What are "Those Teaching Moments"

Throughout my years of primary schooling, my teachers would make a mistake and they would shrug it off as a "teaching moment," and go on with the lesson. I never understood what this meant. What made one moment better to teach than another? At my first job, my boss had just opened up her business and described the experience to everyone as "a learning curve for all of us."

As I have gone through various seminars, forums and classes in my teacher education program, I have had professors and even administrators discuss these "teaching moments" as moments where one messes up and uses it as an example for some great life lesson to impart on all those bearing witness to such a moment. However, I finally am beginning to understand what exactly these moments entail.

From time to time we all have little parts of our day disrupted by the chaos of everyday life. Some, like myself, can get very bent out of shape when plans don't go accordingly (Type A). Why spend so much time planning, if you're going to get off course? Others take the approach, "just roll with it," (Type B). And then there are few who combine the two ways of thinking to create a middle ground of annoying level-headedness people. No matter what category you might fall into, they all share this one type of moment in common.

One way of looking at these teaching moments is where you openly admit you're unprepared to handle an issue, whether that be to the lack of planning, for the Type B people, or the inability to tackle a small disruption, for the Type A people. When you acknowledge this type of moment you're able to use it to your advantage and present it as one of those times you must put yourself in check and merely state the facts so others may benefit from it.

The other, is to take hold of the moment and use it as a demonstration to prove your point. This is the Type A way of thinking about the first method of dealing with these moments. Think about it, using something unplanned in such a planned manner, people think you actually planned it out, how very Type A. Regardless, it is possible for you to intentionally seize a moment and display it for others to learn from it. After all that is what teachers hope to accomplish everyday, teaching something students actually learn.

That's what this blog is meant to be about, those moments where you realize you can take hold of a piece of time and demonstrate its importance to others in the hope they learn from it and apply it to themselves.