Secrets of Being a Linchpin

There are many characteristics of a linchpin that I can relate to, but I'll spare you my self-analysis. Instead I'll let you in on two secrets on being a linchpin courtesy of Seth Godin.

"The law of linchpin leverage: The more value you create in your job, the fewer clock minutes of labor you actually spend creating that value. In other words, most of the time, you're not being brilliant. Most of the time, you do stuff that ordinary people could do."

"The only way I know of to become a successful linchpin is to build a support team of fellow linchpins."

Linchpin

I picked up a copy of Linchpin by Seth Godin at the library a few months ago after I noticed several others reading it and mentioning it. I've only read through a few chapters whose titles grabbed my attention, but what I've read has been thought-provoking, challenging, and inspiring. With it being summer much of my reading has been in small chunks in many different locations (several different states) and I've lost track of a lot of my thoughts that I wanted to post. So, you'll just have to read it yourself. :>) I'd recommend "Becoming the Linchpin" for starters. "The Culture of Connection" is great as well with a confirmation of all of the collaborative work that we do.

I guess what has struck me the most in my reading is both how necessary it is for me to be a linchpin in my role as an educator and how my own kids and my students will need to be linchpins to succeed in the changing world of work.

If anyone else is reading or has read Linchpin, I'd love to discuss it with you.

The contagious "I can" bug

In the following TED Talk, Kiran Bir Sethi talks about how wonderful it is that the "I can" bug can be contagious. She describes becoming infected when she was 17, but wishes she was infected at age 7. So she started the Riverside School on the premise of "children being the change."

It is interesting how the student process she described corresponds to what we learned from Comprehension and Collaboration last year. Students use inquiry to dig deep into the content/problem/issue, they work on solutions, and then they take it to the community.

Lots of inspiration packed into a short presentation.



[Thanks to Aaron for sharing this Presentation Zen post in his Reader.]

Searching for artistic inspiration

[A few weeks ago, I gave myself permission to post random, incomplete thoughts. This looks to be one of those.]

Over Spring Break, C. (my wife) and I browsed through a local gallery and talked about the idea of incorporating more art into the life of our family. We discussed the idea of a making a place for our kids to create art that we could use alongside them.

Along with having a place for art, I talked about the idea of finding sources of artistic inspiration. I set out to find a few blogs that may provide a little daily inspiration. Thanks to a friend and colleague of C.'s (who is also an amazing photographer), I began following the Herman Miller Lifework blog. In the past month I have enjoyed being exposed to talented artists and inspiring workspaces.

One of my colleagues frequently mentions the work of Daniel Pink so last weekend I checked out A Whole New Mind (AWNM) from the library. I was captivated from the first page. I have since jumped ahead to his chapter on Design. In it, he offers suggestions for exploring and experimenting with design. Great resources - highly recommended.

Ironically, at the same time I was reading AWNM, C. was having fun in NYC with her mom and aunt for six days. She, too, had art and design on her mind as she explored many of the amazing stores in the city. When she brought back souvenirs for the family, the kids received Central Park t-shirts and I received a copy of simple home: calm spaces for comfortable living which she purchased at Ochre. Now I'm inspired to repaint our home's interior and get rid of half of what we own.

These are a few places I've found inspiration over the past month. Where do you find inspiration for your own creative pursuits?

Now forming: Curriculum 21 Book Club

Hey ZPS folks,

Interested in taking a closer look at "upgrading" your curriculum (assessments, content, etc.) to better prepare your students for the work of the future? Join us (three teachers, one adminstrator - so far) in reading and discussing Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World.

Shoot me an email if you're interested.

Cairns

When I launched my classroom blog last September I named it Cairns. I liked the idea of the posts marking my students' learning trail through the year. Then, reality sunk in and I realized that I needed balance more than anything this school year. So, my classroom blog became a low-priority item (as did this blog).

This weekend my brother was in town for a short visit. One of the many things we talked about was the desire to blog on a more regular basis (to be honest, I have missed blogging quite a bit the past three months). To that end, my goal is to make this a place to share the little things my brain is working on each week. I am giving myself permission to post incomplete thoughts, wonderings, and the little "ah-has" -- items that I had previously felt "unworthy" to be blog material. The hope is that, in the end, they'll mark the way along a path to new learning.

[Photo courtesy of my brother, Jed Anderson, from his collection of images captured on a recent trip to Thailand.]

