My Blogless Year

…or, ‘And Nothing of Value was Lost’.

Several months ago, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in over ten years prior: take a conscious, long-term break from regular (i.e., monthly) blogging.

It didn’t start that way, of course (nothing ever does, does it?). I’ve been blogging in this space regularly since August 2007. The span from August 2007 to December 2018 is a little over 11 years. Thinking of it in other terms, that’s over half my career and nearly a quarter of my life. Clearly I must have found value in the practice to have stuck with it for so long, but at this time last year, I guess I was just, for lack of a better term… done. January 2019 came and went without feeling the urge to put pen to paper, then February… I think by March I was pretty sure I needed to give myself permission to just shut it all down for a while, rather than beat myself up over yet another month gone by without me writing anything public.

It’s interesting how these habits we develop can turn into feeling like obligations. That’s not always a bad thing: it’s how my exercise habit has stayed as consistent as it has over the course of my entire adult life. It’s how I managed to complete two graduate programs on time (and on budget!). And, until recently, it’s what’s kept me reflecting in this semi-public place about my practice.

So what happened?

Aside from the usual “life gets in the way” stuff, I think, for me, as I’ve moved up the administrative hierarchy, I’ve felt more and more vulnerable about putting my reflections out there. Please believe, reflection is still a major part of my practice – I do it often, by myself and with colleagues (and I work with the greatest team of folks who not only push my own reflection, but encourage me to push theirs as well). But I guess that as a classroom teacher and school psychologist, I just felt less put out there writing about what went well and what didn’t go as planned in my classroom or my practice. Over the last few years as a K-12 department supervisor and now as an assistant principal, I have struggled with the public reflection piece more than I did in other positions.

As I draft this and push myself to think about why that might be, I am thinking that when I was a teacher, it was about what I was doing in my classroom. Regardless of how objectively true it was or wasn’t, my perception was that I was writing about me, myself, and I. The further away I have gotten from my own classroom, the more stakeholders – students, teachers, administrators, parents, board members – are involved in my practice. Perhaps I fear my personal reflections, considerations, and questions being twisted, taken out of context, or otherwise impacting my colleagues in ways I didn’t consider likely (or just didn’t consider at all) years ago.

Perhaps these concerns are not well-founded; I’m certainly open to that possibility. Perhaps I just need to find a better way to write about what I might want to write about in ways that won’t have implications for confidentiality or propriety. Perhaps my perspective has shifted with age (I started blogging at 30; I’m 42 as I write this). Perhaps I just need to get over myself.

Miscellaneous Observations from 2019

People still read this blog. I get hits daily for a variety of posts but the most visited post of 2019 (and overall) is this one from 2012 in which I describe my transition from high school English teacher to school psychologist. The really cool part is that people still leave comments asking me for advice as they face similar decisions and transitions – the most recent one came in August of this year!
Control is an illusion. As a general principle, I’ve come to accept in my adult life and often advise others of it, but this truism punched me square in the nose this year in a way it hasn’t in a very long time. I generally believe it’s better to be proactive than reactive, but in some cases, reactive is all you can be.
Relationships still matter. Content knowledge matters. Theory matters. It all matters, and if someone tells you otherwise, make sure they’re not trying to sell you something. Still, the relationships we develop with students, colleagues, and families facilitate all the other stuff to a large degree; at least, that has been my experience over the last two decades in this profession, and I have experienced how both the existence and absence of strong (or at least burgeoning) relationships can impact our work.
‘Lifelong learning’ doesn’t have to be just a buzzphrase. I continue to read voraciously (most, but not all, books about my profession and/or books I think will help me improve my practice), and I put many miles on my library card this year, as well as got the most out of my Audible account. I set a goal of reading 30 books in 2019, and while I managed to double that, I think a more modest goal is appropriate for 2020, as both professional and personal obligations after work hours have increased significantly over previous years. Check out the 60 books I read in 2019 here!

