In recent years, especially after the publication of my first monograph, more and more of my peers have become curious about my professional growth as a class teacher.
Especially those who are familiar with me, they all know that in the first 10 years of my employment, I was "poor and white": in addition to my good performance in Chinese teaching, the only honor was that I was one of the top ten class teachers in the county, and even the first-level title was barely passed.
But since 2014, when I was nearly middle-aged, I suddenly "opened" in my life - not only won more than 40 national, provincial and municipal honors, including the first prize of the National Young Pioneers Counselor Style Competition, but also published more than 200 professional papers, and was invited to serve as the cover character and columnist of authoritative magazines in China.
In fact, not only my peers are curious, but many times even I can't believe it: how can there be such a huge contrast between two 10 years, the same me? In other words, what did I do right in the second 10 years?
I tried to sort it out and summarized the 4 underlying logics of my growth.
01 Doing it first and then talking about it can solve 80% of the problems
There is an old saying "everything is ready, only the east wind is owed", and there is also "think before you act", which means that you should think carefully before you do something, and then take action.
Of course, this is true, and in reality, we are often used to thinking before doing things, estimating the probability of success, and predicting the consequences of failure.
But if you think too much before doing it, you are likely to stay in the stage of thinking in the end, which not only wastes time, but also consumes energy.
The first 10 years of my career were spent in such repeated internal conflicts.
When I first started my career, I was full of ambition like many newcomers, but as time went on, especially after encountering professional difficulties, I became more and more skeptical about myself: do I want to become better and stronger, can I succeed, and is my life good now......
This kind of tug-of-war will be staged almost every once in a while, and the more you think about it, the more tired you become, and this tiredness stems from disappointment in yourself and fear of the future.
However, apart from the constant questioning, I have not taken action, and I have not realized that I should act first.
It wasn't until 10 years after joining the company in 2014 that I realized that I was in the worst-case situation. So, for the first time, I put aside all those endless thoughts and began to work hard.
I still vividly remember that the first moral education paper I wrote went through 8 revisions before and after, from the first draft to the eighth draft, which was really a radical change. This time, I achieved a breakthrough in education and scientific research "from 0 to 1" and won the second prize at the county level.
After that, I continued to write my first paper, not thinking about the result, but spending my spare time and energy on the practice and writing of the paper or case, and gradually achieved the leap from "1 to 200".
所以，后来有同行问我班主任专业发展如何起步，我总喜欢用脸书创始人扎克伯格办公室里的那句标语回答他，“Done is better than perfect”。
Yes, completion is more important than perfection.
If you, like me at the beginning, want to develop and are in a state of wandering and anxiety, then I want to tell you: don't think too much, there is no concrete practical action, no matter how careful the plan is, no matter how good the plan is, there will be zero.
In the process of reading, thinking, practicing and writing, you will improve while doing it, and you will slowly find a professional growth path that suits you.
02 Believe in the compounding of time
When we take action to achieve our career aspirations, most of us encounter a very real problem:
After studying 13 articles and retreating for 3 weeks, the articles I finally wrote could not even be rated as the third prize at the county level, or none of the newspapers and magazines were accepted. What to do at this time?
Another example is that you believe in the power of professional reading, but after reading three or five books, you find that your educational practice is still a piece of chicken feathers, what should you do?
I would like to introduce a concept of "time compounding". "Compound interest" is "profit on profit", and "time" is a cliché.
In this era when watching videos have to be played at double speed, we have become accustomed to "short-termism", once we can't see the effect in the short term or encounter failure, we will fall into an anxious psychological state, and give up directly in doubt and complaining.
Therefore, after one or two papers are not recognized or three or five books have no practical effect, many people stop moving forward, ignore the laws of the development of things, and ignore the common sense that "only quantitative change can lead to qualitative change".
In my case, when my professional development first started in 2014, the pain of that difficulty is still fresh in my mind. Write only a few lines in front of the computer for a few days. After reading dozens of articles, I feel that the author makes sense, but I don't know where to start when it comes to becoming my own language.
As I mentioned earlier, I changed the first award-winning paper 8 times, but for that paper, I read at least dozens of articles on the same topic and spent nearly a month writing it.
