Give yourself Permission

Change...utter that word and you strike fear into the hearts of the people hearing it.

We like the familiar, we like what we know.  Being asked to change means unfamiliar, the unknown.

Think about our students.  When they go from elementary school to junior high there can be a lot of fear and trepidation.  All of a sudden they are in a new building and surrounded by the unknown.  We have lockers now, with built in locks...ahhhh, I can't open my locker.

Fortunately, most junior highs or middle schools have some type of an orientation for the students, giving them the opportunity to walk around the building and find their classrooms, meet the teachers who are new to them and practice (often repeatedly) opening and closing their locker.

Practice, practice, practice helps make change more manageable.  Why?  The more you practice, the more familiar it becomes and the more natural it feels.

Our family has had a lot of opportunity to change.  Mike's career has given us the opportunity to change our lives on 3 different occasions.  The first change was when he first became a Principal.  The kids were little so for them, the change was fairly easy, in fact unnoticeable for the most part.   For me, that was the biggest change.  I went from being a working mom to a stay-at-home mom.  I was fortunate that we were still in Minnesota when this first change happened.  Minnesota has ECFE (Early Childhood Family Education) so I had the chance to get together with other moms and their children twice a week. The ECFE was one of the biggest helpers for me, it helped me transition from working to staying at home by giving me people to talk to and with and discuss parenting issues.  It gave me a social group.

Our next change was again, fairly easy for the kids as they were 5 and 2.  This one was difficult for me in a different way.  I was used to being a stay-at-home mom (to a point), but now my baby girl was going to school and I had only a 2 year old at home and no ECFE as Iowa does not have that program.  I floundered, I was very lonely.  I love my kids, I love being with them, but I needed adult interactions!  Mike and his staff saw a LOT of Matthew and me for lunch.  We were often there for lunch in the teacher's lounge, where Matthew tended to be the lunch time entertainment!

In both of these moves, however difficult they were for me at the beginning, I adjusted and adapted by practice.  Okay, so you really aren't practicing, you are submerged in it in the case of moving.  You have no choice but to adapt and survive.  The longer we were there, the more of a chance I gave my new situation, the easier it became.

Matthew's biggest change was when he was 3 and I went from being a stay-at-home mom to being a working mom again.  He started daycare.  Yes, he had been in daycare before, but not in his memory, he had been an infant then.  To him, his mommy was leaving him.  I remember those first days, dropping him off, him clinging to me screaming and the daycare provider having to peel him off of me.  I did the "right" thing and told him I loved him and smiled and told him to have a great day and that I would see him after school.  I didn't dawdle and hang around and try to calm him, that would only make the difficulty of change greater.  I didn't let him see how upset it made me, that would only add to his angst.  But I cried every day on the way to work.

Sometimes change is gradual, but sometimes it is quick.  Sometimes the best way to deal with change is  to just do it, kind of like ripping off the band-aid quickly.  The more you prolong the pain, the worse it is.  Just get it over with and do it quickly, the pain ends sooner.

I tend to be the do it quickly type of person when it comes to change.  Change is inevitable in life.  Why make it harder, why cause yourself more agony living in the past when the future is coming or is here.

An example, when we moved most recently, 15 months ago, the kids kept wanting to go back to our old town and visit friends.  They struggled saying good bye to the friends they had made for the 6 years we lived there.  Leaving was a HUGE and scary change for them.  But our new home was over 5 hours away, so there was no option of going back for visits.  The change was quick and complete.  Quite honestly, it was the easiest way for the kids.  They had to submerge themselves into their new surroundings, they had no choice.  Maggie found the Cross Country team and a church youth group right away.  Matthew found neighborhood kids and the swimming pool.  Both kids very quickly adapted and changed and enjoyed themselves.

About 6 weeks after we moved, we went back to our old town for a birthday celebration for a friend of mine.  The kids got to stay with and see old friends.  Do you know what they talked about?  Their new friends.  However, leaving again and going home was hard...it was like they scratched off the scab and opened the wound.  Had we left it alone and not revisited the past, their wound would have kept healing rather than being re-opened.

I know change is hard, I know it is hard to give up old ways, old practices, the way it has always been done.  No one has ever said change is easy.  Every move we have made has led to new jobs for Mike and me.  In each of our new jobs there has been change.  For him, it has been a new role in the school, so in some ways easier to change be because you weren't in that position before so it's not changing how you have always done it, it's finding out what you are supposed to be doing!  For me it's been the same role in different places.  You learn quickly that although you are teaching the exact same subject, you have to change how you do it based on what the former education of those students has been.  You have to look at the surroundings, the environment of the students and adapt your ways to best fit them.

