"Critical Friend" Kevin

Imagine for a moment that each day, before working with others, you had an opportunity to explore social media profiles for those people you were to work with. For the sake of this exercise, focus on the profiles you have seen where people are using social media as it was intended, to further personal and professional relationships. Often, these profiles feature “Favorite Quote” sections where individuals can share quotes that are personally profound. The first quote you come across is this one, by football legend Vince Lombardi: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Do you think you could personally and professionally connect with a person whose profile features this quote? The next person’s profile features this quote from the Talmud, a central text of Judaism: “It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free not to take it up.” Can you connect with this person? You then look at a third person’s profile, and she has a quote by former First Lady Eleanor Roos...

The "Feedback Nightmares Activity" is one of the approximately 30 agenda items that compose a five-day Critical Friends Group Training, and almost undoubtedly, it is an agenda item that always earns a similarly nervous response from trainees when they see it on paper.  Nobody likes a nightmare, and unfortunately many of us have had nightmares that directly involve feedback. Frankly, we would rather not sift through that amidst an otherwise uplifting and pleasant training! However, this activity is meant to help us cast aside those nightmares, setting us up for a bright, new future where feedback can be received gracefully, so our practice can improve without having to experience embarrassment or pain. To run this activity, I always share with my group a story of a real-life feedback experience that changed my career. I share how I spent hours preparing for a planned observation from one of my first administrators and created a lesson that I thought was both fun for student...