A year of inspired insights #4: How teaching Spanish to a deaf multilingual student opened my eyes

February 2, 2012

It was two days before the semester began. I was sitting in my office preparing for class when the phone rang. I looked at the call display and saw that it was the department head calling me.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hi, Sarah. I just wanted to give you the head’s up that you have a student with a disability in your class this semester.”

We get at least one student with either a physical or learning disability every semester, so this was nothing new. As instructors we were used to working with the disability resource centre on campus to help accommodate students with “learning needs”, as they were called.

“OK…?” I queried, wondering why this situation warranted a phone call.

The department head hesitated and said, “She’s deaf.”

I had taught a blind student once, but never a deaf student. I was a bit baffled. There are four primary skills in language learning: reading, writing, speaking and listening. I wondered how I was going to handle the latter two with this student.

The department head continued, “She would like to come to see you today if that is OK?”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.” I went back to my course preparation, wondering how in the world I was going to teach a deaf student Spanish.

Little did I know at the time that Zaina would be the first of two deaf students I would encounter in my career and that experience later lead to project work in the area of Deaf  Literacy.

But at the time, I was apprehensive and unsure of what to do.

First contact

An hour later, Zaina showed up at the door, accompanied by her cousin, Hiba. She beamed a smile and waved hello. I smiled, waived back and motioned for them both to come into the office and sit down.

My first surprise was that Zaina was multilingual. Her native language was Arabic and she was also fluent in English, French and American Sign Language (ASL). Spanish would be her fifth language, she said, but it would be her first time taking a language course as part of her post-secondary education. She was very focused on doing well in school and so, had asked Hiba to enroll in the course with her.

Hiba, who was also multilingual and fluent in ASL was as interested in learning Spanish as she was in helping her cousin succeed.

Zaina, explained that she had been born deaf and had a cochlear implant, which allowed her to hear to some extent. She said if she did not understand something that Hiba could translate it from English in to ASL for her.

I said that since it was a second language class, that most of the class was to be taught in Spanish, though I began to understand that I would need to change things up a bit for this situation.

Learning from my student

I confessed that I had never taught a deaf student before and that I would rely on her to tell me what she needed.

She asked for 3 things. “First,” she said. “We’d like to sit at the front of the room so I have a clear view of you and can watch you as you are teaching. Would that be OK?”

A student asking to sit at the front of the class? Heck, yeah! That would be easy.

“Second,” she said. “It will help if I can see you while you are talking.” She said that she found it difficult when teachers would write on the board and speak at the same time.

I replied, “Well, that’s just bad teaching, regardless of whether your students are deaf or not.” She nodded in agreement.

“Lastly, it will help if I can ask you about things I do not understand. Would that be OK?”

Again, this seemed like a no-brainer to me. Zaina explained though, that she had previously had teachers who got impatient if she asked for clarification during the class. I replied that it would be helpful, in fact, if she did ask questions as we went along.

Within a few moments I figured out that Zaina was very much in charge of her own learning. She demonstrated self-awareness, discipline, high levels of interest and engagement and self-regulation. She knew what she needed and was not shy about asking for it.

Adapted learning (and teaching)

As a result of Zaina’s being in my class, here are actions I took:

More “prepared” visual aids. Previous to that point, I had incorporated visual notes and explanations spontaneously into the class. With Zaina there, I prepared more PowerPoints so that the visuals could stand alone as an explanation. It turned out that other students loved them, too.

I stopped moving around the classroom. I used to circulate around the classroom during  a lesson, talking as I went. Sometimes, I even taught for a few minutes from the back of the room. With Zaina in my class, I made sure to remain in her range of vision at all times.

I paid more attention to what I was saying. As a trained speaker and Toastmaster, I learned to become aware of the “um”s and “ah”s in my speech. With a deaf student I focussed on using precise, concise language.

I asked her what made sense for her. I knew that I was venturing into uncharted territory. I asked her to help me, help her. The end result was a collaborative approach to learning that proved successful.

I opened myself up to trying new things. I knew I had some teaching techniques that worked well, regardless of the group. At the same time, I was not so stuck on what had worked in the past that I was not willing to risk trying something new as we went along.

