Learning is in the Journey

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." ~ Jack London

On Friday I had an interesting conversation with a group of Year 4 students about New Year's resolutions and they had some relevant statistics to share. They informed me that around 25% of people break their resolutions in the first week. I felt the need to confess that I fell into that category as I had not been able to keep my resolution to write a blog post every day. I had made this promise to myself to get back into the habit of reflecting on my own practice as a teacher. Composing a blog post helps me to sort out my thinking and it's an important part of my learning process. I had hoped that the blogging challenge would help me form the habit of writing on a regular basis - not just when struck with a sense of inspiration. So why did I let it drop after only six days?

When trying to explain why I had not kept my resolution, I realised that the blogging challenge resolution wasn't really meaningful to me. The reason I write is to reflect - I need to have a reason to compose a post. While the prompts were interesting, I was more focused on what was happening at school, such as the Year 4 unit of inquiry that will integrate Minecraft as a virtual learning space. The students helped me to see that I needed to revamp my resolution - it had to have a purpose. If I am writing to reflect, then that is what I should do. I should stop worrying about writing daily superficial posts, and focus on reflecting on what we are trying to accomplish at school.

I am grateful to the folks at TeachThought who created the Reflective Blogging Challenge. It did help me kickstart my stalled blog. And I vow that should I ever find myself in a state of writer's block I will go back to their prompts and pick one - I will not wait for elusive inspiration.

Thank you 4b - next post...Minecraft related!

Image Credit: Writer's Block by Sharon Drummond on Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0