A Teacher’s Hat: Submission Instructions
A Teacher’s Hat welcomes submissions on a wide variety of topics. From reflections on books, classroom strategies, new technologies, learning theories and philosophies, there is much we can learn from each other! I am excited that you want to share your knowledge through the publication.
Getting started
The publication is housed on Medium, thus, to publish on A Teacher’s Hat, you will need a Medium account. However, we have a generic account through which you can publish without creating your own Medium account.
As you read the difference between the two, please answer the following questions and keep them in mind:
- How frequently will I be submitting an article?
- Will I be engaging (reading, writing responses to, or simply cheering on by clapping) with the works of other writers on this publication and on Medium?
We are all teachers and educators here and it might not be possible to have something to publish every month. Hence, in my book of definitions, a frequent contributor is one who writes an article every couple months, contributing regularly.
Note that I use the word ‘article’, ‘post’ and ‘story’ interchangeably because Medium considers all writings to be stories. They are all the same thing and I am sorry for the confusion.
Option # 1 Make your own Medium account
Advantages:
- it is personal account.
- anything that you publish on Medium has some statistics associated with it, such as number of views and reads for the story. You would have access to these from your account.
- if you do not already have a personal website, Medium can be your blog. You can post something without it being associated with a publication. You can write for other publications apart from A Teacher’s Hat. The whole platform is open to you. :)
- you can respond to people who reply to your stories. You can also respond to other people’s stories.
- you can cheer on people whose stories you like by clapping for them. You can also follow people and publications whose writings you are interested in.
Disadvantages:
If you do not like making accounts on websites and associating your information with them, then this might not be the option for you.
How to submit if you have a Medium account? The instructions can be downloaded from here (Google Drive link). Please submit only unpublished stories so that appear in the timeline on A Teacher’s hat correctly. What I mean is if you published the article on May 25 and add it to A Teacher’s Hat in June, it will appear on A Teacher’s Hat under May articles.
When do I recommend the personal account? If you plan to continue working with A Teacher’s Hat, writing for yourself and its followers, and reading what the writers are writing, then I would recommend creating the personal account. Also, the articles that you write remain chronologically ordered, latest first, allowing you to keep track of when you were writing and where all you have published.
Option # 2 Use the generic account
A Teacher's Hat is our generic account that only I have access to.
Advantages:
You don’t have to create an account on another platform.
Disadvantages:
You will only be able to publish through this account via me, i.e., your role on Medium would be of a reader rather than a potential writer. You will not have access to statistics for your story unless you ask me, you will not be able to write responses to people’s articles… in short, all advantages that the personal account offers are no longer available.
How to submit if you do not have Medium account? Share a Google Doc or MS Word file with me that we can work on together and when it’s ready for publication, I will publish it through this account. A short bio of yourself would be attached to the story as well.
Email: a.teachers.hat@gmail.com
When do I recommend the generic account? The answer to the engagement question I asked earlier “Will I be engaging (reading, writing responses to, or simply cheering on by clapping) the works of author writers on this publication and on Medium?” should help you with that. If you only plan to submit one article and no more in the future, then this might be a good option for you.
Of course, nothing is set in stone! You can choose to start with the generic account and then create a personal one later if you think it works better for you.
Trivia
It is possible to write an article building on another article. An example for that is Andy’s “I’m all fired up now”:
It has two responses under it. If you have a Medium account and you want to build on someone’s story, instructions can be found here (Google Drive link). If you want to use the generic account, same procedure as submitting your standalone article applies, just let me know which article you are responding to.
Also, this article is a response to a previous one. :)
Publishing Cycle
A Teacher’s Hat publishes 6 articles a month, with an even interval between them (usually 5 days). However, as the team grows and the number of articles in the ready-to-publish queue increase, this number can change.
All received articles are reviewed by me on first-come-first-serve-basis. I write a letter to our followers at the beginning of the month, describing what we did last month and what the next month looks like in terms of what we will be writing and discussing. If you plan to submit an article for next month, please let me know so that I can let our readers know what to look forward to.
That being said, you are welcome to submit articles as you write them and I will schedule them accordingly.
To each article, I will add a short Editor’s note at the end. I might also suggest adding an infographic for readability purposes and I will review what I build with you.
Note that days = business days. I am not counting weekends here so that gives you more time.
Please use a citation system that you are comfortable with.
Please add information to images which are not yours.
If you have your own blog separate from Medium, you are welcome to post the article there first after I have scheduled it here. Please cross-link in this case.
Once the article is published on A Teacher’s hat, we will promote it on Twitter. If you are in our Slack community, please promote it there yourself. :)
Lastly, please consult with me before you delete your Medium account or no longer want your article on A Teacher’s Hat. If for some reason, you must delete your account or remove the articles, please discuss with me first so that we can ensure the information you had shared can still be accessed by the readers in a different manner.
Looking forward to working with you! Please consider joining the Slack community Teaching Resources and Discussions (invitation link) to discuss with fellow educators, share articles, take part in the monthly meeting for writers! I recommend the desktop app as it has a smaller learning curve than the cell phone app.
Please reach out to me if you have any questions. Twitter (@_armedwithabook or @a_teachers_hat), email (a.teachers.hat@gmail.com)
Happy writing!
