Let's not be so hasty to let the old year pass

A new year is coming up fast and it is a time that many look to as a fresh start and a time to make resolutions for the coming twelve months. As the song says "fast away the old year passes". 

Before you cast the old year aside though can I suggest that you take some time to first count your blessings... and if you have had a tough year, and I know a few people who have,  I am thinking that you are reading this post and have access to the internet in some way so you might just have a couple of things to be grateful for as a starter. 

Consider this: 

Found in several places but this one I sourced from:
http://www.speakupforchange.ca/why-you-are-so-lucky/

The main reason why I suggest you count your blessings first is that you will be much less likely to toss out the really good stuff you already have as you focus on the next big thing you want to be, do or have in your life. 

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to do a gratitude audit for the last 12 months or so:  

• Have I been of service to others at some stage? 
• Have I taken care of myself in some way? 
• Have I achieved anything significant for me? 
• Have I used my skills and talents in some way? (and before you say I don't have any, I believe we all do, just some of us don't recognise them yet) 
• Have I learnt something new? 
• Have I fostered positive relationships with some of the people around me? 
• Have I had any fun times? What were they? 
• Have I had any adventures? 
• Have I overcome any challenges? 
• Have I had opportunities to celebrate the success of others? 

I hope that you have come up with a few things to be grateful for and identified some of the great things about your life that you want to keep. Too often we forget to celebrate the good as it happens and taking some time to reflect with our minds and hearts tuned to gratitude can make a big difference to our whole well being. I hope that you spend more time focused on gratitude going forward so you get to experience the joy that it brings. 

This approach also helps you work out what it is that you really do want in your life. 

Ask yourself: 

• Do you want more of the same? Great stuff- keep adding to your gratitude list and stay focused on creating more of the same. 
• Who are the people that you care about and love? If you are able to, how will you stay connected with them? 
• Is there something you want to change? If so why do you want to do that? What will it look like if you make that change? (it is important to have a clear vision of the end point you are aiming for) 
• Do you want to learn something new? 
• How will you use your skills and talents this year? 
• How will you be of service to others? 
• Is there a way you could contribute to your community this year? 
• What adventures would you love to have? 
• How will you create positive relationships with those around you? 
• Do you want to stretch yourself? If so, in what way and why? 
• How will you ensure that you are as healthy as you can be? 

Once you know what you want things to look like and you know why you want to go there then you can work how you will get there and take the first step to seeing your vision coming alive. 

And the crazy thing is that you don't have to wait for a new year to focus on the good you already have or the path you want to take going forward... you can do this anytime and anywhere! The birds do not start singing a new song just because it is the first of the year nor do the mountains shift that day so feel gratitude now and dream as well. 

A personal story to illustrate: 

Last year I made some pretty clear goals going forward in about October. I had an ultimatum put to me that forced me to make a choice (much of my thinking was centred around the vision of the future I had been fostering for a little while prior to this to be fair). The things I wanted for the new adventure that I was to take were: 

• Most importantly it was to have more time with my family and enjoy doing some things around our home- I have loved spending time with our little man this year, we have gone to playcentre together and had a lot of fun. It has also been great to remodel our kitchen using recycled materials and make it a much more useful space for preparing our food 
• Take 3 months off to get my body back in balance and just enjoy a slower pace of life (I had saved up my annual leave for some time to enable me to do this)- it was great and gave me clear headspace to start blogging and do some study for fun as well as walk daily and go swimming and enjoy our kiwi summer with my family 
• Start my own business- yup, done that and have had some great opportunities to explore and play with using my skills in different settings including public speaking, writing resources for schools, and also doing adult workplace assessments
• Growing my own vegetables- we started that this season and it has been fabulous, to those of you who follow this blog you will have already read about this new passion of mine... and I am loving enjoying the fruits of our labours immensely! 
• Teach an average of two days week- this has happened in the last half of this year and I have really enjoyed teaching students from 5-17 years old, next year I will be teaching 2 days a week in a job share role which is fantastic
• Have my own chickens so we can eat our own eggs- we are on the way there, I got a little put off the idea by the fact that some people found chickens to be rather vicious with each other but have done some more research and we have plans to build our coop in the coming month or so... and the chickens will be a late Christmas gift once we get the coop ready for them
• I have always wanted to write despite feeling a little inadequate as a writer- I have had opportunities to play and learn (this blog is one way) and am learning more about this at the moment as I explore another project, it is exciting 

It hasn't always been easy, there are always ups and downs and I have had to take a few risks, but that strong vision of what I was hoping things would look like has helped me get back on course when the chips have been down. I also spoke with other people about this vision so they were able to support me and at times hold me accountable if needed. I am hugely grateful for the opportunities that I have had so far and the dreams that have been fulfilled as well as those that are ongoing and the dreams to come! 

