Endurance

Aussie Cadel Evans winning the tour de France | sportsdoctormd.wordpress.com/

At one of my first PD’s as a teacher I was told (along with the others in the room) that for a novice, the enthusiasm one has for new things is in direct disproportion to the time that goes by. On the other hand, experts maintain their enthusiasm and in fact it builds as time goes by. What I took away from this is that we can be gung-ho to begin with, but there is a challenge in maintaining new practices once the novelty wears off (recent blog activity included…)

I address this now because my school is on the eve of rolling out an iPad trial. Time and brain effort has gone into perusing our various PLN’s, talking with similar schools and generally figuring out what will work for us. While I have no doubt that the great team we have will not fall into the novelty trap with this project, which is taking place at a school-wide level, it makes me ponder the practices in individual classrooms, where already time-stretched teachers face the challenge of carrying on with a class blogging project, or maintaining Edmodo discussion boards, or even preparing interactive white board lessons in advance.

I guess the point of this pondering is to inspire myself and others to continue persisting with new ideas – thats how we build good habits.

 

Oh, and well done Cadel!