Detail
It’s amazing how a change in lighting alone can transform the feeling of a room.
It can make you feel more productive, more focussed or more present…
And lighting is just one thing we can modify in our environment.
What does the environment most conducive of your best work look like? What does it sound like? What things are around?
The details of our environment affect us. And we have the ability to alter the details.
How good.
What and when
The scattergun approach is doing a lot of something in the hope that something will work.
The precise approach is to carefully consider and plan the action before execution.
Both have their place…
A broad approach when you need momentum, fast.
The precise approach when you know the mission and exactly what you need to bring to it.
The real skill is knowing which to use and when.
Rule breaker
I’m back home after a marathon 4 month tour of Mrs Krishnan’s Party.
It’s weird not having to leave the house at a certain time and actually having my evenings back.
My usual rule for life is to be working on the next thing right as the last thing is finishing up.
This time, though, I’m just taking the rest- it’s nice not having to be at the top of my game each night at 7.30pm (and twice on Saturdays.)
The usual rules are usually good.
And sometimes you can just take a break from the rules.
Is there a rule you’re following that you could simply break for a change?
As Tim Ferriss would ask- what if you just did the opposite?
Not on the day
I love the practice of creating every day.
But one thing that tripped me up was mixing that up with publishing every day.
Don’t get me wrong, I think we should publish every day too.
WHAT!? I hear you say.
Here’s the difference- create daily but give some time between creation and release.
So the thing you publish today you didn’t also make today.
Work on something today but publish something else.
I did just write this though…
You Don’t Need to Be the Expert in the Room
You want to teach more te reo in your class but you find yourself stuck on ‘kei te pēhea koe’. You decide you need to upskill! You find a te reo night class- great! You dedicate a couple of hours a night to learning the language and even manage to create some lesson plans for your students.
As teachers, we all want to be well informed. We want to have all the facts. We want to bring a level of expertise to the table so we can stand with confidence in front of our class, field any questions and extend the learning together in the uniquely alive environment of a classroom full of curious kids.
We want to be the experts in the room.
Don’t we all?
I mean surely we have to know everything about a subject before we teach it…right?
The truth is, expertise in any field is hard to define, time consuming to attain and just when you think you get ‘there’ there’s even more to learn.
It’s the beautiful thing about learning, but it’s a trap for teachers.
The real magic in teaching comes from releasing the need to be an expert. The most powerful educators I’ve seen in action weren’t experts, they were outstanding facilitators.
This need for expertise is even more rampant in New Zealand primary schools when it comes to te ao Māori. And trust me, I get it. To say the Māori people and language has been through a lot the last couple of centuries is an understatement. So this need to ‘get it exactly right’ makes complete sense. Teachers want to respect the Māori culture. They want to do right by our heritage and they definitely do not want to disrespect the culture.
Sometimes this prompts personal learning journeys for teachers; they deeply explore the language, the culture and their own relationship to it as a New Zealander.
Other times it creates a paralysis in teachers. They don’t have the time or the resources to become proficient in the language or reach a level where they would be comfortable to pass it onto their students.
While it appears that this is respect in action, it actually has the opposite effect. When we are afraid of getting it wrong as teachers, we pass down this fear to our students. They inherit this fear, the culture doesn’t get passed on and we create a whole new generation of people who do not claim or celebrate te ao Māori as our unique national asset.
I think we instinctively realise that we can’t know it all before we dive into something. We’d be stuck with most things if this were the case. We have to make do with what we have, right? Can you think of a time where you taught something without needing all the answers?
I certainly can…
When I was fresh out of drama school, I found myself teaching a night class for non-actors. I was 23 and felt out of my depth. I had to teach adults (some of whom were 20 years older than me) how to act.
Keep in mind, I had just graduated and after the whirlwind three years I actually felt more confused about acting than when I started. I didn’t feel like I knew nearly enough to teach a weekly two hour night class to 30 people!
I think the secret fear I had was that I would have to demonstrate ‘great’ acting and that just made me want to vomit. “I’m just as confused as you all are!” is all I wanted to shout.
