Tagged: inspiration

The Malnourished Leader

I have been in an educational leadership role for seven years – a PYP Coordinator in two schools and now a Director of Learning.

I have been wondering what is wrong with me for some time. I feel depleted, drained, like the life force and joie-de-vivre has been sucked from me. I fall asleep on the sofa. I’ve stopped all my hobbies.

I am boring. So boring that I bore myself.

Today, I had a bit of an epiphany about why I might be feeling this way.

I think I’m malnourished… if we think of inspiration as nourishment.

Inspiration comes from multiple directions when you’re a teacher, it comes from your colleagues, from your students, from professional learning, from books, from that TED talk, from the world around you. It also comes, or should come, from the educational leaders in your school.

As a leader, people depend on you for inspiration, and so you provide it… and provide it… and provide it. At first, if you’ve just come out of a teaching role, it’s fairly easy and natural to do so. You have your experiences, your approaches, your materials still in your hand, still warm. But those gradually fade and your new reality takes over. People continue to take, but little or nothing replaces what is taken. You look outwards for inspiration, for nourishment, for things that re-connect you with what you loved about education.

But, where is it coming from? Where do you look for it… and why should you have to look for it? That’s kind of tiring in itself! Looking for inspiration can quickly become more work for you to add to your interminable to-do list.

People in educational leadership positions need nourishment. Even if it’s not inspiration, they need someone, sometimes to acknowledge their work, to say “hey – thanks for setting that up”. 99.99% (I just made that up) of all feedback given to people in leadership positions is negative – not “thanks for doing this” but instead “why isn’t this like that?”.

Sure, we know what we’re getting into and, as I often hear people say “that’s why you get paid the big bucks”. But, correct me if I’m wrong, none of us got into this profession for the money. And, its a well-known fact that there’s often teachers on staff in schools who get paid more than people in leadership positions.

I don’t want to turn this into a wining, feel-sorry-for-leaders blog post. Instead, perhaps it could be a provocation for the people who exist around leaders, on every angle. Have you sent your principal an example of something amazing your students did? Have you let your director know how a recent decision they made turned out well for you? Have you popped in and told your coordinator about an idea you’re developing?

Try it. Nourish them.

They’re probably hungry.

The Art of Teaching and the Ability to Connect

This quote is remarkably true about the Art of Teaching, in many different ways.

The ability to see and make connections is a crucial ingredient for a genuine modern teacher. It is our ability to see and make connections that enables us to integrate subjects, to make learning inter-connected and to see that learning – in many shapes or forms – exists in every single moment.

In my experience, there are teachers who – regardless of training or qualifications – just have the ability to walk into a classroom and see the relationships and connections that exist between the types of learning going on. For example, they can see how a student’s desire to learn how to cook is also an opportunity for them to develop their ability to read, do measurement and understand scientific principles. They can also see beyond that into the possibilities of writing and publishing cookbooks, publishing recipes online, creating tutorial videos and developing their ability to explain through speaking as well as writing.

There are also teachers who need to see it to get it, who need to be shown… maybe a few times. These teachers may need to rid themselves of their own experiences as a student – some of these are very deeply ingrained – as these may have limited their ability to see connections for some time. They may also need to rid themselves of the things they learned when they were being trained as teachers. Many teachers were, to put it bluntly, trained to be very dull, disconnected educators. Some of them burst out of those shackles as soon as they see what it is truly possible to achieve with students, others may take a little more coaxing – its a bit like the different ways that animals react when released from a cage!

Sadly, there are also teachers who will simply never see the connections that exist between different types of learning and will, therefore, never make those connections for their students. Their teaching will forever remain as isolated lessons and skills. The thing is – these are often lessons that do need to be learned, and skills that do need to be developed. So we have a real dilemma about what to do with these teachers. Do we try and get rid of them? A year with them could, and often does, put a student off learning forever. Or do we treat it as a “year-in-waiting”, a year developing crucial skills that the students will – eventually – begin to see the purpose of later when, if, they are fortunate enough to have some time with someone who helps them make those connections?