Monday Musings

Image from Sparkle and Shade

I've previously shared how I used my staff memo blog to share weekly updates with staff, as well as a method to model my own personal reflections with staff (you can find my previous post explaining it HERE).  Earlier this year I gave staff a survey to see what they think of my Monday Memo and Friday Focus which led me to make a change.  Basically, my 2 posts for the week have flip-flipped.  My Friday Focus, which used to be my reflective post, is now the post that includes: "Great Things I Noticed This Week", "Events Next Week", "Nuts&Bolts Notes", and "Blogs, Pins & Tweets...Oh My!"  This was in response to staff wanting to know what's coming for the next week before leaving for the weekend.  My reflective post is now called my "Monday Musings." I have found this change much easier for me, because it is so much easier to reflect on the weekends to write that post.

Here is a cross-post of this week's "Monday Musings:"


I recently read the blog post What the Kardashians Taught me About Reading (No, For Real)  written by Chris Lehman, co-author (with Lucy Calkins) of Pathways to the Common Core. To be honest, I love reading everything written by Chris, but I saw this tweeted several times and ignored it, because I couldn't care less about the Kardashians. I'm not sure what got me to finally read it, but when I did I read it several times through.  Please take a few moments to read the article HERE which is actually on Donalyn Miller's blog at Edweek (the author of The Book Whisperer that I raved about last year).








OK, you read it now, right?
Here is what stood out to me, that I'm still thinking about...

Brand Yourself as a Reader, So Your Students Will Emulate

Lehmann writes about using the Kardashians as a metaphor for how we can see our instruction in a new light.  He says, "we need to take a lesson from Ms. K and brand ourselves as readers just as carefully so our students have that vision to aspire to."

Are you known as a reader to your students?  Do your colleagues know they can ask you for a book recommendation or share with you a book they just finished reading?  

This has me wondering if you all think of me as a reader? I have certainly tried to by sharing my Shelfari account bookshelf on my blog and sharing my reflections of what I'm reading and learning about.  Do students think of me as a reader?  After reading this article (which I have actually read several times) I want to start my own little bulletin board in the media center to post a picture of what childrens' book I am currently reading to model for our students. 

There were several other great ideas shared in the comments section of the blog post that made me wonder if any of you would be willing to share your ideas on this in the comments of this blog post?  If you've never gone from the emailed post to the blog, go to johnsonmemo.blogspot.com and scroll to the bottom of the post and click where it says No Comments. This will open up a box for you to add your comment of ideas to share with the rest of us.