Perspective is a Mindset
Newsletter
Welcome to my weekly round up, which includes a short post plus recommended reading and resources. This week, we examine the importance of perspective for teaching, learning, and leading.
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A Special Day
This month we celebrated our daughter’s birthday (she turned twelve). With the current situation, the festivities were limited. Yet we still made the best of it with a cake from a local bakery, gifts, balloons, and calls from family.
That evening my daughter lamented, “I wish this day did not have to end.” While I pointed out that her presents were still here and there was plenty of cake left for tomorrow, it did not matter. Her birthday was special. It was a milestone in her life.
To you and others, her birthday was just another day. What made it special was the meaning she and our family assigned to it - our perception of the day.
While not the same, we can assign meaning to more days by taking on other people’s perspectives. What makes the book we choose to read aloud special for others? How is this lesson important in the lives of our students?
If we believe perspective is a mindset, then we can begin to see potential almost anywhere.
Recommended Reading & Resources
After reading Trust Matters: Leadership for Successful Schools, I spoke with the author, Megan Tschannen-Moran, in this podcast episode. Many insights, including the importance of understanding our families’ perspectives.
Looking for a follow up to Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck? Check out Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen Langer. Preview Langer’s work in this article, about her Counterclockwise study (The New York Times Magazine).
Interesting story about the power of expectations: A student accidentally enrolled in honors geometry ends up becoming a NASA engineer. (h/t my mom)
A post I wrote one year ago, which feels like a decade: To Build Trust, Lead with Humility (I used our staff lending library to model vulnerability and curiosity in my reading life).
Speaking of reading life, I am halfway through The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. It is based on a real, now closed juvenile detention center in Florida. Whitehead’s follow up to The Underground Railroad is equally unnerving yet hopeful, and maybe even more relevant and important for today’s reader.
As Parul Sehgal notes in her review of the book (The New York Times):
Whitehead has written novels of horror and apocalypse; nothing touches the grimness of the real stories he conveys here, of a cinder-block building that still stands, a school that was closed only eight years ago. Its starkness and irresolution recalls the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s point that the opposite of forgetting is not merely remembrance. It is justice.
Take care,
Matt
P.S. Join us Tuesday at 5 P.M. CST for a discussion during ILA’s free webinar on early literacy instruction for 2020 and beyond (tweet below to register). If you have not already, sign up for the newsletter (button) to receive a link to our chat next week.