In the face of such an input-output ratio, there are not many people who are willing to persevere.
But I decided at the time and went ahead and kept trying.
Later, he won one award after another, and the awards became higher and higher, and finally he published articles in core Chinese journals.
In the process of gritting my teeth and persevering although it was difficult, I also gradually improved my ability to plan the layout of the article and control the text.
As long as the direction is correct, quantitative change will inevitably cause qualitative change, and if qualitative change does not occur, it often means that the accumulation of quantity is not enough.
Life is not a 100-meter race, but a marathon. So, don't be in a hurry, don't sprint desperately, but find your own rhythm, step by step, believe in the power of time, believe in the power of compound interest, and always get to where we want to go.
03 Timely feedback makes self-discipline a joyful thing
For many people, it is not easy to stick to one thing for a long time. Whenever I share my upbringing with my peers, a teacher always asks me, "How did you manage to be so disciplined?"
Before answering this question, let's talk about the core concept of the problem - self-discipline.
There are hundreds of answers on the Internet about "how to become self-disciplined", but when we follow a lot of success routines to do it, we find that self-discipline is such a difficult thing to do.
In fact, those self-discipline tricks in success may be really useful, but they are very personal and not universal. True self-discipline comes from our understanding and respect for human instincts.
The core element of self-discipline is not to force oneself to do something, but to go with one's own nature and actively build timely positive feedback that people can enjoy doing.
For example, when I first tried to read professionally, I also went through the stage of "picking up a book and wanting to sleep". So I set myself a reward system of "buy a new dress after reading a book in a week".
A week later, I finished reading a book and bought a dress that I had been dreaming of for a long time. Wearing a new dress in exchange for reading, I feel better about myself.
Later, I changed my ways to provide timely positive feedback on my reading in various ways such as "getting likes on Moments", "publishing official account displays", "writing book reviews and submitting articles for publication", and gradually turned reading into a way of life in the process of continuous positive reinforcement.
The next thing became a matter of course, and in the closed loop of "writing-publishing-getting likes, comments, retweets-submitting and publishing-full of accomplishment-continuing to write", I tasted the sweetness of professional growth, and I persevered in writing.
04 Dig only one well at a time
After gradually becoming self-disciplined, where to devote our time and energy to professional development is another topic worth discussing.
The French writer Romain Rolland once said, "Instead of spending a lot of time and energy digging many shallow wells, it is better to spend the same amount of time and energy digging a deep well." This sentence answers this question very vividly.
The professional knowledge of the class teacher covers psychology, education, management, neuroscience, nutrition and other fields, and the work involves the construction of class culture, the cultivation of learning ability, the transformation of problem students, family education guidance, the design and implementation of class meetings, etc.
In my early years, I suffered such a greedy loss.
It was in 2014, and I didn't know much about the professional development of class teachers, but simply thought that writing essays for competitions was professional development.
Therefore, as long as the school organizes various competitions, I sign up for them, and every time I think: which topic is the most popular, which theme has a higher award rate? Under the guidance of such utilitarian thinking, "rubbing hot spots" has become the only way for me to win awards for educational writing.
It wasn't until I lost the Zhejiang Provincial Class Teacher Basic Skills Competition in 2018 that I realized that I had been "rubbing hot spots" everywhere before, but I had not really penetrated into any field of the class teacher profession. It was also from this year that I understood that if I want to develop professionally, I must abandon utilitarianism and deeply cultivate my own pain points and difficulties, so as to form my own professional knowledge system and achieve professional expertise.
In 2020, I was deeply engaged in brand class building, reading a lot, constantly practicing, and insisting on writing, forming more than 200,000 words of articles represented by "A Classroom That Grows Freely".
In 2021, I focused on improving the ability of family education guidance, and led the studio members to develop 50 family education guidance micro-courses while immersing myself in learning research, benefiting more than 100,000 families......
It is not impossible for teachers to make their own brand and characteristics, starting from digging only one deep well at a time, coupled with "time compounding" and "happy self-discipline".
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Author: Sun Yihua Haiyan Binhai Primary School, Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province Source: China Teacher Daily
Editor: Wu Wenqin
Review: Huang Xiaoyu Liu Jing