Hello! Writing my first blog post has been somewhat of a challenge. All of those questions above have gone in and out of my mind at least 100 times. I keep picturing Chevy Chase in the movie "Funny Farm" where he moves to the country to become a writer and as he begins his novel, the only word that he can think of to type on the first page is "The..." It can be scary to create a document that outlines your thoughts, your beliefs and values and share that with the world to be criticized and judged by people who know you and also those that you don't.
One of my own personal goals has been to take more time to reflect on education. So to do this, I thought one way to help support this goal would be to create a blog that teachers, students, parents and staff could follow and comment on to help me shape my own beliefs. As I was working on the topic of this initial blog post, I remembered a video clip that my former administrator and friend, Shawn Williams, shared with me. It was an ABC nightline clip from a company called IDEO entitled The Shopping Cart. The clip looks at an innovative company in Silicon Valley that looks at different ways to solve a problem or create a better product. In this clip, their task is to create a better shopping cart. One of the statements that the CEO of the company makes is that their motto is "Fail, and Fail Fast". He describes that by failing, they are able to look at mistakes, fix them and make them better.
As an administrator for the past 2 years, I've told staff to take chances with their classes, try new methods, experiment and don't be afraid of failure. I've decided that I need to take my own advice and be vulnerable and take chances and not be afraid to fail. This blog is my effort to "walk the talk", so I hope that you take the time to make a comment, criticize and even judge me because as hard as it may be to hear, I know that it will make me better. In education, we have to do the same thing. Things are changing at a rapid pace - a pace that has never been experienced before. One year we have PARCC testing, less than 3 months later, it's gone and replaced by a new vendor assessment. When things change, people will make mistakes as they learn something new. What I've come to realize is that our students don't care so much about making a mistake, they care that someone tried to be better, tried to experiment and provide a different learning opportunity for them. Because in the end, they know if you tried, you cared about them and their education. Those teachers that don't try, that fight change, really are saying they don't care. Not caring is something we can NOT have in education.
So I hope that over the course of this blog and the course of this year, I do actually fail. I hope that I make mistakes, make grammatical errors, post a wrong picture or say something I shouldn't. I hope these things happen because I know I will learn from them and I will grow. And that's something that I'm truly excited about!