Inspired insight

Working with Zaina made me realize that no matter how hard I tried and how much I prepared, I would never know exactly how to teach every single student 100% of the time. There are some teachers who are deeply convinced that their techniques are superior to others’ techniques. They will say with seductive (if not a little dogmatic) charisma that their methods are really amazing.

In the early years of my teaching career, I listened to a few teachers like that. I even tried to be like a couple of them. They were so convinced of their methods that it was nearly impossible not to be seduced by their unwavering belief in themselves.

Working with Zaina, and other students I have had since then, showed me that it is impossible for a teacher have all the answers. In fact, thinking that you do have all the answers means that you necessarily are not willing to consider other ways of doing things. Being a leader or a teacher or a role model does not mean figuring out the one right way to do things and then convincing others that your way is right. For me, at least, it means a constant and unrelenting search to learn more techniques and strategies and adopting the practice of “resilient adaptability” in my professional practice. That means being resilient enough to deal with unexpected challenges and adaptable enough to figure out new solutions as you go along.

How about you? How have people you have worked with prompted you to try things differently, open yourself up to new ways of doing things and improve your own professional practice? What worked? What didn’t?

Related posts:

A year of inspired insights #3: Servant leadership in the scullery

A year of inspired insights #2: Conversations change everything

A year of inspired insights #1: There’s a silver lining in every ambulance

My 2012 resolution project: A year of inspired insights

_____________

Share or Tweet this post: A year of inspired insights #4: How teaching Spanish to a deaf multilingual student opened my eyes http://wp.me/pNAh3-1do

Update – January 2018 – This blog has had over 1.8 million views thanks to readers like you. If you enjoyed this post, please “like” it or share it on social media. Thanks!

Sarah Elaine Eaton is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

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A year of inspired insights #2: Conversations change everything

January 13, 2012

So there I was, in Spain for the summer, about to take part in my first ever study abroad, language immersion experience. The Spanish embassy gave away a limited number of scholarships each year to different countries. There were a few hundred students in the program, from all over the world. I was one of two Canadians selected that year. I thought I was prepared for the immersion experience. I was wrong.

A lesson in humility

On the first day, all the students took a placement test. I had just graduated with an honours degree. I had good grades, despite having been hit by a car a few months before graduation. I was confident that I had done well on the placement test.

There were 18 different levels of classes. When I saw that my placement test determined that I would be in level 17, I thought, “It isn’t the highest level, but I guess I can live with the second highest level. Some of these Europeans seem to speak the language pretty well, so there are some people here who are better than me.”

As it turned out, level 17 was the second lowest level. Level 1 was the highest.

I was starting to realize that there were many things I did not know.

Living in an international student residence

Students were divided by nationality, gender and faith in the residences. While my classmates were from Europe and the Middle East, I was in an all-female residence with other young women from North America, Europe and Christian and Jewish areas of the Middle East.

The only language we had in common was Spanish. We found that if we wanted to make friends we had a choice: only associate with other people who spoke our first language (in my case, English) or try to make friends in Spanish.

The result was a linguistic hodgepodge – people ended up communicating however they could, in whatever language they could. We communicated what we could in Spanish and helped translate for each other in whatever language we could… English, Danish, French, Arabic or whatever we had to help each other understand and bridge our linguistic and cultural gaps.

Friendships with foreigners

I quickly developed friendships with English girl, a couple of Danish girls who lived in the same residence and two fellows from Jordan. Having grown up mostly in Canada, I had been immersed in multiculturalism since birth. I thought nothing of chatting with people from other cultures. I had an open mind.

Salim and Imad were the two Jordanians in our circle of friends. Salim was in my class and Imad was in the class of one of my Danish friends who was much more fluent in Spanish. We toured the city, went for coffee and helped one another with our studies and mostly, tried to practice our Spanish language skills together.

Struggling together, bridging the gulf

It was July of 1992. In the scope of world events, the Gulf War was still fresh in everyone’s mind. I remember the day earlier that year when they announced the war. As I watched TV, I thought, “But, there wasn’t supposed to be a war in my lifetime. World War II was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Isn’t that what our parents fought for?” But the Gulf War happened and I was pinned to CNN through most of it, just like everybody else.

