The Art of Noticing As an Educator
One of my goals this year: engage in the art of noticing.
If you've followed me on here, you know that I am really good at noticing problems, issues, the negative, etc. It stems from my anxiety, and it actually is helpful for me in solving problems and tackling large issues.
However, it also tends to focus me on the negative, and this constant focus actually reinforces brain pathways to be more efficient at identifying the negative.
On the flip side, I am not strengthening the pathways the same way when it comes to looking at the positive, so I end up up with a very skewed perspective of everything, and it ultimately puts me in a mental and emotional space where I don't always show up as my best self.
As such, my goal is to be intentional in looking for the good this year.
I'm always nervous with this because everyone thinks I’m talking about toxic positivity here. I’m really not. I don’t think there is any benefit to pretending the negative doesn’t exist. In fact, when an organization does it for an extended period time, you end up with a toxic and stagnant culture.
That’s far from what I’m talking about.
To better explain, I need to talk about photography. As my love of photography has grown, I’ve realized that part of why I love it is because of how it intentionally engages me in the art of noticing. I spent a few days in Banff this summer, and it was absolutely terrible weather. Like, completely awful. Non-stop rain, clouds…we barely saw any mountains while we were there.
But, then I slowed down and looked for something beautiful through my camera.
Suddenly, where before I could only see the negative aspects, I was finding things that made me smile and convinced me that there was still beauty to be found.
Was I still annoyed by the rain? Yes. Did we adjust plans to deal with the negative? Yes. Those negatives were still there, and I wasn’t ignoring them.
However, it wasn’t the only thing I was seeing anymore. I was now noticing how cool the texture of the clouds was. I was noticing how the rain was bring out a deepness to all the colors.
Simply the act of intentionally noticing the good completely changed my perspective about the experience, and I was able to enjoy even the more difficult parts of the trip.
I’ve begun to see that photography has really begun to rewire my brain in how I look around at the world. I’m more likely to unintentionally look for whatever is beautiful or positive in a situation simply because I’ve spent so much time intentionally doing it.
How does this apply to teaching?
Well, I want to tell another story to explain this.
After having been an instructional tech coach the year of online school from the pandemic, I missed getting to teach. I returned to the classroom fully, and while I loved most of it, there was one specific class that drove me up the wall.
I was often frustrated by them, and I wasn’t the teacher that I wanted to be. So many things they did started to get on my nerves, and I was constantly correcting behaviors or telling students to stop.
I hit a point where I realized that this wasn’t how I wanted to function as a teacher, and so I committed to trying one small thing. About halfway through the year, I started writing three sticky notes per day where I simply identified something I appreciated about each student. I ended up handing those sticky notes to the students that I had written about each day.
It didn’t happen immediately, but I slowly started to notice that I was becoming less frustrated. I was starting to see more often the things I appreciated about the students, and the things that were getting under my skin seemed less important.
To be clear, I still had to work my classroom management muscles like I had never had to before, but my approach was vastly different. Instead of approaching it from a place of frustration, I was able to approach it with understanding and patience. Instead of ending up being controlling, I was more collaborative with my students.
It changed the entire environment of the classroom, and it resulted in me really having a hard time saying goodbye to that class at the end of the year.
However, the impact was far greater than just my own experience. Those students are seniors this year. I had them as freshmen, and just last year, one of those students showed me that they still had their sticky note taped to their Chromebook.
Final Thoughts:
I don’t think I recognized that my own inability to balance the good with the negative had such an impact on those around me, but it really did. I showed up expecting the negative, and as a result, I carried that energy with me everywhere.
I still find myself doing it often in my new role. I let the frustrations change my perspective into a fisheye lens where all I can focus on is the negative, and a lot of that is because I have conditioned my brain to look for it.
So, this is my goal for this year. I will never be able to avoid confronting the negative, and frankly, I don’t think I would be as good at what I do if I avoided it.
However, my goal is to look for the positive, to focus on retraining my brain to see the good in every situation, to learn to enjoy things even when it isn’t going as well as I would like.
Whether I end up back in the classroom, continuing in a coaching role, or moving into school leadership, I want to be the person that brings joy and positivity into every space I show up in, even when we’re there to be critical and solve problems.
So, that’s my challenge to myself, and in turn, my challenge to you: train your brain to see the good in others, situations, and yourself so that when the going gets tough this year (and we all know it will), you will still be able to see the good in the world and those around you.
