Understanding through Writing

From journaling in middle school in physical notebooks to publicly posting on Tumblr, Facebook, and various WordPress blogs, like Instructional Insights, throughout my professional life, I have always been drawn to understanding through writing. I have even had the luxury of teaching young folks how to process and communicate their understanding in English Language Arts, as well as approaches to historiography, research, and synthesizing all of that to share their insights and perspectives of the world.

Simplicity

I love how writing forces me to slow down and consider one thought at a time in a mindful, meaning-making way. I hope that by sharing my thoughts in an ordered fashion here, you can ascertain some useful, inspirational nuggets that propel you to further refine your daily practices, whether that be in the education world, agile realm, or in your own meaning-making journey in whatever form it takes.

Art

I also love the creative, expressive nature of writing — and how I can uniquely convey different styles and attitudes in my writing, through structure, word choice, and punctuation. Over the past few years, I have read some fantastic books on the subject. For anyone interested in writing, I highly recommend: Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott, On Writing Well by William Zinsser, Writing to Persuade by Trish Hall, and 25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way by Geraldine Woods. Of course, I don’t claim to have mastered the craft of writing in reading those books alone, but each of those books urges one to continuously practice and refine one’s art. The work is never really done.

Curiosity

Like my yoga instructors often request at the beginning of a session, I invite your curiosity, as you read posts here on The Agile Educator. Notice what shows up for you. How are these thoughts alike or different from your experience? What’s the impact? Know that I am doing the same thing in writing. My experience isn’t finished and the thoughts I share here won’t be perfectly complete, but I intend to invite curiosity to each subject matter I share.

Candor

There’s a lot of talk about radical candor in professional circles. I think there’s even a whole program you can buy — There are always programs you can buy to become more x, y, z..! As cliché as it may be, I do aim to write candidly and with authenticity. Throughout my professional life, I have tended to write in sterile manner — sticking to the facts and removing myself from publicly facing writing so that I come across as scientific, serious, and professional. While I still aim to be grounded in research, literature, and facts, I hope to strike a balance and be more “me” in this blog, allowing humor and personal anecdotes to seep into my posts. After all, it is these personal experiences and stories that tie us together, make the facts stick, and illuminate meaning.

Commitment

In terms of frequency, I aim to write at least one post per month this year. If you would like notification when those posts debut and/or would like to be included on future newsletters, I welcome you to subscribe with your email. I will be sure to keep it to no more than two emails per month, as I don’t want to clutter your inbox. I am still unsubscribing from several different email subs myself (mostly businesses offering discounts that aren’t worth the clutter!) every week, in hopes of narrowing down my inbox to the things that matter to me most.

Thank you for reading! 🙂