How are you? No, really, I mean it!

Dr. Justin Tarte, whom many educators follow on Twitter (83.8K followers), posted this earlier today:

When someone asks how you are doing, please try to avoid the doom & gloom response.

Even if you’re having a rough day, please give at a minimum a neutral response.

The doom & gloom response makes the asker feel bad & all they are guilty of is trying to be nice.

— Dr. Justin Tarte (@justintarte) August 29, 2018

I coud not disagree more!!!!!!! If I ask you how you are doing, tell me. If someone has a doom and gloom response, then they are having a terrible day. They may need support - a kind word, an offer of help, an empathetic listener. If you are feeling vulnerable and someone else's 'doom and gloom' response will ruin your day, then don't ask. Simply nod as you pass or say, hello or good morning. I was pleased to see that others had a similar reaction to Justin's post:

Nope. Sorry. Pretty sure hiding struggles with neutral platitudes is not the answer. Relationships are born out of trust and truth. Even if "doom and gloom" I'd rather be transparent in how I am feeling, especially if the person asking is looking for a genuine answer.

— Kendall Sewell (@_mssewell) August 29, 2018

Others wondered if this was a gendered response - are females taught to reply 'fine' when people ask how you are even though you aren't fine?

 What about you?
 How are you?
 how do you want people to respond when you ask them, "How are you?"
 Me, I'm just fine. Thanks for asking.

UPDATE: I went out for a run this morning and by the time I got back and went to finish this post, Justin's original tweet was no longer available. Do you take tweets down when people seem to disagree with your post? Do you leave it up to engage in the conversation? (@dougpete, since your replies never seem to post onto my page, email me! I know you have thoughts on this!)

Honouring the 'Wild Child'

image from pinterest.com

This poster, using text from Wild Child by Jeanne Willis, reminded me of the first week of school in kindergarten year after year.  That first week I would find shoes scattered throughout the classroom - the children were not used to wearing them after spending their summer footloose and fancy free, and would kick them off at the first opportunity. And quite frankly, I wasn't used to wearing shoes after a summer spent barefoot or in flip flops. 

How can we welcome our youngest learners to our schools and still honour their wildness?  Some ideas that immediately came to mind for me were:

Play-based learning - large blocks of uninterrupted time for child-directed play-based learning with open-ended materials

Outdoor learning spaces - finding ways to incorporate the outdoors into our day as often as possible, even in urban environments 

Inquiry-based learning - allowing student wonderings and questions to lead our learning. Educators may bring in natural objects, ask questions or share their own wonderings to spark inquiry.

How else can educators provide a positive learning environment for students without taking "all their wisdom and wildness away." 

Slow Down and See From A Child's Eyes

Leah McDermott posted this on Facebook and Vicki Parnell shared it to the Self-Reg Parenting Facebook page:

Image from Dissolve.com

I wanted to tell him to hurry up... but I paused and asked instead. His response: “I want to see if the vultures think I’m a dead animal.” I hadn’t even noticed the vultures flying overhead... I was so focused on finishing the task and moving on to the next thing that I was missing everything. 

How many times in a day do you tell your child to “hurry up?”

Rushing out the door. Get your shoes on. Eat your dinner faster. Walk quicker. Chin up, eyes forward, let’s go! We’ve got to HURRY…..

To where? To what?

Do you stop and ask yourself what you’re rushing for? What is so important that you are pushing your child so quickly through their childhood?

And do you ever wonder why?

Why they are moving so slowly. Why they are staring off into space.

I stopped hurrying. And I asked. And these are just a few of the answers I got:

“I’m counting my peas.” (not eating dinner)

“I’m trying to decide which shoes are the best shoes.” (taking forever to get shoes on)

“I’m singing to the birds.” (lagging behind on a walk)

“I’m watching this worm to see how fast it can dig.” (not coming in for a bath)

Leah notes:

In fact, we can learn a lot from watching our children. From asking ourselves why we are rushing constantly. Why we are so concerned about the next moment instead of focusing on enjoying the present one.

