Still My Best Professional Development: Discuss a Book

Growth plus connection equals joy. At least for me. That’s why I smile when I look around the office I share with 6 other teachers at my school, and I see 4 copies of the same professional book. It’s one we’ve been discussing—together with 2 other teachers from another office—once a week for the past 9 weeks. This Tuesday was our 9th and last meeting.

When I attend a workshop, seminar, or conference, I get piles of great resources and all the energy of connecting with like-minded educators. Then I go back to school, and the energy fades, and I can’t really remember any of the 367 great ideas that hit me like water out of a fire hose. The stack of great resources is daunting—I don’t have time to dig back through it to find one of those ideas. And I can’t read my notes.

When I read a professional book by myself, I get a great idea, and it’s so good, I want to keep reading, and 192 excellent ideas later, I again can’t really remember any individual idea well enough to implement it. I know I should go back through the book more slowly, but first period is coming and I just don’t have time. Or energy. 

But, when I discuss a professional book with my colleagues, a chunk at a time, over the course of 7-9 weeks, that’s when I really grow—both in my classroom practice and in professional joy. It’s the accountability and energy of collegial community.

Here’s what it looks like. Over the last 9 weeks, we’ve been meeting once a week for 45 minutes. In preparation, we try to implement at least one idea from the previous week’s discussion, and we prepare to discuss the next section with our colleagues. At the beginning of each meeting, we each report on our classroom experiments. Then we discuss what we found intriguing, confirming, or confusing from the next reading. Finally, we each choose something from the reading that we want to experiment with in our classes in the coming week.

Here’s why I love it. First, I actually have to dig in, choose just one thing to try in a week, and try it. Traction! Second, the conversations that trickle into the cracks of the intervening days, not just during weekly meetings. 

• “Hey, I introduced reading strategies today.” “How’d it go?” 
• “I’m going to try running dictation today. How big a chunk of text did you use?” 
• “I heard you doing a choose-your-adventure for a listening exercise with your 2nd period class. How’d it go?”

The book was The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox: Hundreds of Practical Ideas to Support Your Students by Larry Ferlazzo. I’d actually bought it a while ago, and instituted my own personal challenge of experimenting with at least one idea each week. (See some of my blog posts about that here, here, and here.) But it’s much more fun with a community! There are 45 strategies, and we didn’t want the discussion to drag out over a year, so we tackled 5 strategies per week. 

My best take-away? I really dug in on reading strategies and independent reading. There’s a lot more I want to revisit in the fall—and I now have a community who shares a common language and I can talk with about it.

Not an EFL teacher? It doesn’t have to be this book. In the past, I’ve found it equally energizing to discuss the following books in a professional community in three different schools: 

• Setting the Standard for Project-Based Learning
• The New Art and Science of Teaching
• Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners
• How to Differentiate Instruction in Academically Diverse Classrooms
• Better Learning Through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility
• Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding
• Understanding by Design
• The Vocabulary Book: Learning and Instruction
• Teaching Matters Most
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
• Productive Group Work: How to Engage Students, Build Teamwork, and Promote Understanding
• Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?
• I Read It But I Don’t Get It

What is your best professional development? Have you ever tried a book discussion? What book could you try it with?