TIS the season....

Despite being surrounded by oodles of students all day, teaching is an isolating profession. Often, in the race to lesson plan, run off copies, teach, provide extra help, research new resources, dash off emails, etc., we neglect one of the most important moments in our day – conversations with other teachers.

Case in point.

Today, my colleague Kelly Hanley called me into her room to say hello for a couple minutes. Although we have adjoining rooms, we barely see one another. We talked about general stuff, then she brought up a feature on our class websites – the slideshow – that I had not used before. In approximately five minutes, she showed me how she had been using the feature to showcase group work students had completed in class. Essentially the students created study guides of the information which Kelly could simply upload in this format.

Unbeknownst to Kelly, FIVE MINUTES of her time saved me HOURS of extra work. I was working on THREE different lesson plans involving students creating information which they would share with other classmates in the next couple weeks. She was just being friendly and sharing the latest cool thing she had been doing in her class.

On my way home I realized my chat time had somehow turned into professional development. How cool was that? Could I market this idea? Create T-shirts? Find an excuse to have Starbucks cater frappuccinos? Perhaps I was getting ahead of myself. Edcamps – organized events in which teachers share ideas – already exist. However, they are all day events. (Totally worthwhile though. If you have not attended one before, get thee to one asap. See my blog post on Friday, August 16.) I just want teachers to hang out for a few minutes and “see what happens.” Is that even a concept?

I spend part of my day helping manage students’ time to keep them from socializing unproductively. Will I now lose credibility if I tell my associates to dedicate a part of their day to chill out with one another? No agenda, just drop in and schmooze….For my scientific minded friends, I felt I needed evidence to prove my theory that such time is valuable. Keep reading.

The website Kelly is using is called Weebly. I introduced Kelly to Weebly last year with the website I had created for my classes. I never sat down and “taught” her how to use it. In the course of conversations, I mentioned things I had been doing. She liked the idea and on her own started using it. (At least I think I inspired her to use it…Kelly correct me if I am wrong!)

Of course, I can’t take credit for discovering Weebly. Meredith Macomber, a colleague of mine from my previous school, introduced me to that web site builder. The topic came about when we were talking after school one day about cool technology stuff – such as iPhones, iPads, and all Apple products in general – which had nothing to do with school. In the course of our conversation, Meredith mentioned Weebly (not an Apple product, but still cool), and showed me what she was using it for (along with a dozen other cool technology resources). I became a quick convert to the site.

Yet I would not have been having that conversation with Meredith if another recently retired colleague, Cheryl Nastri, had not told me to get out of my classroom more and socialize with other teachers. (Disclaimer: I LOVE being social, but I tend to get immersed in my work and forget to breathe, let alone talk.) Thank you, Cheryl, for the advice. She noticed that I seemed to be leaving late daily and had stopped in to say “hi.” Did I mention we also talked about yummy places to eat, beach vacations, books, and grammar lessons?

Still not convinced?

Last year, a conversation with my school’s art teacher, Jenny Finan, led to an awesome project in which students visually represented a passage through artwork. That project resulted from us talking about The Scarlet Letter, and some drawings Jenny had done years ago.

Two years ago, chatting with Christy Catsos, a former colleague from my previous school’s history department, led to me doing several activities in which we take old text and change it into tweets. The conversation which inspired the project? A talk about Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook. #RUconvincedyet #studentfavs

Most of the conversations I mentioned were no longer than 15 minutes to a half hour long. The bulk of the conversations weren’t even about the items I ended up using. We talked about how we were doing, movies/books/music, and life outside of school. Yet somewhere along the way, perhaps inevitably with two teachers talking, something cool that we were doing in our classrooms came up that we wanted to share. And as my friend Attorney Tracy Shaughnessy says “sharing is caring.”

So join the TIS movement – Teachers Intentionally Schmoozing  - and hangout with your teacher friends. Give yourself permission to leave the classroom. Chill, chat, loiter, loaf about, decompress, veg out, and take time out to smell the roses with your colleagues. TIS the season to do so….