It’s Thursday evening and hundreds of teachers are engrossed in a training session. The topic is pupils using cellphones in class; thousands of questions and answers are pinging back and forth.
“If students text in your lesson and aren’t engaged, leave the profession –you’re not cutting it,” says one. “The kit in their pockets is often better than school equipment,” says another. “Give pupils an encyclopaedia and they get so much knowledge. Give them tech and wow, exponential learning,” says a third.
The teachers, who work in schools dotted around the United Kingdom, from urban academies to tiny primaries, enter and exit the training at various points. They do so without disturbing anyone. Not because they’re expert tiptoers, but because they’re not in the same room.
This is UKEdChat, a weekly congregation of teachers on Twitter. It began when Colin Hill, a year-two (six- to seven-year-olds) teacher at Birkdale primary school in Southport, saw American teachers tweeting about their work at a particular time each week. “The time difference made it tough to actively participate,” Hill says. “But I was keen to attract UK educators to a similar chat session, discussing subjects and -policies more related to our side of the Atlantic.”
Hill approached teachers on Twitter, plus colleagues he knew from outside the micro-blogging community, about a UK version. He posted an online poll asking teachers for their ideal time and settled on Thursday between 8pm and 9pm. Each week a volunteer moderator would pick five questions for a poll on the UKEdChat website.
Then, at 8pm, teachers nationwide would log into Twitter on laptops, iPhones and BlackBerrys to debate the poll-topping issue. Sessions so far have included “homework: waste of time or limitless opportunity?”, pupil feedback to enhance learning and encouraging reading. “The impact has been amazing,” says Hill. “It’s surprising how colleagues from primary, secondary and beyond share similar issues or problems.”
Some weeks UKEdChat invites experts to host sessions, including Michelle Treagust, who works for the Reading Agency (@readingagency) and responded to questions about adult literacy. Each tweet contains the hashtag #ukedchat, so participants can search to see all comments at any time.
After each pacey session, the moderator uploads all the tweets to the UKEdChat website. “Twitter is a brilliant way of bringing innovative and inventive teachers together,” says Jackie Schneider, a primary teacher in Merton, south London.
“Most schools have a really dull, top-down culture in which the senior management try to ‘manage’ learning. But on Twitter there’s a huge generosity of spirit where teachers help out complete strangers with lesson resources purely for the love of learning.
“It’s invigorating for old lags like me. I discovered that innovative cookery teachers in secondary schools are making their own YouTube videos to inspire kids, and did the same, and was directed towards a range of free online music resources perfect for my year-four [eight- to nine-year-old] pupils. I really value the community; it’s a breath of fresh air compared with traditional forms of teacher improvement,” says Schneider.
Across the UK, Glen Gilchrist, head of science at Newport high school, says he “instantly fell in love” with UKEdChat because “schools hold their cards close to their chest and LEAs [local education authorities] are inefficient at spreading good practice.”
He says: “I have Twitter running on my laptop all the time. When faced with a question about pedagogy during an ‘out of specialism lesson’, like maths, I tweet the question and within minutes have the answer. Whether you need inspirational classroom management techniques or want to discuss Bloom’s Taxonomy, there’s always an audience at UKEdChat.”
Hill is working on plans for a live conference for tweeting teachers. In the meantime, UKEdChat is becoming more established online. As Gilchrist puts it: “The more teachers start using the #ukedchat tag, the more useful it becomes.” —