I hope this post finds you savoring your final days or weeks of summer. The Hawaii school year, however, starts very early and public school students across the state are returning to school today. Here at Mid-Pacific, we will have new students and high school frosh on campus on Friday and the ’18-’19 school year officially gets underway on Monday!

I very successfully savored my final days of summer. In fact, I was so successful with my “savoring” that I have been running around like a mad man addressing all of the start-of-the-year tasks that need to be done in a library that I didn’t take care of because I was successfully savoring…

Anyway, that is a long way of telling you that this post is really short because when I am in savoring mode my time management and executive function skills revert to those of a middle school boy (and not even a really academically successful middle school boy… Just a barely passing, shake your head, “Wait, what?”, middle school boy).

Anyway, over the last few days, there has been a really wonderful AISL listserv thread about building a culture of reading with students. Wonderful ideas have been shared, but it occurred to me that it would be wonderful to foster a culture of reading with my faculty as well. A few years ago Katie Archambault shared a post on how she runs her faculty book club. I followed her template and have run a very informal faculty book club for the past two years, but I hoped to add something else to our mix.

This summer I read and completely loved, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Dan Coyle.  Though written for an audience focused on business leadership, I found the book extremely accessible and easily adaptable to the needs of classroom teachers working to get cohorts/classes of students to work well together or perhaps to administrators, department chairs, or librarians working to get teams of teachers collaborating successfully.

I thought the book aligned so well with our school culture and the philosophy of learning and teaching that we try to foster, that I decided that it would be a worthwhile investment to try to just release the book into the wilds of the Mid-Pacific community and to see what organically emerges.

My original copy of the book will get cataloged and added to our collection, but I ordered 7 additional copies of the book and affixed a book plate in front of each with the following instructions:

I’ve chatted up the book and dropped them into the hands of people around campus to whom I thought the book might resonate. I simply asked them to give it a read, clarified the information already on the book plate, and left the rest of to them. After just three days, I’ve gotten positive feedback from two of them.

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.

Enjoy and savor the rest of your summer days! Though you might want to savor your days just a little bit less than I savored mine so you won’t find yourself waking up in the middle of the night writing reminders to yourselves down on Post-it notes that you keep next to your bed…

#Sigh… #Hahaha!!!