Lit

We sat at the high-top table at our usual meeting place. It was the first day of Spring Break. Four glasses on the table, two with ice water, two with straws.

For two hours, we sat, and we talked. We talked about life and kids and husbands. About sisters and dogs. About our plans for the rest of the week.

We talked about work our struggles and our current projects and where the two meet up.

That’s when I got lit. Lit up, that is. For the work that began back in December. That launched Impact Cycles (a la Jim Knight) with fourteen teachers at a time. That inspired me to start back-and-forth notebooks will all of them the way I had thought to do with my students. Thought to, and never had the chance.

They’ve all identified a goal.

I’ve provided them all with guidance in the form of questions, reinforcements, and personalized readings.

They’ve all named and deepened their learning for a teaching strategy.

I’ve continued to follow their leads.

Back: Some have handed me the notebook during my time in their classrooms. This has become a combination of notes capturing the goings-on as well as next steps from our in-the-moment and time-between conversations.

and forth: These notebooks, personalized with an image hand-picked by each and a inspirational quote for the title page, are changing what coaching feels like for me. This is something I will indeed capture in another post, or series of them. But not now.

At this moment, I showed her pictures of the pages I have taken with my phone, documentation of the process that I think may be game-changing.

She leans in as she would if they were pictures of my family vacation. We know each other well enough to know the ways that is this different, and sustains us just the same.