In Spain that summer, I had developed friendships with people from “that part of the world”. These were good people. We had shared experiences. We struggled together to learn Spanish and cope in a culture we were not familiar with. The bond that develops when you struggle side-by-side with someone, through an experience that is both your own and shared is unlike any other bond. You can not explain it because to do so would mean explaining the depths of your vulnerability, your fears, your hopes, your dreams and the very process of living. It is hard to explain the process of living, which, if it is done right, includes some struggle.

Near the end of our program, after a few weeks of gaining language skills and solidifying friendships with the people who had come together in our social circle, I summoned the courage to ask Salim about the button he wore every day on his lapel. It was a photo button showing Saddam Hussein’s face.

I was curious about why anybody would wear a button of Saddam Hussein, especially someone who I’d come to call “amigo”. It was strange, really.

After all, Saddam Hussein was a maniac. But Salim wasn’t a maniac…. I just didn’t get it. When I asked him about it, he said, “Mi heroe. Ayuda a mi gente,” he said. We both had horrible Spanish. It took a few tries before I could wrap my head around what he was saying: “He’s my hero. He helped our people.”

From there, the conversation took off, in broken Spanish. We discovered each other’s point of view, the perceptions we had gained from the media, and our stereotypes about each other’s part of the world. It was an amazing conversation that I have never, ever forgotten. It shattered my stereotypes, challenged my world view and got me deeply engaged in a discussion I never dreamt I would ever have.

The conversation took place on the steps of the Muslim students’ residence. The Muslim students were segregated to accommodate their dietary needs and to provide for quiet at regulated prayer times. The males lived on one side and the females on the other.

Foreign students were not allowed in the residence, so if we wanted to visit, we did so on the steps of the building. Some nights there would be students out there with guitars, singing. Other times, there were groups of students chatting and studying. That night, a small group of us talked about war, terrorism, our heroes and our opinions, stereotypes and attitudes.

By the end of the night, none of us had actually changed our opinions, but we did learn a lot about each other and about ourselves, as we gained perspective, listened and shared.

Despicable me

Through the course of that conversation that night, I got another surprise. I had been puzzled about why none of the Jordanian girls would speak to me. They’d speak to my European friends, but not to me. When we went to visit with our friends on the steps of their residence and sit outside talking, the girls would move away from me. I had no idea why.

That night, armed with the courage fueled by an open conversation, I asked Salim and Imad what was going on. They looked away sheepishly.

In the same way I had stereotyped people from a certain part of the world, based on information that I had learned from other sources, so too, had my Jordanian female counterparts. But in their eyes, I was the reprehensible one. It finally came out that they thought I was promiscuous.

Me? Promiscuous? Excuse me?! Where in the heck did they get that idea? I was raised to be proper and respectful, not some tramp.

I was, however, a Canadian first. That summer there was a drought in Spain and the thermometer hit 40 degrees Centigrade. I was melting.

I wore Bermuda shorts and sleeveless T-shirts and sandals to class. My shirts did not have “skinny straps”, they were just sleeveless. My shorts were not “hot pants”, they came to just above the knee.

In the opinion of my Jordanian female classmates, I showed too much skin. I was shameless. They were comfortable in their head-to-toe covering and did not want to associate with someone who “dressed like a prostitute”.

Needless to say, none of them had experienced the harsh, cold climate I was used to. Nor did they seem to understand that I was struggling in the heat.

It was 40 degrees. That’s almost half way to boiling. Humans aren’t meant to be boiled. We are not even meant to be half boiled.

To be honest, I expect that most of those girls had never actually seen a prostitute, either.

The power of conversation

Unlike the boys, the girls we met were unwilling to engage in conversation. The question that started our dialogue about the Gulf War, our values and ultimately, our stereotypes of one another, was “Why?” I took a leap and asked “Why do you wear that button on your lapel?”

There was a willingness to ask, a willingness to answer and a willingness to listen. I learned a lot that night… about the Gulf War and what it meant to these people who had become my friends, about how other people perceived me and the culture that I come from and about what it means to be human.

The Jordanian girls were not willing to ask me why I wore shorts or had sleeveless shirts. I guess I can’t blame them, really. Who wants to have any kind of deep conversation with a prostitute?

