Swimming to the Moon

"Teaching is a form of show business" Steve Martin

It has been an up and down week in my world. I constantly seem to be reflecting on the same ideas. It was great to have a colleague say to me Duncan "You seem to want to fly to the moon without building a rocket". It is so true I even said back that "I would just swim there if I could". I am persistently looking towards that horizon hoping to produce the perfect customer journey. I really struggle to keep ticking over with the mundane the stepping stones towards success. It is exactly what my students struggle with the hard work between the learning, or hard work that is the learning.

The pace of change in the classroom is blurred by the pace I set myself. This week has been super exciting. Having lost the awesome project management platform of Monday I looked again to the horizon. There I found Bluerabbit a gamified classroom experience. The girls really liked the fact that I could place all their steps toward the core assessment task on this platform, there are no surprises there and they slowly level up as they complete each step. This creates a gameful experience. Unfortunately, not every student enjoyed this and I spent a massive amount of time investing in the platform. A Tuesday stand up with one learner led me to email the company about the user issues. Amazingly as I was out of the classroom on Wednesday the students found the whole platform had been taken down. The CEO emailed me and told me about the improvements he was making.

Could you ask for a more teachable moment? While discussing Globalisation with the class the Brazilian CEO of a company was changing his platform in response to our feedback. Holy Moses this illustrates everything I wanted. The other issue was deeply seated within in myself. Again I was distant in class distracted by the pursuit of a dream or swimming to the moon again. This though all comes out in the retrospective.

In class, I am very lucky to have my year 10 class 1st period every Friday. We have turned this day into our retrospective day. First, we spend time speaking. Originally the format of this was a Socratic seminar. On reflection, the girls decided circle time would be better. All the girls wanted a say. I tried a number of ways to get more engagement with the reading we were looking at but still, the reading is the hard part. That is where the critical engagement is meant to happen.

There is no more valuable feedback than a year 10 as we go through the process of reflection in our stand up meeting in looking you in the eye and telling you that something needs to improve for the learning to happen. I do not think I could do this with every class and I do not know how it would work with every subject, but the deep and honest reflection on my practice has been mana enhancing. Also, the stand up at the end of the week has become a place of both relief and joy, we have a genuine connection in this time we laugh and share and look to build ahead.

As the weeks have gone on the feedback, or forward, has become more honest and sincere. Hopefully, from this feedback, I will continue my own improvement. As I strive for better self-management in my student so to I must improve my own management of myself. Certainly, I can start paddling to the moon but I have to remember I will just have a lot of confused onlookers if I do not fully plan my journey.