When is the last time you conducted a self assessment on your progress? Are you the cobbler whose children have no shoes? Take some time and listen to your replacements. Listen to them as they ask for assistance, provide suggestions, and feel defeated when they watch the adults participate in the Blame Game.
What is your role in the Blame Game? Participant? Bystander? Blamer? Oxygen Thief? Mover? Shaker? Solution provider? Lead by example? Virtual Suggestion Box provider?
Parents, teachers, students, administrators, taxpayers, politicians, community apathy, oxygen thieves, self serving interest groups....you can add labels to the list but what is your role? At one point in time, from the womb to the tomb, you became a student in some type of learning system in life, either as an autodidact or a participant of a learning system whether it was a public / private / home / charter / magnet / virtual school system. Many people continue to learn long beyond the classroom and throughout life. You may own one or more labels, by choice or by association, but you started somewhere. You can continue as is or you can change.
The cycle continues until we break the cycle even if it is one person at a time. What are you doing to break the cycle of passive acceptance? How do you empower others who want to change? Regardless of your role by profession or self labeling by choice, your actions or inactions are being observed and modeled whether you realize or not.
Do your words, actions, digital or F2F match your actions?
Some quotes about change, listening, learning that have been brought to my attention by some of the young adults I volunteer with:
Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable. William Pollard
Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. Henry L. Doherty
A good listener tries to understand what the other person is saying. In the end s/he may disagree sharply, but because s/he disagrees, s/he wants to know exactly what it is s/he is disagreeing with. Kenneth A. Wells
Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. Richard Hooker
From Robert M. Hutchins:
The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts…it is to teach them to think.
Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.
My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.
Do you step in to be one part of the solution for those who will eventually replace you? What are you really teaching, learning, and/or sharing?
From Robert M. Hutchins:
The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts…it is to teach them to think.
Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.
My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.
Do you step in to be one part of the solution for those who will eventually replace you? What are you really teaching, learning, and/or sharing?
Comments or reaction box checks are always appreciated.
