by guest contributor, Suzie Boss: Teaching has long been known as the lonely profession. The way many schools are still organized keeps teachers behind classroom doors, isolated from their colleagues. It’s not a set-up that helps good ideas travel. When new teachers bail out of the profession—as nearly a third do within their first three years of teaching—they cite isolation as one of the top reasons for their early exit. If you listen to conversations taking place out in the blogosphere, however, you get more hopeful about the possibility for grassroots change in the teaching world. Edubloggers are having robust discussions about how and why they teach, and what strategies and new tools will help their students learn. Online, teachers are able to swap ideas and improve instruction by getting critical feedback from peers—improving curriculum in much the same way that open source developers improve software. Vicki Davis, known internationally as the author of Cool Cat Teacher Blog, goes as far as to suggest, “Teachers who innovate have a professional responsibility to blog. It makes the whole community better.” Wesley Fryer, author of the award-winning Moving at the Speed of Creativity and a self-described education “change agent,” says the edublogosphere… (more)
(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Education at 2:17 PM)