our work matters

This month, I'm participating in an #educoach blog challenge, where instructional coaches share posts about the work they are doing. Thank you to Kathy Perret for getting this challenge up and running!

School is busy. Life is complicated. Put the two together and, even someone who loves to write just isn't up for posting on her blog, even though there's at least 10 ideas swimming around in my head at any given moment. After all, it is #DEVOLSON so may as well cut myself some slack. But I knew I would feel better if I made time to come to my writing as soon as I could, so here I am.

Thursday I attended an Illinois Writing Project event downtown. I think it was to celebrate the National Day on Writing, and so it was called Everybody Writes.  Nancy Steineke was our featured speaker with a great presentation on Integrating Writing Across Content, K-12. She read us a book I had never heard of: Piggybook, (I love when someone reads me a book!) and then we did a mini-text set with some data on gender equality (the theme from the book). Finally, we ended with a written conversation about our text set and gained new understandings from our peers.

After Nancy's presentation, we had dinner, talked with colleagues, and then our guest speaker, Adrienne Gibbs, left us with her inspiring story. She is a Chicago Public Schools alumni who was encouraged by her teachers to keep on writing. She went on to become a professional writer and editor. She ended her talk with these words:

One of my colleagues wrote an excellent post about passion, and it was a great reminder of why I do what I do: coach towards the Reading and Writing Workshop. I believe in it wholeheartedly! It's amazing to think that as teachers, we are able to inspire not only students, but also one another with the work that we do.

So while life gets messy and work is so busy, and you can feel like there just isn't enough time in the day, we need to remember that our work matters. We can potentially inspire the next big writer, create a passion for reading that cannot be extinguished, say words that could send out students off to be scientists and artists. In what other profession are they rewarded as such?

Anyone who inspired you? Leave a comment below!