“If we handle 500 books in a day, that means we are busy. If we help 500 students in a day, that means we areÂ
worthwhile.”

- Karren Reish, Library of Michigan

March was a really busy month for professional development … leading it, sitting through it, planning it, participating as a team, enjoying it, loathing it … And here’s what I’ve learned.  The good, the bad, and the ugly:

• Good PD has a lot of thinking behind it.  I respect great presenters who have mastered the art of collecting, synthesizing, and sharing.  It’s hard work making it look effortless.  It’s hard work to make our learning easy.  Thank you to all of the great presenters I’ve seen over the years that have made my heart race with excitement.
• Great presenters know that a presentation is about giving attendees something valuable.  It could be a new insight, an opportunity to share ideas, a chance to hear a different viewpoint, or something else.  Alas, it is not about the presenter lookin’ good. 
• Sincerity and authenticity are powerful presentation tools.  A passionate but unpolished presenter will hook me. A insincere professional will not.
• PowerPoint can be exciting and visual.  Show off your students’ work! Tell us about your reflective process! Show how it works!  But if you’re going to just read your PowerPoint, I’m going to start up a nice game of Minesweeper while you read.  Alas, we can read it faster than you can say it.
• If your PowerPoint is a collage of multiple images, give us time to look at them all.  If you just show the pictures and say, “Here are some pictures of students in action” and don’t give us the time to absorb them, you lose the opportunity to hook us.  Every educator is a sucker for a great photo of kids — if they’ve had time to see it. 
• PowerPoint: COLOR CONTRAST between slides and backgrounds! Seriously! Purple + pink does not = contrast.
• PowerPoint: Limit the information on each slide.  If having big lists is important, give us time to read before you go on.  And by all means, please don’t say, “Here’s Information Power 2 vs. the AASL Standards.  See how they’re different?” and immediately advance to the next slide. 
• PowerPoint: font size.  Big, please. 
• Try to vary the types of activitie that occur during the PD.  Some listening time, some chatting time, some doing time … that will help to hit different modalities. 
• Get a friend to sit in the back to tell you if your mic level sounds good.  Often, we are so used to being in a classroom and talking over students that we accidentally bark into the mic. 
• If you are presenting PD as a team, make sure there is a respectful role for each person on the team.  If that person isn’t needed for a planning session, release them.  I shouldn’t have to say this, but making and passing out copies is not a respectful role.
• I like to take notes online, bookmark sites, live blog, type into Word, etc.  Digital notes help me organize and later find information.  If you’re a conference organizer, please please please try to get good Wifi. 
• In 2009, I’m finding myself impatient with PD sessions that are merely demos of Web or computer tools.  I love to play along and try out what you’re talking about.  But if your plan is that I’ll just watch, then what is the rationale for attending your PD session when I could just watch someone’s YouTube demo for free? In my jammies?
• Food at PD events should complement the event.  It should not be the event.  If you’re asking yourself, “How can we squeeze that information into 5/15/20 minutes so that we have time for dinner?” rethink why you’re hosting an event.  If you want to host a social dinner, please do it.  But if you’ve got volunteer presenters in a donated facility, but you’re charging $20 to cover the meal being served in the cafeteria, then you’re asking school districts to take their teachers out to dinner.  And if I’m paying my own way, I’d rather take myself out for a nice $20 dinner than pay $20 to eat in a school cafeteria.  I’ve been to events that have 90 minutes of content crammed between 30 minutes of snacks and 60 minutes for dinner.  Rule of thumb: Minutes of PD should always be greater than minutes of nosh.  Especially on a school night. 
• That being said, I recently attended a conference where there was NO lunch break scheduled (just 30 minutes of passing between sessions), and the day ran until 3pm.  By the end of the day, there were a whole lot of overcaffeinated, twitchy conference-goers gnawing on tasteless dry pretzels from the overpriced convention center vendor.  Lunch is a chance for us to reflect and learn from each other.  And we educators LOVE LOVE LOVE getting to go out to eat like REAL GROWN-UPS.  (I don’t drink alcohol, but I hear this is an added benefit for some attendees — and imagine how mellow those folks will be in the afternoon sessions!) 
• Who invented the term, “Take care of your own learning” when they really mean, “If you need to get up to go to the bathroom, please do it”? I think it’s meant to be empowering, but it feels artificial.  I’m a grown-up.  If I have to go to the bathroom, I’m just going to quietly excuse myself regardless of whether or not you’ve given permission.  Unless you’re a really good presenter.  Or I am a jailhouse inmate.  In which case I will never leave.
• Phrases like, “If you’re not doing Twitter/Delicious/Twine/Moodle, you should be,” should be banned unless they’re followed by, “because they could really enhance your productivity/student learning/organization, and I can’t wait to tell you the difference they’ve made in my school.”  Tool snobbery without explanation just feels judgmental.   
• Humor is good.  See below for exception.
• When you are presenting, self-deprecation seems to work fine.  But putting your attendees down never works.  I was recently in a session where, in a five minute session, the presenter said, “If you’re hooked into the Wifi, you’re a geek,” “If you’ve got a computer but no Wifi, you’re a loser,” and “If you don’t have a computer, you’re a loser, too.”  Ummm, still waiting for the punch line on that one, but in the meantime, I’m starting a nice game of digital Solitaire.  And I mean that in the nicest, least deprecating way possible.
• Give us time to think and talk and learn from each other.  Some of us want to talk to you, too, and get your take on whether or not the right track.  This is especially true for school librarians who by nature are isolated at work and crave connections with people “like them.” 
• That being said, I’m curious to know if other people like writing lesson plans during PD.  It’s not my cup of tea.  Too often, the participants come from many locations and have different curricula and culture, so it ends up feeling like an academic exercise and not a practical one.  I can’t think of a single lesson plan I’ve written during PD that I’ve actually used.  Or maybe I was just too busy sneaking in a game of Solitaire???
• I’m counting on you to have made sense of content.  Showing me the URL to your Delicious account where you’ve catalogued 800 Web 2.0 sites shows that you’re a good acquirer, but what I would love to hear from you is which of those tools has had a real impact on you and your students and why.  Help guide me into new learning.   
• I love it when concurrent session presenters make connections between their presentation and the keynotes.  It models that their own learning is always growing.  
• If you mention a book or reference a person’s work, could you pause long enough for us to write it/Google it/bookmark it? 
• Not all PD needs a leader.  One of the best PD events I participated in this year was an online book club hosted on a blog.  For each chapter, we made a new blog post, putting the chapter title in the blog post title area and leaving the content area blank.  (This essentially turns your blog’s home page into a table of contents.) Invite staff to post their chapter reflections as a comment under each chapter heading.  While a friend and I did the legwork and set it up, we by no means led the discussion … which was great, because everyone ended up learning amazing things from each other.  We then met for a face-to-face session and it was amazing how often we referred to each other’s posts.  It was very, very powerful.
• Does your district give PD hours for things that really don’t impact teaching and learning? (E.g., planning for open house, watching movies with special needs characters in them?)  Shame on them.  They reap what they sow.  And when you let a movie be your PD, you reap what you sow, too.   (What special ed teacher would say, “Well, I was watching Rain Man, and the way they handled your son’s disability was to _______.  How about it?”) 
• If your school/district is having a mandated inservice for all staff, it should have PD offerings for all staff.  I feel so bad when I see a PE teacher suffering through an introduction to the language arts curriculum or a music teacher being assigned to a team to interpret standardized test items and whether or not third graders mastered two-digit multiplication.  It seems silly to have to say it, but shouldn’t PD should provide authentic learning opportunities for everybody? 
• If you are attending a PD session that doesn’t meet your needs, find one that does.  If you are presenting a PD session and someone leaves, don’t take it personally.  They may have loved your session and wanted to see as much as they could before dashing off to prep their own session, meeting a vendor or out-of-town colleague, stopping by another session, etc.  Heck, they could even be “taking care of their own learning”! 
• If you are presenting a library session, please rethink the use of Information Power 2 or the words “information literacy” in your presentation abstracts.  Those are now outdated terms that might turn away potential attendees. 