Goals, Met & Unmet

For the last few years I’ve been participating in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Not that I need to be challenged to read, as I usually enjoy it, but after a multi-year spell of not doing much reading other than for graduate school & dissertation work, it was fun to do in order to get back on the bike and I guess I’ve just kept doing it out of habit.

Back in January I set a goal of reading 30 books in 2018. Seemed a bit of a lofty number, but after handily blowing past my 2016 and 2017 goals of 12 and 15 books (respectively), I thought it appropriate to set the bar a bit higher. Additionally, I decided to set a modest goal of running 300 miles in 2018. I’d done it before, but in the ensuing years my running had really fallen off as I focused my fitness regimen more on weightlifting. I figured this would be the impetus I needed to get back into it and better balance my approach to physical fitness.

So How’d I Do?

So let’s start with the good news: the reading challenge went well, aided undoubtedly by the hours I spend commuting and my Audible subscription and multiple library memberships. As of now, I have completed 53 books in 2018, and I am on track to finish at least one more in the next day or so. I always say I’m going to do a post about my favorite books of the year and I never do; I plan to change that this year and hopefully get a New Year’s Day post up about that.

The running challenge was not quite as successful, but at the risk of soft-peddling it, I will say that I gained some valuable insight from my failure to reach that goal. As of today I have 195 miles under my belt in 2018 and with a week left, I will definitely top 200 – still well short of my original goal. I realized something, though, sometime in the early fall: from the start of the year, I had aimed to run 3.1 miles (5K) twice per week, but for some reason, I just wasn’t able to fit that into my week along with after work commitments and my lifting schedule. As a result, I only ran once per week for most of the first eight months of the year.

Once school started in September, I reassessed my goals for running – why do I run at all? For me, it’s not about training to go longer distances, but really just as cardio for healthier living and to support my weightlifting. I used 3.1 miles as a convenient way to think about how much I wanted to run, but since mileage wasn’t really a specific training goal, did it really matter if I ran 3.1 miles every time I ran?

I got the bright idea that instead of focusing on mileage, I was going to focus on time – after all, I was not trying to increase mileage for marathon training, I just wanted to burn some more calories. I started limiting my runs to 30 minutes, and however far I ran, that’s how far I ran. To my great surprise, I found myself much more committed to maintaining that twice weekly running schedule alongside my lifting, and my monthly mileage jumped as a result! January-June I was doing 12-15 miles/month. July I totally fell off (the less said about that, the better), I had a slight increase in August (taking advantage of treadmills in the air-conditioned gym on our cruise ship), and from September on I have been closer to 24-25 miles per month.

Call it purely psychological, call it wimping out from running the full 5K twice per week, I don’t care. I may have fallen short of the goal this year, but I learned something valuable about myself and how I best work toward this particular goal. If I keep this pace up, I will have no problem hitting 300 miles in 2019, but more importantly, I’m seeing the health and aesthetic benefits I was really looking for all along (looking leaner, lower resting heart rate). It’s not necessarily the number of miles I ran in a single session that mattered, but the overall volume of work done, and if I had to ‘chunk’ it to smaller individual doses to do more overall, then so be it.

I hate sounding like a cliche or a bumper sticker, but my failure to hit this particular goal by doing things the way I used to do them really did result in me learning more about myself, my purpose, and what works for me, and subsequently, how to better achieve the results I wanted. In this instance, I really was able to ‘fail forward’.

Do Break the Chain

The summer I wrote my dissertation, I posted here about a productivity strategy called Don’t Break the Chain. Click the link for the backstory, but the gist of it is that it’s easier to maintain a habit if you keep at it – even for a little bit – every day, and monitor your progress visually (e.g., Xing off days on a calendar).

The good news is that it worked for me to help me get the last two chapters of that dissertation drafted and finalized over the months of July and August. The bad news is that is also works in reverse – I’ve now maintained a chain of 143 days uninterrupted by blogging. This is not a trend I’m proud of; in fact, it’s the longest break between blog posts I’ve had since I started blogging in the summer of 2007.