I hope that your dreams come true in the best ways too. 

And while you are at it ALWAYS remember you are incredibly powerful because you do have choices... 

  

The growing brain

A few weeks ago I attended a course about Neurobiology and Early Life Trauma delivered by Grant Sinnamon. Although it was largely designed for counsellors and therapists as a teacher and a bit of a neuro-nerd I found the content really relevant and useful. There was so much content that was amazing but for now I will concentrate on just a couple of points.
One of the take aways from the event was that trauma in early years of brain development can present in a whole lot of different ways later on (please note in this context trauma isn't necessarily major injury or intentional harm, it may be a change or loss, it could even be the result of a minor concussion).

Brain development is hugely important for us to consider as teachers. There can be standards set and expectations established for various age groups but in reality when our children enter school they come in at their own stage of development and their progress from there could be dependent on things like any early life trauma encountered. Grant Sinnamon suggested that if a trauma occurred at a time of significance in the development of the brain then there could be an impairment but with correct diagnosis this could be remedied or mitigated at least by building or strengthening pathways that may have been underdeveloped earlier in life. He stressed that interventions must mirror development, starting from the bottom and building up.

This is a challenge for schools. A powerful consideration offered to us during this seminar was if a child is struggling in some way academically such as learning to read and it is due to an interruption in their brain development (for arguments sake think about developing left/right cross over) then putting them in intensive remedial programmes and giving them extra reading to do may in fact not remedy the situation properly and could even cause greater problems by increasing anxiety and stress related to reading as a task. So the suggestion is that we go back to the earliest point of development that seems to be interrupted, with the reading example start with crawling and build up to remedial reading programmes.

He reminded us that the brain develops from bottom to top and inside to the outside. For most of the session we talked about the brain stem development. The brain stem controls our most basic and vital functions and it is where our options are most limited: flight, fight or freeze. If through early life trauma we have created a strong pathway to react with flight or fight then that will almost be an automatic reaction to any stressful situation... think about some of the challenging bahaviour we see in classrooms, could this possibly contribute to some of what you have seen? In order to support the learner it might be that we need to strengthen other pathways that may be underdeveloped, such as learning breathing techniques to calm down and therefore be able to respond better to stressful situations by accessing our thinking part of the brain. This fits beautifully with Glenn Capelli's Three Rooms of our Magic Brain. Grant talked about blowing bubbles being one strategy to help build slower breathing in a fun, non threatening manner. Creating a safe environment for these students is vital.

He has developed a model called REPAIR(tm) and is talking about this all over Australia and New Zealand. It makes good sense, and much of it relates to how we can create safe environments for children. I do recommend if you get a chance to hear him speak it is well worth the effort.

Clearly I have only just touched on a couple of small ideas from our whole day together... there is just so much more I want to learn!

The thing is that I am a classroom practitioner, not a therapist. As a teacher I would love to learn more from Grant Sinnamon and how we can use what he has developed so we are better armed to support the children we work with. For me it is about how we support the range of individuals we work with and finding ways we can help them to build secure foundations for their learning. Knowing more about how our amazing brains work must surely help us to achieve this end.


Further reference:
Slides by Grant Sinnamon from a similar seminar- http://www.academia.edu/1688621/Early-Life_Trauma_and_the_Brain_Consequences_and_Interventions
Grant Sinnamon talking about his REPAIR (tm) Model- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBWmT_TBebA

Get Going with Growing 6

Vegetables can be pretty too.
Zucchini flower... quite lovely and the zucchini's are tasty too. 

Guess who has been eating our spinach this time??? 

We have! 

And it is great :) The taste of fresh spinach on pizza and in lasagne has been wonderful. 

Spinach waiting to become part of a meal for the family 

This lasagne was SO tasty... fresh and healthy 

We have continued to add to the garden plots... what started as four little boxes three and a half months ago is now eight boxes planted (with two more ready for new plants) and a glasshouse full of food producing plants. The apple trees are full of little apples that are steadily growing which is very exciting. I am quite surprised by how quickly things have grown and thoroughly enjoying the fruits of our labours. 

