Last week the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning published ‘Tweeting Teachers‘; a report into how social media can be used to support the professional development of teachers. Through examination of research and exploring case studies of teachers (including this one), school leaders, and successful models of learning from the Nuclear Power and Charity sectors, the report draws on a wide variety of evidence to produce a series of recommendations for school leaders and policy makers. What emerges is a picture of self organised learning of immense power that is happening in spite of rather, rather than because of, existing formal professional development.
What really stuck out to me from all of this evidence was the fact that such use of social media is not just a case of using new technologies to deliver what has historically often constituted CPD. In fact, what comes across is that this is a whole new culture; a culture of professionals choosing their own priorities and shaping their own landscape for development. In a field that is constantly shifting as successive governments seek to change the state of play to suit their agendas, many teachers are simply getting on with it; identifying what they think is important for their practice and ultimately their learners, and creating communities and environments in which they can address these themselves.
In bringing these self organised communities to the attention of school leaders and policy makers, I think it is this quality that we most need to value. To me, this phenomenon has less to do with technology , and more to do with a ground up attitude towards teacher development. Such an attitude values the status of teachers as accomplished learners in themselves, capable of taking responsibility for their own learning and development, and not needing to be overly controlled by policy. The danger in introducing leaders and policy makers into the equation is that you can’t mandate for this kind of self organised, intrinsically motivated behaviour; all you can do is trust and support it.
Thankfully this is evident in the recommendations of the report, which are more about supporting and creating an atmosphere of open sharing than seeking to control the behaviours we are seeing emerge around social media. To my mind, this behaviour hints at an untapped potential for involving teachers more fundamentally in their own formal professional development, and school improvement. Examples are showing that involving learners in defining the process and content of their learning can produce amazing results, so what about taking the same approach with teachers? Professional development where staff are empowered to really define the direction of their learning, and not just the direction of some rarely reviewed performance management targets, has the potential to make a difference to the biggest determinant of school effectiveness; the teachers.
Of particular interest to me is the fifth set of recommendations for initial teacher training on page 33. This shows a strong focus on us as teacher educators to encourage and support the use of social media right from day one, something I have already seen can be incredibly powerful. To encourage trainees to develop their own professional networks, and share their practice is to invite them into the profession from day one, and to value the contribution that they can make even before they are fully qualified. You only have to look at teachers like Tim Handley, who created and published a comprehensive guide for trainee teachers before his QTS certificate arrived, to see that trainees do have a strong contribution to make to the field. As teacher educators I think this report demonstrates that we have a responsibility to welcome trainees into the profession from day one, as well as take into account all of the issues previously mentioned with regards to allowing them to take responsibility for their own learning, and tap into the enthusiasm and potential for immense professional growth that this can bring.
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