Written by After the first face-to-face session of Cohort 21 the thing that I cannot stop reflecting on is the power of collaboration. An an early career teacher beginning a career in an independent school one of the challenges that I found most difficult to get through was a feeling of isolation. At the time, I was the only Grade 5 teacher in my school, everyone was busy what appear to be a well oiled machine, and I was left with a cupboard full of resources binders to build my program from. Please don’t get me wrong, the other faculty members were friendly and helpful when I asked questions but I still felt like something was missing.
Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise as over the next few years I turned to the internet and was able to develop a Personal Learning Network (PLN) to combat my isolation. Participating in chats via Twitter with other educators around the world kept me up on the latest trends in education and provided me with endless ideas for my classroom. I was fortunate to find this collaborative community, as the statistics show many early career teachers leave the profession before the end of 5 years. I am sure that this feeling of isolation is one of the factors.
Fast forward 5 years and with the power of technology now have the ability to incorporated collaboration between faculty members at our schools seamlessly with tools like Diigo (social bookmarking), GoogleDocs, SkyDrive, and Twitter. The power to share and develop resources together with other members of our department, schools, and teachers around the world is a force that I believe will change the environments in schools to be more collaborative and less isolating, particularly for teachers early in their careers.
Imaging coming to a new school and instead of receiving a cupboard full of resources binders to sort through you were added as a member of a Diigo group with valuable links to the curriculum. Instead of reinventing the wheel and searching out all of this stuff on your own, you are now free to contribute to a community where you will get back more than you contribute. It allows you to have face-to-face conversations with colleagues about the resources and ideas they have posted and changes the ‘water-cooler’ discussion as you now have something in common with a teacher in another department. This is just one example of how collaborative online tools can be utilized to assist teachers in designing the best possible student experiences.
I hope that one of the most powerful things that I am able to take a way from participating in Cohort 21 is another layer to my PLN with educators in Independent Schools around Ontario that are passionate about bring a collaborative environment to our schools.
Great post! One thing I really value about Cohort 21, is that it is a combination of face to face interaction and online collaboration.
When I first started teaching, I was one of 9 chemistry teachers in a Science Department with more than 20 members, it was quite a shock to move overseas where I was one of two Science teachers and the only person teaching Chemistry and Physics. At that time, listservs saved me. In fact, it is only this year that the College Board finally moved from an AP Chem listserv to an online discussion board format.
For me, the biggest challenge is managing the volume of content — even just having the time to view everything posted, not to mention evaluate it. I am optimistic that I will find a strategy that will work for me.
Melody – You bring up a great point. Teaching students how to manage content is a very important skill for the 21st Century. Not only do they have to stift through the massive quantities to find the information that they require, they need to be able to critically examine the information and decide if there is bias involved, is the information accurate, how recent is the information/is it out of date?
Even at the Grade 4 level I find that students are overwhelmed at where to begin between books, and internet sources. Something to certainly examine what the scope and sequence of these types of research based skills is in a K-12 school environment.