Feedback = Growth

Feedback = Growth

Procrastination: the action of delaying or postponing something

Procrastination aka my life story when it comes to writing anything! It is how I have literally managed to push my first reflection of 2020 to the end of my to do list even though it was the second item on the list. It's also the reason why I've managed to watch one Netflix mini-series, cleaned the house, finished laundry, and doodled. 

However, my one and only "professional" promise to myself was that I would make it an intention to take one time out of the week to simply reflect on my practice. Before winter break I was challenged (by an amazing educator, Shelby Acevedo) to illustrate my first semester this school year using 6 different pages and a couple of minutes. Through this challenge I realized that the past year and a half of being an instructional coach I've only taken the time to reflect on my practice when something wasn't going in the most ideal direction. This is a similar trait I find among educators, we tend to focus on "the bad", our weaknesses or what's going bad and we tend to push aside "the good", our strengths or what's going right. Although, it's great to reflect and analyze the situations that aren't going as planned we should also take the time to reflect on the positive so that we can take some of the strategies/ techniques and apply them to the negative. This is the match that sparked the light to my blogging candle, so I intend to reflect on a weekly basis through this blog. Through my reflections I hope to share tools and strategies, but most importantly I hope to inspire and showcase that the only way to continue personal growth is through self reflection. 

The best way I thought would help me begin my self- reflection of the first semester was by sending the teachers I coach a survey about my coaching. 

HERE is the survey if you'd like to make yourself a copy. Shout out to Julie Peters, our campus ELA Specialist, for providing me her version of the survey.

I 100% believe that the best way of reflecting on my practice is by asking for feedback from those I am supporting. This does mean though that I must not only be open to the feedback but willing to take action on that feedback. Which is why I made it a purpose to let the teachers know that I made the form anonymous by not collecting emails or names as well as specifically stating that I appreciate feedback and that my feelings truly can't be hurt because I value what they think. I think through this honesty teachers felt comfortable enough to speak the truth, I imagine it's not the only reason but it is one of the reasons. For the results, I valued all questions but there were a few that I prioritized over others and those were the questions on trust and the open ended questions "My coach's areas of growth are..", "I wish my coach..", and "I wish my coach would do more of...". I am proud to say that the ones who responded to the survey all selected "strongly agree" for "I trust my coach", when I saw the results I actually whispered an excited "Yeeessss!!!" when I saw that. As for the other questions some I received two valuable pieces to work on, one was for me to model a lesson and the other was to create a google drive folder where all the resources I share with them can be stored in one place. Both of these are things I can easily begin doing and I would not have thought I needed to do if I had not asked for feedback! This is why I encourage you, no matter what position you are in (instructional coach, teacher, admin, etc.) to begin your reflection by asking those around you to provide feedback.

To think, I almost pushed writing this post to another day! As I previously said my "professional" promise is to reflect on a weekly basis but I also wanted to share my "personal" promise for the year. This one was inspired when asked by Sam Karns "What is your word for 2020?" If I'm being honest, I saw the tweet asking this and couldn't immediately say what my word was so I slept on it and the next day I was able to answer... my word for 2020 is happiness. I do a great job of pushing my self and I pride myself on being the positive person however, I've realized the only way I can do both of these genuinely is by simply being happy. Part of happiness that I need to work on comes from self-care which is most definitely one of my weaknesses. For this reason I want to try and end each blog post with one action I took that week for self-care purposes. 

Self-care of this week was actually drinking water! I was not as intense as the "water gallon challenge" but I did drink between 80-100 ounces of water each day. Maybe one month this year I'll try the water gallon challenge but for now I'm happy I didn't just bring my jug of water to school but I actually drank it! 

Thank you if you actually stuck around and read this whole thing... see you next week!