I Get It

Photo Courtesy of Blue Moon in Her Eyes

Cross Posted from Constantly Changing





It finally happened. I hit a wall. In doing my International PLP I knew that one of the goals was to push the participants out of their comfort zone. And that has happened to me to a certain point, but I grasped onto the experience and figured that the only way to get the most out of the it was to participate in as many aspects of it as possible. So on Twitter, I sat back and just watched for a while before I said much. On the Ning I stuck to comfortable places like the flickr activity and left fairly innocuous comments on the rest of it. All of the things I tried weren’t too crazy for me (after all talking to people I don’t know is certainly a comfortable place for me).

But today it happened. I was pushed to a place where my first reaction was to run the other direction. On our Ning site, we have 5 new Expert Voices. I’m up for anything so I figure I’ll join all five in their specialties. Then I read a post on Ben Hazzard’s page that changed everything. His focus on our ning is Classroom Communities. In order to model building a community in our classroom he is starting a running club using Nike+iPod.

That is when the brick wall hit me.

Running? I was willing to do anything for this PLP, to get everything I could out of it, and now he wants me to go running?

I get it now. that is the feeling that my students get whenever I ask them to do something new. It is that feeling of pushing them out of their comfort zone to a point where they can really learn. So I will run (mostly walk) and why? For my students. So when I ask them to do something that seems scary to them, I will understand and will do a better job of walking them around that brick wall. And I am sure in the process I will learn more about myself.