This really resonated with me.  I remember when our girls were younger and we were hiking at Bay of Fundy National Park. Hubby, eldest daughter and I were marching along at a brisk pace, while the youngest dawdled along behind. But she kept pointing out things we were missing - a snake hiding in the leaves, a stick shaped just like 'her letter' M - and I realized that instead of hurrying her along, we needed to slow down and really be present. We were treating our hike as another task to complete.

As we head back to school in the next few weeks, it is easy to fall back into the 'hurry up, hurry up, you're going to be late/miss the bus' frenetic pace. And it can be easy to see a child's behaviour as reluctance, defiance, or just annoying.  Instead, in self-regulation we ask 'why this behaviour and why now?' As Leah's post points out, it may not be lack of compliance or stalling tactics. It may just be a child's curiosity and wonder at the world. Let's allow ourselves to slow down and join them.

Don't Tweet the Keynote - A Reflection

Sue Dunlop blogged earlier this year about a conference she attended where the keynote speaker requested that no one tweet or share the content of his address on social media. Aviva Dunsiger replied that she was at a conference where the keynote speaker had made the same request and the internet was blocked in the conference room to prevent online sharing.

Wow!

What a difference from conferences I've attended in the past.  For example, at the Self-Regulation Summer Symposium (SRSS#2018) in July, social media use was in heavy use.

• the keynote addresses were recorded and broadcast on voicEdradio 
• people were tweeting throughout the conference
• in the main conference room, a projector ran a scrolling display of tweets from the conference so those who don't usually use twitter could participate in the online sharing
• at the closing address, Susan Hopkins' final slide was a tweet that a conference attendee had shared on twitter about our resilience in the face of the fire ban in Peterborough

The organizers recognized that not everyone who wants to attend is able, so they ensured that people were able to access the information.  They also recognized that twitter was a way for those in attendance to share their learning with one another. The purpose seemed to be information sharing and online dialogue, not monetization.

Some of the ways I use Twitter at a conference are:

• sharing key learning from sessions with colleagues 
• reading tweets of others to see which ideas they found most salient 
• summarizing my thinking
• sharing highlights of the conference, which may encourage others to attend
• reading tweets of others to get key ideas from sessions I can't attend - like when two great sessions that I want to attend are both scheduled at the exact same time
• reading comments from attendees at sessions that I've presented (instead of waiting for the feedback forms)
• sometimes through twitter I've discovered someone I know or follow on social media is attending the same conference; I can send them a message and meet up with them for a conversation in real life!

I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to be at a professional learning event and being told not to tweet. Both Aviva and Sue said that they felt it impaired their learning. 

There was also some discussion as to why a speaker might make such a request: their ideas are their livelihood so they don't want to give them away for free; they don't want someone else telling their story; they don't want others in the industry 'stealing' their ideas.

In an era where we have made great strides in deprivatizing teacher practice and we encourage educators to share their professional learning and their wonderings, this approach of 'don't tweet the keynote' seems to be taking us backwards.

How do conference organizers deal with such requests? Should they book keynote speakers who don't allow their ideas to be shared? How would you feel if you weren't allowed to tweet at a conference? 

seeklogo.com

(Thanks to @dougpete for mentioning Sue's blog post. I find such great inspiration on his blog!)

Make It Happen

Doug Peterson's recent blog post pointed me in the direction of a blog by George Couros in which George shared a flow chart for making initiatives happen:

He proposes four steps to make things happen:
1. Identify what you want to do
2. Find someone else who is doing it and learn from them.
3. If number two doesn't work, figure out how to make it happen yourself.
And most importantly:
4. Want to make it happen.


Doug proposed an even simpler flow chart:

I'm sure that there are people who will say, "Yes but......"

I get that this flow chart is perhaps an oversimplification.  But that's a good thing! If we want to make things happen, then we may have to stop making them overcomplicated.  Not every change requires a task force, a committee, a feasibility study.  Sometimes, to make things happen, you just need a person or a group of people who are 100% committed to making it happen. 

