Last week I entered a meeting feeling pretty good about my teaching life. I was sticking with my goals for the year, trying some new things outside my comfort zone, and achieving some success doing them, but soon my head was fixed on all of the things I wasn't doing. All I could think about were the things other people were doing or telling me I should be doing that I wasn't. I was feeling inadequate and I just couldn't shake it. I was, as ASCD CEO and Executive Director Dr. Gene R. Carter recently phrased it on a panel discussingdeveloping teacher leaders, experiencing "initiative fatigue." There was too much, too fast, and with too little time for me to evaluate or prioritize the ideas coming at me, let alone do anything with them. I was overwhelmed and anxious. I was lost.
Assuming that I was not the only teacher in the room feeling that way (and I doubt I was), what was the collective effect of those feelings having on the atmosphere of our school? Were all of these well-intentioned ideas empowering teachers or disenfranchising them?
Returning home with my two-and-a-half year old son Mason, I grabbed the mail and the cover of a parenting magazine caught my eye and added to my self-doubt. Splashed across the cover were blurbs for articles such as "Are You Raising a Happy Child?," "Screen Time: How Much is Too Much?," and "Manage Your Toddler's Tantrums." Once again, I began questioning myself: Was I doing all of these things? Was I doing them well enough?
As a result of my questioning I realized that parents too were susceptible to their own sort of initiative fatigue. In addition to media sources, I wondered if parents were overwhelmed with messages from schools such as
3-8-14 THE WHOLE WEEK @ The Whole Child Blog — Whole Child Education
The Whole Child Blog — Whole Child Education: THE WHOLE WEEK @ The Whole Child Blog How School Design Affects School CultureEducation Week's 2013 Quality Counts report investigated the effect of a school's social and disciplinary environment on students' ability to learn and the educators responsible for teaching them. Watch this video to explore some of the ways to configure school design to supp