What have I missed?

 

Tonight was the first meeting of a book club for media specialists on Wiggins & McTighe’s book Understanding by Design.  The book club was the brainchild of Sarah S., a high school media specialist in my county who realized that if SLMS were going to have high expectations for teachers’ instructional design, that we SLMS needed to be at the top of our game in that way, too.

But Sarah didn’t stop with just having us read the book.  She’s shepherding us through Second Life, securing virtual meeting space and coaching us all through our own Second Life IEPs (how do we sit? talk? stop flying? get up the stairs? see the other people? stop our legs from twitching when we’re seated on the sofa? stop looking at the wall? take a photo just to prove that we made it? etc.) so that next week, we can hold a synchronous discussion there.  So we’re getting so much more out of the experience.  (An alternative is for participants to use the Moodle she set up for us to share ideas, an idea which I love, because that’s another technology we could all benefit from knowing a bit better.  Nice differentiation!) 

We get to try a newer technology under someone’s capable guidance, we get to explore a new book together, and we get a chance to experience an online learning community.  Sarah’s leadership helps us put our money where our mouth is — because aren’t we trying our hand here at some of the social learning that the AASL Standards promote?

And boy, oh boy, when we all figured out the “real people” behind the scuba-gear wearing avatars, did I get excited.  There are great Michigan practitioners in this group, so if you are a member of MAME and haven’t yet joined, it’s not too late!  Drop me a line at slmamblog [at] gmail.com and I’ll put you in touch with Sarah, our fearless (and patient!) leader.

The fabulous Gigi took this photo of the two of us.  Apparently, the sofa we’re sitting on controls our posture because we would randomly twitch our feet and put our hands behind our heads!  You’d hardly know that it took us, as a group, about 25 minutes to figure out how to ambulate well enough to actually sit. 

Some people take photos of their kids’ first steps or videos of their early speech.  Us? We are pretty darned excited to sit down.

Now if only I could figure out how to change my Second Life clothes …