iServi News | 5 July 2019 | Term 2, Week 10
At this time of year, we would like to draw your attention to one important ritual of education that often gets too little attention – celebration.
Traditionally, end of the semester is a time of reflection. We review our successes, the contributions we have made, our areas of growth and needs for improvement. We then re-evaluate goals, sit down and make priorities and a plan of action for the remainder of the year. These practices are normal and also very important at the halfway line, but in this process, we can sometimes forget to spend time celebrating our achievements, however large or small.
The true impact of celebration is learning. To learn, we must reflect on what we have done, what we have accomplished, and what allowed us to achieve those successes, as well as the things that may have led to failure, incomplete accomplishments or unmet goals. Sometimes we fall into a preprogrammed negativity bias, so we naturally focus on how we fell short or failed. While it is important not to overlook areas of failure to try to learn how to prevent them in the future, it’s far too easy for most of us to see our own shortcomings, failures and faults, and we neglect to appreciate the things that have worked well, where we have been successful, and where we have achieved our personal goals.
I would encourage everyone to take the academic break as an opportunity to look at what you’ve accomplished over the past 6 months. Take time to go back through your calendar and look at each month, each week and ask yourself, “What did I get done? What was finished? What relationships did I strengthen? Which new teams did I join? What problems did I solve? How did I make others’ lives better through my service to them?”. If you look carefully, you may discover that there are many things that at this point in the year you have forgotten that you achieved. By racing from task to task, event to event and goal to goal, always looking forward for that next thing, you may never really feel that you achieve success. Taking this time to look back and appreciate your progress so far this year, you may recognise your achievements and know that your efforts are having an impact.
This reflection encourages you to build from strength to strength, recognising what made you successful this time may be the basis of what will make you successful in the future. Learn from success as well as failure and build your confidence then repeat.
We would also like to remind all our families about our Parent Interviews on Monday 29 July. We encourage all families to make appointments with their child’s teachers to discuss their progress and seek feedback on how to continue building success for the remainder of the year.
We pray all our students and families have a safe and wonderful break and enjoy this opportunity to renew and refresh ourselves for the remainder of the year to come.
Mr Ryan Wiles
(Acting) Deputy Principal – Teaching and Learning