Opinion: A Notebook to Deal with Uncertainty and Change

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We have been confined at home for quite some days, observing how we can live without doing so many things outside. Schools are closed, and all the teachers and managers, with a great spirit of generosity and commitment, have been seeking ways to ensure that their students’ rhythm of learning continues. We want to move the school, where we taught and lived, into every house of our students and their families. It is a monumental effort.

Almost unintentionally, we have created a new way to educate. Moreover, on top of this latest manifestation of being an online educator, mostly unknown to many, we have to manage the rhythm of the family, the concern for loved ones, for our health, and the future. No one told us about this journey. We were not prepared, not as a school nor as educators nor managers. We believed that the school was almost immovable, static, that it has always been there.

Nevertheless, right now, it stops, and not precisely for us to go on vacation but to situate us in another perspective, another gaze, in the position of rescuing the essential, accompanying, helping to grow, helping to think, and perhaps less in making or transmitting content. Reality has forced us to put on the brakes. We know that, eventually, the face-to-face school we left will return; “normality” will return. How do we anticipate and prepare ourselves now so that it will be different? How do we use this time to transform ourselves in order to transform others?

One of the tools that can help us is the personal journal, which we can also call the notebook of life. At Reimagine Education Lab, we began all seminars by delivering a journal to each participant. We invite managers and teachers to incorporate this powerful tool into their daily lives, as an ally, a friend, a confidant who accompanies us in finding ourselves, with the essential, with the uncertain, with gratitude, with inspiration. A tool that helps us to find perspective on the situations in which we live. In short, as Otto Scharmer says, to connect with our inner source and let it flow, without putting any brakes on it, as one who allows the current of river flow. It is that simple and that complex.

The process of change that we are experiencing, ourselves as well as our students and families, asks us to walk and adopt different ways of doing things. It takes time, time to transform mental frameworks, to know ourselves, and to ask ourselves questions: What do I want? What person do I want to be? What kind of educator? What type of manager? What do I want to leave behind because, in this new reality that is emerging, it will no longer be useful to me? What is it that I am going to need, and what do I want to be born in me? When it all ends, do I want the same school?

So, now that everything has stopped (yes, now!), I invite you to take a notebook, any type you want, customize it with colors, phrases, and images and when you have truly met yourself, stop and think about what you want to share from it. Maybe those learnings you have acquired from being an educator, or from what you are doing these days. Maybe what leader will our teams and our school need right now. What makes sense to me as an educator? What is the seed that I want to be born in me when I return to school? What view do I want to have towards my classmates and students? Choose a path, a tour, let it flow and enjoy it. It is in these moments that MY BOOK becomes indispensable, a pencil, and space/time to write every day. The value of writing lies in letting it flow to anchor, glimpse, discover patterns, schemes, to appreciate, to love you, forgive you and remain in your true essence, in what you are and what you live. This simple but profound practice, coupled with meditation, becomes the most potent anchor of our being.

Moreover, this tool can also be used with our students. We have an excellent opportunity to share this action-reflection with them. Have them write their diary from quarantine at home. Writing what they think, what they do, what they feel, and afterward, share it. The journey inside us is an adventure at once risky and exciting for every person – educator, manager, student – who wants to live life to the fullest, connected with his vocation, with others, and with the universe. This is an experience that we practice every day and that we want to share, a lone trip to the inside of ourselves on a pen-and-paper boat.

Life continues; life is about roads. Now we have one to travel, but this time it is solo, deep in ourselves. We need light luggage, just a NOTEBOOK, and a pencil. Let’s dare to do it! Our students and schools need it!

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This post was initially published on Xavier Aragay’s blog.

Jonquera Arnó is a teacher and companion in the processes of change. Her vital and professional project is developed in the field of accompaniment, growth, and personal development of managers and teams from systematic, integrative, and transformational vision.

Xavier Aragay is an expert and international consultant of transformation in educational institutions and leadership for change. He specializes in the shift of education through the accompaniment of disruptive innovation processes, through his original and proven methodology.

Both are part of the Reimagine Education Lab. This team aims to accompany, promote, and implement processes and experiences of disruptive innovation in educational institutions through their original and tested models of reimagining education.

Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and official policies of Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.