It was my mentor that gave me the advice I’m giving you now. He told me I didn’t need to know it all. He told me I just had to hold space for the learning to happen.
Whoa. That’s good. “Hold space for learning to happen” …
“Well I can do that” I thought.
I gathered some of the exercises from acting school that interested me most and took them along to my first class.
He told me I didn’t need to know it all. He told me I just had to hold space for the learning to happen.
With my fresh perspective, I positioned myself as the one who brought the proverbial soccer ball and goal nets.
“I’m not the best in the world, but hey here’s the equipment we need to learn together”
I taught that class for a year and we had an outstanding experience. My ‘students’ grew not because I’m so great, but because I facilitated space for us all to try things out together.
Now I wasn’t ‘winging’ it. I knew our outcomes and had some ideas I wanted us to explore together. But I also didn’t pour hours into late night googling to have impressive facts to sound smart.
I just made a space in which excellent learning could take place; and last I checked us teachers are really good at that.
This is the same strategy I see in the most successful teachers we work with at Online Kapa Haka, they aren’t the teachers who know the most, they are the ones who let go of that need and pour all their effort into facilitating world class learning environments.
While the biggest part of implementing this is a perspective shift, here are a few practical steps you can do now to get the benefits immediately:
Step 1: Decide. Decide to release the need to be an expert.
Step 2: Clarify. Have a clearly defined question or outcome going into the class; What will we all learn together?
Step 3: Resource. Gather as much resource as you can to explore together with your students- not to cram before the lesson, but to use together.
Step 4: Environment. Create an environment conducive to trying things out. Ask your students what you can all expect of each other and how you all should behave in pursuit of that.
Step 5: Explore. With curiosity, explore the resources together and find the learning outcome together live in the room
If this feels uncomfortable to you, you’re not alone. Looking at this as a lesson plan makes me squirm a little bit too. What could look like a lack of preparation is actually yielding to the life of the classroom. Just like an actor shouldn’t over-prepare for a scene, so too should a teacher avoid killing the magic of learning by overcooking the lesson prep. The learning happens live in the room, not on the computer screen the night before.
You might also be thinking “Great, well where do I find the right resources?!”
In most cases it isn’t a lack of resource that trips teachers up but a lack of resourcefulness. Get more interested in the intention of your lesson and the environment you create and let that steer you to find resources that ignite those lessons.
The next time you feel that niggling feeling like you need to know more, remember that you only need to provide the tools and environment for learning to take place. Focus on being a world class facilitator, someone who makes magical and lively learning happen daily; because you’re already an expert at that.
The cake
At the end of the day, the cake gotta taste good.
You can market it, wrap it and talk it up all you like… but it has to be good.
The greatest artists and creators of our time understand this. They become obsessed with the ingredients. The best of the best. The cake that makes people rave for more- there’s no substitute for it.
Sure, you have to know how to sell the cake.
But you’ve got to make it brilliant first.
On being ‘good’
Looking back on my experience of drama school, it seems a lot of the initial training was about getting us to focus on the right things.
There’s this thing people say about actor training where they “break you down and build you back up”.
I’ve never really liked this saying- it seems kind of negative or unnecessarily fear inducing. From my years of training it’s more about discovering patterns and building new ones.
And that’s just the learning process. But I guess people like making things sound dramatic and scary when it comes to acting.
It’s confronting, sure, but so is meeting your edge in any arena.
One of the main focuses I needed to undo in my training was this thing of trying to be liked. Of monitoring in an audience or in a director- am I doing the right thing? Do you like this?!
It makes sense, of course; my only frame of reference for learning was the school system that was all about being ‘right’. But of course acting isn’t about being ‘right’ it’s about being true.
Even that is a tricky metric- true according to who? Looking elsewhere for how truthful your work is is just another way of outsourcing your certainty.
Instead, as actors we must become experts of placing our focus. One way of doing this is to give your character an objective:
To make this person stay
To make them leave
To make them understand me
You get the idea. This is how we pursue truth; to what extent did you fight for your objective?
I love this way of thinking because if I’m feeling nervous I can ask myself, what is my objective?
