225: Highly Recommended: Present or Publish your Work this Year

<p dir="ltr">This week I want to talk about getting you in front of an audience this year.</p> <p dir="ltr">My first year in the classroom I had an amazing mentor. Anne, my department chair, invited me to her house for lunch regularly. I brought pastries, she made fruit salads, and then over oatmeal-raisin scones and papaya, she listened to me talk about everything I was learning and doing. She nodded and smiled, and focused on supporting my enthusiasm rather than telling me what to do. </p> <p dir="ltr">If only everyone had a mentor like that in their lives. </p> <p dir="ltr">I remember one piece of wonderful advice she gave me then, and that was to start publishing. She suggested a local teaching newsletter that I could submit an article to, and I did, and it was accepted. Even though I was 22 and in my first year of my first teaching job. </p> <p dir="ltr">That got me started thinking of myself as someone who could share my ideas with others. I submitted an awful lot more articles after that, and began applying to present on what was going well in my classroom. Sometimes I presented to a crowd at some lovely hotel. Sometimes I presented to my colleagues at my own school. Both were satisfying, and pushed me to see my classroom as a place for trying new things, analyzing the results, and sharing what I learned. </p> <p dir="ltr">So today I want to give you the same advice my mentor gave me nineteen years ago. </p> <p dir="ltr">Put your work out there. Ask to present to your department, your whole faculty, or at a local or national conference. Submit a presentation proposal to your state council of teachers of English conference or to the annual NCTE conference. </p> <p dir="ltr">Write about what you’re doing and send it off to English journal, Read Write Think, We are Teacher, or Edutopia.</p> <p dir="ltr">Pitch yourself as a podcast guest! Send in an Op Ed to the New York Times. Whatever feels like a good step to you, do it! I believe you’ll start to see your work in a new light when you share it.</p> <p dir="l