It’s been bothering me that I haven’t found the capacity to sit with my thoughts and write, especially since I’ve spoken time and time again about how therapeutic and valuable I find writing, I guess just not enough to actually force me to sit down and do it.

Enter Christina Torres‘ blog post in my RSS reader earlier today. Who knows how and why circumstances come together the way they do, but she wrote just what I needed to read at the time I needed to read it. Rather than try to sit down, gather my thoughts, and put together a coherent, “like-and-fave-worthy” statement of profound educational import, I’m taking the advice I gave students for however many years (and the message I took from Christina’s post) – just write. And I’m not doing it sat in my office, or in my living room, or some other “writer-friendly” space – I’m banging this out standing in my kitchen, dripping wet after a run, just to get the words on the page.

It’s my hope that by breaking the chain of bloglessness (?), I can kickstart whatever reflective and creative juices have powered my writing for as many years as they have. It’s something I’ve done here before – a quickie post, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, just to get myself back on the horse. It’s worked in the past; let’s see if it takes this time.

Thanks, Christina. Just goes to show you never know the impact your thoughts and ideas – whether they’re blogged, tweeted, podcasted, or simply shared face-to-face between colleagues and friends – can have on another person, and it’s yet another reason why I’m not ready to give up on Twitter for one aspect – albeit an important one – of my professional learning, despite the increasingly unmanageable signal to noise ratio.

Back in the Classroom: How’d I Do?

As I mentioned back in February, I had the opportunity to get back into the classroom this past semester and teach an undergraduate course called Literacy in the Content Area Classroom at Delaware Valley University in Doylestown, PA. I taught a pretty small class of mostly sophomores and junior secondary ed majors in a variety of disciplines, and while I don’t think any of us were enthused about the idea of a 3-hour long class on a Monday night, you’d never know it by the level of energy and commitment these future teachers brought to class each week.

I still haven’t received my official course evaluations as conducted by the university, but toward the end of the course I asked my students to reflect in writing on some elements of the course; specifically, what I did this semester that they found particularly valuable as well as what I could improve upon for next time.

I appreciated the feedback I received from my students. I have no specific reason to believe they pulled their punches (although it would be disingenuous to not acknowledge their potential for discomfort with critiquing their teacher), and much of what they said to me aligned with my own observations & reflection. Below are some of the common themes that emerged from their feedback (not every single suggestion) as well as my own reflections.

Improvements for Next Time

More emphasis on Bloom’s Taxonomy. At some point toward the end of our first class period, I noticed I kept getting quizzical looks whenever I referenced Bloom’s Taxonomy. I naively assumed that all students had at least a passing familiarity with Bloom’s, which they informed me they did not. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), I got slammed with the flu later that week and had to cancel the second class. In between shivering spats and vomiting spells, I managed to put together an assignment for them to complete over the week that would provide a “101” intro to Bloom and get it uploaded to Blackboard. Upon my return, we dug in a little deeper, looking at Bloom through the lens of questioning. I got a lot of positive feedback on that along with the suggestion that I spend even more time on Bloom next time I teach the course. Roger that.

More time on discussing fiction. This one surprised me. For a class with very few students majoring in the humanities, I tried to tailor the course to what I thought would be most beneficial to agriculture and science majors (the majority of the students) and emphasize approaches to non-fiction texts (we did cover fiction, but in about 2-3 classes, instead of the 6 or 7 devoted to non-fiction). My English teacher soul loved this response, so I’ll do a better job balancing fiction and non-fiction next time.

More in-depth looks at technology tools (e.g., Newsela). This I added toward the end of the class almost as an afterthought. The students seemed to like it but I think we were all a bit frayed at this point in the semester (or maybe just me?) so it was hard for me to get a good read on how valuable it was for them in the moment. This suggestion came up a few times so I’ll definitely have to reconsider not only how I approach this (I considered having them explore NoRedInk as well but scrapped it because of time constraints) but what larger structural changes I’ll have to make to the course in order to accommodate it all.

