Showing posts with label beliefs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beliefs. Show all posts

Monday, December 12, 2011

Excellence pursued...

"I believe in the pursuit of excellence; we can ask for nothing 
more than the individual’s greatest effort."

flickr CC image via DarrelBirkett

Excellence pursued is excellence. 

I believe that excellence in a finite state is not excellence. Once we believe there is no further direction toward an improved state, we have become less than excellent. 

as·ymp·tot·ic

  [as-im-tot-ik] 
adjective Mathematics .
1.
of or pertaining to an asymptote.
2.
(of a function) approaching a given value as an expression containing a variable tends to infinity.
3.
(of two functions) so defined that their ratio approachesunity as the independent variable approaches a limit orinfinity.
4.
(of a formula) becoming increasingly exact as a variable approaches a limit, usually infinity.
5.
coming into consideration as a variable approaches a limit,usually infinity: asymptotic property; asymptotic behavior.

 asymptotic. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved December 12, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/asymptotic

Excellence is an asymptotic concept. An athlete may be rewarded a gold medal for excellence, and then in the next race get dethroned as the gold medal score is beaten in the next race... once we think we've achieved excellence, we cease to be excellent.

In the special education environment I used to teach within, the benchmark for "excellence" was 80% of a goal achieved. Goals marked at 80% achieved would be replaced with a new goal. I always wondered what happened to pursuing the other 20%... and then I started to wonder if 100% was even good enough to be considered excellent. What if we simply stated that we will pursue measurable improvements to all goals, (whatever they may be,) understanding that they will never be mastered, but perhaps that the degree of focus on particular goals will change according to individual circumstances? This to me would be the unending pursuit of excellence.

Can we really every ask for anything more than the individual's greatest effort?


Saturday, June 4, 2011

Beliefs...

 flickr photo via shanzy 294

When I was in graduate school one of my assignments was to reflect on and create a set of beliefs about education and leadership. I posted a couple of these a while back. My intent was to roll one out every week or so until I had written about each one of them at KARE Givers. I wanted to compare what I thought of as my personal beliefs back then, to how they may have changed since then. My intentions were good, but other things came up and I didn't follow through.

I came across the list the other day and decided to revisit sharing my beliefs about teaching and learning. As I read through it once again, I realized that my beliefs haven't changed much at all since I wrote them down over the two year period I was in graduate school. I took the reflective assignment very seriously, and I maintain my perspective that teachers must be serious about what they believe.
Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny. -Mahatma Gandhi
In order for teachers to be sincere and purposeful about what they do, they must be grounded in a set of philosophical principles that guide their practice... their practice being the words, actions, habits and values that they choose to articulate every day in the classroom. To this end, I'm including my complete list here in this post. I will follow up over the next while to expand on each one of my beliefs about education and leadership with the intent to elicit conversations that challenge them. I think teachers need to challenge their beliefs perpetually if they are to continue seeking better ways to do what they do.

Friday, April 9, 2010

If You Believe It, You'll See It

flickr CC image via Cessna 206

Perspective is everything. The lens we look through is the difference between success and failure, courage and fear, positive and negative... the difference between everything as we see it with our own eyes, minds and feelings.

"I'll believe it when I see it" is such a common statement we make. What if we adjusted the statement to say "I'll see it because I believe it?" I'm not so naive to think that we can will things into being simply by believing in them, but can it hurt? Dewitt Jones (...watch the video preview), the acclaimed National Geographic photographer and world-renowned speaker is on to something with this concept. Just like I'll believe it when I see it,  perhaps believe it and then you'll see it will become cliche, but if so, it will be because the wisdom of this point of view is so timeless and true that we'll become desensitized to the message. How can something so simple be meaningful, right? Wrong... we need to heed simple maxims like this one because they help us boil things down to their purest form- the place where clear perspective comes from.

The odds that something we desire will happen increase exponentially when we can picture that desire in our minds; envision it happening... how it will look, sound and feel once realized. We should all take a serious look at how we perceive what we want before it happens.

I think what we want will then begin to happen more often.

.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

There's always another way...


I've been speaking with loads of people about education reform lately.

The topic of reforming education in North America is a popular one. Everyone's talking about education reform... in politics, economics, the social sciences, fine arts, health and wellness, science/technology, and doubtless other areas as well. I'm left wondering, no matter where education reform ends up, who's going to lead the change?

I'm reading The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change, by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis L. Shirley. The authors begin chapter one by stating,
We are entering an age of post-standardization in education. It may not look, smell or feel like it, but the augers of the new age have already arrived and are advancing with increasing speed.
I'm not finished with the book, but it appears to me that Hargreaves and Shirley have presented an excellent call-out to anyone concerned with the state of education, and who wants to be part of the process. Halfway through I'm thinking this is a book that every teacher should be reading, not just in North America, but throughout the world. Sustainable change results from bottom-up, grassroots tipping of ideas. Who better than teachers, hundreds of thousands of them, to lead the move into this post-standardization age in education? In order to do this well, teachers will need to get re-acquainted with the core beliefs and guiding principles that they've been suppressing for so long amidst the standardized system many have spent their entire careers working within.

Everyone, including me as a teacher and parent, has an opinion regarding why education needs to be reformed, and how it should be done. Teachers are embroiled in the debate to be sure, and it's disconcerting for many who have become so used to being led in transactional ways. There's no shortage of groupthink occurring within the education reform debate, and once a little dichotomous or dualistic thinking is mixed in... voila, we have a full-fledged battle on our hands. Teachers everywhere are looking for a side to belong to. What is particularly troublesome for me though, is not what's included in these conversations, but what's missing. There are so many agendas being promoted as part of the massive education reform debate, that it appears to me teachers have lost their foundational voice; the personal belief system that should be guiding them is missing in action.

As society enters a new age in education, teachers should be playing a paramount leadership role in the process. In order to do this effectively, they will have to think hard about what it is that inspired them to become a teacher in the first place, and how their preferred future in education might align with these long-lost values and ideologies. To this end, I thought I'd do my small part as an educator and espouse some of my personal beliefs about teaching and learning. I'm going to choose some of my more passionate beliefs and post them here over the next few weeks. I'm going to do this because I believe in public education, and I believe that teachers, as the most critical cogs in the machine, have very important voices to express in moving what we do to the next level. Perhaps my effort will resonate with other teachers and encourage them to express their voices as well, but if not, at least I've made my contribution.
Here goes... 
"I believe that effective education is about people, always. We must reach people on personal levels to foster relevance in what they learn."
In the era of standardization in education, what Hargreaves and Shirley refer to as the Second Way, students, and teachers became resources in a game of high-stakes targeting of externally prescribed goals and benchmarks relative to the teaching and learning process. Somewhere in the fervor to meet these external standards, I think teachers lost some of their humanity. Curriculum standards, testing standards, professional development standards, accreditation standards... perhaps necessary elements to high-quality education, but when coordinating supports and resources aren't in place to help meet the standards, stress and anxiety result. Teachers have felt both stress and anxiety in massive doses for a long time, and this can't be good for the kids in their classes.

I have maintained my view that the most direct path to a well-adjusted student who has a passion for learning is to support the teacher working with that student professionally and personally. Well-adjusted, well-prepared, and hard-working teachers are built through systems support that ensure affordable access to professional development, curriculum development support, and sincere appreciation for the effort they make every day within challenging learning environments. We need to reach teachers on an emotional level in order that they can do the same for their students.

I'm fond of this quote...
“An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” - Carl Jung
Enough said. Stay tuned.
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