Blog #2 Sharing Sharing Sharing

When it comes to sharing, I think that sharing your work is an amazing thing to do. Why wouldn't you want to pass along your tricks of the trade to create an awesome school environment nation wide! But it's understandable that some teachers might just want to keep their ideas to themselves because they do not realize what amazing talent they hold ☹.

Coming from a fairly new educator I love and appreciate any piece of advise I can get, whether it be through the internet like Twitter, Instagram, or my favorite Pinterest or just through word of mouth. Why have just one impressive, well structured classroom when you can share your work and help other teachers (new and old) also have better learning environments for their students.  Teachers should talk to each other and share their work of not just about the positive warm fuzzies that are working in their classrooms but also the not so wonderful experiences because who knows, the teacher you are conversing with might have had a similar experience and may have done something you would have never thought of and if you would have not said anything you would probably still be struggling.

According to Teach Thought, there are 20 fundamentals that all teachers should know to understand how people gain knowledge, I also think that knowing these things before going into teaching could prevent student failures from outshining their successes. Such as:

1. Knowing that students learn differently
2. Don't just teach information, use the information you teach
3. Make the information relevant to day-to-day living
4. Failure is a fabulous teacher
5. Use several different angles to teach

Some other things that were not listed in this article but what I think are also important are:

• Building a good relationship and communication with parents early
• Offering students help making sure that they know you are there
• Not giving up
• Having patience, patience, patience

Personally, I think that sharing everything is important in order to have an educational system that, in a way, is run by the educators and not the system. The Common Core controls what teaches have to teach but does not (yet) have control on how these key items should be taught. So why not share what you have done successfully or what you tried but did not work so well. By sharing you are able to collaborate ideas and see the trial and errors of others around you.

How do you decide what to share? I think that when it comes to sharing you should think about the following questions:

• Will this help other educators?
• Is this something you think others should know?
• What kind of information do you want to share to your audience (positive or negative)?
• Are you looking/ do you want outside help from a collegue?

Really, when it comes to sharing, it all boils down to what you are comfortable with having others read/know.

Face-to-face sharing vs online

When it comes to face-to-face sharing vs online I do not think that one is better than the other. I do think that you will have more success with sharing online because with social networking if one of your friends shares something you post then their friends can see it and share it and then their friends can see it and do the same. But, when you do face-to-face, people tend to listen and retain information better because you are right their in front of them rather than reading it online and they can just stroll and skim through (probably missing key information).

How should you get the community involved ? Should public writing always be formal? How do you create cultural comfortable with sharing?

A way to get the community involved online would be to create some sort of community page that you can share for the community to see; for the face-to-face aspect you could hold open houses, informational meetings/forums, workshops, neighborhood picnics or walks to build relationships and get to know one another. Along with that I think that parent/community feedback is also a good thing to have because how are you going to know if something is working or not if you are not getting any feedback? Doing things like surveys or public forums are good ideas to use for constructive criticism. I think that in order for people to take you seriously, your writing should be formal, not essay formal  but your audience should hear your voice when they read your writing. If your writing is too informal, it could sound like you do not know what you are talking and no many people will want to read what you have to say. When it comes to building a culture that is comfortable with sharing their work the first thing that needs to be established is trust and in order to have that there needs to be an environment where people give and received honest, positive and direct feedback. 

Overall, I think sharing work will make the educational world better because it will help teachers become more confident in wanting to share their work but it will also help for them to understand that failures are ok! Just because you have failures does not mean you are not successful, if you do have failures in life then you are not learning and growing as a teacher.