Like a great recipe, there was a perfect combination of ingredients that were mixed together to create HI Achievers. Those ingredients are my four core values that guide everything I do.
My core values are encouraging environment, truth, growth, and cuteness. Cuteness was so important to me because learning is fun. My tiny hobbit hole office is such a safe space that tears flow freely when frustrations arise, kids totally nail their reading and writing strategies inside here but can’t put it all together in their classrooms, and there is absolutely no filter between my kids and I, the tangents and teachable moments are daily. But that honesty brings about the biggest growth in an encouraging environment. The honesty with my kids and their own selves, the honesty between them and I to challenge, question, answer, support, and grow together is that magical stuff. Safety is what creates an encouraging environment for any type of relationship and growth.
My brand pillars of struggles and small wins are so important to learning and life-ing. These two littles are my favorite part of all this branding. Life is a daily climb of overcoming struggles and celebrating the small wins. Day in and day out. You’ll see in another post just how important these two are in winning and losing in life. According to Angela Duckworth, we don’t actually learn from our failures. Hmmm? What? Growing up we were always taught that we learn from our failures so we had to study them. Duckworth’s article says that we tune out when we fail. “To avoid feeling bad about ourselves, we stop paying attention. As a result, we don’t learn from the experience.” Think about that. Pause to let that simmer. Think about the last time you tried something really difficult and then failed. I think about my attempts to change my anxiety. I actually think I avoided it until I learned that the struggle was not negative or any sort of strike against my self worth. Then I could “right size” the expectation that I just simply tried something new or difficult and didn’t get it yet. I had to start smaller. The right-sized expectation and then the deliberate counting of my small wins… that was a recipe for purposeful change.
If I could bring this type of growth for my personal life, how could I teach this to my kids? How could I help them master these early on? How could I help them understand how their mistakes didn’t make them any less worthy and loveable? That the grade or needing help didn’t disqualify them from unconditional love and that they are still good enough. That's what I understood about my kids and what I brought to my kids. Understanding them and supporting them because that’s what I needed in someone when I was younger.
HI Achievers and The Learning Pizza is my chance to do just that. My recipe requires values like an encouraging environment, truth, growth, and cuteness mixed with the spice of daily struggles and small wins to create a purposeful change. Is it a perfect recipe? Not by a long shot, but with my students we’ve cooked up some pretty awesome life stories thus far.
Are you on board to try a new recipe to revise education? Stick around and let’s get cooking!
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