To be able to teach again, I had to renew my license. Unfortunately, I let my certification lapse, although they warn you not to. So the end of August has been a scramble to accumulate 75 hours of wisdom I could apply to my job as an educator.

Fortunately for me, I was able to accomplish this in about two weeks. Some of my previous activities qualified already, such as volunteering on my kids’ field trips, practicing reading comprehension with my daughter, and that book, Atomic Habits, by James Clear, that I read in 2023. So accruing the clock hours was not nearly as difficult as I expected it to be.

Here are some of the highlights of my research:

Managing Emotions in Times of Uncertainty and Stress

This was a free Coursera class developed by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. It was designed during and primarily to help deal with the effects of the pandemic; however, it remains highly relevant post-COVID, as well. In eight modules, you can learn to more accurately identify your own and others’ feelings and how to cope with unpleasant emotions in healthier ways.

This lesson proves itself to be an indispensable tool for any parent, educator, or administrator in that it provides real strategies for self and co-regulation, describing emotions in concrete, measurable terms. It gives you a way to evaluate your feelings of pleasant or unpleasantness, via the mood meter.

The course allows you to better articulate your sadness, stress, or frustration, so you can address it, face it head on instead of running away from it or burying it under food or alcohol. It teaches you how to observe and accept what you are feeling without passing judgement.

Finally, there are helpful suggestions to be able to sit with your emotions, to coexist peacefully with them rather than trying to squash them: breathing, walking, doing something you love, reaching out to family or friends. While these may sound obvious, Yale backs them up with actual research, which, at the very least, should give people hope that these types of activities really do work.

I would recommend this course to educators, parents, mental health professionals, or anyone who struggles with emotions themselves or wants to help those who do.

Mindset

Mindset, by Carol Dweck, Ph.D, is a book about the two different outlooks people have on intelligence and how they affect your life.

The fixed mindset believes that success is determined by innate talent only. That one can only go so far as determined by how gifted (or limited) they are. People with this mindset often dread making mistakes for fear of being outed as incompetent, and may try to conceal them. They frequently prefer to do less challenging tasks where they are confident of errorless performance.

The growth mindset believes that hard work, dedication, and practice will make you better at what you do, and that anyone can become more intelligent or more adept with a high level of discipline. Mistakes are seen as learning opportunities, not failure, and challenges are welcomed.

The book promotes the growth mindset as the healthier way of thinking, and gives countless examples of research that proves that both children and adults with the growth mindset can even outperform those with a fixed mindset.

If I am honest, I am not altogether one mindset or the other, but tend to fall somewhere between. There are plenty of situations in which I can recall having a fixed mindset; however, as a professional student and lifelong learner who is always looking to improve in virtually every aspect of my being, I can say that I work tirelessly toward the growth mindset.

I believe that every child is capable of making progress, regardless of what they are born with, and I am certain that this informs the way I teach. As a special education teacher, I meet students “where they’re at” and map out where I hope to help them go. If we don’t get there by the proposed deadline, I don’t get discouraged. I might break down the benchmark into smaller components, or change my instructional method. But I don’t give up. You can’t.

Mindset is clearly useful for teaching, but I have found it most helpful on a personal level. For example, this morning I banged my head on the lip of the island on my way back up from feeding the cats. My knee jerk reaction was “I’m stupid.” This is very old, learned behavior, established from a 45-year history of thinking that thought again and again in similar situations. My brain is literally wired to insult me when I bump my head. Stupid is the beaten neural path.

Someone with a solid growth mindset, on the other hand, would simply think: “I miscalculated,” or “I must have a lot on my mind if I’m bumping into things.”

My goal for myself, then, is to alter the neural pathways that cause me to have that thought by replacing it with one of those more forgiving, self-compassionate thoughts. The more I observe and self-correct my unhelpful thinking, the closer I am to a growth mindset.

I think anyone would benefit from this book, but especially those in education, business, human resources, sports, or really any profession in which you wish to excel. People interested in self-improvement in general should also read Mindset.

I would add more great professional development experiences, but I think this post is already long enough.

I have to say that this pursuit, although somewhat of a whirlwind, was enjoyable for me. I’m one of those nuts who actually likes professional development. I got a lot out of this lightening round. Hopefully, the next cycle of PD will occur more evenly over three years. But what I learned in just a few weeks was equally beneficial.