Feb

16

Leadership Qualities Revisited

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Dealing With Stress, Special Education | 1 Comment

me-happy.jpgRecently I wrote about leadership qualities here . At the time, I was responding to a challenge to identify the leadership qualities that I had that others may not have known about. I thought for a while and came up with a list of qualities informed by my “unique” sense of humour. Today, thanks to Doug Turner, I found a quality I had but didn’t think of it in terms of a leadership quality. Doug answered a question that I didn’t even ask: what leadership quality do you have that you are not aware of having? I found out it’s the quality of focusing on the positive. It’s true. It’s really almost a fault of mine. I get teased about it.

Doug says he’s noticed

…that the leaders who continue to languish are still focused on the negative while the leaders who are flourishing – and happy - leverage the positive and keep the negative in perspective.

It makes sense to me when I think about it. I ‘ve been teaching at- risk kids with and without behaviour issues for over twenty years. I have chosen to do that. How have I been able to do thids for so long? I have chosen to focus on their their strengths and not their weaknesses. I’m forever telling them not to define themselves by their weaknesses. I help them discover their strengths and show them how they can choose to use these strengths to be successful.

Today after work, a group of us were talking about the troubled, troublesome and troubling kids we have in our classes that make our classes so difficult to teach. I told them that I choose to look at these kids in a positive light. They’re just kids. They have much to learn about themselves and how to negotiate their way through life more successfully. I have seen enough kids turn their lives around to keep me focusing on the positive. My glass is definately more than half full.

Jan

29

It’s Deja Vu All Over Again

Filed Under Behaviour Management, Blogging in and out of the Classroom, Computers In The Classroom, Dealing With Stress, Evaluation, The Way I See It, Useful Handouts | Leave a Comment

homeworkHomework
It seems that the debate about homework is gathering speed. I wrote about it here last December, and I was interested to read Doug’s idea for taking the sting out of homework. He has his students blogging their History homework! I think Doug is going to have a problem: he’s going to kids lining up to take his History class.

Taking Care of Yourselfjumping through hoopd
It’s the end of semester and tomorrow is the deadline for marks so of course there would be problems with computers and printers. What did we expect? Teachers were running around everywhere (not me thankfully) looking for computers and printers that would work. Talk about stress. I wanted to grab them and have them read David’s post “How to Be Good to Yourself”, but that would have just added to their stess. So, I think I’ll just wait until things calm down a bit.

Reflecting Back (Can you say reflecting back, or is that redundant?)
Today I was reflecting upon the past semester and what worked well and what could have worked better. In all the hurly-burly of the last day of classes, I forgot to ask my students to give me my report card on how I did as a teacher. Mind you my group of kids don’t hesitate to tell me what they like or don’t like and that’s ok with me because as long as we get the job done I don’t really care how we do it. I’m open to suggestions if they don’t like my suggestion. I just tell them what the outcome has to be, how we get there is open to discussion. The only stipulation is that we get there. I like Dustin’s philosophy for managing his classroom and his Course Evaluation Handout, too. It would give valuable feedback. In fact, I like it better than the one I was using. Thanks for sharing, Dustin. A+

Nov

9

Working Hard In The Present Moment

Filed Under Behaviour Management, Dealing With Stress | 5 Comments

Neon made a comment about what a relief it was to realize “that I shape my feelings and life by choosing what I want to think about.” It is quite a relief, in fact it’s empowering. Whenever ( well almost whenever) I start to have negative thoughts about a situation or a person, myself included, I encourage myself to let those negative thoughts fall away and choose to see things in a more positive light. I can feel angry, crummy, disappointed etc about something or I can let it go and not bring it into the present moment. Whatever happened, has happened. It’s over. Done. I can’t change the past. I can only affect the present moment. I can choose to be negative in the present moment, or I can choose to be positive in the present moment. It is a choice. Yes, it’s a choice. But it’s not always an easy choice. Sometimes it takes me more “present moments” than I would like it to. Why is it the case I have to work hard at being positive while I never seem to have to work hard at being negative? If anyone has any ideas about this, I sure would appreciate hearing them.

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