It's the end of June and I'm reflecting (well it's July by the time I posted this). It seems like this is a good time for reflection on the year, or maybe the only free time for reflection on the year. This last semester I think was the busiest in my now complete first four years of teaching. All three of my courses were new, I was in my second semester in a new school, new department, the list goes on.
About three-quarters of the way through this semester I met with my previous department head about some interesting innovations I had made to the grade 9 course and the new style of final assessment I piloted the semester before. It was a great conversation not only about the innovations but about the pedagogy in general. This left me energized and feeling good about some advances that I had made last semester. That feeling soon turned to guilt as I had done nothing but the status quo yet this semester.
I took me quite a bit of reflection and thinking to rid myself of the status quo guilt. I came to the realization that sometimes the status quo is actually new for you and that's okay. After teaching three brand new courses and two of them being senior physics, I decided to give myself a break. This is also a message that I am going to incorporate into my new teacher mentoring program. A new course can be your innovation this semester.
Looking forward, I have ideas for innovation for these courses for next year which I think is important. Innovation and adaptation of teaching needs to happen, but sometimes that has to happen the second time around.
Yes, it was a great conversation! I really appreciate you taking the lead in trying out a different format for the final evaluation in MFM 1P.
ReplyDeleteOne of the best parts of being a teacher is also one of the worst parts of being a teacher: our job is never done. Our checklist will never be complete because there is always something else that we could be doing, like phoning parents more often, creating new classroom activities, taking part in PD, volunteering for committees or extra-curricular events, etc. It's easy to get bogged down when you see colleagues (at your own school, other schools, or even online) doing fantastic things and leading initiatives that you feel obliged to undertake on top of what you are already doing. However, it's also good that our job is never done, because it means that no two days are exactly the same, and it means that we can let go of being perfect and just focus on aiming for effort and excellence instead. Often, we feel like we are in survival mode, just trying to get through the semester with some semblance of a work/life balance.
To answer the question posed in the title of your post, "When does innovation happen?", I would say that it is tough to innovate when you are in survival mode, and one of the best ways to get out of survival mode is by getting assistance from colleagues who have been there before, which is one of the goals your mentoring program is meant to achieve. That is also why, now that teachers are not in survival mode since the school year has ended, we can more readily reflect on and celebrate our past teaching experiences, forgive ourselves for the things we wanted to do but didn't make time to complete, and set new goals for the coming year.