I spend too much of my time on Twitter!

Yet sometimes I’m really glad that we have this tool. One of the times I enjoy it is when someone tweets or retweets a little gem or nugget of an idea that gets me thinking.

Such an event happened the other day when I read a tweet along the lines of:

Training teachers in the tech is only a first step. A bigger task is getting them to use it in the curriculum

I think you can take this tweet in different ways. At first I thought I agreed with the statement that teaching about the technology is only the first small step and that it is more important that teachers then use it in their curriculum teaching. Then I reread the tweet and put a slightly different interpretation on it, as if the person were saying that teaching teachers the tech is the easy part but it’s more difficult to get them to use it in teaching the curriculum; in which case I’m not sure that I do agree with the statement.

I guess if you’re the trainer, it’s all a matter of what you’re more comfortable with; if you’re more comfortable and familiar with the technology than with the curriculum, then you would certainly find it easier to train teachers in the tech.

Perhaps this has been a weakness in the more traditional approach to training? Teachers may have been trained in the technology, what it is and how to operate it, often by someone from the company that made or marketed the product. Hopefully, that trainer had also had experience within education and could at least give pointers to the product’s potential use in the curriculum. Even where this happened, though, it was still a funnel down approach with the trainer passing information and ideas down to the trainees.

In all good training sessions, I believe there must be time for the teachers to be allowed to simply explore or play with the product. They then discover and share their own ways of using the product in teaching. I always strive to make the bulk of my training sessions spent on this hands-on time.  Being realistic, however, it is very difficult to do so when the training consists of a single day, or more often, a single hour and there is so much baseline information that needs to be presented.

I’m not always comfortable with the word ‘training’. To my mind the word ‘training’ can often allow the inference that the delegates, in themselves or what they are currently doing, are somehow deficient, misguided or inappropriate. Nobody likes to be told this or even to think it, least of all, teachers.

To my mind, the best form of ‘training’ is more like a ‘nurturing’. I believe that most teachers have the ability to grasp new ideas quickly, to develop them and be able to evaulate them. What they often lack is the time to do so and perhaps this is the most valuable thing that a training session can give them.

I see Teachmeets as a great tool in the professional nurturing of teachers. You can go along and share in what other attendees have been doing. Each ‘presentation’ is short, 2, 5 or 7 minutes. If you like something, then you can go away afterwards and explore it further or arrange to link up with the presenter, if you don’t like something … well you’ve only got to wait 7 minutes at most for the next thing!

The best bit about Teachmeets is that these are professionals sharing their practice or findings with fellow professionals in a non-critical environment, though it is also nice just now and again to have a commercial company come along to give a short, say two minute, presentation of a new product they’re offering or a something they are working on; that just adds a bit of ‘newness’ to the event.

Teachmeets are great but I don’t think they can be classified as CPD or training. I’m not saying that critically because teachmeets are great for awareness-raising and sharing; the training starts when you take something from teachmeets and explore it further. What I see as being the value of teachmeets  is the model of teaching professionals learning from and sharing with fellow professionals. It is this model which I feel could and should be applied to more traditional training sessions, perhaps exploiting the use of a facilitator or moderator to ensure the smooth(ish) running of the session.

There is, though, a thorny question that still remains. That is the question of accreditation, how can you assess (assuming you need to) and accredit a teacher’s attendance, contribution, or professional development at such a teachmeet or teachmeet style training event?

hmm?

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