Written by Throughout my teacher training program and various professional development opportunities, I have written and rewritten my philosophy of education multiple times. It usually resulted in a number of pages of educational jargon with examples of how I have demonstrated these beliefs in practice. In preparation for the Cohort 21 final meeting I noticed that we needed to include our philosophy but we were only about to use 140 characters or the length of a tweet.
At first I thought I would be able to hammer something out pretty quickly, but after thinking about it for a little while I realized it was going to be trickier than I first thought. There are so many things that I believe are important to my philosophy. After a suggestion to check out #6word – an approach to creating memoirs I still was a little stumped as to how I was going to get my philosophy into one tweet.
A few years ago after hearing Stephen Covey speak at the ISTE conference, I wrote my own personal mission statement that is included on my Twitter profile ~ Love Life Learning. I thought that this might be a good place to start, as it is something that I try and life by and share with my students. Next, I opened a recent copy of my philosophy of education that I spent some time editing and revising last summer and started a list of powerful words that I felt needed to be included from the document.
With a cue card full of words related to my philosophy, I tried to look for words with similar meanings to chop it down further. I was left with inspire, love learning, authentic experiences, questioning, and world.
What do these words mean together? What do they mean in relation to my philosophy of education?
After a few different sentences, I was left with “Inspiring students to love learning through authentic experiences tuning them into the world around them, and encouraging them want to know why.”
As much as this task seemed very basic – it is just making a tweet, it was an excellent exercise in really synthesizing what your philosophy is.
I guess a Tweet is the new elevator speech!
Loved your process involved in arriving at 140 characters, Marcie. Whittling a personal philosophy of education into a tweet is not an easy task. I enjoyed reading how you arrived at the final 140 characters, what connections you made to other sources of inspiration, how you had to redefine and rethink earlier ideas. A great exercise. Keeps things fresh and, as you indicated, authentic. Also a great opportunity for us to remember why teaching is more than a job; it’s a calling.
Marcie,
Like Shelley, I enjoyed reading about your process, and that you found value in it as well. I think that your personal statement is signficant because it gets to the heart of what teaching still is: relationships and introductions. Relationships of students to the world around them, and introducations to the world around them as well.
Many might assume that amongst the CISOntario schools, we are all about technology and ‘edutainment’; however, something that I have learned throughout this year is the importance of establishing these relationships and introductions, and not necessarily about the technology.
I hope that you share this process with your colleagues, and add this to your Twitter bio too!
See you soon,
garth.
Thanks, Garth and Shelley! Hopefully this post will inspire others to do the same!
“The whole art of teaching is the only art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards; and curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy” ~Anatole France
Marcie, your philosophy is wonderful! I feel 21st century educators will have a harder time awakening the curiosity of young minds, of encouraging them to ask why. Information is instantly accessible and answers to questions are readily available too. Warren Burger blogged that he was discussing the subject of “questioning” with Richard S. Wurman, original creator of the TED conference. Wurman immediately focused on the educational system saying “In school, we’re rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question.” A subsequent Newsweek story titled , The Creativity Crisis, examined the declining creativity amongst school children in the USA. Burger raises an interesting question: Have the kids stopped asking questions because they’ve lost interest? Or have they lost interest because the rote answers-driven school system doesn’t allow them to ask enough questions? I am hopeful that we, as independent school educators, keep the light of curiosity burning for as long as possible while students are in our care. What do you think?