This post is written by member Oona Marie Abrams, editor of .
It鈥檚 3:00 p.m. on the last Monday of September, not usually a time when I鈥檓 on my A game, but today is an exception. I am reviewing submission criteria on various education websites, step one on the agenda for my Genius Hour professional development project. For the past few years, my supervisor has asked my colleagues and me to take time intentionally after school to work on our PDP goals.
My goal this year is to collaborate with my friend Sarah Mulhern Gross to write professional articles about our experiences facilitating teacher-led professional learning. Sarah鈥檚 school is 鈥渄own the shore,鈥� as we say here in New Jersey, and I teach and live in the northern part of the state. We can鈥檛 meet in person, so we talk on and work together virtually in Google Docs. At 4:00, after drafting a list of viable submission opportunities, I leave school. My discussion with Sarah on Voxer takes me halfway home. After that, I spend the remaining 30 minutes of my commute listening to by Barbara Kingsolver. I鈥檓 on disc 6 of 15, but this is the road I travel every day. The book will be finished by this time next week.
By 5:00, I arrive home, check in with my kids, text my husband a reminder that he鈥檚 in charge of soccer carpool this evening, and start preparing dinner. Out come my pots, pans, cutting boards, and utensils. In go my bluetooth earphones. On goes the audiobook I have downloaded onto my phone: by Jason Reynolds. This is how I read most YA novels (and audiobooks are not cheating!). Audiobooks fill the edge time in my day, time spent on the household minutiae that poet referred to as 鈥渓ove鈥檚 austere and lonely offices鈥�: laundry, cleaning, and cooking. When I finish listening to Reynolds鈥檚 novel, I decide to recommend it to my colleague Christina, since it would be a great fit for her ninth graders. The time listening to the book hasn鈥檛 been wasted.
Time is the precious commodity that all stewards of learning must protect. Small pockets, well spent, can make an incredible impact. Daily rituals, such as quick writes in the writer鈥檚 notebook, or ten minutes spent reading, can yield a fruitful harvest after just a few weeks of implementation. By the same token, each minute spent falling down the Snapchat rabbit hole or getting sucked into the Twittersphere (guilty!) can diminish our initiatives and best productive intentions. When time gets lost or wasted in school, there鈥檚 a palpable tension. For so many literacy leaders, professional time is often populated by top-down, standardized tasks that are far from inspiring or culture building. In the short term, this type of work is frustrating; in the long term, it will affect students鈥� learning.
I鈥檓 often asked by teachers who don鈥檛 offer reading and writing rituals in their classes how I 鈥渇ind the time鈥� to address all the required curriculum if instructional time is 鈥渟acrificed鈥� by silent sustained reading and digital writing workshop. My response? The time is invested, not wasted. When it鈥檚 time for my students to select a book they want to read or to write an assignment, they will have more clarity about how to proceed and more confidence approaching the task.
Support and practice: these factors must be in place for literacy leaders. For our time to be invested and not wasted, we must be, dare I say, ruthless in safeguarding the practices that best serve our young readers and writers.
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Oona Marie Abrams has been a high school English teacher since 1996. Editor of聽English Leadership Quarterly,聽Abrams has also been selected as an Emerging Leader Fellow by the Council on English Leadership (CEL). She resides in Bergen County, New Jersey with her husband and four sons.