NoNoWriMo? Not! 30 Days of Blogging? Sure!

I had a huge work deadline last Monday - a major report that ended up being over ten pages long, not including supporting documents. I got the assignment in September. When did I start? Saturday. 

My procrastination, I recognize in retrospect, has everything to do with wanting to be perfect. I have this romantic impulse, a voice in my head that tells me to wait for the proper mood, for inspiration to strike. And when it does, as if by magic, a fully polished, final draft will appear the instant my fingers start tapping the keyboard.  

That's the belief, anyhow. 

Waiting for the inspiration-inducing lightning bolt isn't the only attitude keeps me from getting down to business. A part of me believes I need lengthy swaths of time to grade papers, wanting to finish in a single sitting. So I tell myself I can’t begin without least three or four hours of uninterrupted time. Why bother starting something unless I can finish it all right then and there? You can imagine how well that works for me. Not. 

Renew & Reflect #5: Positivity (& SWCBlogger Challenge #5, too!)

I admit it. This post is a bit of a cheat. I'm answering the question, "How do I stay positive and share/encourage positivity with my students?" for two blog challenges: Teach Thought Online Community's Reflect and Renew and the SWC Blogger's challenges. My prerogative, since I chose the prompt for this week's SWC Bloggers!

I wish I had written the post my colleague Adjective's Noun from SWC Bloggers wrote. I nodded my head every paragraph, both out of recognition and not a little bit of guilt. As Adjective's Noun writes, my own positivity has everything to do with how balanced my life is and how truthful I am about the lack of balance. 

Indicted. And willing to make a change. So today, I gave myself an hour to listen to a fun podcast while I cleared out a room my husband and I have been meaning to make more livable On the face of it, tidying may not sound like a balancing practice, but truth is, it felt nice. I actually invested in making our space less cluttered, a place we can enjoy coming home to. And I got to crack a grin as I caught up on my favorite podcast. 

Attitude of Gratitude #14: Five Things I've Learned

Today's question asks me to reflect on five lessons I've learned during my teaching career, lessons that make me feel grateful. The biggest challenge this prompt poses is which five! So, in the order they pop up in my head, the list: 

Growth Mindset: Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology Success of  has had a huge impact on my teaching. It takes time, but I see that nurturing a growth mindset encourages students to celebrate mistakes, see them as opportunities for growth rather than as proof of their inadequacy. Assignments feel, I hope, like experiments to improve decision making skills rather than measuring a static, immutable trait. 

Blogging. There is no substitute for writing to a real audience. Learning to assign blogs  compelled me to think of relevant, meaningful writing assignments that help students develop and publish their ideas. I get better at developing these assignments semester-by-semester. And the quality of students' writing (and their feelings about writing) improve accordingly.

Mutt Genres: A "mutt genre" is the kind of writing that only exists in first-year college composition courses, formulaic writing  no one ever reads (or writes!) outside of a classroom. Certainly, the notion behind teaching mutt genres is laudable: teaching form, structure, and rhetorical patterns is important. But we run the risk of training students that there is a single, right way to produce text, one that doesn't exist in the "real world." 

Recognizing the risk of  mutt genre assignments pushes me to shift focus. When I'm at my best, my assignments compel students to make intentional choices based on their purpose, audience, and their own voice - not on strict adherence to a generic formula.  I wrote about mutt genres in this post, and I hope to keep moving away from highly standardized, decontextualized prompts to to those that challenge students to solve problems real writers encounter. 

On Course: This is one of the first professional development programs I ever attended, and the lessons I learned at On Course reverberate today. Two concepts that  stuck with me are the difference between teaching and learning and  the difference between a victim and a creator mentalities. 

Critical Thinking Community: This was also one of the first professional development programs I attended, and just like On Course's lesson, what I learned from the Critical Thinking Community remains vitally important to my teaching. Being able to identify the elements of thinking  and the standards of reasoning helps me make lessons relevant and meaningful beyond my subject area. 

Naming the elements and standards helps students claim and strengthen their application of those concepts. I don't know about you, but I never took a class on what constitutes thinking and how to judge my reasoning. Not in psychology classes. Not in my education classes. Not even in when I took philosophy. I learned about cognition but not anything directly applied to improving my thinking. 

