Over the last few months, I’ve been focusing on the ways that we’re rooted in the people, places, and experiences that created us. Now that March is here, it’s time to focus on what comes next. In my yoga practice, the “root to rise” is both a literal instruction about activating different muscle groups and a metaphorical direction to connect to your foundations so you can grow.
Teachers know how much foundations matter. It’s the nature of learning- one thing builds on the next, with ideas and skills combining to create new questions to explore and new things to learn. Sometimes, though, we have to put our foundations (or our connections to them) under pressure in order to test them. Using muscles (and content) in new ways can reveal misunderstandings or strengths we didn’t know we had, but isn’t that the point? Our growing edges are where the, well, growing happens, so finding the appropriate edge is the work of learning— and of teaching.
In our work, we often talk about “over time and with experience” to describe that evolution. The increasingly messy problems students solve, the diversity of resources available to them, are the ways we test those academic foundations while also teaching and practicing skills and dispositions that simply can’t be learned in isolation.
The question is always how to exert the right amount of pressure. What to change so we’re growing without breaking? This month, I’m happy to share Upping the Challenge, a free excerpt from The Complete Guide to the Critical Skills Classroom. Critical Skills teachers have spent years figuring out how to adjust just the right things at just the right times to keep students in that sweet spot between boring and too hard. I’m happy to share it with you as part of our 40th anniversary celebration, and I hope you’ll share it with your colleagues too.
I’m also sharing some resources below about growing your teacher-self and your self-self.
Rising with you!
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