February 23, 2016
By Jenna Fournel, Chief Curiosity Officer
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast episode for Jenna’s conversation with Pax Linson, early childhood educator, longtime friend of Inspired Teaching, and an avid birdwatcher. Pax shares her experiences observing nature, connecting with the birding community, and what birdwatching can teach us about living in the present and embracing difficult moments.
When I started working with Center for Inspired Teaching back in 2004, I met someone just a few months into the job who would not only become a mentor and teacher to me and hundreds of other people, but also a lifelong friend. Her name is Pax, and while her Bluesky account accurately describes her as a “retired educational consultant, early childhood education and child development nerd,” she is all that and so much more.
This month at Inspired Teaching, we’ve been thinking about observation and how practicing our observation skills is key to building and feeding our curiosity. And when I think about observation I always think of Pax, because she did hundreds of observations in classrooms all over Washington, DC both for Inspired Teaching and DC Public Schools. Upon her retirement, she shifted her skills of observation to a different pursuit: birdwatching. And this makes me wonder:
Where do the skills of observation we use in the classroom overlap with the skills we use when looking at birds?
What does it take to be a good observer in either space?
A yellow-crowned night heron, photographed by Pax Linson.
No matter what I’ve pondered over the years I can rely on Pax to help me see the topic through a different lens, and this discussion is no exception.
I love the idea that careful observation can reveal our interconnectedness, and I know this is as true in the classroom as it is in the wild. In thinking about the “spark birds” Pax mentions in our conversation, I think about the many “spark birds” I have met in classrooms over the years, who open my eyes to different ways of thinking and being, the ones who make me want to get to know them better, to learn more, to see what else is possible.
May your eyes, and ears, and other senses inspire new discoveries in the classroom and beyond this month.
Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