As it turned out, I would end up doing just that a number of years later, but that is a story to be saved for another day.

A life transformed

After returning home, I decided to return to university to study Spanish, which my family didn’t really understand, to say the least. I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school. Graduating from university was an even bigger deal. That I had been accepted into a Master’s program in English was off the charts.

So when I came home from Spain and said, “Actually, I’m not going to grad school, at least not just yet. I’m going to spend a year doing nothing but learning more Spanish,” that did not go over very well.

Suddenly I went from being the big family success story to a “flop about” who had no proper job. A university graduate is someone to be proud of. A “professional student” is a drain on society. My family all but wrote me off that year.

What I couldn’t explain was… why. Like the Jordanian girls, members of my own family were not open to having a conversation.

Immersed in change

My life had changed. I had changed. The immersion language learning experience in Spain had changed me. My head had been blown open. I don’t mean that in the sense of someone whose head is literally blown open by a bomb or something, but intellectually, everything I thought I knew had been shattered.

I had not just been immersed in a new language. I had been immersed in change and in challenge.

That is what is hard to explain to people who have never immersed themselves in another culture or another language… That it isn’t really about the language at all. What changes us is not the verbs or vocabulary that we learn. It was not the grammar that we cram into our brains so we can pass a final exam.

It the connections we are able to make with other human beings because we can communicate with them. We reach out. They reach back. We meet somewhere in the middle. When we retreat back into ourselves again, we have seen a bit of the world differently. Then we re different. Forever. Changed.

Just like our communicative abilities when we are learning a new language, our thoughts and assumptions are jumbled and are not very fluent. As we understand the world more deeply, so we understand ourselves more deeply. We begin to know what we do not know.

Related posts:

A year of inspired insights #1: There’s a silver lining in every ambulance

My 2012 resolution project: A year of inspired insights

_____________

Share or Tweet this post: A year of inspired insights #2: Conversations change everything http://wp.me/pNAh3-19V

Update – January 2018 – This blog has had over 1.8 million views thanks to readers like you. If you enjoyed this post, please “like” it or share it on social media. Thanks!

Sarah Elaine Eaton is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

4 Comments | A year of inspired insights, education, languages, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Sarah Elaine Eaton, Ph.D.

A year of inspired insights #1: There’s a silver lining in every ambulance

January 5, 2012

Sarah Eaton - blog imageI was in the fourth and final year of my bachelor’s degree. I’d been accepted to several Master’s degree programs. I had a boyfriend. A job. Life was grand.

Then, the night before final semester classes were scheduled to start in January, I was hit by a car.

My boyfriend of a year-and-a-half was with me at the time of the accident. Actually, he had been holding my hand until seconds before the accident. We were in a cross-walk. He saw the car coming. I did not. He let go of my hand and stepped back to avoid the car, which ended up hitting me.

For a while, I didn’t move. An ambulance came. I remember looking around the inside of the ambulance and thinking, “It’s grey inside here. Or maybe it is silver. A silver lining to an ambulance, that’s good.”

My train of thought was broken by the paramedic asking, “Can you feel that?”

“Feel what?” I asked.

He was palpating my leg. I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel either leg, actually.

It turned out to be shock and nerve damage. By the time we got to the hospital, sensation in my legs had returned. They gave me the full work up anyway. No broken bones, but extensive soft tissue damage. Probably some nerve damage.

Sarah Eaton - blog image - www.drsaraheaton.wordpress.comBones: OK, but… Heart: broken

I was sent home, with instructions to rest, take Tylenol 3 and start moving again as soon as possible. There was no physical therapy, no follow up, no further instructions.

The next day, everything was swollen and bruised beyond recognition. Even lying in bed hurt. I took Tylenol 3’s like they were candy, but doing so with as little water as possible, since going to the bathroom meant getting out of bed. It took about 30 minutes to get from the bed to the bathroom, which was seven feet down the hall.

There was a niggle somewhere in the back of my mind. The accident did not make any sense to me. Why had my beloved let go of my hand and stepped back when he saw the car approaching? I mean, isn’t it more normal to try to get someone you love out of harm’s way?

