Ingrained Behaviors

An ingrained behavior is "firmly fixed or established; difficult to change."

Educators have ingrained behaviors.  School administrators have even more.

These ingrained behaviors result from effective training, procedures and protocols, and most essentially, quality experience.

Picture c/o gembapantarei.com

We opened the 2015-2016 school-year this past Thursday at Lake Norman Charter.  Not only was this my first school opening as Principal, but it also was the first at LNC.

The first two days of this school-year have opened my eyes to my own ingrained behaviors.  Ingrained behaviors, to which I did not even realize had become ingrained until I had instinctual reactions.

An interesting component of these ingrained behaviors is the fact that they differed from my own personal ideologies.

Example: Cell Phones.

We allow our students to access and use our cell phones during class change and during lunches.

For 10+ years, I had trained myself to "be on watch" for students attempting to utilize their mobile devices during the aforementioned times.  These were either district- or school-wide policies and I was expected to enforce.  As the diligent and deferential Assistant Principal/Dean of Students, I did exactly that.  I'm not claiming one policy to be better than another.

I found myself instinctively reacting to seeing our students using their devices during class change and had to continually "catch myself" from addressing it in the cafeteria and hallways.

The bizarre component of these reactions is how I actually am in support of students utilizing their devices during non-instructional time and always have been.  This post isn't about mobile devices, but about the ingrained behavior that became second-nature.

I now have to re-train the previously in-grained behaviors.

It's probably not the last, either.

Thank you for viewing,

CS

The opinions shared in this blog belong to Craig Smith and do not represent the school or district in which he works.