When you know better, you do better… right? I would be inclined to agree with this statement most of the time, but not all of the time. Here’s why: this school year, I feel as though it’s been my biggest year of professional growth thus far in my career, but I am not always able to apply everything that I’ve learned and continue to learn. This often leads me to feel completely overwhelmed and down on myself when I’m doing something that I know isn’t good enough anymore.

I really appreciated the raw honesty from Michael Buist‘s post Connected Yet Not Connected about the fast paced nature of the #IMMOOC Twitter chats. This part especially resonated with me:

“parts of the “course” just became too big for me to manage. Will I participate in this week’s chat? Of course, because it’s the final one. Will I be overwhelmed? Certainly”

What Michael’s post, along with George Couros‘ comment on the post also reminded me is that everyone has to move from their own point A to their point B:

“Part of the idea of innovation is finding information that is crucial in a world of information overload, and then making sense of it. I actually think that it is great that the chat is so fast, because then you have to learn how to deal with it. It is a good problem to have.”

Maybe George has mastered using TweetDeck and sifting through information to gather what’s important, but I’m certainly not there yet. It doesn’t mean that I won’t be one day, it just means that I have to teach myself these skills in order to get there. Thankfully, George gave some great pointers in his comment, which benefited many for the last IMMOOC chat.

I have to remember that I can’t do it all right from the start. There will be things that I do that I know aren’t best practice but I also know that I can’t change everything all at once. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a blog post giving me excuses not to take risks and do things differently, I’m simply reflecting on the fact that I if I want to continue to grown and learn (and not be so overwhelmed that I eventually burn out), I have to be gentle with myself. I have to give myself time to implement all that I’m learning. What’s important is that I keep moving forward, keep growing, keep learning, keep changing… one step at a time. Thankfully, my Twitter bio reminds me of this often: Innovation in education is my passion, one step at a time!