Three weeks later I could walk well enough to make it to the university and start going to class. I had missed a quarter of the semester already. Some professors were compassionate, others ambivalent. My grades were sliding. Graduating that year was no longer a sure thing.

I was depressed. To make matters worse, I just couldn’t get that niggle out of the back of my mind. The whole sequence of events didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, you hear these stories about complete strangers running out into the road when there’s a car coming to whisk someone to safety. In my case, someone who supposedly loved me, made no attempt to even warn me of oncoming danger, let alone offer protection.

A week after I returned to classes, my boyfriend broke up with me. He said, “When I saw you get hit by that car, I really couldn’t have cared if you lived or died.”

He moved out the next day.

A life unwinding

The next day, I was fired from my job in a retail gift store. I had missed three weeks of work while the soft tissue injuries were healing. I went into the store to pick up the pay cheque from the last two weeks of December.

The boss said, “If you can’t stand on your own two feet, then you’re fired. You haven’t been in for three weeks.”

“I called you the day after it happened, to say I had been hit by a car,” I replied. “I couldn’t walk properly until all the swelling went down and some of the bruising healed.”

She replied, “I don’t see any crutches. Take your cheque and get out. You’re done.”

I wondered how I was going to pay the rent and buy food. Panic washed over me.

I felt like my life was unwinding before my eyes.

And now for something completely different

It had been a month since I had been hit by a car. My boyfriend had dumped me and my boss had fired me. All I had left was school. I buried my head in my books and tried to catch up on three weeks of missed classes.

My Spanish instructor had been supportive and encouraging through the ordeal. She said, “You will get through this. I’ll do what I can to help you. Don’t worry about the grades. Just work hard.”

Not long after that, she arrived to class one day with a sheaf of forms in her had. asked,  “Who would like a chance to study Spanish in Spain this summer?”

My ears perked up. A chance to get out of town for the summer? That sounded good to me. With her help, I filled out the form to apply for a beca or grant, compliments of the Spanish Embassy. It was a lottery, so the chances of actually getting the bursary were slim, but at that point, a chance was better than nothing. Really, what did I have to lose?

I spent the rest of the semester trying to put my life back together and at least pass my classes so that I could graduate.

It turns out that not having a job or a boyfriend can seriously help improve your grades. (Who knew?) I passed all my courses with straight A’s.

My future in an envelope

One day in May, just before graduation, I got a letter from the Spanish embassy. Of course, I couldn’t read very much of it, but I guessed that it wasn’t a rejection letter, because it wasn’t just one sheet of paper. (Ever notice how letters telling you that you didn’t get something are only ever one page long?) There was a whole bunch of stuff in the envelope. So, I took it to school the next day and asked my Spanish professor to tell me what it said. “You got it!” She said. “You’re going to Spain!”

The bursary covered tuition, books, residence and food. I didn’t have the money for the plane ticket, so I sold everything I had and gathered the money to go. A week after graduation, I was in Madrid.

I had lived in England as a child and had travelled through Europe, but I had never really travelled on my own before. It’s a life-changing experience, to travel alone to a country where you don’t speak the language or know any one. It is terrifying. I highly recommend it.

Being in the moment is over-rated

There were so many times that semester that I wanted to give up that I lost count. There were a few people who were sources of endless encouragement and support. I listened to them, mostly because I had no one else to listen to by then.

At the time I could not see that my life path was not to work in a shop. I only saw that I had been fired from a job – and I was humiliated. I could not see that a man whose break up line is “I could not have cared if you lived or died” was not worth my time. I only saw that I was rejected and alone. There are so many things that we can not see when we are living through them.

Spiritual gurus tell us to “be in the moment”. Sometimes, when that moment stinks you would really rather be anywhere else.

Forgive me if I sound sacrilegious, but I think sometimes that “being in the moment” is over-rated. Getting through the moment, is sometimes more important. “Keep on keeping on” is a better mantra, I think, for it is only when we look back at certain moments that we see the value in moving ahead even when you are not quite certain that there is any reason to do so.

Be demanding, gently

One of my anchors of sanity that semester was my Spanish teacher. I have never forgotten the support that she offered me. Other professors were skeptical. Some were even jaded. One even said, “If I had nickel for every time a student said they were hit by a car, I’d be rich by now. Teachers hear so many excuses, it is easy to become hardened and lack compassion when students face real crises.