What They Liked About This Time

Midterm conferences. Taking a page from Dean Shareski (can’t think of a specific blog post to link to but I’ve followed his writing about teaching undergraduates closely over the years) I took my assigned midterm “period” and divided it up into 15 minute segments for individual conferences with each student. This was facilitated greatly by the fact that I only had 13 students in my class; I’m not sure how (or if) I would do it with a much larger class, but I’ll cross that bridge if/when I come to it.

Optional second mini-lesson. To make a long story short, I had originally required and planned for each student to conduct two mini-lessons. A few factors led me to decide to scrap the second, but keeping in mind that some students may already have started work on their second lesson, I didn’t want that work to be for naught. I presented my students with a choice: you can either skip the second lesson (in which case the score from your first lesson would count twice in the overall accounting of the final grade) or you can present your second lesson. Nobody chose to present their second lesson after all, but many students told me they appreciated having the option to choose which way to go rather than being told.

New (to them) types of assignments. For one assignment, students were given a choice of working solo or in pairs on either a) giving a book talk with a corresponding close reading activity or b) choosing a reading selection, developing a discussion prompt, and actively moderating an online discussion over the course of a week. Many students had never seen or heard of book talks before but said they liked getting exposure to books they wouldn’t have read otherwise (my only stipulation was the book had to be about teaching). Most students had participated in online discussions before, but developing and moderating them gave them a whole new appreciation for the potential of the medium (as well as how they feel that potential is not often reached and how much work is involved in getting there).

My Reflections

Aside from generally really enjoying getting back into the teaching groove after so many years away, one big takeaway from this semester has been the single-point rubric. After hearing about it on the Cult of Pedagogy podcast and then finding it referenced elsewhere, I used them pretty much exclusively this semester. The students told me they much preferred them to the typical 4-point rubric, as did I. I even shared the rubrics I developed with some teachers and administrators I work with for their own implementation. Initial feedback from them has been positive as well, so looks like we may be onto something here.

Not that I didn’t know this already, but this semester reinforced for me just how hard teaching is. My inner perfectionist knows I would have done a better job had I not been teaching at 6pm on Monday nights after having already worked a full day and commuted 45 minutes to the university, but regardless – teaching is intellectually taxing (one of the reasons I like it so much, tbh) and proportionately rewarding. Aside from the course content, I also did my best to imbue my students with relevant pearls of wisdom here and there gleaned from my years of experience and my current position, especially as someone who hires teachers and has some insight as to what might set them apart from other candidates. Perhaps the job hunt is too far away for most of them, but hopefully in a year or two when they’re prepping for their first round of interviews, their memories will jog with something I said and maybe it’ll do some good for them.

All in all, it was a simultaneously tiring and energizing experience, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to teach the course again, tweaked ever so slightly for the better, with a new crop of future teachers.

Broadening Our Audience: Published Again!

After our short article “Teaching Social Media at Lawrence High School” was published in NJASA‘s newsletter On Target last spring (itself a follow-up to our January 2017 presentation at Techspo ’17 in Atlantic City, NJ), I spoke with my colleagues Dr. Andrew Zuckerman and Ms. Natalie Richey about fleshing it out further with more details and examples and maybe trying to get it published in a more widely circulated publication.

Just under a year later, our work paid off! Andrew, Natalie, and I are proud that our updated, more fully fleshed-out article (with the same title) was published this week in Educational Viewpoints, the annual peer-reviewed publication by the NJ Principals & Supervisors’ Association (NJPSA).

Educational Viewpoints is also published in hard-copy format, but you can read the article online at their website (or mine).

I’ve been a member of NJPSA for four years now and have always been thoroughly impressed with the quality of professional support (including workshops) they provide. I’m very proud to have been selected for inclusion in this year’s edition of EV.

Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

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