It’s early morning. The weather is lovely. I’m two little coffees down, sitting out on the back porch trying to write a blog post about teaching because I haven’t done one for ages and I know it’s a good thing for me to do. It helps me order my own thinking.

And ordering my thinking is important, because the holidays ended last week.

And as I sit here making an attempt at typing profound and important things, my son has been bringing me old clothes pegs to examine and asking me to play. The dog is nudging a truly disgusting tennis ball against my left leg, and my son, realising that this is getting some of my attention while he gets none, makes the obvious link and starts making dog noises and running around my chair. He’s already asked to play footy when I’m done. I say yes, but I feel guilty. I might never be done at this rate. After a holiday of almost limitless access and attention, my son is no doubt confused by my focus being on something else.

Late last year I started a process of modernizing my teaching practice for 21c learners. By the time we’d hit that last celebratory staff meeting of the year, I’d exposed myself to Ian Jukes, Ewan Makintosh, Dan Haesler and Sugata Mitra. I’d set up classroom like Lisa Burman and made passing glances at Ann Baker and Sheena Cameron as well. I’d done a lot of reading and trialing and testing and thinking, (and as in this case, quite a bit of namedropping). I’d had discussions with team teachers and the school leadership. I’d spoken to like minded tweeps and done endless reams of little mind maps and colour coded lists, which I love, because they make the hours fly by. I had grand and amazing visions of major projects that would spring fully formed from the lazy afternoons of a six week Christmas break. I plotted my return to the classroom in term one as if I were some form of chrysalid, planning a big shiny, fully formed butterfly transformation.

I’m now being slapped lightly on the head by a small swimmers kickboard, attached to a small swimmer. This is an indication that yet again I’m being boring and grown up and I should just stop it. The item is duly confiscated.

And it’s not like I’m alone in this butterfly transformation project. I have teaching partners, thankfully, that are well and truly keen to take risks. We’ve been working as a unit for several years. We have a leadership that is keen for us to trial and innovate. we have release time and more. We are, in my opinion, extremely well setup for innovative and team thinking to flourish. It’s an opportunity that needs grabbing.

We run five Primary years classes (6/7) in one big unit in an Adelaide inner west school, and have been team planning activities including film, design learning, robotics, a kitchen garden (with kitchen) as well as new shared programs around Ann Baker maths that this year will form a unit wide maths program. This is a busy space, made possible by a group of teachers who are all on board and a leadership who supports us financially, with endless tedtalk links and boundless moral support. And yet I still found it hard to find the time to do it justice when holidays came around.

So am I being lazy? With all this amazing potential before us, am I squibbing it? Shouldn’t I be flat out creating this amazing new butterfly of learning? All holidays it bugged me. My ambitions for this year demanded I get on and work non stop. My family suggested the beach. Guess what won?

And inbetween bike rides and laundry and coffee shops and book shops and bike rides and scooter rides and bike rides, the worry that I wasn’t making progress just stuck there like a poppy seed in my teeth. I started to think about what it is that all those self propelled super achievers have on twitter that I seemed to be missing. You know the ones. Blogging non stop, maintaining their PLC’s. Curating useful links to evernote and prompting each other to greater heights. I have to assume they have families and classrooms as well. What was their secret?

Mr six has just tried to talk to me about something. I am using tactical ignoring. After a moment he says “I’ll just get back to my drawing then” and I’m sure there’s sarcasm in it. I’m running out of time to get this down.

Because it’s easy to see the end result. It’s easy to see the glorious Butterfly transformation of your classroom in your mind’s eye, but sometimes it’s hard to stomach all the tedious eating and cocoon building you need to do first.

We can see all of these potential changes in our building clearly. I can see all the potential, the possible future of a learning space that covers design learning and personalisation and digital curriculums and collaborative learning. A space that uses targeted intervention and effect sizes and moderation amongst five teachers who are all on the same page. I can see team planning and moodle classrooms and democratic student voice set in a learning space that is flexible and collaborative and independent.

But I’ve know that seeing it is the easy part. The perfect learning space. I bet we all have one.

Now, in an effort at solving both of their problems, Mr six is currently trying to throw the ball for the dog, who unsurprisingly won’t give it. So he’s decided to stop shouting at her and ride his scooter instead. Could I get it out of the car? “In a minute… ” I say.

After four seconds and with a verbal eye roll, he lumbers off mutterring “I’ll ask mum.”

You see, often the best innovators within our business don’t just demonstrate to others that their ideas have merit, they don’t just demonstrate their passion for a topic, (their perfect classroom), they’re also honest about the fact that what they are advocating as part of the process is harder work. More time. More reflection. More refining. But they rarely outline how they balance that with daily life. So I started to look around.

The most helpful talk I found was on the topic of the ‘slow hunch’ by Steven Johnson. The (link) is here,

I particularly like the idea that Eureka moments have historically been overplayed, and that most good innovative thinking happens as part of a network or team. This is good news. We have a good team. The example (from the presentation link above) of scientific research into innovatons in a science lab, (with most innovations coming not from the lab but from the weekly office meeting), is a great one. It demonstrates the value of teams working together in an environment where clashing ideas is a safe activity (gratuitous Tfel namedrop – safe conditions for learning). It also happens to be a great argument for not trying to fashion the perfect 21st century classroom on your own in the holidays. Two weeks into this term and I’ve already gone so far off the reservation in terms of my ideas from December that I’m pretty glad now that I ‘wasted’ my holidays in the way that I did.

The second message from this talk was that great ideas don’t arrive as new shiny things (like my fully formed classroom butterfly), they are almost always cobbled together from old, existing parts we are already using. A combinaton of ideas and perspectives stitched together to be tested, repaired and rerun. For example: I had been trying in the last few months of 2014, to set up a design learning lab in my building. I’d done reading, interpreted and modified other’s ideas and I had come up with something that in the end I was pretty happy with. I implemented my ideas and I changed a few things as I tested them out on last years classes and ironed out the kinks.

So I start the year with a pretty serviceable lab, but I know I can improve on it. And the big thing is, now that I’m at the point of sharing this room and its principles with my co teachers, I’ve started to have qualms, as if the design lab I’ve created isn’t like the other ones, or perhaps I’ve misinterpreted the idea or missed the point or gone off on a tangent. I was looking at it all again and again, trying to see how I might justify it to my colleagues, looking for flaws.

And that’s a waste of time.

Because now I’m sure that this cobbling together and testing is exactly what I should be doing. My next step isn’t presenting my shiny new machine for design learning and a manual for its use to my colleagues. Rather, it’s an invitation to the whole team to come in and start tinkering as well, to help out. This will not only make it a better program, but it takes all the pressure out of it too.

So now I can spend a bit of time trying to launch jr. into orbit on the trampoline, instead of reworking the lesson plan again.

The final learning I took from Steven Johnson is that connections outside my network matter. Exposing myself to other fields and other practices and other people in other networks really matters. And so again, I can look back on my holidays and see the hours on politics blogs, conversations with my engineer brother and trips to the beach with a six year old as valuable cross pollination.

This guy really gets me off the holiday hook .

And it also means that I come back into the room ready to take incremental, tinkering steps towards that ultimate classroom, walking around the problem with a group of peers, instead of trying to launch the perfect butterfly when I should be relaxing.

I start to plan a walk to the park, comfortable in the knowledge that I didnt really waste my holidays at all. It was all slow hunch time. And it works.