My Spanish teacher said to me, “Don’t worry about the grades. Just work hard.” She helped me focus my attention back on my studies. That helped to keep my mind off the break up, the lost job and the pain from the contusions. Those words were enough to get me back on track and re-focus.

As a teacher, you may not know who is telling the truth and who is whining. It’s not our job to figure that out. I do believe that it is part of our job though, to ensure that they keep up with their studies to the best of their abilities. The point is not to let them off the hook, but to help them help themselves. As teachers, we can be compassionate and strict at the same time. Learning to do both at simultaneously is the mark of an exceptional teacher.

Gracias, Profesora Santos, for being exceptional. You were a beacon of hope, leading to a wonderful silver lining.

_____________

Share or Tweet this post: A year of inspired insights #1: There’s a silver lining in every ambulance http://wp.me/pNAh3-18C

Update – January 2018 – This blog has had over 1.8 million views thanks to readers like you. If you enjoyed this post, please “like” it or share it on social media. Thanks!

Sarah Elaine Eaton is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

6 Comments | A year of inspired insights, education, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Sarah Elaine Eaton, Ph.D.

My 2012 resolution project: A year of inspired insights

January 1, 2012

Sarah Eaton - blog imageI rarely make New Year’s Resolutions, mostly because I think we tend to set vague goals that are impossible to achieve. “Lose weight”.

OK, so you don’t eat for a day and don’t drink anything for 12 hours. You step on the scale the next day and you’re down half a kilo. New Year’s Resolution achieved.

Now pass the chocolate.

Really, what’s the point of that?

SMART goals

The purpose of making a resolution is to keep it, and effectively make some sort of positive change in your life. Experts tell us that resolutions should follow the “SMART” formula:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • be set within a Time frame.

A new year’s resolution gone wrong: A year of taking vitamins…

Even then, there are no guarantees it will work out how you plan. The last time I made a resolution that I actually kept was over a decade ago. My resolution was not just to eat healthier, but to be vegetarian from January 1 to December 24 of the following year, allowing myself to end the resolution by eating Christmas turkey the next year.

No red meat and no poultry. No beef, no pork, no lamb, no chicken, no turkey. Any kind of flesh that came from a land animal was out. I figured that fish was OK and since I was raised in the maritimes, that keeping in one source of animal protein that I knew how to cook wouldn’t be a bad idea.

I did it.

I didn’t eat any red meat or poultry for an entire year. When I started, I had no vegetarian recipes in my repertoire and I had never purposefully eaten vegetarian food in my life. That year, I ate a lot of canned tuna, peanut butter and tofu.

And beans. We can’t forget the beans. Supper that year included beans on toast at least twice a week.

By the time my annual physical rolled around and we had some blood tests done, we found out that my iron levels at a level so unacceptably low that the doctor went off on an animated and emphatic rant about not knowing how I could even possibly get out of bed and function on any meaningful level. I was a bit tired, I had to admit. Listening to the rant made me more tired.

The rant led to lectures on nutrition and being told to take a daily cocktail of iron, vitamin C and B12. That effectively turned my year of vegetarianism into a year of taking vitamins. The iron levels were at non-doctor-ranting level about the time I got to eat my turkey dinner, which promptly made me ill and gave me terrible indigestion that lasted about 3 days.

That was 1994.

No more beans on toast for dinner

Since then, there have been no more resolutions. I try to avoid beans on toast for dinner now, too.

But recently I thought to myself, well maybe it is time to revisit this whole idea of a New Year’s Resolution. What if a resolution was not about doing something just for the sake of doing it? Or just to be able to claim victory at the end of the year to say “Yay! I did it!” and quietly ask yourself inside, “Now why did I do that, really?”

Those of us who are really stubborn and headstrong are more likely to keep our resolutions, I think. But then I wonder, what the point was to achieve whatever it was, except to prove that you could do it? That you were stubborn enough to do it. To what end?

