Dr. Adriane Johnson-Williams

She's a amazing scholar, education scholar.

And in our research methods class, she was like, you know, basically teaching us what it meant to become an academic.

And she said that we have big dreams and big vision, but what we need to recognize is that in our lifetime, in the span of our humanity, we may only be able to make one brushstroke on a huger canvas.

But we have to make sure that our brush stroke is the right brush stroke and the best brush stroke for us.

It's so funny to say that like five times really fast.

But yes, so and so that's what I believe.

We have to figure out what our contribution is to solving the big problems.

Yeah.

reflective practice is important for everybody, every profession, if you want to get better, because if you're spending all of your time just doing, doing, doing, doing, then you could just be spinning your wheels.

You may not actually be doing anything of any real value.

It's important to step back and think about what worked, what didn't work, why.

And it's a critical part of emotional intelligence too, to be able to

Really do some thinking and digging into your own motivations and your own interactions with other people to determine how could this have gone better?

Because if we don't start with ourselves, if we're not reflective of ourselves, then we're really just out there judging what other people do.

That doesn't help us either.

I wonder if it was ever a good thing to have people just saying, I've got all the answers.

Because they never did.

They never had all the answers.

And I wonder, again, on this issue of all of humanity and everything we're capable of, what we lost with that leadership model.

Who were the people who were in that room who had better answers?