Question Everything

Question everything. 

One of the best years of my teaching career was the year my teaching partner and I began questioning why we did the things we did. We had taught many years together, and to the outside world probably looked like we had teaching kindergarten down pat. 

That year we challenged ourselves to question why we did what we did, and to change our teaching techniques where necessary to improve our classroom. It was such an awesome, exciting year as we began to do things differently. 

Recently I was watching a You Tube video of a young woman recommending exactly the same thing. Now of course don't take the "everything" part too literally, but still embrace the idea of questioning what you believe and why?

Another idea that falls in line with this is something employed by Toyota called The Five Whys.  This entails asking the question, "Why not?" and following it through with four more whys in response to each answer. 

Author Tanner Christensen of The Creativity Challenge states, "By taking this approach...you can implore your imagination to explore possibilities you may not have imagined before."

Sometimes it's just easier to do things the way you always have whether they are the best way or not. Sometimes we do things because that's all we know, and we've never taken the time to look for alternatives. 

I find life to be more interesting when you begin to question why, and continue to search for new and different ways to do things.