“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

Anthony Trollope

I have just received my congratulations from WordPress on the first anniversary of my blog! Nearly eighty posts later, easily over one hundred thousand words, I feel immense pride at having reached this point. So, why write a blog?

Pride at the fact that an amazing number of people, mainly teachers, have taken the time to read my posts and leave comments. Pride at the fact that I have managed to balance teaching and writing about teaching. Pride in the knowledge that blogging has helped me in my pursuit of becoming a better teacher.

Writing the blog has inspired me professionally: it has helped make me more disciplined with my working habits and it has undoubtedly made me more creative. I would feel I was cheating people if I didn’t recommend blogging for all teachers, even in the midst of busy working weeks.

I hear many valid arguments for not blogging. Workload issues or the sheer temerity of having a life beyond teaching spring up most commonly. I admit, I have the great pleasure of having very young children, therefore my social life has been whittled away like carrion in the dessert – ideal for some evening blog writing! For me, blogging is an antidote to drudgery filled tasks like report writing – without the attendant guilt of more purposeless pleasures.

Other people appear to be paralysed by a pursuit of perfection and therefore decline to publish. Perhaps is it my low standards, but I stick to the attitude of publish and be damned! Errors may exist, but I don’t possess a personal editor beyond my capacity to proof read through tiredness, so my fallibility is exposed – and I care not a jot. I welcome correction and laugh in the face of pedantry…then hastily make the correction.

I know some people view blogging as an act of arrogance – a symbol of a misguided sense of a person’s sense of self-importance. The problem with that perspective is that if we all lived by this thinking then no-one would produce or publish anything. People who persist with this complaint need to get over themselves: stop chipping away at the ideas of others and produce some of their own they deem better!

So what are the benefits of blogging?

1. It can make you more efficient and even work less!

I understand the argument that blogging can simply mean more work. I would argue that the discipline of habitually writing a blog can actually hone your skills to the point where you research, plan and execute lessons better, and faster, than ever before. By making myself blog habitually in my evenings, attempting to post weekly, I have created productive habits that have spilled over into my teaching life. Gretchen Rubin, in her book, ‘The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun’, described the positives thus:

“Step by step, you make your way forward. That’s why practices such as daily writing exercises or keeping a daily blog can be so helpful. You see yourself do the work, which shows you that you can do the work. Progress is reassuring and inspiring…”

Of course, the converse is true, but having people read and respond to your personal reflections or teaching and learning ideas is tremendously motivational. That motivation pushes me to complete my work and subsequently write. It takes habit building – finding a routine: a space to write; a time of day; the usual tools and treats that give you those vital daily cues that writing needs to be completed. Of course, like anything worth doing, blogging does require perseverance. I like the perspective of Alexander Graham Bell, of telephone patenting and “99% perspiration” fame, on this:

“You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them. It is perseverance in the pursuit of studies that is really wanted.”

By writing a blog we are committing ourselves to continued learning – however ill defined the ideas. Read some of my earlier blogs and find myself disagreeing with myself, but that is part of the discovery. What better way to constantly remember and model the habits of mind our students themselves need to succeed than by living them ourselves?

2. It can make you a better teacher

I undertook my blog writing hoping that it would make me a better teacher. I am pretty sure it has. My writing has led me to research and search other blogs, books and articles that have easily doubled my knowledge of the art and science of teaching. In one year I have undoubtedly learnt more than my last six or seven years in the job combined. By building my knowledge I have been able to try, trial and improve.

I have been able to write about my teaching regularly, reflecting upon my many failures and my less frequent successes, honing my knowledge of how I teach, whilst borrowing ideas from other great teachers about how they teach. I have been able to get constructive feedback on my practice, as well as having my ideas, preconceptions and knowledge tested by fellow teachers and those with more expertise than myself.

By building my knowledge of pedagogy and related research I have become much more creative as a teacher. I have been able to make creative connections between what I have written and what I have had to read to enable me to write with thoroughness. Those creative connections have strengthened my core teaching habits and given me the confidence to experiment.

Too often creativity is depicted as a ‘Eureka!’ moment, or worse, the preserve of the creative genius. This lazy representation has neglected the more workmanlike truth that creativity emerges from gritty determination, dogged persistence and daily effort. Most often the dull repetition of ‘deliberate practice‘ must precede the creative act of breaking the rules, which can often be the hallmark of ‘creative genius’. In the words of Seth Godin:

“The notion that I do my work here, now, like this, even when I do not feel like it, and especially when I do not feel like it, is very important. Because lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it.”

 

3. It engages you in disciplined self-reflection

Blogs can be a shouty celebration of success. They can also be a deeply reflective examination of failure, marginal success and barely perceptible improvement. Most teachers really experience the latter. The much heralded ‘ten thousand hour rule‘ of expertise made famous by Malcolm Gladwell is a good barometer for teachers for the true complexity of some of the most obvious core activities of teaching.

In my ten years of teaching I feel I am perhaps half way there with the ‘basics’ of questioning or memorable explanations. My self-reflection on this process is the reason why I am making small, incremental improvements. My blog is one key tool to to reflect, as too often in the hurly burly of the job such clear, reflective thinking simply becomes too difficult.

4. It can be great for your self confidence

Teaching can be a solitary pursuit at times. Beyond the discussions in staff rooms and offices, or the less frequent opportunities for useful feedback on our practice, we often disappear into our classrooms and simply get on with things. Talking about what we have done, sharing the ups and downs can be really liberate and having positive feedback and making a record of when things went well is good food for thought in gloomy times. The simple act of writing can build your confidence:

“Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all.”

Norman Vincent Peale

 

I plan to keep up my blogging action for a long while yet! Give it a go – find a routine. You won’t regret it.

Thank you for reading, retweeting and commenting.

Ref: The brilliant www.brainpickings.org has been the source and inspiration for many of the quotations selected for this post. If you don’t follow that website you absolutely should.