Skip to main content

Monday Minute-March 4th


This quote caught my eye and I thought it would be a great start to the week.  I know nearly every school and organization has one, but the question that came to mind when I saw this is "Are you on mission or are you trying to live up to a mission statement?"

To me if you are trying to live up to or follow a mission statement, you are following someone else's path and not your own.  If you are following someone else's mission statement and not on mission, you may need to evaluate your reason for being a teacher.  You may be someone that is either burned out or has lost focus.  It may be time to find a way to kindle that fire again or find something else that inspires you, for your sake and for your students.

If you are on mission, you are passionate about it.  It is something that drives you and motivates you.  You are likely someone that feels teaching is a calling and that calling is a big part of what motivates you.  It is part of the mission.  That mission, for the most part, is to help students be as successful as possible.  That mission is at the heart of everything you do in the classroom.  It means you are there early or late.  It means you spend time at home working on lessons, preparing for your students.  It means you are at their events.  It also means you are building relationships with them, finding out what motivates them.  It means you notice when there is something wrong.

There is so much that goes along with being a teacher when you are on mission that putting it all in one post is challenging, so I leave you with the question:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Beginning again

I have been silent on my blog for a while.  Partly because I have started a "new" challenge that took some time to settle into.   I have been an educator for over 20 years.   I have been a classroom teacher, building administrator & district administrator.   Our family recently felt called to a new location which gave me the opportunity to work for an education non-profit for a year. Then the call back to the field came.  I couldn't resist.  Those of you that are called into education know that the calling never really leaves you.  I knew I needed to be back in a position that allowed me to have a more direct impact on students.  I loved the work I was doing, but I was in a position that didn't give me any interaction with students and I needed to get back to that on some level.  If you haven't been in that position, it is hard to put into words exactly what this calling means.   Granted I was still able to influe...

Do you need a Philosophy of Education?

When we first start out in education we often think that we know what we're doing. We think that we don't need any help and that everything that we need to know we learned in our education classes. It only takes about three days into the job to realize that our college education did not fully prepare us for every single student that we're going to face. It didn't truly prepare us for how we really should deliver a lesson when we have students on five different levels along with multiple types of disruptions. It didn't prepare us to handle all the routines, all the the daily tasks, all the decisions that we have to make.  This isn't intended to disparage any university program, but just an acknowledgement that there is now way for them to fully prepare you for every student and situation you will face.  Experience is the only true way to learn how to handle all of these different types of situations.  So how do we make up for that information gap? That is a chall...

4 Tools for Creating Instruction Video

Many educators are plunging into creating digital resources as part of their districts plan to continue instruction while school facilities are closed for the remainder of the school year.  If you have not explored this before now, there are several options available to you in a variety of prices and skillset. The tools we suggest will be free or inexpensive and only focus on creating videos that you can share with students later.  There are options for live video conferencing and some of these tools are designed for that, but we are only focusing on video recording.  This type of learning model would best be classified as asynchronous because you are allowing students to work at different times.  This may be the best option since some of your students may have siblings and limited use of technology at their house. Before we get started, please check with your district to see if there are any restrictions on which tools you may use.  There is a possibility that ...