Changing schools can be incredibly stressful. Each workplace has its own unique culture, both hidden and explicit. Additionally there is a whole new set of colleagues to understand, and who need time to understand you. In a collaborative work environment, like a school, I have found that it is essential to start on positive assumptions of belief in new colleagues and in myself. Most people want to be helpful, they mean to be clear. I will emerge from the fog of confusion. I will ...and here is the rub....feel competent as a teacher again.

This July, I started work at a new school. It is my fourth school in my 20 year career. I remember distinctly the cognitive and professional dislocation I felt during my last school transition. It seriously threatened to derail me, undermining my confidence and my identity as a teacher. Thankfully, so far I have been handling this transition with more grace. 

When you have been in a school for a long time, there is a known track record, a level of trust, familiar resources, known professional expertise and working relationships that you are comfortable with. In changing schools, all these are left behind. While I carrying with me a large pool of professional capital, in my current setting it is only privately held. In contrast, the collective professional capital of my new school does not yet belong to me. I know that it will only be a matter of time and experience, that eventually I too will be able to claim and be fully cognizant in the collective professional capital of this new workplace. For now though I live and work with a level of ambiguity that is uncomfortable and stressful. I am trying to rejoice in this: to claim it as my own professional Goldilocks Zone, or ZPD if you prefer, of professional learning. I do not believe in professional stagnancy. So while I am struggling, I also know I am learning.  

How has change impacted my life of late? It has not merely been a shift to a new school. Can I promote growth through practicing positive assumptions across all areas of my life? I have written before about developing growth mindsets and positive habits of mind in our students. Now my challenge is to develop these is myself amidst these changes:

• Changed country from China to New Zealand
• Change educational systems from an IB International School to the New Zealand public school system
• Switching from Year 5 to Year 0
• Living with family just down the road for the first time in 18 years
• Started attending a new church community
• Living in my own house instead of rented accommodation for the first time
• Living on considerably less than my previous salary
• Owning and driving a car for first time in 18 years
• About to vote for the first time in 18 years - This one is really confusing me. Understanding a countries political climate is tricky!!!

It is a scary thing to let go as teachers. To let go of control and decision making. To step back and let a natural learning process take place. This year our grade 4 teaching team have grappled with the question of when to intervene and when not to. I have discovered that it is one of the hardest things to do as a teacher. We are wired to sort, to organize, to order kids and resources and to ensure that all learning moves forward as it should. Our first foray into handing organizational control to the students was during our unit under the theme of "How We Organize Ourselves". We realized that the more we as teachers organize kids the less hands on experience they have of organizing themselves. 

First, the students decided to organize a flash mob in the school cafeteria. Our 55 grade 4 students are all very opinionated!  The biggest difficulty was that everyone wanted to lead, they all thought their own ideas were best. They easily spent the first two planning sessions talking themselves around in circles, while we, their teachers, bit our lips and sat on our hands. After school meetings as a team centered around questions of parameters. Should we set any? How long were we willing to wait for action? Is there a time in which we will need to step in and at which point might we need to pull the plug? After the first agonizing week, where they went nowhere, we finally delivered an ultimatum. By the end of the next lesson, they had to agree on how they would organize themselves, who would be responsible for what, and they had to deliver a schedule of rehearsal times so that they could being making bookings for facilities and equipment. Suddenly they were off and away. Rehearsals went well and corporate  decisions were made, although not always the ones we teachers would have chosen. The final flash mob was a success - in our small world at least.  

