When does Innovation Happen?

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.

Professional Learning During Social Time

During one of the initial meetings for our new mentor program one of the fellow mentees leaned over to me and said "we should do this over drinks". I think he had a great idea (not that I am promoting drinking). I have worked on teams where we were social together and teams where we weren't social. together. I know that having that more personal interaction helps with the everyday grind and maybe even introduces you to someone you didn't know very well, especially in the isolating career of teaching.

So as we are moving forward with the first semester of the new mentoring program I decided to incorporate two or three social outings. Last week was the first outing. When I organized it, I purposely didn't ask people to RSVP, I just told them where and when. As expected a couple of people stopped me in the hall or sent me an email with their regrets but I didn't hear many "I'm coming" so I wasn't sure how it would go. In the end there were over a dozen people who came and socialized after school (close to half the group). I think that's a win!

By my observations there seemed to be good conversation between many people, some social and some professional. I also heard many introductions around the table so I know some relationships were new. In the end as the crowd started to thin I was talking with a fellow mentee and he told me that he learned more than one thing that night. I also had a couple of good conversations and confirmed a couple of things about our upcoming interim reports. I think that's a double win!

Learning doesn't have always happen in the classroom or at a PD session and sometimes is better if it doesn't! Plus, it's also nice to know a bit about the person you pass in the hall everyday.