No Teacher is an Island (a Peninsula perhaps, but not an Island)
It’s been a very busy week and a bit with work. I’ve been in both Orkney and Shetland for their learning festivals, two very impressive events. In both cases, all teachers in the authority are invited to attend a two day in-service, and have access to a wide and relevant programme. I was there doing my Glow-vangelist bit, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first chance to run a Glow session on my own. I think I’m starting to know what I’m talking about.
Aside from working with the teachers, one of the benefits of the events was getting to know my LTS colleagues, as many of the Curriculum for Excellence team and other LTS types were there too. Although many of us are based in the same building, we’re so often out in authorities that we don’t know many of the people we work alongside. Even when we are in the building, being on a different floor means I rarely see those who’re based upstairs. It reminds me a little of school, where we didn’t have a staffroom. We’d cluster in our staff bases at breaks, and that’s only if we hadn’t sequestered ourselves in our classrooms to catch up with marking. As a consequence there were people who worked on the other side of the campus who you only saw at in-service days. Certainly, when I’d been there two years, I still met staff members who’d been there for longer than me, who would ask me if I was new. It does raise a slight worry about how the cross curricular aims of CfE can be met when you don’t even know who you’re working with.
Perhaps Glow can help with this. It seems faintly ridiculous on the surface to suggest working online with people whose classrooms are a hundred yards away from yours, but secondary teaching can actually be a very solitary business, where perhaps the only contact you have with your colleagues on a given day is a wave in the corridor as you’re welcoming your class. If you’re in a working group with your colleagues, or you’re planning a cross curricular project, working online could be more convenient than face to face meetings. The idea of discussion boards appeals, especially when it’s so hard to find times when everybody can be in one place together, and document stores make organisation of resources easier. There’s the added bonus that working online means your project or group doesn’t have to be limited to your school – if it’s relevant to you it might be relevant to other schools in the council or even the country, so why keep it small if you don’t want to? Where time and availability have been barriers in the past, there can be at least some progress if we work online.
But back to the Learning Festivals and getting to know people…It made a real difference to be able to speak to people whose faces you’d seen, but whose role you had no idea about. It was so encouraging – each and every person I talked to was full of enthusiasm about their role, and grateful for their secondment, It certainly made me feel more confident about where CfE is coming from because the range of experience and ability within the writing teams is phenomenal. I always expect to turn into a cynic about these things one day, but so far, so positive.
Anyway, I digress. The point I’m trying o get across is one I’ve touched on before – no teacher is an island and we should realise that. We’ve got a great resource in our colleagues, with their own experiences and skills, and it’ll be a shame if we can’t get into the spirit of collaboration that CfE encourages (and that Glow brilliantly supports). And if we’re still islands, at least we can be a large archipelago with good links between each other, or peninsulas tethered to the same land mass of share ideas and resources 
On an unrelated point, I was interested in something one of the ladies at dinner had to say about us technical types. She began by saying that when she first encountered people in education who were of a technical persuasion, she always noticed that those people were, how to put it nicely, erm, socially awkward. She went on to say that she’d noticed a gradual but definite change over the years, and in general now the technical types she comes across are just as social (or anti-social) as the general populous. Having grown up in the period she’s talking about, I haven’t really been aware of that shift, but I wondered if that rang true for anyone, and if it’s down to the user-friendliness of newer technologies – are the grassroots programmers and computing scientists still like the people she remembers?
5 Comments
Regarding your final point about techy types, I’m sure I’ve bemoaned the lack of geeks where I work
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I’m actually not sure if I can comment on this very well since I am one of the geeks in question and I know that I find it difficult in situations where I don’t know people. I can be friendly and helpful, but can run out of conversation very quickly.
I’m not sure I’d put it down to the friendliness of new technology, but more to its gradual assimilation into everyday life.
Think back a decade, and the adults who knew how to use computers knew because they sought out those things, making them technically or actually geeks. And the people most likely to seek out that sort of technology were unlikely to enjoy social interactions. Now, of course, practically everyone who’s been to university or school in the last 10 years as well as many others have had access to computers, meaning you don’t have to be a social pariah to understand technology.
The fact that “knowing about computers” now means “understanding how to use computers” rather than “knowing how to build computers” or “knowing how to program computers” also helps: it means people who are interested in computers as useful tools are considered techie, and that’s an activity which is more likely to appeal to social types.
I’m less techie than Raj and Dave, but probably more techie than you. I’m also probably more comfortable in social situations than Raj and Dave but less so than you. So I suppose the general trend hasn’t changed, its just that the techie people don’t have to take the social jobs (like IT in teaching) because there are less techie but techie enough people to do it for them.
Hm. That was a longer comment than I meant to give!
You know, I carefully avoided using the word geek, and there you both go ruining all my effort
Raj, I’ve never know you to run out of conversation (I know, we don’t count)
Jo, I would never have said you were less comfortable in social situations than me – funny how people’s ideas of themselves don’t often match up with other people’s view. I think the points you make about technology are valid though – there’s been a definite mind-shift over the period of time in question and we’re at a point where using tech is really very normal in lots and lots of places all over the world. There will always be the people who really understand the technology though, and perhaps the social issues will still be there with them for a while.
I quite like the idea of being ‘techie enough’.
No teacher is an island, unless their name is Madagascar!
Kenneth, have you any idea how much of my precious time I just wasted trying to remember where that came from?? White and McKay, right?