Why Educators Should #ShareMore

Sharing is something vital to a society’s progression toward advancement. It is a practice that helps make a community stronger and more responsive to change. We may not be aware of it, but most of our formative education has been a form of sharing:.young learners often teach each other skills they have acquired, middle and high school students share information and ideas over lunch, and professors share expertise and perspectives with us in college. But for some reason, the close-the-door-isolationism of schools, combined with contrived PLC structures and a serious lack of time in the workday, has halted prolific sharing and schools are suffering as a result.

Education has a reputation as one of the institutions most resistant to change. This can cause a lack of respect for our profession from those unfamiliar with it. Don’t believe me? Look at your paycheck or class size. Credentialed teachers often make less in our country than uneducated and unskilled workers. How can this be when we must have college degrees — many of us have completed advanced graduate study? We need to build a reputation as the most innovative and collaborative professionals out there!

Could it be that we teachers are our own worst enemies? We have a stagnant professional culture with little exchange of ideas and information, and our schools are suffering because of it. This may be due to a few factors:

• Our credential programs — studying outdated educational theory and student teaching in classroom environments — do not foster or encourage collaboration.
• Our colleagues are more critical and unsupportive than we would like.
• Our only evaluators are school or district administrators checking standardized data and conducting observations based on obsolete models. We receive little meaningful feedback.

Working in an unsupportive environment leads teachers to adopt the “close the door and teach” mentality. Under these circumstances, it’s not worth it to reach out and share ideas with our colleagues, because we don’t get any positive or beneficial information from other people.

In education, only a small percentage of teachers actually share with colleagues outside of a tight network of their closest teacher friends. Even when required to share in PLC meetings, most opt to stay quiet for fear of judgment. But sharing is something crucial and needed — it’s a practice that makes a community stronger and more responsive to change.

As an author and a proponent of change in schools, I am always visiting inspirational schools that are really trying to do things differently. When I see something truly motivating, I repeatedly ask: “Are you sharing about this?” Or, “Are you blogging about this amazing thing you are doing?” and I always get the same response, an unapologetic “No.” Just the other day a teacher in Bath, Maine told me about something truly game-changing she was doing in an AP Biology class. Her response to sharing was the same; “No.” (Although I could tell she would be a person I could have talked into it if I had had more time). But I know other AP Bio teachers would love her ideas!

It is time to start sharing!

Think what might happen if once a week we all did a quick three-minute video reflecting on the “Best of the Week”. We explain our thinking, our lesson, student response and the pivotal factor for learning. What if WE made our thinking visible? Video sharing does not have to be fancy or mind-blowing, just “hey I taught my history class this way this week — here is what happened, what do you think?” Or if you are not ready for video, do it with a simple 280 character tweet or Facebook post. We could ask for feedback from other educators and what happened if they implemented our ideas. Using this process, I wonder: could we transform education one share at a time?

Some of us flock to Twitter for a sharing environment, with the free flow of information that is often lacking in our school sites. But only a very small percentage of teachers are actually sharing out what’s happening in their classrooms. Additionally, I am not sure how many of us share the thinking behind a blog post or tweet. If we are truly going to support each other and share great ideas, we need to make our thinking visible. I for one am making a pledge to do share my thought process for blog posts I share out until the end of the year.

When you share you become part of something bigger — something that challenges the status quo.

And if we truly want to change education for our Generation Z students who will grow up in a 5G world, we must support the professional practice of sharing

Think about what might happen:

• Those sharing might improve a lesson if they knew it was going to be part of a reflective post.
• Sharing might become the learning itself.
• Teachers who share would open themselves up to new collegial relationships with educators from around the world like this woman who got inspired by George Couros to share…

I think transforming education might just be simpler than we all think. It might start with sharing, opening up our classrooms, our ideas, and our world to others. That way, we learn together and create a culture of shared learning.

The Socratic teaching method reflects early schooling circumstances in which students shared ideas with each other to strengthen their learning. It’s time we go ‘old school’ to get the ‘new schools’ we are looking for. The more we share, the more stories we tell of success and change, the less isolated we will feel, and learning environments will improve in a meaningful way. It’s a win-win. So what can you share this year?

There are lots of platforms to help us with this — but its time for an iteration something that would make it easier for us to share. Looking forward to seeing what EdSpace does in this arena when it’s launched.