Keeping Up with Professional Development

I met with my "sanity group" today, one of my professional learning teams, a group of school librarians from all three grade levels who share a common goal of advocacy and activism and teacher librarian leadership to promote teaching and learning in school libraries.

I call them my sanity group because we began meeting about the first of May when testing season really got going. As my school's test coordinator, I've been drowning in end of grade and end of course testing for six weeks. As an educator at a year round school, this means yet one more week of testing to go. It also means that I've done next to nothing media and technology related, let alone teaching and learning related, for my students and staff.

And goodness knows, I've done very little to keep up with my own professional growth over the last six weeks.....except for meeting with my sanity group.

As a self-proclaimed professional development junkie, I'll admit that I'm having withdrawals. Of course, that's coupled with the high levels of stress and anxiety and sleepless nights that have accompanied the title of test coordinator.

As I have begun to check in with my colleagues on Facebook and my friends at some of my favorite blogs and my fellow teacher leaders over at the TLN, I'm feeling a little jealous. These traditional school educators are posting summer plans, summer trips, summer excursions, and summer adventures. Most folks might think I'm just a little jealous that my friends are having a summer, time to do what they want to do, which most would think includes fun in the sun.

Nope, what I'm jealous of are all the great workshops and conferences and educational trips that everyone's planning! Some of my fellow school librarians attended Big6 workshops this week, learning how to implement this six step research process. Another friend and colleague jetted off to Des Moines (exciting, right?) to attend the P21 Institute. Others are headed to D.C. next week for ALA national conference. Still others are crossing the country to Seattle for the National Staff Development Council summer institute. And others in my own district will attend week long workshops on reading strategies, technology integration, and literacy.

I'm also jealous of all the books and professional journals and blogs my colleagues will have time to catch up on -- reading young adult literature late into the night and surfing Doug Johnson's and Joyce Valenza's blogs to glean ideas and strategies for planning the new school year.

I'm starting to question how I can manage it all while continuing to work in a year-round school, or maybe I'm just starting to question how any professional worth her salt manages to keep up with professional development period. With so many incredible educational leaders out there sharing their insights, how can I not afford to read their articles, check their blogs, keep up with their publications?

With the changing culture of education and the tightening purse strings and the evolution of information and processes to gather, evaluate, and create new knowledge, how can I not afford to keep up with professional development?

What have you done for your professional growth lately?

What are School Librarians Saying?

Too bad my friend and colleague over at The Tempered Radical has been listening to what the wrong school librarians are saying! And too bad he felt he had to remove this post from his blog and surrender to the emotional, stressful responses to his earlier posting.

Some of the school librarians who commented on your original post get it, Bill.

I know that as a language arts teacher, you are stressed, overworked, frustrated by the pressure of the tested curriculum. I know that you are working your arse off to provide creative, informative, valuable, technology-rich lessons to your learners. I know that you are the consummate educator, praising the strong outcomes of professional learning communities with your colleagues because the end result is improved instruction and through-the-roof student achievement.

I get it, Bill.

I felt this way, too -- stressed, overworked, frustrated. I also felt isolated, insular in my own little classroom, autonomous, and incredibly responsible for my 120+ students' learning. I felt all those things as a language arts teacher.

I realize that you don't feel like you have the time to collaborate with your school librarians and take them up on their offers to plan, teach, and assess with you and your students. I recognize that you are an intelligent, well-read, tech savvy professional. I recognize that you are an avid reader and that you take offense at comments that lead you to feel that school librarians believe themselves to be the "lead readers" in a school and the "make or break" factor in reading programs.

I take offense at that, too, because now as the school librarian at my current school, I'm responsible for creating 850+ information literate, life-long readers, and I certainly cannot do that by myself. I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I'm the "be-all-end-all" when it comes to reading instruction.

But I am smart enough to know that my students need our entire school community to become the most academically successful individuals they can be. I also know that I would be a better language arts teacher now because of my experiences as a school librarian.

I appreciated your disclaimer at the beginning of your post and your recognition of some of the strong school librarians in our district. Those are the school librarians you need to be listening to; those are the ones that can help us -- classroom teachers and school librarians -- figure out how to all be accountable for the learning that happens in our schools.