Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge's Caitlin Krause urges teachers to embrace vulnerability as an opportunity for strength and compassion during the uncertainty of school reopenings.

• How can funders ensure that teachers have the support and resources they need to support students in this time? 

• Learn about how you increase your giving today.

There’s so much uncertainty right now, and it’s understandable that we’re feeling it intensely. In times of great change, the thing we all crave as humans is control. To have control, or even a perception of agency, in times of complexity can change our mindset and approach. So how can we convert these feelings of dread and powerlessness into something we can use to our advantage?

It involves staying aware, assessing current conditions and understanding that we have a capacity for what we can affect. Not only do we have limits, but we can choose how we self-assess and how we perceive our own weaknesses. In short, we need to reappraise our own vulnerability by giving it a makeover.

In other words, it’s not exactly the weakness that’s the asset, it’s our re-framing of the perception of weakness that’s necessary. We need to train ourselves to embrace and appreciate what is weak and vulnerable. We don’t need to struggle to look for it right now; that vulnerability and uncertainty is all around us.

Let’s put this in context of teaching and learning. We’re about to start the next school year, and there are many great unknowns. We feel weak in certain ways.

These feelings are both natural and toxic, because they represent our limiting beliefs that cause paralysis and fear instead of agency and action. To give vulnerability a makeover, we need to start by looking at it in the face, and reappraising what we see.

Let’s embrace the messy, with courage from the heart, with passion for what we love that brought us to teaching in the first place, and with a nurturing self-compassion that is needed right now, for ourselves and for our communities.

Read the full article about how educators can embrace vulnerability by Caitlin Krause at EdSurge.