Taking Initiative

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told. ~Victor Hugo

This past month, as advisor to NHS/NJHS, I prodded the students through the process of organizing a health fair. When the day finally arrived, we had 15 exhibitors and the majority of attendees came from within our school community. The goal of the fair was to get the larger community, outside of school, to see what health, fitness and wellness resources were available. Overall, for the first health fair at school, it was successful. The exhibitors stated that they enjoyed the opportunity to network with each other and our own students learned a lot. However, as a NHS/NJHS activity, I was frustrated by the lack of initiative exhibited by the students, which set me pondering – how do we teach initiative?

One of the four pillars of NHS/NJHS is leadership, which does include demonstrating initiative in promoting school activities. But what does that mean? According to dictionary.com the definition of initiative is: The power or ability to begin or to follow through energetically with a plan or task; enterprise and determination.

Let's look at follow through. In the classroom, teachers give assignments and a due date, students turn in work and the teacher grades it. Once the grade is given, the assignment is over. This is the typical cycle of education. So if there are mistakes, are students expected to follow through on their learning - to make correctly, enhance their learning and truly take the assignment to its completion? In my experience, most students don't even bother to read my commentary on an assignment unless I specifically assign revision with a due date.

The next part is energetically. That would indicate that someone is doing something with passion or interest. Again, quite often students complete work because they have to, it may be on the test, or its for a grade. Many students don't feel they need to complete work if “it doesn't count” towards the grade. Why has the grade become the goal rather than the learning?

So, the big question is, how do we “teach” initiative? Mark Twain said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” This sounds more like it needs modeling rather than teaching.

"Do it right - Do it now" by SmartLeadership.com

Isolation

Isolation is one of the hardest aspects to deal with when teaching in a small school. Everyone is always occupied with teaching or supervising, and I don’t have a like-minded, subject area colleague to talk with. In the past, I’ve used Connected University http://cu.classroom.com/logon.asp to stay connected with enthusiastic teachers. I’ve enjoyed all the classes I’ve taken with it. Besides learning something new, the Discussion Board allowed me to interact daily with other teachers. Unfortunately, it does cost – about 400USD, and takes a bit of Internet time, which is very short for me lately. However, I have enrolled in the PBS TeacherLine program http://teacherline.pbs.org/teacherline/ , which is self-paced. I worked on it over the week of vacation, but haven’t looked at it since. I need to get busy with that.

This week is Drug Awareness week on the island. On Monday grades 6-12 went to see a motivational speaker. He was born with no legs or arms, but did not allow people to “handicap” him – tell him that he couldn’t do something. He was interesting, funny, and thought provoking, yet didn’t speak much about drugs, other than, “Don’t do them.” In the afternoon, the students visited a volunteer drug rehab center. Some of the recovering addicts spoke with the students. The students had a lot of questions, mostly “Is it true…” or “I heard that . . .” types of questions.