Teachers as Scholars

On Friday I attended my first ever Teachers as Scholars seminar.  Teachers as Scholars offers 1 to 3 day content based professional development seminars.  It was started by Henry Bolter, and has been around for 15 years.  The seminars are led by university professors and are available to both public and private school faculty and administrators.  Teachers as Scholars is a bit different from other professional development seminars because it's content based.  A lot of professional development focuses on curriculum, which is important, but sometimes it's also good to just go and learn something new, or get to talk about something you care about with other people.  Teachers as Scholars offers many, many different seminars each year, on every topic you can think of.  Science, history, math, English, arts, architecture, local interest, tons of stuff.

I'm lucky that I'm at a school that is very supportive of professional development.  There were a number of openings and I was able to get one.  The way it works is you select three choices, and you'll end up with one of those three, but not necessarily your first choice.  I'm not exactly sure how it's weighted.  First come first serve?  Seniority?  Not positive on that.  The first seminar I signed up for was "The Right Book at the Right Time: Quality Fiction in Children's Books," but I didn't get it.  I was disappointed, it had sounded really good.  I got put into m second choice, which was "Pleasure Squared and Squared Again: Rereading Austen's Emma."