Learning Networks and Professional Growth

Professional growth is not only about finding like minded people. Our professional learning networks can be built in this way, adding people from similar backgrounds or roles to our Twitter network. But that might just confirm the bias we already have.

I see great value in the exposure to alternative thinking. We gain access to perspectives that differ from our own and that may be in obvious opposition. Our social learning networks provide easy access to thinking and development from beyond the domain of education. I have deliberately built connections with practitioners in a wide variety of fields not just education.

Yes, your professional learning network should help you tap into the expertise and ideas of fellow educators. But I think the real value emerges as your network matures and you build connections far beyond the walled garden of education.

These connections challenge us to think critically about our work and what we think we know. The dissonance instigated by diversity of thought and alternative viewpoints can be a springboard to empathy.

Photo by Daniel Hjalmarsson

Join the inaugural #creativitychat

Togs on. I’m jumping into the swirling currents of Twitter chats.

Why

There is little in terms of coordinated Twitter chats about creativity in all of it’s wonderful complexity. I have decided to establish a new, regular Twitter chat for people to coalesce and gravitate towards.

#creativitychat

I want to help people become more creative. One of the ways I can do this is establish a chat that connects people, that inspires action, engagement and thinking about the subject. I hope the chat helps participants learn a little more about creativity.

For nearly ten years I have been using Twitter as my preferred tool for connecting with others and building a learning network. Whilst Twitter chats have their naysayers and their limitations, I still find them (and Twitter) a powerful and consistent way to organise a community, connect and learn from others interested in a topic.

When

#creativitychat will run every Saturday morning 7am-9am Melbourne time.

The inaugural chat is Saturday 29th Oct. Times below.

  • Melbourne / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 7am-9am
  • Auckland / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 9am-11am
  • San Francisco / Friday 28th October 2016 / 1pm-3pm
  • New York / Friday 28th October 2016 / 4pm-6pm
  • London / Friday 28th October 2016 / 9pm-11pm
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Have a look at this Worldtimebuddy link to add the event to your calendar.

I have decided to go for a longer chat because most chats I have experienced are just getting warmed up by the time their scheduled time finishes. With a couple of hours we give ourselves the best chance for meaningful dialogue.

Saturday morning in Australia, are you mad? Maybe a little, and certainly my younger self would have preferred a later time. This allows for family plans to still carry on and not to eat into a weekday evening after a long day of work either.

This is an international chat. I have always been lucky to have been connected to people on Twitter from across the world and so I wanted to go for a time that worked for the majority. Everyone will have a preference, I know, and which ever time I chose people would miss out. I think this gives us the chance to be able to share hemispherically diverse understandings of creativity.

What

Content

  • Weekly topics related to creativity.
  • Crowd-sourced set of questions and provocations, moderated (by me) into a short list.
  • Please send me a direct message on Twitter with your question or provocation suggestions.

#creativitychat / 0001 / Nailing jelly to a tree? Seeking a common understanding of creativity.

My background is in primary education and so I have a learning focus when I think about creativity. However there is so much to learn from others. I am keen for #creativitychat to have diverse participants.

We should encourage a broad representation from different fields. The chat should be a gathering of anyone thinking about how creativity impacts on our (professional) life.

Chat Structure

  • 10 minutes for introductions
  • 100 minutes for reaction and dialogue about provocations and questions
  • Maybe some time to share next steps, what actions are we going to take? What have we learned during the chat? “As a result of the chat I am…”
  • 10 minutes for networking and sharing our own projects and blogs etc.
  • Close with the next week’s topic

I have been inspired by the #agchat founder Michele Payn-Knoper who outlined some of her lessons from running a Twitter chat over the last seven years. Thanks to Simon Owens for the great guide on running a chat, which outlines Michele’s thoughts. Highly recommended if you are looking to start something too.

