Choose Your Own Adventure- Professional Development and the Role of Reading in Creating Teacher Leadership

They say that readers are leaders. I have often thought that this catchy rhyme was just a pithy statement to encourage reading. But we’ve had  Natashya Hays from Erin Kent Consulting at our school, and she submerged us into the current research on reading. Obviously, it made me take a hard look at my own classroom practice, but it made me reflect on Who I am as a reader.

Here’s one thing question that really stuck with me- Can you spare 10 minutes a day? 

1.2 million words a year? What does that do to a brain? Clearly, that makes for better test scores, but us adults really don’t take tests, do we? That doesn’t motivate us to read, right? However, I firmly believe it has a profound impact on developing our perspective, as each book or article we read shapes our heart and mind. This, in turn, has a compounding effect, in which interest becomes a passion. Clearly, this is the biggest difference between someone like Natashya Hays and other educators because she is a voracious reader of literacy research. Naturally, she becomes more effective and impactful as she takes the words off the page and into practice. She’s wasn’t “born that way”–she cultivated herself to become an expert. Readers ARE leaders, dedicated to a purpose and truly, any of us can become such a proficient teacher.

Needless to say, this has had me reflect on what I have read for professional development so far this year. Although I have picked up and skimmed many books this year, these are the titles that I have genuinely read from back to front:

What’s the best that could happen? by Debbie Miller

Teaching Talk: A Practical Guide to Fostering Student Thinking and Conversation by Kara Pranikoff

The Children You Teach: Using a Developmental Framework in the Classroom by Susan Engel

The Teacher You Want to Be: Essays about Children, Learning and Teaching by Matt Glover

Personalized Learning in a PLC at Work: Student Agency Through the Four Critical Questions by Timothy Stuart and Sascha Heckman

As you can see, it’s a sort of mixed bag of professional ideas and I regret that I haven’t had a lot of professional focus this year with regard to my reading. That, of course, I take personal responsibility for, but it makes me wonder if school leadership shouldn’t be encouraging more professional reading within its walls. Not only books but blogs or articles. Have a think, when was the last time you received an email about some interesting current research that relates to your school’s objectives or just something provocative related to education? Our director, Elsa Donohue, often shares things that have impacted her thinking from conferences that she attends. I love that because it draws me into new ideas that I may not have been exposed to before and inspires professional dialogue at school. But it’s not a common practice that research is shared among our primary team, let alone a book study.

Hmmm….. but is it school leadership’s job to do this? Shouldn’t we, as educators, be taking initiative and “choosing our own adventure” when it comes to professional reading?

That makes me wonder, is it too late to change school culture? Might we have a professional book club after all? And how might we encourage reading to expand our thinking and improve our practice?……

I think the best time to start something like this is NOW. So, I’ve decided to reach out to my colleagues and invite them to attend an organized book club meeting for professional reading. I sent a survey and included this message:

Hi Book Lovers!
I’d appreciate you taking the time to answer a few questions so that I could help organize a professional book club at VIS. Before you complete this survey, I want to frame this by stating this is not mandatory and should be thought of as a casual and social venture. Here are a few rules about this book club:

Rule #1: The book you choose is related to something professionally, either to support teaching content or your developing your professional character.

Rule #2: This is in the spirit of fun and a love of reading. Your participation is completely voluntary and is in no way reflects judgement on you as a professional or is related to your evaluation as an educator.

Rule #3: Conversation stays on the books. Gossip is strictly prohibited.

Rule #4: Even if you don’t finish the book, you are welcome to participate in conversations.

Rule #5: Anything personal or professional at book club, stays at book club. Respect vulnerable and candid conversations.

Rule #6: Be open-minded and kind so that a spirit of fun is maintained.

Rule #7: Teaching professionals outside of VIS are welcomed to join. We honor all educators and are not elitist in any way.

I’m hoping that this gets the ball rolling. So often we wait for school leadership to drop ideas in our laps and direct our professional focus. However, we need to take an agentic approach and enlist others into aspiring to excellence. 10 minutes a day? I think this is absolutely doable, and it makes me think about that book by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, in which we learned how intelligence and talent can be cultivated through diligent effort, rather than innate ability.

Now, as I peruse through my stack of professional books, I wonder what book I might consider sharing. Will it be…. a more recent book like Visible Learning: Feedback (Volume 2) by John Hattie and Shirley Clarke, or an older but still relevant book like Making Learning Whole by David Perkins; or should it be more specific to content areas such as literacy like Who’s doing the Work? by Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris or expand my depth of understanding with Concept-Based Inquiry in Action: Strategies to Promote Transferable Understanding  by Carla Marschall and Rachael French? Tough choices. I have quite a lot of books to choose from, but I look forward to picking one and connecting with others.

So do you agree–Readers are leaders? Whatcha’ been reading? What are you developing your “leadership” skills in?