Start something new.
We ask our students to do it all the time, but how often do we think about how challenging that can be at times?
9 days ago, I started a 91 day challenge to blog every day of the winter.
I’m 9 days through it, and it’s as hard to get the posts out today as it was on the first day. We ask our students to make changes all the time, and we probably think to ourselves, It’s just one thing; they can adjust, each time we introduce a new expectation.
Even teachers who mean well might not recognize the impact of small changes for our students (I sure didn’t when I was a teacher, and I tried to be mindful of these sorts of things).
If teachers made one change for each class each week on my campus, students would have 126 changes each semester to deal with.
126.
That’s a lot. And that’s just one a week for each class.
Be mindful of the changes we ask students to make and the impact those changes have on all of our students.
I had not given this much thought, thinking of where students need to be might be what has driven me in the past to ask for many changes, but what you say is true, it can be overwhelming and counterproductive. This might be lessened by, rather than dictating what changes are imperative, having a conversation that might lead students to feel the need for change in order to achieve a personal goal. So much can be learned and done using the art of conversation as a springboard.