Drinking from the fire hose

I have always tried to expand my teaching repertoire by reading as many articles and resources as I could find and talking with colleagues at my school and at conferences. I have enjoyed presenting at numerous NABT and NSTA conferences for the past 20 years on a variety of topics.  In the past few years, I have joined a few list serves related to science teaching, followed a number of blogs regularly and continued to try and stay “current.” This past year I began a new phase of my career as the first Director of the Henry R. Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching (KCET) at the Loomis Chaffee School. Essentially, I am responsible for a lion’s share of the on-campus professional development at the school. (more background on the 1st year of the KCET in future post) As a result of my new responsibilities, I stepped up my personal PD by becoming an active user of Twitter as part of my PLN. The explosion in my own professional development that has occurred has exceeded my expectations by orders of magnitude.  I have found myself taking part in many online chats such as #edchat #flipclass #apbio #scichat and following some incredibly interesting people and discovering some wonderful resources that will definitely help me and my colleagues at LC. My only worry is that it feels a little like drinking from a fire hose at this point. There is so much stuff coming at me that I can find myself overwhelmed at times. Good thing it is still the summer when I can spend an entire morning checking out people’s blogs and following links from Twitter. All things considered…not a bad problem to have I guess!