There Are Plenty of Ways to Learn with Others—Use One!

Here's an example of a free 90-minute learning activity you can participate in!

Have you ever felt like you were going it alone in your classroom or role at school? Like you needed someone to give you a couple of their best ideas, and you could give them a couple of yours, and you could cheer each other on? 

I have. And at a time when I deeply needed such a teaching buddy, I found 176,000 of them—colleagues who came along side me with answers to questions from what books are 6th graders reading to what desks work best in upper elementary classrooms! They cheered for my daily success stories and shared ideas that had worked for them.  

I know that I flourish as a teacher when I am learning as well as teaching, when I am growing in my knowledge of pedagogy and my subject area, when I am experiencing and modeling the transformative learning I want for my students. 

I want all staff at international Christian schools to flourish in terms of this kind of transformative learning. And it is not difficult, expensive, hard to find, or hard to get to. All that is needed is internet access. My deep hope is that staff are experiencing participation in professional/virtual learning communities and in professional organizations.    

I wasn’t experiencing learning with others in March 2020 (think the start of COVID).  As the world shut down, I found myself in a new city in a non-English speaking country, teaching at a new school—and new classes, new age levels, and a new subject. 

I felt alone, a little panicky. Facebook saved my life. Well, maybe not my life, but certainly my professional confidence. In a teaching situation where I needed a community and found it thin on the ground for understandable reasons (everyone was flat out scrambling to figure out the online education thing, and in-person meetings simply weren’t happening), I found it thick online in virtual professional learning communities.    

Facebook groups were especially live-giving:

(1) ELA in the Middle (42.2K members) helped get me back in touch with middle school after nearly 30 years away, raising kids and then teaching high school.   

(2) ESL Teachers (10.5K members) helped me find my feet in a new teaching area, introducing me to thought leaders in the field and sharing a plethora of resources.

(3) Not So Wimpy Fourth Grade Teachers (55.5K members) provided a lot of support for my first foray into elementary teaching (4th and 5th grade ELA), including a free mini-course on teaching grammar and a free give-away I won for a class on teaching writing!  

(4) Creative High School English (24.0K members) provided a discussion of the book In Search of Deeper Learning by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, and an ed camp on independent reading.  

(5) Christian Teachers’ Lounge by Teach 4 the Heart (31.5K members) offered specifically Christian support. Through it I’ve gotten a free mini-course on elementary classroom management, a useful stack of prayer cards with a verse on one side and a prayer request on the other, and an online conference with sessions by Dave Stuart Jr. and The Redeemed Reader.   

(6) Patterns of Power Community (11.6K members) offered me a supportive place when I decided to experiment with a reading-embedded way of teaching grammar and writing. Here, I could share my little success stories, with both community members and the textbook writers themselves (!) always chiming in with words of encouragement.    

(7) “Awakened” Educator Book Discussion (932 members) is running just for the month of February. It's a discussion of the book Awakened: Change Your Mindset to Transform Your Teaching (2nd edition) led by the author, Angela Watson. You don’t even have to read the book to participate, though it will deepen your understanding. 

Angela daily posts a summary of a section of the book with significant quotes and a prompt about how you’ve seen that principle at work. Today’s was about how the unconscious biases of confirmation, recency, and negativity can distort our thoughts.

These Facebook groups, though private (meaning that you have to apply to be admitted) are easy to join! Joining usually involves just answering a question about why you want to join. 

And I'm confident there's a group for you. I don’t know how many different groups there are, and I have no idea whether these are the best—they’re just the ones I happened across and have found helpful. I know people have mentioned even more specific special interest groups, like ones for teaching AP literature or even a specific novel, like The Scarlet Letter! 

In addition to Facebook groups, I have also found membership in professional organizations helpful. ASCD (Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development) has a wealth of information about educational practice and curriculum in general that is relevant to any educator at any level. It provides a monthly newsletter, publishes books, and puts on webinars. For my teaching area, NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) keeps me abreast of developments. Both of these organizations have annual membership costs.  

There are also organizations without membership fees, like National Write Center. This is an incredible community that offers not only conversation about writing, but also free webinars. I’ve enjoyed an hour with the American poet Taylor Mali and a 90-minute panel of experts on ChatGPT (recording available here). The next webinar (scheduled for March 14) is “Argument in Service of Civic Reasoning and Discourse.”

   

Maybe you think that you can't participate. 

• Because you teach in a small school with no counterpart. 
• Because your community is limited by mobility, language, or health. 
• Because everyone around you is flat out too busy. 
• Because you have limited funding for attending conventions. 

Good news! If you have internet access (and I'm pretty sure you do), you can still connect to colleagues and professional communities that can support transformational learning for you—the kind of learning that you want to experience so that the students at your school can experience it. 

Bottom line? Do one thing: 

• Join one Facebook group that represents a level, area, or topic you teach.
• Join one professional organization.  
• Join something! 

What about you? Have you ever felt like you were going it alone in your classroom or role at school? What professional/virtual communities are you a part of? What professional organizations are you a member of? What can you do to more consistently experience transformative learning?