A call to action

  • Check out your diary for the times above and consider joining me. There will only be one shot at being part of the first!
  • Share a tweet using the hashtag #creativitychat to encourage others to get involved.
  • Join and participate in the chat.
  • Direct message me on Twitter with your questions or provocations related to the chat topic (0001 = defining creativity)
  • Leave a comment inline or otherwise with any ideas or suggestions related to the questions I still have. I need your help.

More to consider

  • What is the most efficient way to archive the chat? Should we archive it? How much do people really use a chat archive?
  • I like the way readers can comment, highlight, and engage with content on Medium. Perhaps a summary post with questions / provocations and a curated set of tweets to continue the conversation.
  • How could we incorporate a slow chat element during the week, to allow others to participate?
  • What new ideas are we bringing to the Twitter chat arena? How are we helping to advance this way of learning and connecting? How might we connect Twitter with other tools to extend what we can do and mitigate against some of the known weaknesses?
  • Need to probably use the @creativitychat handle eventually. I have contacted the current account owners.
  • Find a merry band of buddies who can help moderate and facilitate.
  • Do we need some web property to gather resources, guidelines and ideas about the chat?
  • Develop some chat protocols and rules of engagement.

Education Suffers from a Lack of Knowledge Urgency

Knowledge Urgency

Dave Binks, a headteacher you would happily call a leader, was one of the first principals I worked with. He gave me the space and time to enjoy my teaching, to innovate and explore the untrodden path. To take risks and to fail.

Many years later I moved on and became a deputy headteacher myself and I really struggled. I had some of the hardest most challenging times in my working life. I struggled to find that balance between management and teaching and was having to compromise the quality of what I was doing – just to get it done!

I didn’t have access to the knowledge and ideas I needed in those moments when I needed it the most. How I wished I could have browsed Dave’s brain.

A Lack of Knowledge Urgency

We have a lack of knowledge urgency in our profession – we don’t feel the sting of wasted ideas or the importance of capturing and sharing our knowledge and experience, it simply is not in the front of our minds. There are over 430,000 teachers in the UK and in Australia just over 250,000 according to 2011 figures. But only a tiny fraction share ideas using Twitter.

On average in England over the last 25 years there have been around 15,000 teachers retiring from the profession every year. People like Dave who take their expertise and skill with them.  That equates to nearly 525,000 years worth of teaching experience laying quiet and dormant on the back 9 of golf courses and between the aisles of garden centres. This saddens me.

This great body of latent knowledge going missing, but also the lack of urgency from current teachers to capture and share what they know. Let me give you an example of what I mean by knowledge urgency:

In 1972 the Imperial War Museum established the Department for Sound Records and began in earnest to archive and collate oral histories of those involved in conflicts and especially those involved in the First and Second world wars. It is a striking and extensive archive of over 56,000 hours worth of historical records. The urgency to capture this knowledge is clearly linked to the passing of the generations involved.

These pieces of knowledge are lengthy to produce and take time and deep thought to capture. Social technology has begun to reshape the timeframe needed to share our expertise all we need is a simple device and we can tweet and blog our experiences on the go.

Ross Selkirk Taylor was a British Army driver during the second world war and his pocket diary was his record of his experiences. Since then his grandson has begun tweeting his written diary entries, but in 1940 they were private to him and had no immediate impact on those around him. The postal service was often the sole means with which to share his experiences whilst away from home and that was heavily censored. The ranks of other army drivers could not learn from his published experiences and connect with him to learn. (Despite some hunting the original @DriverRoss account is no longer active.)

Twitter perfectly encapsulates the fragmentation of our knowledge and I think it has a direct impact on the frequency of sharing – the likelihood that people, teachers, openly share an idea or publish their thinking is increased if the scale is smaller.

Share What You Know

As teachers we need to be more open about our work and quickly realise that the whole profession can benefit from our collective expertise – we mustn’t become silos of knowledge ourselves. Nor do we want our knowledge and experience, our stories and ideas to lie dormant, our knowledge needs to live on and impact those around us, to be contextual and be flexible enough to improve the lives of as many people we can.

