On March 5 and 6, Peg and I had the honor of co-facilitating the Assessment, Teaching, & Learning Winter Retreat for the SBCTC. Usually when I am a part of something like this, I will reflect and write for hours about my ideas. I took a lot of notes. We generated a lot of notes, people! Unfortunately, I am a bit swamped at the moment with deadlines, conferences, and quite frankly—who am I kidding? We are all busy. Yet you took the time to come, new friends. You took the time to talk. To care. To share. One of you commented on the power of breaking bread together, and that’s exactly what we did. Funding well spent.
I want this blog post to hit your inbox at the same time as the survey Jen will send to you. It’s very important that we start something soon while it’s on our minds. The screencast video below and my wiki are not my finest work, but I’ve let go of aiming for perfection. The moving target of perfection is what stalls the Slow Ideas. My unfinished hunch may resonate with you and I invite you to help me so we can help each other. No rush. No pressure. Think about it.
I didn’t get to talk to everyone personally, but I tried to look you all in the eye. You know that communication teacher trick, right? You scan the room with your eyes and everyone feels noticed. Cared about. Recognized. And what a group! Wow.
Can I also admit that I felt like such an impostor standing up there? Really. All of you are so smart. So driven. So experienced. So very cool. I left there thinking I could be happy at any of your institutions because you care about the same things I do. I don’t want to speak for Peg, but I could tell she left energized by this experience. If nobody would say no to my ideas–as we discussed–I would ask for you all to have funding and support to do the work you want to do on your campus.
So. Here’s the wiki–The This–in screencast below–that I started that we didn’t talk about the retreat. And that’s okay. I can roll with changing the lesson plans, so to speak. And I mention “a five-year” in this video as a way to think about this work in smaller ways. It’s a huge sea-change that we have to see wave by wave. Sometimes this work–professional learning–feels like we’re drowning in sorrow yet a retreat like this is a life raft. That SOS we can only see and feel when People Talk To People. Door to Door. Click by Click.
I explain this retreat follow-up in a five minute video http://screencast.com/t/xjZ5nitHPU
Here is the wiki http://atlwinterretreat2015.wikispaces.com/
And yes, dearest retreat attendees, you need to own your “Wow.”
photo credit: c’est moi
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