and every staff member and student know that they are loved, automatically, without having to earn it first. This is because in order for me to do the job I need to do, need to start with love for the people with whom and for whom I work.

Love is a scary word for many people. It's too intimate, too mushy, too touchy-feely, too insincere. But I don't think anything short of love will do the job. If a community accepts me, asks me to join, and most importantly asks me to lead, I'm going to love each and every member of that community.

That love will help me find the energy, the compassion, the perseverance I will need to help every person grow. Wherever they are, each teacher, each staff member, each student can grow and learn and improve, and they will do that best when they are loved.

This does not mean I will have less love for my family and friends. This does not mean I will have no other life outside of my job. On the contrary, if I also love myself, I must make time for me. Self-love includes taking time for yourself, doing the things you love, and staying connected to the very people who make your life worth living. But it does mean I will work hard, I will spend extra time, I will keep learning and growing myself.

At the center of it all is our students. Every adult needs to feel the same love I do for our students. For us to work as hard as we need to work, to recover from setbacks, to get past the overwhelmed feeling we all have sometimes, to care most about the kids who are hardest to care about, there must be love. Once the foundation is there, the community that is built can support each member on his or her learning journey.

Core Values

Recently I have struggled with productivity. It seemed that my day-to-day management responsibilities had completely dominated my schedule leaving no time for the big picture work of fostering positive school climate and improving teaching and learning. This focus on management leaves me uninspired, yet I know how important it is and certainly must get done. Staff need to know who is covering lunch on an early dismissal day, students who misbehave on the bus need to be spoken to and their parents need to be called, and intervention meetings need to be scheduled. However if this is all I do, then I'm not truly helping to improve my school, which is always my goal.

Then I stumbled upon an organization that provided me with some guidance. It's called Asian Efficiency, and it was mentioned in a Tweet I read a few weeks ago. I followed the link and discovered a series of podcasts called The Productivity Show. Each week the podcast focuses on a different aspect of making your life better and more productive. I scrolled through the archived podcasts and discovered shows about core values, morning rituals, and getting to inbox zero, to name just a few. What I have realized is that reflecting on and writing down both my personal and professional core values as well as goals, is where I need to start in order to become more productive.

If I can clearly identify the core values upon which I operate, I can make better decisions about which activities are most inspiring for me. If I can also clearly identify my personal and professional goals, I can then prioritize which activities should get most of my time. Of course my management responsibilities will never go away, but perhaps I can get better at eliminating, automating, or delegating those tasks that fall low on my priority list. I've only just begun this process but I'm feeling more inspired already. Daily reflection on my core values and goals is helping me stay focused on the most important parts of my life and my job which deserve most of my time. Getting to inbox zero will be icing on the cake.