Meet our team: Susan Lucille Davis

It’s a brand new year at Powerful Learning Practice, and our Communities aren’t the only ones who have exciting things happening. Powerful Learning Practice has expanded its staff (and we’re still hiring!) and brought some fascinating new minds (and fresh ideas) to our team. We’d like to introduce our team to you, one by one, and so we’ve come up with seven questions for each of them so you can have a little peek into what they’re thinking and who they are.

Meet Susan Lucille Davis, Community Leader for Powerful Learning Practice

Tell us a little bit about yourself – who are you, where are you from, what are your passions?

I am a “military brat,” which means that I moved around quite a bit when I was growing up. I ended up in South Carolina and gradually moved north until I settled in the Washington, DC/Baltimore area for almost two decades. Now I live in Houston, Texas, which is a richly diverse community — and the people here are more self-deprecatingly humorous than you might expect. I am passionate about beautifully crafted things: writing, art, music, ideas.

What do you do here at Powerful Learning Practice?

I am in my first year as a Community Leader, working with the ADVIS/AIMS cohort. I am also working on some blog posts for Voices from the Learning Revolution.

What else are you up to professionally?

As Academic Dean at Chinquapin Preparatory School, I love working with excited, young teachers to expand their perceptions of what teaching can be. I also teach 8th-grade English and AP English to juniors and seniors.

Desert island situation – you get to take five books. What are they?

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Girl Scout Handbook

What’s your favorite example of how online communities are powerful and transformative?

I love how Personal Learning Networks can help us feel less isolated from others in our profession, in our schools. I find like-minded colleagues who support me and who challenge my ideas and help me grow. The Community Hub of PLP is exactly the kind of “faculty room” I would create if I could magically make one from scratch: It is made up of teachers who want to learn and share coming together to do just that.

Where can people find you online?

@suludavis on Twitter
The Flying Trapeze, with my long-time friend and co-blogger, Renee Hawkins

Any final words?

I am struck by the irony that many educators worry endlessly about the time that online sharing can take away from their “real work” when they could be re-energized by the those very activities. Maybe we need to get past the faulty notion that our collaborations with other teachers will take up too much of our professional time. This is the work we need to be doing in order to do our “real work” better. I wonder if we think we’re not supposed to be having this much fun?