March 2017 – Tavia Clark

Reflection

Over the past month, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about reflection. This hasn’t been easy – I’ve actually stopped writing and walked away from this piece multiple times. It’s not that I don’t value reflection (both for professional and personal growth) but the act of reflecting requires vulnerability, which is something that I struggle with.

As much as I’ve tried to write about something else, it seems that I keep coming back to this. Whether through conversations with friends or colleagues or the random article showing up in my inbox – I can’t escape this topic. So, despite my fear of appearing vulnerable, of sharing this part of myself, I am going to discuss the role reflection is playing in my life currently and how I can be more diligent in my efforts to give myself time and space for reflecting.

In a recent conversation with a colleague, I was forced to take a hard look at my impact on our team. The work I do wasn’t in question, but the role my actions and words play on building a more connected team was. No one wants to hear that they could be responsible for negative impact. And I especially don’t want to hear this since I’m new to the team and my goal, since arriving in October, has been to be a positive spark.

Immediately following this conversation, I decided that I had to take time to slow down – to think more about the role I play on our team and how I can act as a bridge, rather than a roadblock. I have to own this – I have a responsibility to take a step back and reflect on my actions and words. And not just think about these things, but to use this reflection to actually create actionable change.

I read an article recently from Harvard Business Review about the importance of making time for self-reflection, even when you don’t want to. Even when you hate it! Not only was this article timely for me, it gave me some good questions to start with:

What are you avoiding?
How are you helping your colleagues achieve their goals?
How are you not helping or even hindering their progress?
How might you be contributing to your least enjoyable relationship at work?
How could you have been more effective in a recent meeting?

For the past month, I’ve journaled and worked through these questions – considering my impact on others. The result was two, awesome conversations with my supervisors where I was able to clearly articulate my professional goals, my learning and growth, and how I think I can be an integral part of our team’s work moving forward. Without taking time to reflect, I am certain these conversations would have gone differently. My reflection allowed me to stop feeling victimized – something that will absolutely always hinder progress.

I’ve also made a commitment to myself to spend more time reflecting on the learning experiences that I design and facilitate for others. After I travel and deliver content to educators, I always look at their evaluations of the sessions and read any other reflections that I ask them to complete. I engage with this feedback – but not in a way that feels effective enough. In the past, I’ve been more interested in how my participants felt about me, as their facilitator:

Did they like me?
Did I deliver content in a way that was not condescending?
Did they enjoy my humor and anecdotes?

While this helps to make me feel better about myself, unfortunately, my lack of true reflection does little to help my work evolve and grow. Generally, building relationships with people I am working with is not hard, but my confidence in my ability to design creative and innovative content is something I struggle with. And this is one of my goals – I want to design content that has real impact on both educators and students.

Reflection requires us to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. True reflection (the kind that really makes you dig deep and helps you grow) makes us expose ourselves to the possibility that we aren’t perfect, great, or sometimes even good. The thing is, that’s okay. It’s what we do with this knowledge to affect change in our own lives and practice that really matters.

Go Forth and Drown Oceans

It’s International Women’s Day.

This morning, I came across this excerpt, that resonated with me, from Rupi Kaur’s poetry anthology Milk and Honey.

I’ve spent extra time today quietly reflecting on the women in my life who have raised me, taught me, inspired me, challenged me, and made me better. I’ve thought about the feminists who call me to act and my fellow nasty women who won’t stop fighting. I’ve thought about the countless times I’ve personally been made to feel ashamed as a woman and how I’m proud that I no longer allow this type of treatment. I’ve considered how I can be the best aunt to my niece and help her to grow up to feel limitless. I’ve also thought about the men in my life who proudly call themselves feminists, support me, and don’t ask me to apologize for the independence that is such a huge part of my being. I am so fortunate to be surrounded by so many humans who embrace the same ideals as I do. My support system stretches far and is filled with wonderful women and men who stand up and fight injustice in their own ways.

