Working at summer camp was really what caused me to pursue a career in education. At Camp Sea Gull, Captain Lloyd used to explain the length of camp sessions this way:

When other camps are moving to two-week sessions, we are sticking with four-week sessions. You know why? It takes 21 days to form a habit. While our campers are with us, we want to guide them to form habits of taking better care of themselves, each other, and the world around them. It’ll take some time to break a few bad habits, and we have an extra few days to make sure the new cement dries.

For the past 62 days (I started at “0” and I wrote a “48.5”), through this “CHANGEd: What if…? 60-60-60” blog series, I have been building new habits. I am just one day short of repeating the 21-days-forms-a-habit rule for three consecutive cycles. Here are just a few of the things I have learned and enjoyed:

1. I crave the time to write each day. I wake up wanting to write. At about day 16, I wondered if I would make it for 60 days. At day 25, I knew I would make it.
2. I failed more times than I succeeded. I set out to write 60 posts…in 60 days…of 60 words each. I rarely achieved the 60-word goal, and that was part of the challenge for me. I failed repeatedly. And I learned everyday from the failure. I embrace that failure. I will be a better writer for that failure. I still feel very successful nevertheless.
3. By “learning out loud,” I connected with people whom I probably would have never met otherwise. During the 60-day challenge, I have doubled and tripled my average weekly readership, compared with the number of weekly readers before the series. Through those new readers, my PLN has grown, and I am the better for it.
4. Megan Howard helped me tremendously. She became my partner in this exper(ience)ment, as she called it. By getting in this boat with me, she made me feel more accountable… to at least one other person, and I did not want to let her down.
5. All day long, I now think of what if questions. I think I have developed and enhanced my Innovators DNA because of taking this on and building better habits of observing, questioning, experimenting, networking, practicing, and associating.

Won’t you try something new for 21 or 30 or 60 days? We ask our students to do so all the time. Shouldn’t we be students ourselves? Shouldn’t we be learning out loud? Shouldn’t we be building the habits that will make us better teachers and educators for the future? Better learners?

What if more of us worked to develop not just 20/20 vision, but “60-60-60 vision?” We educators should never think that we’ve got schooling as good as it can ever be. We should be seeing our current reality clearly, and we should be envisioning how we can get better. Isn’t such delta-oriented vision what it will take for education and schooling to be CHANGEd?