The original plots

The garden now

The weather has been really changeable which has had its challenges but earlier this week we had some really hot weather followed by warm steady rain showers, I couldn't believe the growth in the garden from that... bean seed that had just broken the surface the day before grew almost two inches over the day. Nature is amazing! 

Webbs Wonderful Lettuce seedlings

I have now planted spinach seeds and lettuce seeds and they will go into the empty plots in time. I am getting better with nursing my seeds to the next step, it is about nurturing them- giving them what they need as they grow and adjusting the care as get bigger and stronger... like any baby really. One thing that has worked for me is using egg cartons as seed trays, it makes transplanting less stressful on the seedlings and they are a little easier to keep moist once the seeds strike. 

Every day there is something new to see and, as always, learn :) 

Broccoli on it's way

Your actions scream louder than the words you use

Last week I was reading a post called What our kids learn in school (http://markmanson.net/school). It got me thinking about education and teaching again.

We are teaching much more than we have written in our planning or have milling around in our own minds... what we do screams so loudly that it often drowns out what we say.

It is said that integrity is doing the right thing even when no-one is looking. In our schools and our communities our students/children are looking so integrity becomes vital. We are teaching even when we don't think we are.

Consider the following:

• if we state that speaking kindly is important and then yell at a student or put them down 
• if we state that we need to sit quietly and listen to others, then talk to a parent/colleague at an assembly when the students get 'the hairy eyeball' for chatting
• if we state that when you do something wrong you need to apologise but refuse to admit when we make mistakes 
• if we state that it is important to reconcile differences maturely and then backstab our colleagues or glare at them in public 
• if we are teaching healthy habits and yet eat poorly 

... what are we teaching in those circumstances? 

• That the rules don't apply to us
• That when you are in a position of power the rules don't apply to you 
• That our students are powerless 
• That we are right and they are wrong 
• That you don't trust people in authority, they lie 

Of course this isn't the way it is with every teacher, or parent, grandparent, caregiver, coach. In fact I'd like to believe most of us value our role as role models. Our students/children need to know they can rely on us to stand by our words, so that when we tell them we care about them and that they are valued they will believe that too. 

Here are some small examples from my own experience and I'd love to hear your examples too as I find our stories are powerful motivators and reminders : 

Not so long ago I apologised to a student for telling her off publicly when she said something very unkind to another student. She was flummoxed and stated that she couldn't understand why I was apologising to her when she was the one who had done something wrong. I explained that I was apologising for my behaviour because how I reacted was wrong and then we were able to talk about her behaviour. 

I do this at home too, I know sometimes when I am tired I can snap or react rather than respond, when I do I apologise (not as often to my husband as I should!). My four year old is quite adept now at letting me know when I have hurt his feelings and he is right to call me on it. It is OK to be human, none of us have to be perfect. 

Getting Going with Growing No. 5

Another update is well overdue I think.

If you have read my other posts re. gardening (1, 2, 3, 4) you may have figured that our horticultural beginners journey is one of highs and lows, and it continues to be so. 

So far I have identified a couple of 'enemies': 

• Sheep- who loved my cabbage plants but ignored the spinach 
• Weather- hail stones that had no problem with attacking both cabbage and spinach, as well as leaving a considerable frost which killed the pumpkin seedlings that I had planted 

And I have two more to add: 

• Firstly, and I apologise for not mentioning this sooner, but cats can be a bit of a problem in the
  
  garden... one cat in particular for us I fear is our own rather heavy grey feline called Pippin. When I first started preparing the beds I think she misinterpreted my work as creating a sunbed/toilet for her. This did not stop when the first seedlings were planted! We remedied this with placing large netting over the beds as you may see in the background of the image here. 
• Secondly birds! Our first strawberries had ripened about a week ago and I was all ready to share them with my little man as a treat for our evening meal but... I left the glasshouse door open as the day was hot and I wanted to get fresh, cooler 
  
  air moving in the space. I assumed my strawberries were safe in the glasshouse and didn't even think to cover them... I was wrong! Lesson learned. 
• Weather again... this time heat. I was away for work for a couple of days and one of these was particularly warm. I had left instructions for watering in my absence but neither of us had anticipated the impact of heat in the glasshouse on the seedlings. When I came home found that most of my delicate capsicum seedlings had fried in the hot sun. Another lesson learned. 

As you can see our setbacks have been based around nature, and so it seems to me that learning to garden successfully is about learning to live in harmony with nature itself. We are finding our way. 

So let's now focus on the highs of the gardening journey at the moment: 

• Our basil is growing well and I will be thinning it out in the next week or so. 
  