We were ready to step up the ante. We floated the idea of a Maker Faire with the students. A Maker Faire would give them the opportunity to participate in the organization of another whole grade event, but also each student would need to be responsible for the organization of their own exhibit. The scariest part was that none of us teachers had ever even been to a Maker Faire before. The projects were all their own choices and in many cases they needed to source their own materials. We worked closely with our Design teacher who supported the students through the design cycle and the development of various prototypes. Some students chose to work alone while others grouped together. Again, it was excruciating at times to see kids spinning in circles achieving nothing but then at other times there were huge gains in product development taking place. The same questions of intervention and timing arose. I was hesitant to step in too quickly, wanting to give them the chance to find their own way back to the task. One group decided to design a product display box to market the headphones they had made. I watched them muck around with this ugly naked box for about a week, basically achieving nothing. Finally, I stepped in to demonstrate action and to get them moving forward. Within 10 minutes, 1/2 the box was painted and their mylar window had been installed. Suddenly they caught the vision and I stepped back again. Over the next two lessons that box was fully kit out with a persuasive paragraph, instructions for use, a photograph showing it in use and the product logo. In class, we had moved onto our new unit about persuasion and influencing others, so the students were also asked to develop an advertising campaign both for the Maker Faire itself and for their own stall.  

The final Faire was a huge success. There was a range of items on show from stomp rockets, to recycled can cars, a fishing game, a model airboat and even a cool hovercraft. One of my favorite was a very addictive squishy ball. Some products definitely had the WoW factor, while others were frankly weak and didn't reflect a productive engagement over 6 weeks. It was very evident in the final event who had shown good organizational skills. I hope the school repeats the Maker Faire, opening it up to the wider community in future years. I think this is an event where the quality of the exhibits can only get better each year, as they learn from each other and the experience of being a maker. The biggest indication of success for me was the very high level of engagement from our visitors. Many students had sourced sufficient materials to encourage visitors to get involved and make too. As I moved through the throngs calling for pack up time, there was a chorus of disappointment from the visitors and grateful relief from the presenters. They were exhausted, having spent 90 minutes teaching, demonstrating and helping others become makers too. 

What does it mean to be a good teacher? What defines and separates out the good from the excellent? I keep returning to this question of excellence in my own professional life. I am in my final semester of a very profitable 9 years at my current school. Huge life changes loom ahead as I will be relocating back to my "home" of New Zealand after almost 18 years of absence. Questions of finding a teaching position, of entering what will be for me an new education system and the transferability of my professional skills, dominate my thoughts. 

Yet in the midst of all this, I have a wonderful class of very present students. Daily, I need to seek and find myself as a professional in this present moment. Thoughts of the future will not benefit my current students. They need me today, to hear their queries and respond to their excitement about learning. Dylan Williams in a recent conference at our school summed up a very popular sentiment by saying repeatedly to us that: "teaching is an impossible job." There is always more to be done than can be achieved within the constraints of time, curriculum and access to resources. And yet, beyond all of these, I have always believed that the most powerful of all forces for learning is relationship. Today, tomorrow, each period of class, I commit to being present for my students with all my mind and heart. They deserve nothing less. I am inspired by the students before me, their trust in me to make each day count.

Last week my students completed an end of quarter math review. In collecting the papers in, I glanced at 2 or 3 and immediately my heart sank. It seemed on first glance that they hadn't done very well at all. I was dismayed. So much so that I kept procrastinating over marking the papers. Fortunately, the pressure of reports and 3-way conferences forced me out of my lethargy and I finally got down to marking. It slowly dawned on my as I worked through paper after paper that actually I was putting a lot of positive ticks on the pages and I started to take courage that all had not been a waste after all. 

I only just managed to resist analyzing the results and scoring the sheets. This year I have turned all rubric work, analysis and scoring over to the students. My job is simply to mark, then to collect and respond to their reflections. When the students received their tests back they went through them question by question, marking up their rubric and comparing their results from 12 weeks previously. There was a very excited buzz in the room as the realization of their progress hit home. As a final step, I got the students to score the work and convert it to a percentage, and to my surprise many students had actually doubled their scores or even more. 

There was a good professional rebuke in this for me. I should have greater faith in my effect as a teacher and more importantly these students deserve my faith in them as learners with growing minds. Building a growth mindset in the grade has been an important driving goal of the year. It is my responsibility to action this first in my beliefs about my students.