Blogged Down by Your Reflection?

Knowing how deep to reflect, the questions to ask and what purposeful reflection is is always a challenge.  Thinking about the levels of professional learning and guidance in the meeting that I attending with the other professional learning leaders was so exciting.  Exploring the tiers of professional learning was interesting and I enjoyed what was said about 'asking why five times'.

I want to explore that today.

One of my huge challenges is making phonecalls home.

It's not that I don't see the benefit of them - I really do.
It's not that I don't have time, though admittedly, sometimes the calls are a little further down the list of urgent priorities - especially at this time of the year.

The conflict lies in the fact that making phone calls scares me.  Even as a little girl, I hated making calls.  I always felt I was interrupting people, I'd make a mistake when talking to them or that they wouldn't hear who I was.  These are all still concerns today.

Despite this, I know that this is an important goal of mine and my colleagues and I who call find this task rather arduous are working together in a supervisory role to make sure our calls still happen.  Today I had a great time, celebrating a chase on the sports field, the fact that a child was not more badly hurt when they were knocked off their bike on the way to school, and the effort and determination a child puts in at school, including her courage in attending camp when she had been hesitant to do so.  I made some great connections with parents and it was awesome to hear their tone change from nervous and defensive to buoyant and celebratory.  I'll keep it up.

Asking why of this process is challenging.

1.  Why do I still feel nervous about making calls?
I feel as a parent that I don't want to be disturbed at home and as such, don't like to disturb others.

2.  do I feel disturbed at home?
Because I feel my time with my family is precious?

3.  Why do I feel my time with my family is precious?
Because I have so little of it.

4.  Why do I have so little of it?
Because I'm spending time working all the time.

5.  Why am I spending time working all the time?
Because I have an amazing class and want to do well by them this year.

So the phone calls are important.  They are building relationships and connections with parents and celebrating kids successes.