It’s hard to believe that we’re already in the second week of the second term, this year is flying by at a breakneck pace. However, before it gets too far ahead of us I wanted to slow down and come back to something that I really believe to be the most important thing we can do as educators…model.
I’ve written about modeling our life as ‘learners’ for our students before but this goes beyond that, this is bigger, and is easier to forget. At the beginning of the year, before we hit full stride, it’s easier to keep the small things in mind. Modeling for our students, as important as it is, often seems like one of those small things. It’s something that is easily overlooked as the year goes on. We see our students’ true colors and they get to see ours…what are they seeing?
Recently I discovered Jennifer Gonzalez and her amazing website, The Cult of Pedagogy. If you have some time it’s most definitely worth a look, she’s got great stuff to share about education. I also began following her on Twitter, and over the weekend she shared one of her past blog posts. As I read it, I realized that it was perfect timing for this piece at our school. It came as a wonderful reminder to me and I believe you’ll find it as a great reminder as well.
The post is titled, Lessons in Personhood: 10 Ways to Truly Lead in Your Classroom, and it is outstanding. In fact, you should stop right now and read that post.
Jennifer’s 10 lessons are as follows but you’ll have to read the post to get the details…if you haven’t already read it, you should really do it now…
- Lead with imperfection.
- Lead with assertiveness.
- Lead with relationships.
- Lead with language.
- Lead with self-control.
- Lead with manners.
- Lead with quality.
- Lead with humor.
- Lead with enthusiasm.
- Lead with humility.
Over the last 12 weeks I’d like to think that I’ve done my best to lead in this way but I will continue being mindful of these 10 “Lessons in Personhood”. Similarly, I hope that you take these lessons to heart and stop to think for a minute about what it is that you’re modeling for our students. These lessons go beyond education, management, or business. These truly are lessons for how to be a better person.
Week 12, hard to believe…enjoy it 🙂
Pushing Forward 
lead with humor. Every time you make someone laugh you get an extra 15 minutes on earth.