We Tried Something New
Last year as a Secondary Math Teaching and Learning team, we ventured into an endeavor that had never been tried before with secondary math teachers in our district. We made the attempt to start a district based twitter chat that catered to the professional growth needs of the secondary math teachers of Round Rock ISD. The aim of the twitter chat was to provide an innovative opportunity for teachers to participate in professional development. When we think of “professional development”, most time it raises the notion of travel, conference fees, arranging substitutes, and loss of precious instructional time. Many teachers did not want to be away from their students, or felt the process of preparing for a substitute was just not worth it to them. In response to these concerns, we invited teachers to join us in a twitter chat. We wanted to show that professional development did not have to entail all the concerns posed by attending traditional formats.
As we moved further into the 21st century, we felt that we had to diversify our modality of professional development. We were asking teachers to personalize learning for students, so we had to do the same for teachers. We say we want our students to be lifelong learners, so we need to model that behavior by being adults that value continued learning for professional growth. Formal degrees and training programs provide the foundation for our career paths, but long-term professional success depends largely on the openness to continued learning that included content knowledge, instructional strategies and resources.
Joining twitter can feel like opening the nozzle on a firehose. There are hundreds of regional, topical, and level-specific Twitter chats available for educators each week, and participating in them for the very first time can be daunting. This is particularly true for teachers not yet comfortable with the nuances of Twitter. For these reasons, we started a twitter chat specifically for the teachers of our district. It was intended to be a safe environment for them to experience a Twitter chat and connect with other teachers from around other campuses. Besides connecting with other teachers, this platform gave teachers an opportunity to reflect on their work. They were able to share what had and hadn’t worked in their classroom.
We dubbed our special day “Twitter Third Tuesdays”, and met at 7 pm for one hour using the hashtag #secmathchat. To increase participation, we included door prizes for participants to win throughout the night, and even had prizes for the instructional coach who had the largest number of teachers from their campus(es) participate. In total we hosted seven Twitter chats. At the conclusion of each chat, we Storified the chat for individuals that were not able to attend. Our discussions were substantive and invigorating. Despite our best efforts, the discussions were not well attended, usually consisting of mostly members of our Secondary Math Teaching and Learning team and a handful of teachers. Our last Twitter chat included teachers from across the nation that stumbled onto our hashtag that outnumbered members of our district. So at the end of the school year, we did what we ask our teachers to do and reflected on our practices. It was determined that the investment of time and resources did not produce the returns to justify continuing the Twitter chat for the next school year.
Benefits of a Twitter Chat
Although we did not continue our Twitter chat, I do still feel that there are benefits in being a part of one. Twitter chats offer instant opportunities to follow and learn from like-minded learning professionals worldwide around a particular subject area. These spaces allow us to follow and learn from educators, authors, and other professional heroes and heroines who not only share information and resources but frequently initiate and invite direct engagement. You could follow people who you would otherwise only have access to through books and articles. Even if you don’t feel like you have a lot to say, there is power in retweeting. Although this is an acceptable way to experience this virtual space, if one stops there they will miss out on its full potential.
The idea of a Twitter chat is one great big conversation centered around a particular topic. All you need to do is jump in. Twitter chats take place when a group of educators “meet” on Twitter at an agreed upon time, using an agreed upon hashtag. Any user can create a hashtag by adding it to his/ her own tweet. These hashtag create a community around a topic of interest. Participants sound off by sending tweets about things on their mind, and responding to tweets of others. This back and forth helps participants build close relationships with each other. These connections become an integral part of educators’ Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) that may have a substantial impact on refining practices, ideas, resources, and inspiration.
With Twitter chats, professional development is always in session. You can read and respond to tweets at your own pace. There is a variety of ways of interacting with chats. Chats allow individuals to participate in conversations weekly, biweekly, monthly, and sometimes sporadically. Typical chats have a duration of 60 minutes, but others are 30 minutes. There are also “slow chats” that happen over an extended period of time. Regardless of the version you participate in, the time commitment is minimal.
What’s Next
Although our in-district twitter chat was not a success on the scale we had hoped, it did open some of our teachers, instructional coaches, and curriculum personnel to the idea of using social media as a form of professional development. You may be one that has little to no experience with twitter and twitter chats, but I implore you to start somewhere. Our district no longer hosts a twitter chat, but there are a number of options out there for you to try. Just jump in. Tweet or don’t tweet. Retweet or don’t retweet. Your level of activity does not matter, just be active.
Use this site as a resource.
