Inter.Connect.Ed
reflections on teaching and learning through technology
If you dare…
May
21
History repeats itself…
Filed Under (21st Century Learning, change, leadership, learning, Professional Learning) by benpaddlejones on May 21, 2012 and tagged #tmsydney, teach meet, teachmeet
Teach meets began in a small pub in Glasgow, I leave you to Google its origins in your own time. To me what made teach meets different was:
- It was run by practitioners for practitioners with practitioners needs in mind
- It was not dominated by experts
- It was an open floor
- It encouraged mass and virgin leadership
- Vendors where purposely excluded
- It was local solutions to local problems
- It reinforced human connectivity in the flesh
- It dis-established conferences
- It was the “Occupy your conference” we all wanted
So why is history repeating itself?
I don’t want another edu-conference, putting a “Teach meet” brand on it like a dodgy restaurant puts up “under new management” it’s demeaning to me and my intellectually informed peers.
Or are we so addicted to the traditional conference consumption model that we will subvert higher learning just to get some more?
I do not want this….
One Response to “History repeats itself…”
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May 22nd, 2012 at 9:37 am
So true Ben. Teachmeets are great because is it a sharing among equals and a respect for individual teachers.
It is like a PD session in a school, where there is already a teacher there with tremendous expertise in an area, yet the exec call in the ‘experts’ to give the session.
We had a GATs teacher leave the school a few years back because she felt underutilized and was offended by the school never asking her to share her skills and yet bringing in outside authorities to lecture to the staff.
It is really affirming when your colleagues and the exec call on members of their own staff to share their skills. Yet oddly it rarely happens. It is as if bringing in the expert gets the school brownie points with district office or something.
Teachmeets are run by teachers for their peers and it seems a lot of great sharing and meaningful connections have taken place.
However there is always an element who see these phenomena and attempt to hijack the idea in an attempt to gain personal promotion.
But then you should know Ben, that heirarchies inevitably form in any group, according to a range of variables. Cheers