For many educators in the southern hemisphere, the end of the school year bumps up against Christmas, and then the end of the calendar year. It’s a LOT. I have long envied those in the Northern Hemisphere for whom the long summer break and the festive season do not coincide and where Christmas concerts do not overlap with farewell functions and classroom pack-ups! Here, the end of the year is typically an exhausting blur of report writing and forward planning, where everything seems to happen all at once.
Today is the 6th of January. For at least some of my Northern Hemisphere colleagues, this mean returning or soon to be returning to school. Even those of us still on our longer summer break, are starting to allow ourselves to think – even just for a small moment – about the school year ahead. By now, the blur of those last frantic weeks has settled and, perhaps, we are allowing some deeper, quieter reflection to emerge.
Whether halfway through or beginning a school year, the early weeks of January are typically a time of resolution. A quick inquiry into the etymology of the word ‘resolution’ yields some fascinating results. The Latin root ‘resolvere’ means to loosen, undo or settle’ and to ‘reduce things to simpler forms’. Later, the meaning evolved to include the idea of the ‘power of holding firmly and the character of acting with a fixed purpose’. These almost contradictory notions got me thinking about the relationship between loosening or undoing, in order to reform and renew - so perhaps they are not contradictory ideas at all. An obvious analogy for me is when I notice an error in something I am knitting or crocheting. Although it is often tedious, I know the outcome will be better if I undo, go backwards and re-do more carefully.
Bringing an inquiry stance to our work as educators means a preparedness to regularly ‘loosen’ and undo our thinking in order to re-think and refresh our understandings. After four decades in education, I am acutely aware of the ease with which my ways of thinking and acting can easily become calcified. It can get harder and harder to loosen my comfortable grip, undo habits and change. At the same time, I want my core values to keep me grounded – to ‘hold firmly’ to the heart of the work I do. It’s a tight and loose way of thinking.
One of the keys to resisting calcification of our thinking is, of course, to question. To regularly question ourselves and bring questions to our team that invite reflection, dialogue and perhaps, new resolutions. Here are some of my favourite questions to loosen thinking …
Why am I an educator? What brings me to this work? Has my ‘why’ changed over the years?
How do I see this work? Is it a job? A career? A vocation?
How do I ‘see’ children? What is my image of the child? How does this image influence the way I teach
How do I see myself as a teacher? What metaphors do I currently hold for myself as a teacher?
How do I see the curriculum? Friend or foe?
What is learning? How do people learn? How would I explain what learning is to others?
What is the role of the environment in learning?
What does this classroom space – and the way it is curated – say about teaching and learning? What might it say about what I value?
How have I changed as an educator over the years? What might I want to change in the year to come?
What am I most curious about right now? What am I hungry to learn more about or learn to do or be?
What do I consider to be the main purposes of schools?
Who are my role models as an educator? Why?
How can I keep myself inspired and passionate?
What might I need to untangle, loosen or simplify?
What might I continue to hold tightly? Why?
My hope is, that as a new year unfolds, we all have opportunity and time to allow such questions to deliberately unsettle our thinking, and invite reflection and dialogue. One view I unashamedly hold tightly is that teaching, as the late Ken Robinson so wisely reminded us, is not a ‘delivery system’ – it needs agile, responsive, creative and thoughtful educators willing to regularly revisit and articulate their ‘why’. I hope some of these questions can find their way into your thinking and discourse with colleagues as a new year begins.
What questions would YOU add to this list?
Just wondering …