Balance

For the past five or so years, a good friend and I have been setting goals at the start of a new year. The hope has always been that by sharing our goals with each other, we could support one another as the going got tough.

Life gets busy, though. This past year we checked in with one another about once a month (we currently live 600 miles apart), but I couldn't even tell you what my goals for 2009 were without looking them up. So this year we're simplifying things and going with a single goal.

Why am I sharing this with you? My goal for 2010 is to maintain some semblance of balance in my life and one of the areas that throws me off-balance the most is work. Mostly because I love my job. It's always challenging, never dull, and no two days are the same. I'm also eager to watch and learn from others, to collaborate, and to do lots of reading and reflecting. However, while I try to never put work before my family, I will often sacrifice my personal time for work. And that doesn't make me the best husband or father (or teacher or friend, for that matter).

That being said, I need to lighten my load. I need to choose wisely where I devote my time and energy. I'd love to be doing more writing about the thinking that I've been doing as a part of our Comprehension and Collaboration book club, about the small group of folks who have committed to studying constructivism and inquiry and applying it in our upper elementary classrooms, or just about the learning I do in my own classroom on a daily basis. But as you may or may not have noticed, I haven't posted much here over the past month. I can't seem to find the time. Maybe it's the holidays. Maybe it's having a two year old at home (in addition to 3rd & 1st graders). [I've noticed recently that many of my favorite bloggers have kids that are at least high school age, if not older. Maybe there will be more time then?] Maybe I'm simply trying to juggle too much.

Anyhow, friends and colleagues, I'm asking for your encouragement to help me maintain balance. The next time you see me getting ready to jump into a new endeavor, remind me to think on it for day or so before committing. Also, this doesn't mean that I'm not interested in reading something new or working on a new project, I just hope to be more mindful about it.

So, thanks for listening. How about you? Any goals, personal or professional, for 2010?

[Photo credit: SlackLine by Speleo Perdido on Flickr.]

Happy Thanksgiving from the Holland-Anderson Family!

ZPS PSD: Google Reader Session

Hello to the participants in Shari and Kip's session on using Google Reader.  Below you'll find links to blogs that you may be interested in following.  These are just a few starting points.  Remember, there is often a list of great blogs (a.k.a. a blog roll) in the sidebar of each blog.  Have fun exploring and remember to share anything that interests you!

A few of Shari and Kip's favorite blogs:

• A Year of Reading
• Two Writing Teachers
• The Stenhouse Blog
• Carol's Corner
• creative literacy
• All-en-A-Day's Work
• Visolutionary

Or, if you trust Shari and I to choose good content, you can click on this link to subscribe to all of these sites in a bundle.


 The following articles contain lists of blogs from a wide range of topics:

• Scholastic's Instructor: Top 20 Teacher Blogs
• Choice Literacy: Favorite Blogs: A Great Way to Keep Up with New Children's Books
• Bookmark This! A list of leading edge ed-tech blogs
  

I have created a Moodle site called The Connected Teacher for those who are interested in learning more about using blogs and Twitter for their professional learning.  You can either log in as a Guest or use the enrollment key: tweet.

Some other articles that you may find of interest:

• Getting Started with Google Reader
• Educational Leadership: How Teachers Learn: Learning with Blogs and Wikis
• A few posts I've written on using Google Reader
  

Our Workshop Schedule

One of my biggest challenges of teaching using reading and writing workshops is making sure that I confer with each student, check in with their reading response and writer's notebook, and give each student a chance to share each week.  As I tend to be an out-of-sight, out-of-mind person, when I saw index cards tacked to a bulletin board under the heading "Writing Conference" in a colleague's classroom a few years ago, I knew it was something that I had to try.  Over the past few years, our classroom workshop schedule has slowly evolved to what you see in the image below.

In an ideal week (does that exist?), a student will turn in his or her reading response notebook to me after independent reading, I'll read it that night and then have a chance to discuss their reading and their responses the following day when I confer with them.  On the following day when they have an opportunity to share some of their thinking from their independent reading book, I can prompt them for any particular thinking that we had discussed the previous day or that they shared in their reading response notebook.  The same process goes for writing. 

What systems or structures do you use in your reading and writing workshops? Or, borrowing words from Samantha Bennett in That Workshop Book, how do you help your "students [to] read, write, and talk about important content in order to learn how to read, write, talk, and develop their dispositions as thinkers?"