“Be fearless. Have the courage to take risks. Go where there are no guarantees. Get out of your comfort zone even if it means being uncomfortable. The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades bumps and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested. And have the courage to accept that you’re not perfect nothing is and no one is — and that’s OK.”
- Katie Couric (born 1957); American journalist
Love this quote - it was today's Value email.
And it makes me think of something...wait for it...I pinned on Pinterest awhile ago. (I bet you were able to guess that, right?)
As a teacher, I try to push myself outside of my comfort zone, my limits, every day. And I try (sometimes to no avail) to do the same with my students. What happens sometimes, though, is that students are so seeped in this notion of needing to get the "right" answer that they forgo the opportunity to dig a little deeper or try something new.
Taking risks? Ha! What a concept? What would happen if they got it "wrong?"
Um, well, it'd be "wrong"...? Or, gee, maybe we could all learn from it.
This makes me think of one particular instance in my classroom this year - it was technically with a student in the other fourth grade class, but since I consider all the 4th graders mine anyways, I'll call her one of my fourth graders. :) We were in literature circles (for Tuck Everlasting), and for each meeting, a student prepared how the group would run - who would share summaries, what questions would be asked, what aspects of the chapter/characters would be discussed, what activity we would do to enrich our learning...You get the idea.
So, it was one particular student's turn to lead, and after doing the usual chapter discussion summaries and any questions students had written/answered, the student invited each of the other students to draw a picture of the character that she assigned to them. Thinking that we needed to push this particular activity a little further, I prompted the group leader with a couple of harmless (at least, that's what I thought) questions: "Once they've all finished drawing, what are you going to have them do? How will this help our learning?"
Student's face falls. Tears start coming. Student walks outside our classroom and into the hallway.
Great. How could that have possibly set her off? I was trying to get her to push them a little further. What is going on??
And so, taking a deep breath, I stuck my head outside of the classroom door too.
Apparently, the student was upset because she felt like she could never "get it right" - that there was always something "wrong" for her to fix or make better and that "nobody else had to do that."
Needless to say, with one foot in the classroom (while students continued to work on their pictures) and one foot in the hallway, I talked her through her emotions and eventually (5 minutes later) got her to come back into the room and lead the rest of the discussion.
But it baffled me that such a small request to push her (and the other students') thinking set this student off so easily. Has my school's culture come to this idea of being 100% right 100% of the time? Goodness, I hope not.
As I move into a middle school teaching role next year, I realize that working past this 100% thing with the students may get even harder. (And what makes it even more difficult is the realization that I was one of those kids in school - I always had to get the A, and if I couldn't, then I didn't want to try - it would be like setting myself up for failure. It's only now that I realize how screwed up that way of thinking is.)
With all this in mind, I need to arm myself with strategies for use in the classroom. I need to work extra hard to make sure students know and truly believe that mistakes are okay - we can (and will) learn from them.
So, what do you say to taking chances? Have you found yourself outside of your own comfort zone lately?
