Connections

A big part of personal growth is reflection, taking a step back and thoughtfully noting the progress you've made. Reflection helps you evaluate the direction you've come from and change the angle of trajectory, if necessary. As important as reflection to personal growth is connection. Connections--to ideas, information, people, media--help you take next steps and pull you forward. Making those connections opens up possibilities; every connection leads to more possible paths and more opportunities for possible futures. Assessing the value of those connections and determining the direction for the opportunities that those connections make available is the tricky part. In fact, it's the part that is hard to see from your own perspective, and may take an outsider to help you figure out.

This is one way that we can help students, who are even less capable of determining what directions their connections can take them. Sometimes it takes an outside observer to make the connections--and the possible pathways those connections reveal--obvious to students. We do it all the time, even if we don't always recognize what it is we're doing. Talking to kids about making good choices and studying to get good grades which leads to increased academic opportunities; encouraging kids to try out for a travel team or new activity which leads to increased extracurricular activities; challenging kids to make new friends or find different friends which leads to increased social and personal activities. The point is this: if we can't always see the way connections open up the possibilities in our own lives, students definitely need us to help them see the possibilities in theirs.

That means that part of our responsibility as teachers is to not only challenge students to explore new opportunities by first recognizing what connections they already have, but to teach them to think about how these connections play out in their lives and lead to opportunities for growth. In this way, students will be better prepared for the world and able to see, evaluate, and reflect upon their own connections and the many possibilities that those connections reveal for them.