🌿 Your Tuesday Email: Restore Your Vision

Hello Reader!

Before the planning starts, let the vision come first.​
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If July has done its work, if you've rested your body, given your mind some space, and reconnected with something that belongs just to you - then you might notice something quietly emerging.

You are starting to feel ready for the next school year. Some of you have started your new teacher institutes and workshops. Some of you are getting into your classrooms and spaces. And at this point, you can feel your direction.

Not a to-do list, or anxiety. Not even the running of mental inventory of everything that didn't work last year. That feels quiet.

Something more like a question: What do I want this year to feel like?

What is my vision? We always start with visioning work when working with new teachers. It helps to have a visual in mind, and work with what that is to take steps toward making that a reality.

Vision Before Strategy

Most of us are trained to start with strategy. The standards, the plans, the frameworks, the systems, the tools. We reach for structure because it feels productive and concrete.

But strategy without vision is just blind motion. It's the experience of working very hard in a direction you never consciously chose.

Vision asks something different. It asks us to imagine before any logistics, before any constraints, before the schedule and the curriculum and the meeting calendar, what you actually want your experience to be.

Questions Worth Sitting With

You don't need a vision board anything tangible to do this - unless you want to. You do need ten or fifteen quiet minutes and a few honest questions:

• What word do I want to describe my year - for me, and for my students or staff?
• What kind of educator do I want to be next year?
• What is one thing I want more of? One thing I want less of?
• What would I need to protect in order for this year to feel different from last year?

These questions don't require answers you write in stone. They're just invitations to orient yourself before the machinery of the new year takes over.

Vision Protects Against Default

Without intention, most of us default. We teach the same way we taught last year. We take on the same commitments. We fall into the same patterns. Not because we planned to, but because we never paused to choose otherwise.

Vision - even a light, directional, incomplete vision - creates just enough of a gap between default and intentional choice to matter.

That gap is where next year gets better. Not because of a new program or a new initiative, but because you showed up with a direction.

Podcast:

• This week: Summer Series Ep 3 - Sarah, a literacy coach asked: How can teachers be more efficient?
• Next week: Summer Series Ep 4 - Sarah asks another question - Do you have advice for supporting teachers who are struggling with planning?
• Last week: Summer Series Ep 2 - Keeping Stuff Will Not Making Teaching Easier is a response to a question we got from James!

Listen to the pod on all the platforms like Apple, Spotify, iHeart Radio and YouTube. Now you can follow us on Instagram.

Resources:

• ASCD article: "The Power of an Intentional Teaching Year"​
• Podcast: Intentional Teaching
• Audio book: The Art of Intentional Thinking: Master Your Mindset. Control and Choose Your Thoughts. Create Mental Habits to Fulfill Your Potential (Second Edition)

Reflection

If this coming school year could feel meaningfully different from the last one, what would "different" look like?

We love hearing from you!

Yours,

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