Monday Minute #1

Educational Communities: Let’s Lift Each Other Up

Ok, educational communities: let’s do this. Over the past two weeks, many of us began a new shared experience: teaching and learning online. Let’s take a collective deep breath, and lift each other up. This is hard, this is real, and many of us aren’t exactly good at this yet, though we yearn deeply for it to go well — to feel some sense of “normalcy” or “control.” Together, we can figure this out. We all don’t need to be perfect at this today. Here’s what we do need to try to find in ourselves in the coming weeks:

• Patience with ourselves, our students, our teachers, our colleagues, and our communities
• Trust in our unified commitment to learning, and to improving our professions, industries, and systems
• The ability to self-reflect, to evaluate whether emotions like frustration, anger, or resentment might really be fear (that we can untangle together)
• Empathy, for others who are struggling, and also ourselves (it’s okay to be bummed out, sad, worried, etc.)
• Self-care, to tend to our individual mental, physical, and emotional health
• Inspiration, to tap into what each of us loves, whether it is teaching, studying, learning, reading, writing, researching, communicating, persuading, empowering, representing, helping, changing lives — whatever makes you you
• Humility to ask for help, if we are feeling adrift, isolated, or stressed
• Gratitude for our health, safety, communities, and great privilege to learn together

This week, as we likely ride a roller-coaster of emotions, continuing to adjust to this new educational interchange, let’s imagine how much more impactful we will be as change-makers for others, once we get through this tremendous individual and global challenge. We will be better teachers, learners, mentors, employers, employees, classmates, colleagues, listeners, communicators, and creative problem-solvers. We will be better equipped to help others struggling in the face of fear, because we, together, have survived this.

A profound thank you to the IT Departments of all of our educational institutions!