Adria Steinberg describes the importance of knowing one’s values as an educator and how that relates to long term goals and a career in education.
[MUSIC PLAYING] May I think someone going into education now, who would like to have a long career and a long passage in education. I think it’s really more important than ever to be very clear on what your values are? Why you’re in this work? What you’re hoping to accomplish in this work? And to look beyond, I mean, I know people talk about initiative fatigue and they talk about the pendulum swings in a kind of pejorative way.
But I don’t think you have to look at it that way. I mean, I actually think that yes, initiative names, you know, everybody brands everything now. Names are going to change all the time. But you’ve got to look underneath that. I mean, does this agree with my sense of values or not? Does this agree with what I’m seeing about the world I’m in and what young people really need to move forward.
And you know, it doesn’t matter if it’s what it’s called really. If I can find a way to be myself within it and bring what I think is important, I’ll use the terminology of the day. I mean, it’s just like that’s the language of the day. So you use it and you don’t have to feel like it’s a brand new initiative.
It’s like oh, great. This is a continuation of something I started 15 years ago and here’s a new opportunity to take the mistakes we made and the things that didn’t go so well and try to come back around and maybe this time with some new tools at our disposal, we can move it to a different place.
