Growing up in a family with several educators, I made some keen observations before starting my own journey within it. While I could spend endless time on its politics, and the societal issue with why we can never “fix” education itself, my focus remains solely on becoming a better educator.
Within every profession, there seems to be a plateau where people develop enough skills to become proficient, maybe even good for a brief period, but then stagnate in their growth. I figured out the response to this particular moment separates the disgruntled from the masters.
One of two things happen:
You recognize there’s still more to learn and when you hear praise being thrown towards others, you immediately find out what they’re doing and pick up their ideas.
Or you assume you have it figured out and when you hear praise being thrown towards others, get defensive about it.
I suppose option three is to just give up, but speaking from an education standpoint, it’s usually one of the two above.
The part I always find wild is that when you’re willing to put aside ego and pick up new ideas to implement, making mistakes and having missteps along the way, the defensiveness naturally subsides because you’re not even thinking about these ideas as a personal attack. It simply becomes part of the process to ask whether something works, if it can work for you and how.
And more often than not, the best ideas tend to be old ideas that are repackaged for a new audience. As a magician, this rings so accurately that you start to wonder whether there has been any progress in the magic world. That’s why Penn & Teller’s “Fool Us” is so popular among magicians–there’s a promise of something new… but not really. Just new takes on old ideas. Usually.
But all of this is how growth happens.
It’s how learning happens.
All you have to do is be open to it.