Shaping our class

 Some rights reserved by Matt Stratton

I was just talking to one of my colleagues about this lately.  How can we shape our classroom, and our classroom culture differently.  

I was mentioning Lakoff, and how metaphors help shape our reality.  Today reading Creating Cultures of Thinking I came across the same idea.  Often we refer to school as work, especially for students.  How does this shape how they go about their day? 

I remember Sir Ken Robinson talking about teachers as gardeners. 

How powerful can we be if we start changing our metaphors? How do we start this? 

When we think about vision of a school and the places we want to go, we don't often address how we shape our school through language.   When we think about brands and story telling and the whole image of school, we as teachers need to start shaping it through our daily interactions, the metaphors we create and the language we use. 

I'm not sure gardening is the best metaphor (although it fits nicely with my environmental beliefs) but the idea that growth is always possible and that there are seasons of better growth really resonates with me (actually now I wonder if this is something we have to differentiate as well).