My goal was to share writing once a week. I did a good job accomplishing this in January, but then came February. My month has been insane. With traveling back and forth across the state to facilitate PD and do coaching, I’ve had very little time to even breathe. Last week I got back from OETC’s iPDX conference in Portland. I dragged myself in from a late flight last Saturday, took my suitcase to my bedroom and realized that I still had two other suitcases packed from previous travel this month. This is the metaphor of how my February has been – it has literally come and gone.
So instead of a normal post referencing articles and education issues, I’m going to share one thing I read this month that has really made me think, reflect, and feel inspired to act.
On February 9th, I came across an article in my Twitter feed entitled, “Ten year old applies to be Cambridge professor of Lego.” Instantly, I was intrigued. Hoping that it wasn’t just click-bait, I went to the site and began reading. It’s short and you should read it yourself, so I won’t summarize it, but I will say that I was left feeling very inspired. The article served its purpose, to give me all the feels, but it also made me reflect on how we (educators) are in a position daily to inspire our students to reach for whatever dreams they can imagine.
Here are a few of my takeaways and questions after reading:
- What if we were able to inspire all students to engage in making their dreams reality?
What would this look like in our classrooms/schools? How would this effect school culture and how the community views what we do? What would this mean for our communities? - How can we give students more opportunities to not just be engaged, or learn, but to be inspired?
This makes me think about the fact that engagement doesn’t ensure that students are actually learning anything at all. How do we tell the difference between compliant engagement and true learning? - Why are we afraid to foster environments that allow students to fulfill their dreams?
Working with 3rd graders has been eye opening – they jump right in, they take risks, they aren’t afraid of failure because it’s not failure to them, it’s more like a speed bump, the have very few inhibitions. Why doesn’t this happen more often, especially for older students? - What about leadership capacity? How are we constructing and designing opportunities for students to explore their capacity as leaders?
Does what we do in our classrooms help students to see themselves as leaders? If not, what can we do to fix this problem?