Their publication, Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools, is indispensable. 

All these lesson improve my approach to designing learning experiences. That's for sure. The other through-line is that these lessons also apply to me. I have to maintain a growth mindset to stave off insecurities and fear of failure - and to recognize that it takes effort, not some innate talent, to be a good teacher. Blogging keeps me writing. I have to practice what I preach, and  remain will to feel the burn of finding and sharing my own voice. And so on. 

Big ups to those thinkers, writers, and organizations that make me a better designer of learning experiences. And to the folks who run the professional development programs where I work. 

Attitude of Gratitude #7: Inspirational Lessons

I'm one of those "professional development junkies," happy to comply with professional development regulations. I show up at practically everything. The snacks don't hurt, either. And, after listening to so many PD horror stories from colleagues from other schools and grade levels, I know I'm luck that wherever I've taught, they've had great PD offerings. 

So answering today's challenge, "What new learning has inspired you in your career?" means having to select from so many wonderful professional development activities I've attended.  Rather than pick one, I'll share what I've read for (or as a result of) PD programs: 

Growth Mindset: Since I first read excerpts from Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, I was hooked. It's helped me tremendously to motivate and encourage students who believe they don't have the skill or talent to succeed. At least once a week, I bump into an article or blog post that references Dweck's theory that it's more about practice than talent. And I've slowly found ways encourage that kind of thinking in my classes. Slowly. 

Digitally Enhanced Teaching: It's taken be several years of a gradual growth curve to feel comfortable with technology. The most important points along that curve were realizing the difference between adding a cool shiny digital layer to an assignment vs. leveraging technology to actually promotes and enhances the writing process. The two catalysts?  Troy Hicks' Crafting Digital Writing and Jose Antonio Bowen's Teaching Naked. The first got me to revise the way I use blogging in the classroom. The second helped me to rethink my views on social media and cell phones. I don't fully implement all their suggestions (wish I could!), but by degree, I'm getting more and more naked. 

Critical Thinking: Many years ago, the dean of our college introduced me to Linda Elder and Richard Paul's Critical Thinking Community, formerly known as the Foundation for Critical Thinking. The website it full of resources regarding the elements of thinking and standards we can use to evaluate our reasoning - for all grade levels. I've been incorporating their way of thinking about reasoning into all my classes, little by little. I refer to their starter booklet The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking practically every week. Love. It.  

One thing these inspirations have in common is that i didn't "fully convert" overnight. The "aha moments" were intense, for sure. But It took a semester or two of marinating over their ideas, experimenting with one or two easy, doable changes at a time. Some mindsets and practices were easy to immediately modify for my setting. Others took longer to digest and modify, for instance, allowing students to keep their cell phones on their desk.  

A big take-away for me is I don't have to change all at once. When I decide to follow an inspiration, I can be selective. I can take my time, deliberating on what changes might work. After implementing changes, I can reflect on what students learned to make thoughtful, relevant revisions. 

Big ups to my workplace and the San Diego Writing Project for offering these meaningful,useful learning opportunities. Their gifts continue to shape my teaching philosophy and practice. 

The Positive Psychology Learning Trend

I am obsessed with what I will call the "positive psychology" learning trend. This is the umbrella term I use to group a related set of ideas about how people learn, theories that have to do with attitudes and mindsets. Here are a few of the sources that demonstrate what I mean by "positive psychology": 

• Carol Dweick's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
• Skip Downing's On Course, particularly the section on "victim/creator mentality"
• Angela Maiers' Classroom Habitudes: Teaching Habits and Attitudes for the 21st Century
• Angela Duckworth's notion of "grit" (clip above) is great example of the postive psychology trend 

A quick Google or Youtube search will uncover a trove articles, inteviews, and clips about growth mindset and "grit". 

Luckily, my courses are skills based, i.e., how to read for content and craft, how to compose texts. So I can use the articles and youtube clips that increasingly inform how I teach as content students can read and respond to in writing. I typically have a content focus in my classes; one of my classes focuses on the Filipino Experience  and another is focused on the African American experience. But I've found many ways to incorporate positive psychology material into all my classes. I use one or two pieces at the beginning of the semester to set a "we can all learn" tone. Throughout the semester, I strategically introduce other pieces as the need arises.