HEART!. Timothy D. Kanold

MY HEART PRINT

      I suggest reading one to two chapters per week—not too quickly! My personal improvement as a teacher mostly came as a result of becoming a more reflective and mindful practitioner and by learning from and embracing my mistakes along the way.

      It is my hope that HEART! will be both affirming and challenging as your teaching and leading career unfolds. No matter where you may be in the wonderful journey of this remarkably rewarding and sometimes frustrating profession, I hope the book will touch the story and the humanity of your professional life.

      Please complete this book by writing in your own story along the way. Perhaps use the book in group study and discussions with colleagues. As you do so, you will discover your personal heartprint and realize the power you have to touch the hearts of all the students and colleagues in your school community and professional life.

      These spaces or margins are places to write your responses and tell your story as you read your way through the book and reflect on your career progress. Use the spaces as you deem fit for your personality and style. The chapters are reasonably brief and provide space for you to take notes and be more reflective as you read, if you so choose.

      PART 1

       DEVELOPING HEART

       Essential Heartprint Question:

      Are you a person of passion, positive impact, and perseverance for the education profession?

      There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

      —Nelson Mandela

      In part 1 of this book, we explore the role happiness plays in our pursuit of a fully formed professional life. We explore the happiness—positive emotion-passion connection—in our day-to-day teaching and leading life, and we explore the role of compassion and love in living a more meaningful professional life.

      Without passion for the profession or the desire to become a person of positive influence, character, and perseverance, your heartprint on others could result in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living, as Nelson Mandela reminds us in the opening quote.⁵

      You should carefully consider the role of happiness in the workplace as you join the teaching profession. Does our profession fire you up and align your personal passion with the nature of an educator’s work life? Does your positive emotional state serve you well through the grind of each and every day?

      In this first part of the book, we explore the elements of the happiness research, what it feels like to become a wholehearted teacher of others, with the essential and necessary challenge of providing compassion, hope, and stability to others.

      You will be asked about the love you have for your work and the issues in your life worth weeping over. We examine what experts can tell us about happiness and then try to apply it to the journey of our professional work and life.

      If you teach young elementary school students or are in a stage of your personal life that includes younger children, you most likely know Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy.” First released as part of the Despicable Me 2 movie soundtrack, the words seem relevant to the context for this part of the book.

      Here are two lines from the chorus:

      Because I’m happy

      Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof⁶

      You can almost hear the tune in your head and sing along, right? If not, go to iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes) and check it out! This specific part of the chorus resonated with my heart the loudest: “Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof.” You see, in order to be meaningful, our professional life needs to feel like a room without a roof: unlimited potential and possibilities as we grow together. No ceiling on our potential and our achievement as educators, no limits to how expert we could become as practitioners within a profession we love.

      In part 1, “H Is for Happiness,” we examine actions that help us to reconnect to the meaning of our life and our career as educators and professionals. We examine steps to stay connected to our calling toward the profession and maintain joy in the journey—a joy that makes it so much more than just a job—as the days unfold, the seasons come and go, and the promise of a great career rests in the rearview mirror. The following chapters describe how to find and maintain that joy!

      The Happiness Dilemma

      Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.

      —Abraham Lincoln

      Emma Seppälä is someone you should get to know. She serves as the science director at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. In her book The Happiness Track, she defines happiness as “a state of heightened positive emotion” and elaborates further: “[Happiness] increases our emotional and social intelligence, boosts our productivity, and heightens our influence over peers.”⁷

      Happiness is about your state of being. It is about the heartprint of positive emotion we leave at school each and every day. We either walk into work in a positive emotional state or we don’t. Alternatively, we are either creating an emotional drag on our students and colleagues, or we are not.

      You and I make an impact each day: one way or the other and no matter the circumstances of our lives. The students also need us to be at our best, which on some days can be very difficult to achieve.

      We each have a story—your teaching career consists of a sequence of school years or seasons, generally starting in August and ending in late May or early June. Our lives and our careers revolve around one season after another. These seasons stack up one upon the other, each with a unique path in its own way, year after year, eventually stringing together the real-life chapters of what will become your professional career for good or for bad.

      It is in the daily grind that our school seasons unfold. And it is in our school seasons that our professional life unfolds.

      What’s happiness got to do with it? According to Seppälä, quite a bit. It maximizes your resilience at work, your creativity for your lessons, and your interactions with others, your productivity, and even your charisma factor!⁸

      All your former students and the trail of colleagues that intersect with the wake of your work will remember your happiness state season after season. It becomes part of your reputation in the community and among your colleagues.

      Speaking of seasons, which season number is this for you, as you read this first part of the book? What school year are you in (for example, 2019–2020)? And, is this school season number one, five, twelve, or twenty-five for you? Or is it some other number? What time of the year is it? First quarter, third quarter, or is it the off season (usually summer) as you read these words?

      

MY HEART PRINT

      For the eighth season of my teaching career, I chose a job at Community High School District 94 in West Chicago, Illinois. We started the school year twelve days late due to a teacher strike (I had not yet set foot in the door, and I was already walking a picket line). As we started the school year—the new season—I was in a department of teachers that