Thought of the Day: Tuesday, September 24th, 2013

The Power of Small Wins
We were very fortunate to host a Feedback for Effective Thinking conference at our school in Nanjing this past weekend. The weekend itself was an excellent learning experience and was made even better by the fact that three well known educational consultants were a part of the conference giving their own keynote presentations and leading other workshops as well. 

The main presenter was Dylan William who led an all-day workshop on Friday, followed by Ron Ritchhart (Harvard Project Zero) and Judy Willis, a board-certified neurologist from Santa Barbara, California. Although I will be writing a number of blogs over the next couple of weeks related to my takeaway from the conference, today's blog will focus on a simple, yet powerful idea presented by Dylan during Friday's workshop and deals with the 'power of small wins' in our daily teaching practice. 

As an educator for over 15 years myself, I am still sometimes focused too much on the bigger picture in regards to my teaching. Although it is essential to always keep this bigger picture in mind, we can sometimes forget those incredibly brief but extremely powerful moments in which we can have great impact on our students. As Dylan says, agile teaching often leads to better engagement and responsiveness within our students which is one of the essential keys to successful learning. 

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I want my teaching to be more focused on creating these small win situations whenever possible for it is these experiences that truly deepen our students' level of motivation in regards to their learning. It is very important to reflect on how we can create more of these small win situations in our teaching practice. Perhaps we need to use better questioning techniques or engineer more effective discussions in our PE classes. My takeaway from this part of Dylan's workshop was that I can certainly do a better job in this area. I look forward to trying new strategies learned this past weekend and applying them within my future teaching practice. Thanks for reading.