Social medias are being used increasingly by educators as part of our ongoing attempts to improve our practice. They’re effective for sharing and discovering ideas and are a handy go-to when we have a question or query that we’d like to put out there for people beyond our own institutions. There are also plenty of fantastic blogs about that provide all kinds of inspiration around (not just around my own eternal quest towards conciseness but also) educational thinking. We are lucky to have the VLN in New Zealand which is set up specifically to help educators collaborate and access the content they need at a given time.
While we gain access to some great educational ideas through social medias, it can sometimes be hard to find things that don’t only reinforce what we already think. Blog comment banks and social media discussions are full of feedback where we affirm and agree with each other and requests for help are usually responded to quickly and usefully. While there’s not anything particularly wrong with agreeing with each other and offering a helping hand when we have a moment, there are some other ways educators collaborate across social media that provide some further (pretty impressive) benefits for our professional learning. One of the really powerful things about communication across these kinds of tools is that even if we don’t participate directly in discussions (personally I’m more of a lurker) we can still benefit massively from seeing the thinking laid out in front of us when someone has taken time to do some of the following things:
1) Inquire into contexts. If we want to help each other with useful offers of advice or suggestions, it is often important that we inquire further into someone’s context. Both parties have access to some great learning this way and the person requesting help is more likely to have it specifically tailored to their situation. It takes time to inquire but in the conversations where I’ve seen others do this, the subsequent dialogue that came out of it did a much better job of articulating the complexity of the issues at hand. Successful teaching and learning relationships (and many collaborative relationships outside of education) are increasingly recognising the variation of contextual specifics when forming solutions to problems. Discovering these contextual factors often takes sustained communication back and forth in some manner. While the time pressures of teaching don’t always set us up well for this, it is still something we need to make time for if we want to use each other as useful resources.
2) Share unresolved questions and tensions. I really love it when people do this. Not only does it put ideas out there that we may all have been thinking about for a while but were too scared to bring up, it also invites some of the most well thought-out and helpful replies I’ve seen on social medias. Education is complex and full of unresolved tensions, situations with multiple contributing factors and diverse contexts that can make simplistic communication limiting. While there’s a risk these kinds of discussion can become long-winded rants or complaints, the quality of our responses to each others situations and ideas can really make these interactions worthwhile.
3) Explain alternative viewpoints. While this can be difficult, it is an important part of a successful dialogue around unresolved questions and tensions. Respectfully posed alternative viewpoints can give real insight into the different perspectives and parts of an issue and I have nothing but admiration for people who can lay out alternative viewpoints respectfully and clearly.
4) Friend and follow people we disagree with. This is a great natural progression from 2 and 3 and can help us avoid the social-networking-only-gives-me-opinions-I-agree-with effect (sorry, that’s a terrible name for it). Carefully considering the opinions of those we often disagree with can have a couple of positive outcomes. We are more likely to discover more of our own inadequate mental models and subsequently are able to better understand issues that we feel strongly about.
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