This whole blogging thing has been such a conundrum to me. On the one hand, I have so many ideas and thoughts about teaching and education in general that sometimes I feel like I have to get them out just to clear my head. On the other hand, I often feel like no one really cares what my thoughts about teaching and education are, so I just keep them to myself. Somewhere there has to be a happy medium, especially since one of my favorite things is talking about teaching and learning.
This past week I was participating in #USEdChat on Twitter (Still not on Twitter as an educator? What are you waiting for?) and the topic was blogging. There were so many educators sharing many of my same feelings and fears that I felt bolstered in the decision to try this thing again. So here I am, somewhere around four years since my last post trying to revive this blog and my sanity.
So much has changed in the past four years. When I last wrote on here, I was completing a school administration program and trying to decide if I really wanted to go into administration. I then decided to move states and go back in the classroom where, honestly, my greatest passions lie. I started a doctoral program on Organization Leadership in K-12, and have since moved back home. I actually worked in administration for the past year. Let me tell you that life is not always greener on the other side. Very often administration is caught between a rock and a hard place, and right now, that particular hard place is not where I want to be. Thus, I am moving back toward my love, curriculum and instruction. As I told a group of educators at a recent EdCamp here in NC #EdCampBullCity (Don't know what an EdCamp is? Check out one of my earlier posts.), "I want to talk about teaching and learning not just discipline."
Please don't think that I am anti-discipline, but I definitely have learned to look at student Behavior much differently over the years, as that linked post shows. In fact, I continue to refine my thoughts on behaviors and school discipline as my dissertation topic is on Restorative Justice and the effects of school discipline paradigms on teachers. So often we only talk about school discipline and the effects on students, but whether or not teachers buy-in or feel supported by these discipline policies affects what happens in our classrooms academically. Again, everything I do comes back to teaching and learning.
Now that I am up-to-date, I'm excited to open this blog back up. I hope that I can spark dialogue with others through my writing, and I hope to share things that are valuable. Thank you for reading!
