What can youth work learn from #TeachMeet?

It’s time for youth workers to get together, share ideas and celebrate what we do. 

First published October 2012.

Last night I attended #TMClevedon, the fifth TeachMeet to be held at Clevedon School in North Somerset.

TeachMeets have been around since 2005, they provide an opportunity for teachers to get together and share their ideas and practice. More often than not they have grown from an interest in the use of technology to support learning but a fairer description would centre on a desire to innovate in the classroom and inspire students about their subjects and the act of learning itself.

The format usually involves presentations of different lengths but rarely more than 20 minutes. Last night, after a keynote from Vic Goddard, hero of Passmores Academy and the Educating Essex series, the group broke into seminars and then reconvened for a series of five minute presentations from around twenty individual teachers, many of whom were called Dave (#teamdave).

This was my second Clevedon TeachMeet and I do always feel like a bit of an interloper because I’m not a teacher. I am however, interested in young people and learning. I’m a youth worker at heart and learning, informal or otherwise, is never far from my thoughts or my work.

It was a brilliant night and I was struck by the commitment and enthusiasm all the presenters showed for their students and their subjects. Not only that, the atmosphere of the event celebrated curiosity and an open-minded interest in others. There was no cynicism and no sign of a “we tried that, it didn’t work” mentality. Instead there was a lot of joy, laughter and a vibrant twitter backchannel on the #TMClevedon hashtag.

As I sat at the end of the evening, while teachers drifted home after playing out late on a school night, I started thinking about what an event like this would look like if there were youth workers or social workers on that stage. I asked myself a lot of questions and I certainly didn’t come to any firm conclusions, but it did make me think that a format like this would be a great way to celebrate the innovative and often difficult work that those of us working with young people in settings out of school do.

TeachMeet is interesting in that it is driven by a twitter presence. There are thousands of teachers around the country who use twitter to talk to their colleagues. They share ideas, they blog, they reflect on their practice and their own learning and then they meet for a discussion every week, using the hashtag #ukedchat. It is these tweeting and blogging teachers, interested in reflecting on their own practice, who are the backbone not just of Clevedon’s TeachMeet but the others that are popping up around the country.

So are there enough tweeting youth practitioners out there who could build some momentum?

TeachMeet works well because in teaching, every classroom practitioner can be the master of their own domain to some degree. They have the freedom to experiment and innovate in the way they help their students learn.

It struck me that if youth work practitioners and those working with young people face-to-face got together, they would be able to do something similar. We all have our different approaches and we use our unique skills and experience to shape the way we work with young people.

Is there enough diversity of practice to make an event like that work?

Teachers are fortunate that they will always be needed. Despite cuts to education and school budgets, teachers will be in front of students. We know only too well that wider services to young people, and in particular statutory universal youth services, are hugely under threat and in some places completely decimated. On average, authorities are slashing up to 9 specialist youth worker posts each. Instead, practitioners are taking on a range of tasks relating to the young people they work with and specialisms are weakening.

Are there enough of us left to get together?

My other concern is that we are in a world of outsourced support for young people. From advocacy to outdoor education, children’s and young people’s charities and buzzing social enterprises are delivering what were once in-house services to children and young people.

I’m afraid my cynical thinking leads me to conclude that some of those big players wouldn’t be that interested in their staff sharing practice with, frankly, their competitors. That feels a bit depressing. Has it really come to that?

Could the big young people’s charities share their local practice without organisational egos getting in the way?

And then there’s children and young people’s social work. A different kettle of fish to teaching or youth work, with deeply serious issues to confront. I’d like to think that even with the complications of the role and the demands of paperwork and process over practice-led time, it would be possible for social work to engage with this kind of sharing too. What struck me most about TeachMeet was that it was an unapologetic celebration of a set of values deep at the heart of teaching: children and young people first. We’re familiar with that and we know the lengths we go to to protect and serve them.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a chance to celebrate the work we do and our commitment to it?

So there it is. TeachMeet had quite an impact.

To all my fellow youth workers, social workers, leaving care teams, youth offending people, youth charity doods, what do you think? Could TeachMeet be for us?

And what would we call it?