Today was a very happy day, as a group of PLC teachers in Chicago met with Sabrina. Here is the report from Sabrina:
Today a few teachers from The Greater Chicago area and myself got together . It was great seeing each other in person for the first time after years or months of virtual interactions.
What a breath of fresh air! It reminded me of how important real human interaction is, especially in the age of communication through social media and in cyber space. Don’t look any further, this is why our kids, who spend a great amount of time communicating virtually, have a hard time with interpersonal communication skills!
We had a real nice meeting today. Everyone except for Ardythe whose mom is sick came. Great to put faces to names. Everyone is so nice and committed. I think the other teacher from my school (whom I recruited to come since she is already doing some form of CI after meeting me) was happy to have come and had some nice contributions of her own. It was also nice to meet Yiyi who is also a blog member but not active.
I was and still am saddened that so many people want to attend these conferences (I got another email from Greg today saying how sad he was not to be able to come) cannot do so. Although the conference itself is not so outrageously expensive, when you add up all the other necessary costs, no wonder why so many teachers can’t afford it! It is not fair, I wish we could change that, but how?
I was reminded today that collaboration is paramount in thinking/reflecting/practicing the kind of work we do. So today we shared our successes and challenges this year, and we talked about how we can move forward and further collaborate on a more local basis in addition to the kind of collaboration we do on the blog. We decided we would get together, do some peer coaching, and perhaps have a conference of our own, in which case Ben would be the first presenter we’d want to bring here.
Skip has been doing this for a while now, with great success. I think we need to emulate his story in Maine (and MIchele’s in Alaska!) and bring it to other parts of the country if we want to advance our push for comprehension-based instruction model at a national level.
Collaboration it is! In an “esprit de collaboration” (spirit of collaboration), and since a few of us will attend one or both conferences, I would like to suggest that we who are going possibly reach out to those of you who may be interested in hearing from us. If you are interested:
- Take a look at the session offerings for both conferences (see both links to session descriptions below).
- Let us know which sessions you have a keen interest in.
Amongst all of us going we should be able to cover whatever session you are interested in. We could report back to the blog with our findings either in the form of video whenever possible, or at least with some good notes. I am planning on bringing my camera so I will film whenever possible or have someone else film on my behalf. Let me know what you think.
Here are the links:
This is the link to iFLT session descriptions in San Diego: http://www.tprstorytelling.com/images/Sessions-Prop_Form-1.pdf
This is the link to the Dallas conference overall session descriptions: http://www.ntprs.org/ntprs.org/Sessions.html