Written March 9, 2023

Day 16 of 40 in a 45-day period: If you’ve never recorded yourself at work, it’s something to consider. When I was a student teacher we had to record ourselves teaching. Watching the lessons invited me to reflect on whether the teacher I thought I was, was the one who showed up.

Years later, as a math coach, I was part of a Professional Learning Community and had to record myself as a coach working with a teacher, S, I’d worked with for a few years. I was nervous and eager to reflect on who I thought I was as a coach and if it held up in practice.

In preparation I watched and listened to a 20-minute debrief on loop for more than four hours so I could edit the transcript. In doing so, I had a pretty good sense of my strengths and weaknesses. I was particularly proud of my exquisite use of humor to open up a conversation that was stuck in a ping-pong match with S and I on different mathematical pages.

The PLC participants never saw my humorous finesse. We paused the video five minutes in to give teachers and coaches the chance to reflect on their noticings. When the discussion began I was floored. One after another, people talked about what they noticed in S’s body language. He had his head in hands, was rubbing his face and looked anxious and uncomfortable.

I sat less than two feet away from S in that debrief and not once did I pick up on his body language. In the four hours I spent watching the video, I focused on what we were saying and what I was doing. I never bothered to look up and just watch the video. Maybe if I had, I would have seen what was actually happening.

Since that experience, I pay close attention with my eyes and my ears when I’m working in a school. But more importantly, it made me question what else was right in front of my face that I was missing because I was preoccupied with my own agenda. I figured if this was happening at work it was happening at home too. I wasn’t wrong.

The school’s motto is on the door when you walk in, in today’s picture. It’s difficult to miss and yet I hadn’t noticed it this year. It turns out paying attention to what’s directly in front of us may be a lifelong pursuit.