As I reflect today on others, I’m also reminded of my own strength. I’ve come a long way. I will always be finding my voice, but I’m learning to accept empowerment and use it to be heard. This is the role model I want to be for young women – someone who can be generous, kind, and caring, while being equally fierce, independent, and courageous.

I want to be a woman who can drown oceans, but leave no disaster in her wake.

How to Play the Gig

Last month, I came across this post by Jason Kottke on a list of advice that jazz pianist Thelonious Monk gave to a fellow musician. The post is playful and the advice is both practical and humorous, but after reading it a few times, my mind started making educational connections.

As educators (whether we teach kids, adults or both), we play a similar role as musicians. Each day we enter our classrooms, schools, or work spaces and play a “gig.” Sometimes that gig is successful – we hit each note just right, we engage our audience, and leave them wanting more. Other times, we fall flat – our audience just doesn’t connect with what we’re playing and we are unable to evoke any emotional response. I don’t know any educator who has a perfect day, everyday, but I know hundreds who reflect on both the perfect and imperfect days and use this to grow.

Here’s some of my favorite advice from the list:

“Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.”
How often have you heard a colleague say, “Well, that’s not my job” or “I teach ______, not _______”. Unfortunately, these conversations happen every single day. As educators, our job is to make sure kids are receiving the most amazing learning experiences possible. We don’t teach English or Science or History or Math – we teach kids. Nurturing them, their dreams, their imaginations, their wants and needs comes first. This is all of our jobs. We aren’t hired to simply disseminate information to students, we are hired to inspire them in their own pursuits and help to prepare them for whatever is happening now and whatever comes next. So, even if you don’t identify as a drummer, you are still a part of the band and we all have to be in sync to make the magic happen.

“You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?”
Do you love what you do everyday? I don’t mean do you have an awesome day everyday – I mean do you enter your classroom, school or work space knowing that what you do matters? That what you do is impactful? That what you do is making a difference and changing the world? If you don’t dig what you do, or believe these things, then why are you doing it in the first place? Because, your kids and colleagues will know.

“Avoid the hecklers.”
Once negativity set in, it can run rampant, infiltrating an organization quickly, destroying its culture. Most of us have probably experienced hecklers at some point. Unfortunately, this can be a consequence of being fabulous! It’s important to remember that regardless of what others say, we must do what’s best for our kids and colleagues. I would go further to say that instead of avoiding people who try to tear you down or undermine your efforts, embrace these people and try to change their minds. There’s always a tipping point.

“The inside of the tune is the part that makes the outside sound good.”
You’ve probably been inundated with TPACK, SAMR, the 4C’s and countless other learning frameworks. These things have their place. They are great reminders of what good lesson design is and the components that we should be sure to reflect on and include. But sometimes, our conversations about frameworks revolve too much around technology integration and not enough on good, solid pedagogy. If we think about tools and resources as being the ‘outside’ of the song (lesson), the bells and whistles, the part that catches our students’ eyes and ears, we have to have place importance on the ‘inside’ of the song (pedagogy) or how we deliver the tune to our audience. Fancy tools and resources are great, but it’s the delivery that will make the learning stick.

“Don’t play everything…”
There’s so much information swimming around in our world. I just attended two educational conferences in the past two weeks and the amount of tools, resources and learning opportunities I experienced is huge, almost too big for me to wrap my head around. It’s very important to not get lost in information – don’t allow the sheer volume of new things to try or new ideas to cause you to shut down or become intimidated. When I was a School Librarian training teachers, I always told my colleagues to reach up and grab one thing out of all of the things and try it. If that one things works, if it’s transformational, if it’s good for students, keep it and continue to use it. If it isn’t worthwhile, let it go and try something else. We don’t have to know everything and often it’s better practice to thoughtfully and intentionally work with a few tools and resources than it is to try everything available.

And finally…

“Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.”
Embrace your genius. Don’t be afraid of failure. Try the things that scare you. And as the late Princess Leia once said, “Stay afraid, but do it anyway…You don’t have to wait to be confident.”

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