Twitter PLN: Because Solutions Must Include Teachers

I recently read a tweet by the National Education Association’s (NEA) president, Dennis Van Roekel, which brought me to this quote: “I’m so tired of OTHERS defining the solutions….without even asking those who do the work every day of their professional life.”

Consider how solutions determined by others have determined the profound changes in education in the past 12 years. The legislation for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Common Core State Standards (CCSS), have come from stakeholders who are looking into the classroom as if they are looking through a one-way window. This one-way window prevents the sounds of education, limits other visual perspectives, and prevents dialogue with teachers. The one way also window prevents the teachers from seeing or communicating with those stakeholders who have made these changes.

This past week, in my Twitter feed, I found links to information which made me wonder, with the increasing adoption of technology in education, how might this one-way window dynamic change?

The first piece of information came from a tweet by @webenglishteach. On a recent post titled “My career by the numbers (so far)” on her Chalkboard blog, Carla discussed her retirement as an English teacher and reflected on the numbers in her educational career, for example, the number of papers she had corrected or numbers of students she taught over the course of her 32 year career. She has spent the past year with the Department of Education (DOE), and noted:

“People at the DOE like to identify themselves as teachers. ‘I taught 2 years.’ They’re good people, but teachers make more decisions that affect other people on Monday than someone at DOE does all week. Be proud of what we do.”

The second piece of information came from a link in the article The Gates Foundation’s Education Philanthropy: Are Profit Seeking and Market Domination a Public Service? tweeted by Education Week . The article comprehensively argued against the agenda of wealthy philanthropic enterprises that partner with public institutions, a public-private partnership.This article by Anthony Cody contained a link to a April 2011 article by Sam Dillon in the New York Times Foundations Join to Offer Online Courses for Schools that described how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be working with the textbook and testing firm Pearson:

“In his educational work, Bill Gates has explored ways that new technologies can transform teaching. Vicki Phillips, a director at the Gates Foundation, said the partnership with Pearson was part of a ‘suite of investments’ totaling more than $20 million that the foundation was undertaking, all of which involve new technology-based instructional approaches. The new digital materials, Ms. Phillips said, “have the potential to fundamentally change the way students and teachers interact in the classroom.”

This investment will be extremely profitable for Pearson, a large corporation that also houses the publishing companies Penguin and the Financial Times; $330 million in Department of Education financing. The partnership with the Gates Foundation could give Pearson a considerable advantage as textbook and learning technology companies position themselves in an education marketplace upended by the creation of the common standards. Finally, Susan Neuman, a former Education Department official with the Bush Administration commented in the story, “Pearson already dominates, and this could take it to the extreme. This could be problematic for many of our kids. We could get a one size fits all.”

In these instances, the classroom teachers are clearly not involved solutions. There are Department of Education employees with fleeting experience in the classroom determining educational policy. Public-private partnerships are fundamentally changing how content is delivered in the classroom. Finally, education services companies are developing both the texts and the tests for use in the classroom.

So why are teachers, those with years of expertise in the classroom, not leading to challenge the solutions offered by others? That is what Van Roekel asked when he addressed the NEA Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly at the 2012 convention:

“I’m so tired of OTHERS defining the solutions… without even asking those who do the work every day of their professional life.

I want to take advantage of this opportunity for US to lead – and I’m not waiting to be asked, nor am I asking anyone’s permission.

Because if we are not ready to lead, I know there are many others ready, willing, and waiting to do it for us. Or maybe I should say, do it ‘to’ us.There are plenty of people outside our profession who have their own ideas about what we should be doing, how we should be evaluated, and how to improve public education…”

Teachers could define the solution if they had time and the ability to effectively dialogue with other teachers. Unfortunately, there is little teachers can do about the finite elements of time, however, teachers can communicate with teachers much more effectively today through numerous platforms. Research has proved that peer to peer professional development is successful, and one platform for such dialogue is Twitter. No, not the “Katie Holmes vs Tom Cruise” Twitter or the #justsayin Twitter trend. Twitter provides teachers a means to communicate (140 characters) quickly, to link content, to help research, or to celebrate success. Twitter can be an effective a part of a PLN (personal learning network) for a teacher who has only a few minutes to spare each day, weekends included, during the school year and can be part of self-directed professional development mandated in some state teacher evaluations.

Twitter offers evening “chats” by subject, grade level, or on educational topics simply by using a hashtag (EX: #edchat, #engchat, #sschat). A complete schedule of educational chats is available on technology guru Jerry Blumengarten’s (alias Cybraryman) Twitter page . And of course, don’t forget to follow The Educator’s Room@EducatorsRoom!

Using Twitter as my PLN, I found each of the articles I referenced above through Twitter. I will Tweet this blog. I may be re-Tweeted so that the information finds its way to other teachers.

Now consider that there are more than