Where do you find inspiration?

If you are lucky enough to be active on twitter you know there are a ton of great #hashtags and teachers that supply endless information about what is going on in their classroom, their successes, their projects and the honest ones even share their failure so that we can learn from that too. Personally, I have a lot more respect for these teachers as it is not always easy to talk about a superstar lesson that crashed and what you learned from it. I’m still not to the place where I feel confident enough to talk about these failures on a public platform with strangers. Kind strangers, but strangers none the less. I do talk about them in the hallways with my colleagues as I find that is the place I grow the most. From my failures.

One area that I have begun to explore for inspiration in the last 6 months has been Instagram. There are a lot of young, full of energy, full of heart, excited teachers who are giving teaching their heart. They build beautiful classroom cultures, create engaging lessons and have students who love them for their sense of home. I’m sure it’s a generational thing: Twitter vs Instagram.  Not all teachers on Instagram are great to follow, but a few of my favourites include Megan Forbs (teacher, mom and social activist), MissBertels_ (just an amazing human) and Five Foot One Teacher (another incredible teacher who is unbreakable in the spite of the tragedy at her school). None of these girls teacher science, but they teach kids. I prefer that. I have so much to still learn on my own journey to become the educator I want to be and these ladies are helping to lift me up, make me pause and reflect and are always encouraging the teaching community.

A shout out to Ms. Bettencourt, OCT (@L_Bettencourt) who suggested I write this down when we met in person @rns1877 during our CAIS soccer tournament