"What are you thinking about today?" I asked Amy a few weeks ago. We then launched into a conversation about helping our students, helping our fellow teachers, and reflections on our recent experience at the TELL Collab. Then, in true Amy fashion, she asked me, "What about you?" That's the thing about Amy: she'll push your thinking and unravel your status quo with one single question.
After floundering and talking a bit, I finally distiller what I was thinking: "I think I need to give myself permission to fail." That's something I'd never considered before: failure. Sure, I've tried things and had great success. Sure, I've tried things and had little success. Sure, I've learned how to make something better or more efficient in my classroom. But I've never given myself permission to fail. Fail.
Maybe it's because I've been driven by...I don't think the "Why?" matters, really. I can't have a growth mindset if I don't recognize what didn't work at all in addition to what worked well.
What didn't work? What flopped? What did I not do that could have made this function the way it was intended?
I once worked in a school where the buzzword was "feedback." I got so much "feedback" from every administrator at every level that my head spun. Even though I was growing as a teacher and wanted to improve, it was hard to pinpoint anything to really target, especially since a lot of the feedback conflicted from one person to another. And there was little positive feedback or encouragement.
Though the school recognized its need for change in order to produce results, there was little time to implement strategies to improve. As soon as the administrators saw--or perceived--a failure/misstep/error, the school went on to the very next thing to try.
I work in a very different school now, and I've learned to strategically help other teachers improve their teaching. I've tried to strategically improve my own teaching based on how morning classes responded to certain activities in order to tweak them for better results. We all do this as teachers; in fact the really do teachers keep looking for ways to improve every year in the classroom.
But how many of us take our flops and learn from those? Maybe we learn what NOT to do and avoid anything that looks like that specific idea, but how can we take that failure and turn it into something to learn from, build on, surge ahead?
I feel so free right now to try something different and new! It might flop, but it might work splendidly! I get to try new things, I get to innovate, I get to learn!