November, the month that flies, brings Thanksgiving, the national holiday that honors our gratitude, our survival in an alien environment that became home.  How did that happen?  Certainly the spirit of adventure and resilience mattered, but the new challenges demanded a willingness to learn, to break with patterns that no longer fostered necessary adaptation.  Not unlike those earliest pilgrims, when we leave the classroom to attend the National Teachers of English Convention and The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, we are motivated to learn and grow, returning to the classroom, and your children, with a renewed sense of purpose and dedication to thrive as the best professionals we can possibly be.

This year’s event, held in National Harbor, Maryland, exceeded our hopes.  From Friday at 8 a.m., to Tuesday at 2 p.m., we feasted on an array of ideas, offered by the top professionals in our field, and heard from the authors who galvanize our efforts to put great books in the hands of our students.  It was truly an event for which we give thanks, to an Administration and Board of Education that supports such professional development, and to you who entrust your children to us throughout the school year.

This year we attended several sessions that focused on the shifts your children will be experiencing in curricula and testing.  Among them is the critical ability to be able to read texts of all types, and put them in conversation with one another. In a particularly affecting session, the presenters discussed the myriad formats available for authors to present their arguments, providing examples from his eighth grade class that had participated in a C-Span-sponsored contest.  The multimedia feature http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A9%22%7D#/?part=tunnel-creek, “Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” provides an exquisite example of the options available to developing writers in the 21st century, and serves as inspiration for those of us who are teaching them.

In another very different, altogether inspiring session, presenters demonstrated how they have used video recording as part of the daily Readers’ Workshop to foster book analysis.  Students record themselves speaking about the books they have finished, each creating a digital file as a history of their reading development.  As the presenters attest, this “Selfie Center” has promoted a deeper look at independent text selections on the part of the students as well as an awareness of effective speaking and production skills.  We know that we can adapt and implement this strategy in our classrooms.

These two sessions represent but a tiny portion of what was offered; each of the three convention days was jam-packed with food for thought, full-fledged meals of ideas, ours for the taking, and digesting.  The ALAN Assembly serves as the perfect dessert: a buffet (see photo above) of soon-to-be-released, or recently-released Young Adult titles accompanied by authors’ talks that run the gamut from informational to humorous–but always thought-provoking.  This year’s conference featured authors who shared their stories of triumph and loss, heartbreak and hilarity, in a range of genres.  A particular highlight was the parent-child collaboration panel where author Neal Shusterman, a favorite among our students for his dystopian series Unwind, and his son shared their experience in collaborating to create a novel about the son’s mental illness,                                      .

Although it may not be universally true that professional development extends one’s boundaries, engenders discovery, and validates the time away from the job, this opportunity certainly did.  We are grateful!