And more often then not in those nerve wracking situations my objective has accidentally become “to make these people think I’m clever or funny.”
You lose when this becomes the objective, you really do. And this is what can happen if you’re not clear on your objective as an actor.
Trying to be clever or funny or attractive will always set you up for failure. Those things MIGHT come as a result of what you do in pursuit of an objective (emphasis on might, haha).
So in life, I think we should practice the same thing; give ourselves objectives that get us out of our own way. Objectives we can fight for, use our full selves to pursue them.
That’s playing big and that’s where the real magic is.
The three ingredients
I have a question for you: As a teacher, what do you find most difficult about making te ao Māori part of your day?
Many schools genuinely want to make te ao Māori an authentic, living part of daily school life…
…but often the challenge is not intention, it’s knowing how to turn that intention into something practical, consistent, and sustainable for busy staff.
That’s why I recorded this short video for you.
In it, I share 3 core ingredients I keep seeing in schools that are making real progress with embedding te ao Māori school-wide.
If this is something your school is working toward, I think you’ll get a lot from this video.
Too much too soon
It’s new years day and you have a big beautiful piece of paper in front of you. It’s got scribbles in different colours with words and sentences of all different sizes; this is you LIFE PLAN.
It’s so exciting! You can see it all there in front of you. The energy of the fresh cup of coffee coupled with the momentum of the first day of January has hit you hard and this grand plan represents your entire vision.
This was me on new years day- I had the added inspiration of being on the beach at Oakura Bay in the north of New Zealand. My inspiration quickly turned to overwhelm. I had no trouble getting all my visions and goals down on the page. But just a few hours later I looked at the page again. What was once a battery pack that charged me up with energy now seemed like the opposite- I felt drained and daunted by what lay in front of me.
Inspiration isn’t enough.
Being inspired feels great, doesn’t it? New Years Day does it, but we see these moments in other bursts throughout the year too. The beginning of term or the start of a new flashy program at school… these ‘launch’ moments have a tendency to burn bright and burn fast. The problem isn’t the vision, we need a clear direction. The problem is too much too soon.
One of the grand goals I had was for the kids I was teaching to have a full Te Reo exchange with me at the beginning of class. I barreled into our first session together and began laying out a multi-step greeting and conversation exchange… It felt exciting and new and I got some great initial progress. But the next time I went in, the kids had forgotten and each subsequent lesson I had to start from scratch. The kids were over chunked; it was too much too soon.
Out of frustration one day, I decided to drop it. So I just did the opening greeting. Some of them remembered it… cool! I drilled it again for those still not confident. The next few lessons I just did the same.
What I’d hoped would take me one lesson actually took more like six- but I was stoked.
I learned to use the moments of inspiration as the ‘lift off’ and chunk down the subsequent bits. It doesn’t all have to feel like the raging fire of a rocket taking off.
Sometimes it’s just striking a match.
And when you strike enough of them, you get a pretty bright light.
Target practice
When I was 23 I was tasked with teaching 30 adults how to act- I felt completely out of my depth.
It was a weekly class; two hours each Thursday night. I was only a couple of years out of drama school but the thing that really got me was that the oldest of my ‘students’ was 45.
I felt completely unqualified to teach this class. Despite my three years of actor training, I didn’t think I had any wisdom to share with these people- I was hardly an expert! And besides that, I felt like a kid compared to the people I’d be teaching who had full on careers and families.
My mentor from drama school was the one that changed my whole perspective. He told me I didn’t need to be some zen master of acting to run this class. He said “You know a lot of acting exercises, right?”
I said “yeah”.
He said “And you know the learning embedded in the exercises, right?”
I said “Of course”
“Then that’s all you need. You don’t need to be the best at archery, you just need to bring a bow, some arrows and a target. Then you can all do target practice together”
This changed everything. I realised I didn’t need to be an expert. I just had to bring what I did know and we could all explore the learning together.
The weight lifted off my shoulders and I walked into that class with confidence. And the confidence didn’t come from knowing everything, it came from knowing enough and having a willingness to learn more.
That’s all we ever need. I take this same mentality into every environment where I teach or learn.