AND…..WE’RE OFF!

Today was the very first meeting of a wonderful group of educators in my school who enthusiastically joined me on my 30 Goals journey. I had no idea that so many people would be interested, and so you can just imagine how excited I was to see everyone follow through.

13 of us met at a local restaurant for happy hour to both socialize and discuss ideas on how to kick off this adventure. There was a positive energy as we discussed work and joked around over drinks and food. I would dare to say that under normal circumstances we would not have come together, so the experience proved to be even more fulfilling for me. I tend to not always take care of my social needs because I’m taking care of the needs of others, so I really valued this time.

When everyone was happy with bellies full of appetizers and libations, we began the work of deciding how we wanted to go about achieving these goals. I’d proposed the following options:

1) Choose our own goal that aligns with our needs

2) All agree on a goal and move along together

3) Follow the goal cycle on 30goals.com, which are variations on the original 30 goals. The goals they’ve already worked on are:

• Support a movement
• Be someone’s champion
• Send them on learning missions
• Go on an epic selfie adventure
• Build your teacher survival kit
• Inspire them to inspire
• Give yourself a pep talk
• Introduce us to your school
• Share your edtech success story

In the end, we decided on a hybrid of those.

• We would smash two collective goals together: making it fun and being someone’s champion
• We would choose an additional personal goal

Then came the fun part of brainstorming how we would make it fun and champion each other’s visions or ambitions. Some ideas were:

• Having a spirit theme biweekly where we wear something similar on the same day. Our first “spirit day” is superhero t-shirt day on August 28. This combines being someone’s champion AND making it fun!
• We would send each other silly text messages when they pop into our mind as a way of cheering each other up (animated GIFs anyone?).
• At some point we will do some sort of Secret Santa.
• We would also commit to meeting once a month to continue with the celebration.

To post our progress and celebrate each other:

• We decided to use the hashtag #30goalsHTM when updating our progress.
• For myself, I created a 30goalsHTM list to make it easier to follow our tweets.
• I created a Google+ community for us.

For our next meeting, we need to come up with an appropriate 😜 team name and maybe even some sort of logo. Details forthcoming.

Honestly, I could NOT be happier about the outcome. I left feeling energized and optimistic about this school year. These ladies are amazing, and I’m SO THRILLED to be pursuing this with them!

I want to send a special shout out and thank you to Shelly Terrell and her 30 Goals. You’ve inspired us to band together and break through our frustration, weariness, and negativity, and rediscover our purpose and drive for teaching.