Tweet of The Month: We Love to Learn!

Another wild Saturday night at the Berg house this weekend!  Between the diapers, the bath toys, the tickle fights, and a massive Lego structure that some of us believed to be a castle while other claimed as an airplane, we really cut loose!  After the dust cleared my wife and I ended up in the emergency room with the littlest one (as parents sometimes do).  Ear infection.

If you’re not familiar with infant hospital check-in procedures I can tell you it’s no fun watching a nurse take a two-month-old’s temperature (they don’t go in under the tongue).  So, while my brave little guy got acquainted I turned to a few minutes of catching up with my Professional Learning Network (PLN).  I pulled out my phone and clicked the Twitter icon.  There it was.  It was staring me right in the face.  It was the hands-down, no questions asked, in a league of its own, the tweet of the month!  Check it out:

MBrook at Reading Conference

As you can see, the sender is Colleen Mestdagh.  Colleen is an incredible second grade teacher in my building and the author of Force Field For Good.  As you can also see, there are lots of other people in the picture that Colleen tweeted out.  Specifically, there are two Meadow Brook ASD teachers, one Meadow Brook first grade teacher, two other Meadow Brook second grade teachers, two Meadow Brook third grade teachers, one Meadow Brook Instructional Literacy Specialist, and one recently retired Meadow Brook Instructional Literacy Specialist; each incredible, each immeasurably enthusiastic about professional development, each focused on building capacity for the service of our student population, and each spending his/her Saturday engaged in learning and growth!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard things like, “It must be wonderful to get so much vacation time,” or, “You can’t beat summers off,” over the course of my career in education.  If you are an educator you know that we spend much of our vacation time working, learning, and engaged in personal and professional development.  If you know a teacher, you can concur.  Don’t misunderstand, having the time to spend in those ways is wonderful!  We love it.  We crave it.  We can’t get enough.  Learning is an educator’s life.

The fine folks pictured above spent this past Saturday at a conference focused on literacy learning.  Between them, they have decades of experience and an inordinate amount of knowledge in the area.  Even so, they still can’t get enough.  And look at their faces.  What do you notice?  They’re smiling.  After working at school all week long they got to go to school all day on Saturday…they chose to!  They were like kids in a candy store.  What do you notice about the tweet text?  How about the part that that reads, “lots to share!”  It’s a great part, and very telling.

These amazing people aren’t finished yet.  No, they intend to come back to school on Monday with connected thoughts, ideas, tools and materials (weather permitting).  They intend to spread the learning word though enthusiastic collaboration.  Each one believes that the first step was to work hard at enhancing his/her own practice, and that the next step is to bring that enhanced practice back our school in the form of masterful instruction and collaborative professional development.  Awesome!  Tweet of the month…right?  Indeed!

I am so fortunate to be working in a field populated by such passionate people.  I am truly privileged to spend my days at a school whose staff gives so much, every day!  I feel extraordinarily lucky that a group of teachers who I work with would be so excited about weekend learning that they would tweet me an update on Saturday evening!  I can’t wait to be shared with when we get back to school!

Live. Learn. Lead.

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Dream Big. Work Hard. Be Well.

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