Source: Amanda Woodward Flickr
I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.
– J.D. Salinger
My head is full of partially written blog posts. These “unwritten words” are starting to overwhelm my life so it is time to write, express, confess, and share. I was honoured to work with Sheryl Nussbaum Beach this year and she said many things that have stuck to my mental idea board but one in particular particularly resonated with me. She challenged us in #sd36learn to share our recorded learning in our analog notebooks digitally with others. If we keep our learning only to ourselves, then our collective learning suffers. What would happen to our public education system if we shared our learning with each others? We have seen this happen with our hashtag #sd36learn as we can now see into our colleagues’ thinking and teaching practice. This “learning party” never existed when I first started teaching.
I love the idea of social media being the virtual water cooler where educators gather to share ideas and strategies for learning. We all are learners, perpetual learners and when we embrace this stance as educators then the learning of new curricula, assessment, and strategies don’t seem too overwhelming.
I had an inspiring Spanish Literature professor Issac Delgado at the University of British Columbia and when people asked him if he was a writer, he would say, “I am not a writer, I just write”. His humility and brilliance as a teacher inspired me to work really hard in his classes and ever since I have been trying to build similar creative learning environments like he did. I believe that we can write ourselves into being and we need to teach this to our students. So here is my challenge, if I can find time amongst all the noise of my day to write some ideas down about learning, then so can you. Public education needs our ideas, dreams and aspirations. Let’s tell our stories….let’s release our unwritten words.
This blog post emerged from the #bcedbloggers challenge from my colleague and friend @tiahenriksen. Thanks for the push Tia!
The Making Commons 