Whew. This past week the 2024 TCEA Convention and Exposition took place in Austin, Texas. It is one of my favorite times of the year. I absolutely love this organization (full disclosure – I am on the Board of Directors honored to represent Area 10). While I could go on and on about TCEA, I’ll save that for another time. This post will look at what to do once a conference is over.
Digesting
Initially, the term “drinking from a firehose” comes to mind after a long day of learning. Add up five days of this and it can feel like a lot tends to leave me exhausted (but in a good way).
Give yourself some recovery time. Take a day or two and step away from the notes and presentations and social media. All of that will be there later. This isn’t to say you cannot share stories or experiences when family or friends or coworkers ask about it. It just means your brain may need time to process and rest after the flood of information and adrenaline you operated on for multiple days. Additionally, you may need to recover physically. (Okay, I needed to recover physically. Ha ha.) That is a lot of walking and engagement. I also call it “people-ing,” and for an introvert like me, it takes a bit of time for my body to rest up after having so much fun with others during a conference.
Organizing
If only snapping my fingers could organize it all! Oh well, what I can do is create a way for my brain to group notes, presentations, and anything else collected while I learned.
Group information in a way that works for you. You could create a folder for each day and place everything for that day in the folder. Maybe you prefer to create folders by topic or audience. This folder can be part of a shared cloud system like Google Drive. Perhaps it helps to go the Marie Kondo route and only keep information for the sessions that brought you joy or provided a specific insight. Then you place all of those on one document you can share later. In the past, I’ve done shared folders with others from my district. One of my favorite ways to organize includes creating a Wakelet for each day since I can place pretty much everything into a Wakelet. Other tools this method could work with include Padlet and Smore. Also check with your district and see what organizational methods they already provide. Again, find what works best for you since you are the one going back through everything before sharing it out.
Revisiting
After organizing everything, it is important to go back through and revisit notes and presentations. I find it is easier to tackle the information now that it is in manageable chunks by days or theme or whatever.
Use a note creation system that works for your brain. Similar to the step where you chose a way to organize information that made sense to you, it is important that the notes also make sense to how your brain learns. Otherwise, they aren’t helpful to you. It could be something as simple as headings and bullet points in a document with links to resources. I know many people lean towards the Cornell Notes system. For me, I am incredibly visual and love color. There are two ways I enjoy revisiting notes and turning them into something that makes my brain happy. The first is by sketchnoting. I remember learning all I could about this system in the summer of 2017. Since then, I love expressing learning this way. Then in 2020, I attended a session on Polaroid Notes which helped me take main ideas and put them in note form. You could also take a couple of methods and mix and match:
Sharing
After giving the brain a rest, organizing information, and revisiting notes and thoughts; it is time to do something with what I learned. It is important to share the learning!
Become an ambassador of learning for your campus or district. The more learning is shared the better. Not only does it help the learning stick better in our brains, it amplifies the good all the ideas can do in classrooms and for students. Make a plan with your leadership on how attendees can share the learning once they return from the conference. I know some places will have attendees conduct station rotations of what they learned that teachers can participate in. One of my favorite things I’ve participated in was a presentation in PechaKucha style where all attendees are given a few minutes to share their learning. Then teachers know who to approach for more information.
I hope this helps calm the flood of information that can come at you during a conference. Perhaps you are now ready to be the drop in the water causing a ripple effect owning the water rather than being drowned in it. (Yikes. I might have enjoyed that metaphor too much.)
An Educational Cup of Tea 