Resolve to look after yourself

I spent my early years in the teaching profession working too hard, playing too little and kidding myself I was having fun. You can’t be resourceful, and inspire and support others when you are not giving enough back to yourself…School culture is a wonderfully warm and enveloping blanket, but it can sometimes smother you: when you are no longer aware of the hours you are putting in; when you are no longer aware of the cost to those you love most.

These words come from the opening of The Managing Workload Pocketbook written by Will Thomas, and thousands of teachers  struggling to juggle competing demands will identify with the sentiments.

Keep your promise to yourself

I wonder how many of us made new year resolutions about work-life balance. Those kinds of promises to ourselves are certainly ones worth keeping and as Will later found out, it really is possible to perform well at work and enjoy a healthy, happy rounded life. As he says, ‘your performance will improve precisely because you are happier, healthier and more rounded’.

Happy, healthy, rounded

The previous paragraphs were first posted on this blog in January 2010. They set me thinkng, though, about those words – ‘happy’, ‘healthy’,  ’rounded’. I thought I’d share some ideas on these matters for January 2012:

1. Happy (or SAD?) – By January, we’ve endured already two months of shortened days.  Many of us leave home and return home in darkness and those of us who spend our working days indoors, perhaps in offices or environments with small or no windows, see very little daylight between November and March. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that lack of sunlight can lead to ‘winter depression’. According to mental health charity Mind:

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), or ‘winter depression’, may affect as many as a third of us, but the problem often goes undiagnosed.

The charity gives an excellent overview of the matter with a clear explanation and suggested solutions. I am currently sitting in front of my newly purchased light box and, for what it’s worth,  after two weeks’ usage I am impressed with the results.

2. Healthy – It’s generally accepted that two of the key ingredients contributing to good health are diet and exercise. I’m not best qualified to comment on the latter (!) but as this is rapidly turning into ‘Homespun Wisdom from PocketbookLinda’, I am prepared to share thoughts on – and indeed a recipe for… … … soup. Hearty, warming, nutritious and easy-to-make, I’m a soup fan. One of my resolutions is to bring home-made soup to work for lunch at least three times a week during the winter. So far so good. (Apologies to colleagues for slurping noises emanating from my office at lunchtime.) The best thing is, it’s filling, so no need to ‘pick’ throughout the day on other, less healthy snacks. Here’s my recipe for Ginger Edge Soup – the liquid levels vary according to bulk of vegetables, and for reduced zing cut back on the ginger:

About 4 cm of root ginger, peeled and finely chopped
one medium sweet potato, diced
5 medium carrots, diced
2 medium leeks, thinly sliced
2 tomatoes, chopped
500-600mls stock (I use Marigold Bouillon)
a couple of sprigs of rosemary
3 0r 4 sprigs of thyme
milk (up to 300 mls)
ground black pepper

1. Melt a small amount of butter in a large pan and stir in ginger and all vegetables. Sweat gently (the veg. that is) over low heat for 4 or 5 minutes.
2. Add stock and herbs.
3. Simmer gently until veg. are soft – about 15 mins.
4. At this point, carefully lift herbs from pan and strip leaves from stalks (asbestos fingers useful).
5. Blend. (If you’re going to get into soups seriously, a stick blender is a good investment. The whole process of blending and cleaning the blade takes seconds, unlike using a jug blender which requires potentially messy pouring and significant washing up.)
6. Add half of milk and blend again. If the soup looks like mushy vegetables rather than liquid, add more milk until smooth consistency is achieved.
7. Grind a generous portion of black pepper into pan.
8. Serve.

3. Rounded – You will be significantly less rounded if you eat more soup, less fat and fewer carbohydrates. But, taking the sense of the original, reading Teachers’ Pocketbooks will make you a more rounded individual, both professionally and personally. Here are the current top sellers:

1. Outstanding Lessons Pocketbook
2. Behaviour Management Pocketbook
3. Differentiation Pocketbook
4. Assessment & Learning Pocketbook
5. Dyslexia Pocketbook

        

Happy reading – and let me know how you get on with the soup!

PocketbookLinda

Jerome Bruner

Guest blogger and Pocketbook author Brin Best gives an overview of Jerome Bruner’s contribution to education and educational thinking:

JEROME BRUNER

 Jerome Bruner (1915 — ) is an American psychologist who has been a very influential figure in the field of education. His work, bringing together the ideas of Vygotsky, Freud and Piaget, has helped teachers to understand the process of education. In more recent years he has made a special contribution to the importance of culture in learning.

An influential theory

Bruner’s most important book (The Process of Education, published in 1960 – see ‘Further reading’) emerged following a 1959 meeting of scientists, psychologists and educators who were united by a desire to improve scientific education in the USA. It profoundly influenced some of the finest minds to work in education in the remainder of the 20^th Century, such as Howard Gardner, who has gone on record to say that he was drawn to a life in education after reading Bruner’s landmark volume.

Five concepts underpinned the ideas in The Process of Education:

• Knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it – it is the underlying structure of a subject that is most important
• The child is an active learner and problem-solver
• Children are always learning: intellectual activity is all around us
• Any subject can be taught in some meaningful form to any child at any stage of development – Bruner called this concept the ‘spiral curriculum’

The representation of knowledge

Bruner’s core work has focused on the full range of human capacities involved in teaching and learning, including language, creativity and motivation. He has developed a powerful three-stage model to help us understand how children represent experiences and convert these into knowledge, which included the following ‘modes’:

• The enactive mode – involving physical action
• The iconic mode – where one thing stands for another (eg a child uses a stick to simulate a rifle)
• The symbolic mode – involving children representing their experiences through a variety of symbolic systems (eg writing).

Bruner differed from Piaget in believing that, instead of children’s progression through these modes being a one-way process, their entry point depended more on the level of experience of the individual. Children are more likely to choose the enactive mode of representation for things that are new to them; as they become more experienced they move towards symbolic representational modes.

The importance of culture

Bruner’s more recent work places much emphasis on the key role of culture in education.  He believes that cultural psychology can help explain the intentional behaviour of people and that education provides a test-bed for developing cultural psychology as a field of study. Writing in his book The Culture of Education Bruner states, ‘Culture shapes the mind…it provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conception of ourselves and our powers.’

Further reading

The Process of Education (Latest edition published by Harvard University Press, 1977 and still available on Amazon) is Bruner’s key contribution to education. The 1977 edition has an introduction by Bruner that considers the strengths and weaknesses of the original work, published in 1960. Also of special note is Bruner’s volume The Culture of Education (Latest edition published by Harvard University Press, 1997).