• My last lot of corn planted is growing and the wind break cloth seems to be working with protecting it from some of the harsh winds we have had lately. 
• I have also nursed our last three pumpkin seedlings to ensure they are as healthy as possible and just planted them outside in the last day or so. So far they are looking good, I wonder if I had planted them too early last time? 
• We have little apples beginning to grow on our three old apple trees as well, yum, apples for Autumn. 
• The potatoes have survived the frost and are now showing
  good growth. 
• I have been experimenting with striking seed on dampened paper in plastic lidded containers, so far the beans and peas have responded well. Will keep playing with this method. 
• We have eaten some of our own spinach and it was delicious. It seems to have come away from the hail storm OK, not perfect but OK. 
  
• The zucchini are doing really well and we will be eating our first one soon. 
• We have little tomatoes on all of our tomato plants. I love the smell of our tomato plants, it brings back fond memories of my dad including one of the last moments I shared with him in his garden when he was ill. He loved his garden and grew the best tasting tomatoes, I hope that my use of the 'ucky' bucket juice (seaweed soup) will help to replicate the flavour a little at least.  

And to close the best and biggest gardening highlight for me...  

The other night we finally had another ripe strawberry, so when my little man came down to tend the garden with me I got him to check the strawberries for me, there was much excitement when he saw the juicy red strawberry sitting there. We picked it and I gave it to him to eat. He took a small bite and the response was one of absolute joy "oh mumma, it tastes soooooo goooood!" He ate it slowly and thoroughly relished every bite. It was wonderful to see and in some ways I wish I had taken a photo but on the other hand I am pleased that I was just able to enjoy the moment with him. 

Teaching is leading

From my perspective if you are a teacher (and let's think broadly about that term as well) then you are a leader and that is a tremendous privilege and responsibility.

Recently I attended a presentation about successful educational leadership with associate professor Ross Notman from the Otago university. He presented findings from his own research as well as international research including the International Successful School Principalship Project. As we went through there were opportunities to reflect on our own leadership practices and experiences of leadership, in this time I often came back to the thought that these qualities are not the exclusive domain of successful school principals.

Below are three of the areas discussed and how these might look for classroom practitioners:

Building a strong vision and setting expectations
Here we are talking about motivating others, setting high expectations, having a clear sense of purpose 
In the classroom how do you share your expectations? How do you motivate your learners? Are you clear about why you are doing what you are doing? And how do you communicate this with your class?
When we set clear expectations our students have confidence to complete set tasks. When they know why we are doing what we are doing there is a better buy in and if well thought out with them in mind then the learning will have greater relevance and therefore be more meaningful. Motivated students are more likely to be self managing and committed to the task at hand, whilst we don't want to create a dependence on us for motivation it is important that we support the students to get on board and stay on board. We can use WALTS (We Are Learning To Statements) to help clarify the our expectations, we can use rubrics and tools like SOLO taxonomy among others.
When talking about expectations we are not only talking about teaching and learning, there are behavioural expectations as well. One important thing to consider about expectations and is that unless these are held/owned by the whole group then they are unlikely to be motivating or sustainable.

Understanding and Developing People 
Thinking about building relationships and developing dispositions, valuing others, practicing what you preach
The three R's of teaching is sometimes described as relationships, relationships, relationships. I agree! The fabulous Allie Mooney shared the following quote at a conference I attended many years ago "you need to reach me before you can teach me", I have never forgotten it.
How do you build relationships with your students? It is not about being friends but getting to know each other. How do you develop dispositions in others? What about valuing all the students in your classroom? Do you practice what you preach?
If we know what switches people on and turns people off we are better able to help them stay motivated and share a vision that is palatable. When you are teaching is your focus on the subject/topic or the different learners you have in your class? Where your focus is will make a huge difference to the quality of the relationships you have with your students. It is not always easy to like all the children/young people who enter our classrooms, some come with some pretty tough baggage, it does help though if we approach all students with a desire to identify their strengths and unique gifts as everyone has something of value to offer. A question I have gained from a parenting expert Dr Monika Potter is to ask yourself 'what would love do?', it is a helpful reminder when dealing with difficult behaviour.
If we want our students to walk along a path with us, to respect and respond, then we need to be authentic... they can smell the disingenuous a mile off and if we don't practice what we preach then that will erode trust which is one of the foundations of relationships. It is OK to be human and make mistakes, admit it, apologise and move on if you do... in just the way you would expect your students to make amends if they made a mistake.

