Help yourself and your colleagues be lifelong readers whose reading spills over into your professional life.

If you are a school librarian, aiding your colleagues with their professional reading will be beneficial to your school library program.

For decades and decades, teachers have complained about having a lack of time to read professionally. As teachers and librarians, we are able to identify many reasons why should read. We have the motivation. We have the problems set before us and know that there are reading materials available that might help us to lead us to solutions or guide us to possibilities. The environments in which we work may not address our needs, but there are state standards that can help us support our own reading.

Unless your certificate is provisional, for the state of Texas, an educator needs 150 to 200 clock hours on continuing professional education every five years for recertification. (School librarians need 200 clock hours.) Independent study may account for, but not exceed, 20% of the required clock hours; i.e., 30 or 40 clock hours respectively.

In turn, the results from the independent study, which includes your professional reading (book, journals, periodicals, and online information) may lead to other activities that are considered continuing professional educational activities, such as development of curriculum or CPE training materials, presenting CPE activities, and others that are listed at the SBEC site.

For the PowerPoint from the Texas Library Association presentation, "Be PRO-active: Encourage Professional Reading," use the following link for SlideShare.