MANAGING MY TIME

 Teachers who grow have the ability to see the ‘big picture’–what’s most important, the value of an idea or strategy, drains on their own creative energy. I ‘see’ what’s happening around me and I'm learning and making adjustments as part of my growing.

As often as possible, I strive for a balance of thinking, tools, strategies, and related resources. The most popular, clicked, shared, and curated content on the internet. It's the lists... you know, the:

Top 10 Strategies for..., 25 Apps..., 5 Tips for ..., etc.

This is probably because they’re easy to skim, extract, save, and move on with your life. But to really see a change in teaching, strive to have a balance of content—of thought leadership, tools, strategies, frameworks, and other resources that, in fragments, combine to make a fuller, clearer picture of the complexity of teaching and learning.

Depending on my own expertise, experience, and comfort level, I probably need more of one area and less of another and that’s all good. But I must resist the temptation to skip anything longer than a few paragraphs and go straight for the pretty graphics, books, blog posts, and webinars with whiz-bang titles that promise me silver bullets.

My time is valuable but because it is valuable, that’s all the more reason I need to seek out the strategy to use with the app in the learning model that followed up on the thinking in the inspiring piece I've just read.

A crucial part of vision is what I see. A teacher who grows in capacity over time has the vision to see what’s working and what’s not–to separate what is and is not important and have a clear sense of improvement and progress around the former while being able to navigate around the latter.