Redesigning/Refreshing the Organisation 
This is where we are establishing collaborative cultures, restructuring to meet changing needs and managing conflict. 
How do you create opportunities for collaboration in your classroom? What about distributed leadership... do you share ownership? How do you identify the needs of the learners in your care? What do you do about changing needs? How flexible is your classroom programme? How do you manage conflict? Do you create opportunities for honest, healthy discourse in the classroom?
We can be the masters of all destiny in our classrooms but when we do that we disempower our learners. Think about ways that we can share decision making with our students. I remember with one class giving them some guidelines for choosing desk groups then let them go for it, I was impressed with the quick way they selected their groups and how successful they were. Collaborative cultures take time to build and it is important to work on creating an environment where it is safe for students to disagree or have different opinions even with the teacher. When groups go too far with their desire to reach consensus we start to lose divergent, innovative thinking as the need to fit in with the group supersedes anything else. This is called 'group think' which I would imagine as teachers we would want to avoid developing in the minds of our young people if they are to be the leaders of the future.
Teachers have a lot of competing demands on our thinking when planning for our students so consider how much of what you do in the classroom is driven by student needs. When you are thinking about needs are you only concerned with the academic or do you look at the whole person? I suggest that if you are not considering the social, emotional, physical aspects of your students lives you might be missing out on some important information which will enable you to better tailor your programme to meet diverse needs and help your students do their best. If a child is struggling with their learning sometimes the root of the problem may not be the subject area or lack of ability but could be a health issue, problems with friends, or any number of things going on. Focusing only on the academic may lead to little improvement or, worse still, increase anxiety and create more problems. This brings us back to knowing our students and relationships, relationships, relationships.

There are many other qualities we could discuss including being leaders of learning, modelling an inquisitive mind, thinking dispositions and so on but I think this is a helpful start to establish the understanding that teachers are leaders. These qualities can equally be applied to parenting and other contexts I am sure.

Leadership for me is a learning journey. I see so many opportunities in everyday life to apply aspects from my learning in leadership so far. If you are interested in exploring leadership a little more I suggest that Simon Sinek's leadership material is a good place to start.

Simon Sinek shares valuable insights around leadership and is well worth following. 

Getting Going with Growing 4

Gardening is a pursuit that teaches important life lessons... this week resilience, patience and wonder.

After the attack of the killer sheep and the subsequent repairs to the fencing as well as putting up some wind proofing for my latest attempt at growing corn I thought we had catered for just about everything.... but not quite!

Public enemy no 2 has been identified and no it is still not the white butterfly.

This time it was unseasonal weather! Check out the little video clip below to see what hit, literally, our garden earlier this week.

The size of the hailstones were quite spectacular too.

The spinach that survived the attack of the killer sheep did not fare quite as well against the hail stone

bullets that pelted down from above.
Worse still was the unexpected frost from the hailstones overnight as they did not melt away... the potatoes (largely self seeded) did not fare well as the blackened curled leaves here show. I am hoping that they might come away again though... fingers crossed.

The pumpkin plants however do not look like they will come away again. It was so disappointing as this is my second attempt with my pumpkin seedlings and they were looking so good, now they are yellowed, curling up and very sad.

BUT this is gardening, and there's no point moping around about it. This is where resilience comes in, I could chuck it in claiming it is too hard with the pumpkins, the spinach and the brassicas but I have a glasshouse full of growing plants (and I am lucky I still have five pumpkin seedlings in the glasshouse to transplant).
There are seeds coming away that we planted a couple of weeks ago and I thought were not going to strike... they are now popping up all over the place!
The other day I was looking at the bed where I had planted sunflower and sweet pea seeds two weeks ago and there was nothing happening, I had decided I would put nasturtiums in there instead when I got the time... well today I walked past and had a look to water a couple of seedlings I had planted earlier and lo and behold there are a whole heap of little seedlings now coming through, what a difference three days make! A little bit of patience pays off, and if they had been right up when the hail hit, who knows, they might not have fared so well.

Sunflower seedling... exciting! 

On reflection there are lots of life lessons I am getting from gardening, here are a couple from this week:

• very few things in life are ALL bad, focus on what is going right if you can
• don't put all your plants in the one spot, diversification is key
• if at first you don't succeed, look at what you could do differently and have another go 
• it is OK to try something and fail... that is a great place for learning to happen 
• patience is a virtue and nature knows it well

In gardening, as in life, you win some and you lose some. If you are prepared to focus on the wins, work through the losses and approach as much as you can with a sense of wonder then all going well things will bear fruit.