When I think about win win situations, I think about how many areas of one's life that this should be taken into consideration yet might not be. For me personally, I believe that my husband and I do not compromise as Dr. Pumpian discusses, because that would mean that one, or both, of us are not being fully respected or heard. Instead, we find the win win solution that ends with us both very happy. This communication and partnership in my personal life has often helped me in professional situations. As a teacher, I have recently found a greater partnership with my students after reading "Student Voice" within a professional development setting as well as small optional book clubs. Although I am looking for more ways of providing a win win situation for my students, I have recently expressed to the class that I would like to collaborate with them in reconfiguring our classroom layout. I expressed the areas that were most important to me and then offered them opportunity to discuss and explain what is important to them. After this, they had the opportunity to draw out floor plans with any explanations necessary as to why they would prefer their changes. After looking through the feedback, I made the changes over the weekend and the ongoing feedback and appreciation from the students is incredible. I believe that I offer as much assistance as possible to my fellow teachers, but should start paying more attention to how I am modeling this. I do believe that we also have more room to grow in this area as a team. I believe that next steps for us in making sure that we are pushing for more win win scenarios would be for us to meet as a middle school staff more often so that all of our needs and ideas can be heard. This is something that is hard to find time to do, but it seems clear that all are in agreement that it is where we want to be.

The habit of putting first things first hits pretty close to home for me. I truly believe that we are all creatures of habit and learn these habits at an extremely young age. I know that there are many habits that I learned from watching family members, as I am sure we all do. Something that I remember was really difficult for me was being punctual when it came to after school activities. I know that my mom was super busy, but I feel that since we grew up in a family of six children and many different events it was awesome that my mom even got me to practice or church functions at all, even if I was known for showing up late. Once I reached adolescence, I realized that I had more power than I realized. I realized that I was not doing my part in making sure that I was doing everything I could to keep track of my own priorities and obligations. I will admit that I didn’t truly make as much progress as I could have, but by senior year, I had made some drastic changes in habits. I also noticed that these changes had a large impact on my school efforts and overall work ethic, pulling me into lunch tutoring as such knowing that afterschool I had practice.  I now am (usually) a person who shows up early for work and such just to make sure that I am ready for the day and in the right mind-set. I learned this from my dad. In high school, he had told me that when I get a job, it is important for many reasons that you are never planning on showing up when your shift starts, but early.  It may sound silly but I like to also sit in my car in silence before walking in. 

            When watching the video, I was laughing because I have actually come pretty close to running out of gas because I didn’t have to stop. ??? I know.  I also understood completely how negatively it can impact your life by putting small unimportant and non-urgent things in front of others that may be more time sensitive or valuable.

            So I can admit that there was a time when I found myself in putting time aside for what quadrant IV calls “time wasters” but have learned from my errors.  What I find difficult at this time in my life is prioritizing what I want to do first because there are so many areas of my professionalism that I want to build upon. For example, I just realized that I had fallen a bit behind with a few posts due to the fact that my mind has been focused on the Time to Thrive conference that I am attending right now in Portland, Oregon. So this is going to be a focus of mine and I am going to do my best to reflect on this with my students so that they start earlier than I did! My goal is to do an activity that can tie into their character reflection journals that helps them list what they have going on in their day and then try to list them in order of importance. I also think tat a demonstration as shown in the video would be fun! It would also be an easy activity to produce!

When I think about this habit, it makes me think about how we need to consider what we want our students to e successful in before the year starts and even before teaching each lesson. We write the purpose statement on the board (in some cases, we write three purposes).  Who do we want our students to be? We may not realize it, but we do ask ourselves this. We ask ourselves what type of writers do we want them to be by the end of the year? What unit do we want them to be on in math?, and so on. It is important to know what you want to see in the end before you create the steps or consider the tools. I know I wouldn’t go to Home Depot to by materials for my kitchen remodel if I had no idea what I wanted the kitchen to look like. When remodeling my garage into a gym, we had to decide what equipment was most important to us and then draw out the blue prints. I will point out the obvious. All of these areas in which I have began with the end in mind are areas that I feel comfortable and confident in. I do wonder though, and would love some feedback, about how we could possibly look at this habit in terms of our 680 course. I think that since that course is a bit more confusing to me, it might be good for me to take these habits and make those connections.