All good experiments start with a question

This led to more questions, which eventually led to the decision to try an experiment that would ultimately result in me breaking my 18-year habit of not making any New Year’s Resolutions. As with all worthy experiments, this one starts with a question or two:

What if a New Year’s resolution wasn’t about achieving some personal goal, but rather, what if it was a resolution to share the best of ourselves with others, on a consistent basis? What if the resolution was about others and not about us? What would happen then?

18 years… A teacher all grown up

Interestingly, the last new year’s resolution I made, in 1994, was the first year of my teaching career. This year marks my 18th year of teaching. That’s a turning point in life, isn’t it? When you turn 18, you’re considered an adult. If that’s true, I’ve just passed a milestone of a professional birthday. I guess I’m a real, grown up teacher now.

We have a limited number of Christmas turkeys to eat in our lifetime. The older we get, the fewer turkeys we have left to enjoy. Few of us know for sure how many turkeys we have left. Now that I’ve passed a milestone “professional birthday” and before I run out of turkeys, I figure that there is no better time to start reflecting on what’s been amazing about this career so far, and share the best of those insights with you.

2012: A Year of Inspired Insights

Sarah Eaton (photo credit: Todd Maki) - Calgary, CanadaSo, my resolution for 2012 is to share my deepest insights and inspirations about teaching, leadership, literacy, language learning, technology and everything that I’m most passionate with you on a weekly basis. I’m calling the experiment: A Year of Inspired Insights.

Here’s the method:

Once a week, I’ll post an Inspired Insight. It might be something I’ve learned though my professional practice, something I’m reading or something that I have personally experience that has changed or transformed my work in some way. These will not be hollow platitudes or little cute little inspirational sayings that I’ve read somewhere along the way. They will be reflections, insights and challenges from my own experience; things that have made me think in new ways or have challenged me to re-think how I do things and why. The sharing will come in the form of professional experience, true stories from my own career and deep reflections about what professional practice means.

I’ll post once a week and I’ll number each post. For example, this week I’ll post “Inspired Insight #1”. I’ll do this weekly throughout the year and allow two weeks off (holidays, illness or just allowing myself to be UN-inspired every now and again). With two possible breaks, by the end of the year, with any luck we’ll have 50 Inspired Insights for 2012.

You are part of this experiment

The point is to share these insights with you and to go on this journey together, having your comments and reflections as part of the process.

I wonder if a project that involved sharing the best of who you are as a professional would have a positive impact on others? What would happen if a resolution was about creating something that others could take part in and use as a departure point for personal reflection and conversation… possibly even their own growth?

What do you think? Interested in joining me on a journey of inspiration for a year?

Related posts: Insight #1 – There is a silver lining in every ambulance

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Update – January 2018 – This blog has had over 1.8 million views thanks to readers like you. If you enjoyed this post, please “like” it or share it on social media. Thanks!

Sarah Elaine Eaton is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

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Posted by Sarah Elaine Eaton, Ph.D.

Are you promoting your program from the inside out?

June 13, 2010

I like to say that marketing is about people and sales is about the dollars. Marketing is about developing excellent relationships and building a reputation of excellence so others want to work with you. The most effective marketing starts from the inside out. This includes the marketing of educational programs, be it an English as a Second Language program, a literacy program or any other kind of educational program.

Here’s how: Managers, administrative staff, teachers, tutors and all staff become your program’s ambassadors in the community; not because you want them to, but because they want to. Are you the kind of administrator who inspires your staff to be an ambassador for your program?

  • Do you treat them as if they are the most important aspect of the program? Excellent teachers = excellent program.
  • Do they have their own business cards? A business card is a symbol of professionalism. Can you really afford not to have them? If your teachers don’t have this “business basic”, the message you are sending is that they are not considered professionals.
  • Do you ask for their input? What are their ideas on how to clean up the school, improve the program and extend your reach further into the community? Do you ask them to act on their ideas by pitching in to help the school improve?

If you want to market successfully, start from the inside out. Make sure relationships within the school are the best they can be.

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Update – January 2018 – This blog has had over 1.8 million views thanks to readers like you. If you enjoyed this post, please “like” it or share it on social media. Thanks!

Sarah Elaine Eaton is a faculty member in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

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Posted by Sarah Elaine Eaton, Ph.D.

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