The Importance of Delta's: Focusing on Positives Only is Food for Delta Growth

     Last school year and the one before I belonged to Specials PLC meetings at our school. If you don't know what a PLC is or Specials are, PLC is Professional Learning Community and Specials are the art, music, gifted, PE teachers, librarian, and in our school also Dine teachers...We had a meeting together to discuss what was happening in our classrooms and how we could collaborate together to meet student needs.

     Most times meetings can be dreadful but I must say I looked forward to our Specials PLC meetings every week. We talked about our positives and laughed about our deltas (negatives). Sometimes our deltas far overshadowed our positives but that made it even more comical for us. These meetings made me smile and feel good. It was also a time of camaraderie.

     I was visiting with some of my friends from my school and talking about the deltas. I am so thankful the district put the deltas on our notes, they wanted us to write them down.I got to thinking of how important those were. It was important to get the deltas out in the open so that we could move past them. If you only focus on the positives you can't get rid of the negatives. We were not complaining, we were not whining we were simply getting out in the open the things that were deltas, the things that got us down, the things that sometimes were out of our control.

     At some of our meetings we would start in on our deltas. We all knew what each others deltas were because we talked about them other times too. Then we would get to positives and sometimes struggled to find them...so we would laugh at that fact and pull something silly our of the air...then we would laugh some more. Not just a little chuckle, sometimes we would laugh so hard we would cry. Then we would leave our meeting and feel free of those particular deltas for the time being.

     I think that was one thing that kept us sane. It is important to recognize the deltas, get them out in the open because well, in reality no matter how much you try to ignore them, they are there. If you don't get them out in the open they fester like an open sore and will eventually rot your insides making it impossible for positives to bloom.