Yes, we need to think about barriers and issues, and there may be policies and procedures that we have to follow, but we don't always have to wait until an idea has been examined from every possible angle, with every 't' crossed and every 'i' dotted, before proceeding. 

Here's one small example:

A grade 6 teacher had a class with many students who seemed to have great difficulty in paying attention in class. They were fidgeting, with a myriad of excuses for getting up - sharpening their pencils, getting a drink, borrowing an eraser from a friend, etc.  After checking with her principal, she used some classroom funds to purchase three large yoga balls for alternate seating.  She discussed the purpose of the yoga balls with the class - they were to help them learn, not for playing. The teacher and the students devised a schedule - the day was divided into three 100 minute blocks so every 100 minutes, three different students could have a turn using the yoga ball as a seat. Students were free to pass, if they didn't want a turn.

The impact on student learning was immediate. Students who were formerly 'wanderers' were now able to stay focused. And students who had been quiet and not participating began to participate when they were sitting on the yoga balls.  It seemed the yoga ball seats helped down-regulate some students and up-regulate others.

After about six weeks, the students wrote to the principal, advocating for funds for more yoga balls and explaining how the yoga balls had impacted their ability to learn. 

This teacher saw a need, she figured out what she thought would be best for her learners, and she made it happen.

Restoration & Resilience

Yesterday I had the honour of being invited to join Doug Peterson (@dougpete) and Stephen Hurley (@Stephen_Hurley) for their weekly podcast This Week In Ontario Edublog (#twioe) on VoicEdRadio (@voicEdRadio). It was great conversation and we talked about a wide range of topics from county fairs, self-regulation, educational leadership, and grades versus feedback. But just like a job interview, about an hour afterwards I thought of MUCH better answers to some of their questions. I messaged Doug and he said, Yeah that happens a lot.  Why don't you write a blog post with what you wished you said?

My biggest 'woulda, coulda, shoulda' moment was in regard to Stephen's comment about dealing with stress that he experienced as a result of dealing with technical issues at the Self-Regulation Summer Symposium. Now I was at the symposium and I would have never guessed that anything was going wrong; Stephen looked calm and in control at all times. But, apparently, behind the scenes there were multiple technical glitches.

Afterwards I thought, that was a perfect opportunity to talk about Restoration and Resilience.While we can reduce stressors as much as possible, there will still be some days or moments that are more stressful than we expected. Even at the Self-Reg Symposium there is going to be stress. We need to know what helps us to restore our energy after dealing with stress.  This can vary from person to person. At the summer symposium, they had a wide range of activities available for participants to use to restore energy after a busy day of learning

• knitting stations
• jigsaw puzzles
• make your own stress ball station
• colouring books
• bikes
• kayaks and canoes
• yoga
• zumba
• board games

Other people might have restored their energy by going for a walk or reading quietly in their room.

So if I had a 'do-over' I'd ask Stephen what strategies he used to restore his energy and get back to calm so that he was ready to tackle whatever stressors the next day at SRSS2018 might throw his way.

Two great examples of how what restores us varies from person to person:

Baths - There are lots of people who relax by having a bath. Since the time they were little, my girls love 'spa bath' - we'd float rose petals from the garden in the water, dim the lights, put on soft music  and they'd relax in the tub forever. In my self-reg course, lots of people said they relaxed by taking a bath. I don't find baths relaxing. I'm just bored.  And I sit in the tub and wonder how other people find this relaxing. And why doesn't this work for me?

Massage - I love massage and find it very relaxing.  Other people can't stand going for a massage - they hate the weird music, they don't like having to lay still, they don't want someone else touching them. Not only do they not find it relaxing, some actually find it stressful. There are the physical stressors of touch and sound and scent but it's also stressful because there's a social stressor because you're supposed to be enjoying this and relaxing and why aren't you? 

We each have to discover what helps us to restore our energy, knowing that works for someone else may not work for us. And what works one day for us may not work another day - that's why it's important to have a range of restoration strategies. What are your strategies?