Portfolio | PD Practice (RECIT) | RSS by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own.
When I garden I want to tear my hair out along with the weeds and grass at times because there just seems to be so much to pull to let the plants I love to breathe and shine.
My first inclination could be to just pull haphazardly but I’ve noticed that if I patiently allow my hands to travel to the root of what it is I want to suss out, then a gentle tug is enough to remove a whole tangle of unwanted grass and weeds.
Understanding why and locating where is enough to tend to just about any garden.
My driving force has always been hope for the future. That everything I do is buttressed by this incredible hope for the future. Indeed, that everything we do in education is held up by the same.
There is a lot of talk about hope lately. There has to be because some pretty hope-less events are happening.
Men are being killed for the colour of their skin and their killers are not being punished for the colour of theirs.
Women are lost/missing/disregarded for their ties to the land.
Children are dying for a difference in matrilineal lineage.
If we look at the comments to almost any article written about these events, the situations seem even more dire.
My dilemma is that I place hope in the future. Or towards the future. So today I question: must hope always refer to the future?
If I focus on hope, do I deny the good being done today, for today?
As educational leaders – and to this I include teachers, consultants, administrators, support staff – we need to lead our learners to find the actions and events infused with hope that are happening in the present.
#NMOS14
#JewsandArabsRefuseToBeEnemies
#IdleNoMore
I. Hope.
Now.
#leadershipday14
Playing with Coggle, which I read about on Avi Spector’s blog, Beyond the Tools. Pretty neat little thinking tool.
Facebook and, I imagine, Twitter exploded today with the news of Robin Williams’ death. I found myself touched more than with other celebrity deaths. Rumours, still rumours, say that it was at his own hand. That depression was a factor. It’s public knowledge that he had problems with drugs.
I did not know the man other than through his brilliant performances. But all of that – possible depression, struggles with addiction, and constant performance – make me think of some of the students I have had the great pleasure of meeting over the years. Students who always seem to take up too much space in a room. There’s a reason for it. The more space you take up, the farther you can keep people away.
It’s easier to build strong children than rebuild broken men, or something like that.
As teachers, as people, we are humanely obligated to build strong children. It’s part of a continual process of creating hope for the future.
I hold on to that hope.
I have been thinking a lot about the role that conflict plays in making change. Change would not happen if they were no conflict. Great change happens because of conflicting opinions, of challenges, and of a questioning of principles. I believe that conflict can allow us to create beautiful things together. Margaret Heffernen calls this love because the kind of investment needed to challenge, defend, answer, seek, and finally change requires infinite care.
She dares us to collaborate through constructive conflict.
but…
She points out that most organizations can not think because the people inside of them are afraid of conflict. 85% of them.
I recently had a conversation where I likened an organization to a learning brain. We know that learning can not happen when strong emotion is present. Why would it be different for organizational learning?
So it takes courage.
“The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we’ve witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can’t handle, don’t want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.”
when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking
Daring. Creating. Enabling. Thinking. Amen.
Margaret Heffernen’s views came from Dare to Disagree, yet another TED talk.