Unanticipated Teachers-only Day

I never thought hearing the words ‘Teachers only day’ could evoke such excitement and invigoration. To kickstart our Teacher only days, Stonefields staff was blessed to have Nicky Benson facilitate a Resilience and Flexibility workshop. I could talk endlessly on the absolute gems of advice Nicky shared with us today (believe it or not, largely things we already know!) but there are a few main points that I have taken:

• We need to identify what makes us feel at ‘our best’ - physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually and ensure that we make those things a priority in our daily lives so that we are feeling balanced and fulfilled.
• Rather than focus on ‘Time management’ we should be focusing on ‘Energy Management’ - we need to be aware of things we have no control over, things we have influence over and things we can control and use our energy accordingly.
• Our beliefs are manifested in our everyday language as things we say we “should” be doing. Nicky suggested that instead of ‘should’ we use ‘could’ as ‘could’ represents our freedom of choice. Everyday we have the choice of how to feel and act.
• Self awareness of our emotional responses to other people's behaviour helps us to understand the subconscious beliefs we might have which in turn affect our behaviour.

The most valuable thing I took from today was that being self aware - from knowing your preferred communication style to your weaknesses, from your beliefs to your pet hates to your biggest strengths, being aware of all of these aspects of self will help shed light on how you can improve as a person and therefore as a teacher. As teachers AND learners we want to be ever increasing our self awareness so that we can do just that, constantly improving ourselves so that we are putting our very best selves forward to the learners and to everybody and everything else we have a responsibility for. Loving the learning that is coming from every day spent at school. Loving that blogging keeps me reflecting. Yes, I am excited to discover what tomorrow’s teacher only day has in store!