On my desk at work, I keep one of my most prized possessions. I call it my “School Leadership Processing Journal.” It is a notebook that I kept during my year as a master’s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I’m not really sure how I managed it at the time (my wife reminds me that I stayed up until after midnight every night reading and taking notes for the entire year), but every day after classes I would try to synthesize my learning and digital shorthand into a hand-written notebook. Looking back now, I realize that it was really the start of what would eventually become a consistent practice of bullet journaling. Those who have worked with me at some point in the past 5 years know that my notebook and set of markers are never far from hand.
But this blog post isn’t about journaling (which is certainly one of my consistent rituals), but rather, it’s about the role of reading in my professional and personal journey. I was reminded today when I was thumbing through my School Leadership Processing Journal, that one of the common entries was a page I would simply call “readings” that included a brief summary of 4 or 5 of the articles or books that I had read. This was a regular addition in the journal, with “readings” pages showing up every few weeks. Perhaps more than anything else, what defined my experience as a master’s degree student, and then later when working on my doctorate, was the volume of reading that I was doing. As a doctorate student working on an Ed.D in Leadership for Educational Equity, I switched to a more digital platform, largely because I had to draw on my references database to do a considerable amount of writing, including and especially my dissertation. So the readings pages migrated to an Excel spreadsheet and Mendeley database.
While it will likely come as no surprise that I love school, I’ve come to realize that what I probably love most about school is reading (and the subsequent discussions about what we are reading). Yes, graduate school was a challenge, but I also tend to miss it, precisely because of the heightened expectations for reading and processing new ideas. It’s like having a personal trainer for your mind.
I’ve written previously about how the arrival of a new Superintendent to Santa Ana USD back in January 2020 jump started me on reading again. I had slowed down to probably no more than a dozen books a year, and then our Superintendent Jerry Almendarez started talking about books – all the time. I think he might be secretly employed by Corwin Press. So, I started taking his recommendations and reading more. Then the pandemic hit. While the initial adjustments were tough, working from home and the dramatic decrease in other outside obligations (soccer practices ended, church ministry visits came to a temporary halt, etc.) gave me more time to read. I read 52 books in 2020. A book a week. It was something I had wanted to do for the past decade but had never accomplished.
Now, I’m not pushing for quite that level of reading this year, but I have been enjoying integrating reading more deliberately into my daily routines, both at work and at home. It’s not graduate school, but it is enough to keep me engaged with new ideas and concepts. I try to get 15-20 minutes in during lunch at work, and my evening routine almost always includes 30 minutes of reading. For work, I’ve taken to reading academic articles on educational leadership and instructional pedagogy and even logging in summaries in my excel spreadsheet. I find myself thinking and talking about the concepts I am learning (or being reminded about) on a much more regular basis with my leadership team. At home, reading is almost exclusively for curiousity and pleasure.
Perhaps I’m too much in my head. That’s a fair critique. But I can’t help thinking that pushing myself to keep reading and learning, engaging new ideas and challenging old ones, is a healthy way to live and lead.