As teachers we are facing changes all the time.  The latest is the Common Core - it tells us what children must know or be able to do at the end of each grade.  It does NOT tell us how we have to get there, but it tells us where we must end up.  This is hard for people when they are used to everyone in the grade doing things the same way at the same time.

I had a teacher in High School who used the overhead projector for his lectures.  He had the kind of projector that had a roll of the transparencies.  yes, like a roll of paper, only this was a transparency of his notes for lecture.  He had all the rolls in his closet in the classroom, numbered.  Every year he would take out #1 to start, then go to #2, etc.

So on the plus side - it was consistent.  You knew that every child going through those classes would come out learning/hearing the exact same material.  It was thorough.  My having planned this all out, he was very thorough, we got a lot of information.

But now that I am a teacher, what about those "teachable moments?"  When something is asked or said and as a teacher you really should grab onto that and take your lesson that way?  If you have every word, every test, every plan written and don't vary from the path, you miss what could get the attention of students in a way you had never imagined.  Often you can steer those moments into a way that even greater benefits what you were trying to teach!

A co-worker of mine was telling me the other day how his dad never uses the same lesson plans two classes in a row because every class is different and their learning is different.  Infact, he goes as far as to write different tests each class because how they covered it or what exactly they covered, may change.  Now THAT is what I call great teaching.  The willingness and ability to change and adapt as the kids need it.

As teachers we are teaching kids, not a subject.  We need to keep in mind that every year the kids we are teaching change and so should the way we teach to them.  What works for one doesn't work for another.  My daughter had a fabulous 1st grade teacher who embraced this philosophy to it's core.  He truly believed that every child deserved to be taken as far as THEY were able to go.  That meant that he basically had different plans for each of his students.  Each student may be in a different place or at a different level, but he worked with them to make sure they each obtained THEIR best.  That looked different for each child.  You might wonder if all he ever did was work.  Nope, it's more of a philosophy change than anything.  It's a way of looking at the delivery, the way you approach your teaching.  He was ready to adapt to what his students needed.

What does that look like in practice now for us with the Common Core and all of our new expectations?  It means that no two classrooms look the same.  It means that each teacher is teaching to the kids they have, not the class they had when they wrote the lesson plans.  It means that we have to dump some activities, plans that we have done for years (and possibly really enjoyed) because they have nothing to do with the Common Core.  It means embracing technology in a way we can't even yet imagine.  It means being willing and open to change our ways.

Kids, they will change easily.  They adapt much better than adults do, they are constantly being asked/told by adults what to do, so the idea of change doesn't scare them.  For example, give them a brand new smart phone and no directions...they will have it working and doing tons of things much more quickly than an adult with an instruction book.  Kids are willing to try and fail.

I think that is the key to change...the ability to give yourself permission to fail.  We stick with what we know and what we've always done because we know it and it is safe.  Trying something new takes us out of our comfort zone, it scares us and makes us vulnerable.  Kids are willing to try, to mess around with new technology and figure it out as they go.

As adults we need to follow their example.  Schools around the country are moving away from text books, they are outdated and "so last year."  They are moving to digital texts or information.  There is no pressure to "get to the end of the book" like there was in the past.  Now the pressure is to teach all the aspects of the Core.  That means doing things in different orders than we have in the past, looking at what we are doing and seeing how it fits in or if it doesn't fit in, being willing to say, "Okay, it served it's purpose in the past.  I liked it, the kids liked it, but I need to find new things that will serve our new purpose and be just as rewarding."

Change, although intimidating, doesn't have to be so scary.  Allow yourself to be human, allow yourself to make mistakes and even fail.  We learn from those errors, we learn from trying new things and seeing how they work.  Allow for the fact that what works for some will not work for all.  Your colleague may be teaching the exact same course, but they approach it in a totally different way...that is perfectly okay.  Just like we don't all learn in the same way, we don't all teach in the same way, and that is okay!

Allow yourself the freedom to change, give yourself permission to try new things and experiment.  The first expectation I have in my classroom is "Always Try."  I explain to the kids that some things may seem wacky and weird, but you may learn something about yourself along the way that you didn't know before.  You might find out you can do something that you thought you could not do.

Give yourself permission to try, to think outside of the box, to make mistakes, to fail, to succeed, to learn a new way, to learn many new things, to approach things from a different perspective.

Give yourself permission to change and be okay with it.