The phrase “Pearls of wisdom” is often attributed to this poem by James Russell Lowell.

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

I love the delicate description of the pearls of thought – “softly lucent as a rounded moon” – we need to ensure we treasure the jewels of knowledge we have – and continue to pluck them from their seabed and do more to share them with other teachers, display and publish them, string them on threads, and help everyone bathe in their moonlit glow.

Finding the edges of your page

lego

Not to be confused with restraint which is much more about self-control, constraint is about finding the edges of the page before you begin, it is about knowing what limits you have in terms of resources. It is about must haves and must nots. And to be honest not something I previously worried too much about, but now I see constraint in lots of work that I do and inevitably seek them out if they are not so explicit.

In many ways the 28 Days of Writing project is built around the concept of healthy constraint, about creating an edge where often there isn’t one. A rule to stick to and enjoy the creative challenge. 28 days of writing with a time constraint on how long you can spend every day.

Twitter was such an interesting medium to write through. The constraint of writing within a specific character limit is just second nature now – I always try not to abbreviate or shorten words unnecessarily too. Back when the education community didn’t know it’s tweet from it’s blog it was a fascinating challenge to share your thoughts with such brevity. In many ways this is the most enduring feature of the Twitter platform and certainly something I still enjoy.

Another time when I observed the impact of constraint in a rather unexpected place was a Year 3 classroom in London. The class were all set to build some versions or prototypes of their new house/dwelling ideas they had been intricately designing on paper. Detailed diagrams and rough drafts overlapped on the tables as the class clamoured to discover what was next for their ideas. LEGO makes a similar introduction when used in most classroom, eyes light up and ideas roll over in the mind. However something unexpected happened once construction of the next prototypes commenced. Constraint.

Boys and girls grabbed LEGO baseboards to build on and suddenly fell into a steady rhythm of stacking bricks around the edges, the cuboid house once again asserted it’s dominance. It was a fascinating thing to reflect upon for Meshendia (the classteacher) and I once all was said and done. The LEGO had in fact imposed its own constraint to the process and those baseboards even more so. What were dreamy, intricate designs on paper soon became cookie-cutter boxes in LEGO.

I think this happens a great deal once we are up to our armpits in the making process, the standard classroom doesn’t quite cater for the resources our ideas truly need. Why would they? After all if we are not given enough signals of the constraints in the early stages of a process when we are encouraging new ideas, those ideas will grow and expand without an edge to them.

I was with a school in Perth last week and the very same thinking task for one group of 3 teachers produced completely different results compared with another. The reason. Simply the size of the paper they chose to work on. One group had a large sheet of flipchart paper and their ideas were more numerous, sprawling and often tangential. The other had an A4 piece of paper, the group’s ideas were fewer, focused, more potent. Same task, just a different piece of paper. For one the edges were tighter, closer and more constrained – for the other much more open and freer. The constraint, or lack of, impacted on the type of thinking the group achieved.

#ukedchat Assessment Special

ukedchat logoI am delighted to finally have the opportunity to take the moderator’s hotseat for this week’s #ukedchat – in which we will be running a special discussion all about assessment.

UKedchat is a Twitter based discussion group that meet every Thursday evening between 8-9pm GMT. It is a fantastic example of narrowing the use of Twitter to allow educators to discuss a specific topic, and I am excited to be moderating this week’s session.

If you have never taken part in a discussion, no fear! Just take a look at this handy information about how to get involved. Everyone is welcome. Explore some of the previous discussion sessions on the summary blog.

Assessment is such a broad issue that I grappled and struggled to come to terms with as a teacher, in this week’s conversation I hope that you will join me in exploring this rich topic.

We will be looking at the wider pressures of an ageing assessment agenda; how summative assessment may blinker our understanding of success; why failing is good and also tips and ideas for implementing formative assessment in the classroom.

So join me @tombarrett on Twitter for the #ukedchat Assessment Special on Thursday 20th October 2011, 8-9pm GMT.