Growing Pains

The TMC leadership team just did a very useful blog post clarifying how they processed proposals for TMC19.

I found it extremely helpful in sorting through my own understanding of the confused and confusing messages in the response notices this year. I appreciate the leadership team's commitment to being accountable for its own stuff.

We are all on this journey together. We need to hold hands and stick together. #OtterNation

 I do think there was some inartful language in the acceptance letters — and I believe it caused more distress than was necessary. Communication matters, and sometimes we just get it wrong.

But this is why we need to be — and remain — in dialogue in this work. Alliances across difference are hard. They are impossible without receptivity on both sides of the dialogue.

Everyone in this community knows what to do when a lesson bombs. You analyze what happened, reflect, and try again. This is how we develop resilience.  This is how we improve our knowing.

We will all do better next time because all human beings are better than our greatest or our least. And this particular group of human beings is committed to doing things better, and to doing this work together.

Our community is rare because it is willing to accept feedback, to adapt, and to grow. Let's agree to do that now. It is natural — and necessary — to experience discomfort as we learn and grow. This is what our students experience. It is inevitable that we will experience it too.

This is one of those moments when we have to make a decision about how to love this community and our world.  My hope is that we can take what we know about powerful teaching and learning and use it to make TMC the kind of reflective, resilient, transformational community we envisioned right from the start.