#EdBlogNZ Challenge Week 1

Inspiring Bloggers

The challenge is to write about a legendary blogger that inspires you or makes you dream bigger.  I am in awe at how some educators write reflect so frequently on their blogs.  Two bloggers that I follow and read regularly both bear the same name Stephanie Thompson!  I wonder if they are connected on line too?

First Stephanie who is the author of Four Seasons in One Kiwi I first met her at a two day Solutions Focus Coaching Master class. Stephanie is a primary school principal and as I aspire to be a principal I was really impressed with what she had to say about leadership and growing a coaching culture in her school.  Her blog posts reflect her leadership wonderings and I find them useful to read and reflect how her message resonates with me now (in my role as an acting principal) and to store for my future leadership experiences to come.

Second Stephanie who is the author of Train the Teacher I had connected with her many years ago on twitter and first met a few years ago at an Ignition Conference held at Albany Senior High School.  At the time she was a classroom teacher in Wellington, a tweeter and edu-geek.  I was impressed for a beginning teacher how she used blogging to collect evidence of her practice and labelled her blogs as a great filing system.  Now Stephanie teachers overseas and posts almost daily of her educational learning journey, whether she is reflecting on what is happening in her classroom or from one of the many conferences that she attends.  Her latest post about participating in a disruptive strand at a conference reminded me of the robust conversations I had at the Google Teacher Academy where we put our big ideas into an action plan for immediate steps in our learning community.

I often fear that my reflections will just be aimless ramblings and not worthy of the deep reflection I read in the posts of others.  I do believe in projecting positivity and continuous improvement, so to move forward, I feel you need the time to look back and reflect on your practice to improve. Like ripples in a pond, ideas can grow, reverberate and merge to create new circles of ideas.  I wonder if participating in the #EdBlogNZ challenge will help me get into a routine of weekly reflection (or at least fortnightly) for my leadership and/or education learning journey?  I hope so!