This New Year, go "South"
For much of my career in education, I strived to be as task-oriented as possible. Teachers and principals know, there is always something we can be doing to make a difference to one more student. I always made sure I was doing that "something." If I wasn't working on a task, I was wasting valuable time. That said, one of my most successful New Year's Resolutions pushed me to quit thinking this way. An NSRF Critical Friends activity called "Compass Points" taught me that strong educators, strong leaders, and strong people possess qualities of the four different directions on a compass. While we usually have one dominant direction, it is important to value the strengths of people who come from different directions, and to push ourselves to exhibit the traits of each direction. When I did this activity, I recognized that the traits of the "south" may have been those that I demonstrated least. According to the NSRF descriptors, south is the direct...