Findings

Our goals through this work were to allow teachers a low-risk forum for sharing the work of their classroom, connecting with others within the school and organization, and having self-curated venue to explore their interests and passions about their practice. Our initial staff-wide baseline data included questions about feelings of connectedness.

At this point in the process, we had begun our @HTeNorthCounty Twitter account to share the work of the school and retweet the posts by teachers. This account was made visible through the television screens at the entrance to the school.

When analyzing this data, we really hoped for overall growth of connectedness within the organization as well as beyond our organization. We were also very curious about the 28% of teachers who reported feeling somewhat or not very connected within the school.

Our next step was to form a focus group who would utilize Twitter as a way to connect and share their work. We collected data prior to the start of our Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles as well as mid-way through. The data from this focus group showed growth in the feelings of connectedness.

Within the data for our focus group, we were very excited to see the changes in feelings of connectedness within our school and the overall organization. One major contributor we found to this was our use of the @hightechhigh Twitter account, beginning on February 1, 2016. At that time the account had 4200 followers, but was relatively stagnant, tweeting about five to seven times per month. The reciprocal connection was not there yet, as the account was only following 78 accounts at that time. A quick snapshot of the account activity during January 2016 vs March 2016:

*Tweets includes unique tweets and also retweets. Impressions means the number of times tweets were seen by Twitter users. Mentions are times when the specific account is included in a tweet.

Amongst all of the data we collected, the most exciting pieces are the stories and anecdotes of teachers finding the use of Twitter to be meaningful in their practice. A highlight of this was @cegonzalez333. She was new to Twitter and during our third PDSA cycle, was asked to tweet five times. In those tweets, she mentioned the project work in her class and a teacher from Canada replied and shared a video of his students doing similar work. They were able to tweet back and forth, sharing ideas, and then eventually did a Google Hangout to brainstorm even further. Celina said, “Seeing what his students did was inspiring. I had ideas of where I wanted the project to go, but connecting with Marc and seeing the work of his students helped me have a clearer picture in my mind. It was also helpful to watch the video of his students’ work with my teaching partner. We often talk about the big ideas of a project, but having something concrete helped facilitate our conversations.”

Implications

When we set out to complete this work, we were eager to get all teachers at our school site using Twitter to connect within our school, organization, and beyond. Our plan was to support this through the school account and later the High Tech High account. At the conclusion of this research, sixteen of nineteen classroom teachers were sharing the work of their classrooms via Twitter. As school leaders, we used the school Twitter account to like and retweet the work of our classroom teachers as well as posting tweets from that account. Our intention was to model effective use of Twitter as well as acknowledging the great work of teachers by sharing it with a wider audience.

We were struck throughout this research by the feelings of connectedness our focus group was having within our school and organization. Through the Iimprovement Sscience model and the small change ideas we presented to our group, we were able to increase the impact and reach of their tweets.

As we look at the deeper implications for our work, we are reaffirmed that for any real change to stick, it must feel meaningful for the participants. At no point in the year did we gather all the teachers together and give them a directive to start using Twitter or even talk about it as a whole group. Those teachers who found it meaningful began to use it because they saw the value. As school leaders, the changes we implement should be modeled and supported so teachers can feel successful and find their own meaning within the work they are being asked to do.

Recommendations for School Leaders: Supporting Purpose, Quality and Value

In order to for this work to gain and maintain momentum, the school leader must create conditions to nurture sustained purpose, quality and value amongst the participants. The most important piece of our initial work toward making teacher practice more public was opening up a school Twitter account. We were consistent and deliberate with the account; we retweeted and favorited tweets from our staff each day. We also set aside time each day to tweet from classrooms, the open spaces of the school, or even interesting articles. The school account was a place for us to model and support the quality and type of work were hoping teachers would want to engage in.

In order to maintain momentum, we began purposely acknowledging the work we were seeing online and the connections we were drawing from it. We intentionally engaged teachers in conversation about their tweets, our takeaways and any other impact or conclusions we had drawn from its visibility.

A key component to creating a robust and sustained Twitter network was to create a culture of high-quality work amongst the teachers. Creating something of quality requires models, time and multiple attempts at doing the work. One support we put in place was providing high-quality models of everything we wanted teachers to do. We showed teachers models of profiles, photos, tweets and hashtags. In addition, we consistently identified tweets, photos and/or connections that we thought were of value by retweeting them to the High Tech High account, the HTe North County account, or our own accounts.  It is important to note that we tried to strike a balance between modeling and highlighting high-quality work, while being thoughtful about relationships and motivation. In essence, we wanted to keep our focus group motivated by retweeting a lot. We were also conscious of our leadership positions within the school and the negative emotional or motivational impact it might have on an individual teacher who was not being retweeted or acknowledged equally by us. As our group became consistently prolific with their tweets, it allowed us to be more discerning in what we were retweeting with a larger audience.

We also created consistent, high-impact time for teachers to try out new features on Twitter. Meeting every other Monday for 15-20 minutes was a low-risk amount of time to devote to the work. In that time, we provided scaffolded opportunities for teachers to engage with Twitter, including creating a profile, trying an EdChat, or thinking about hashtags to use. Every other week was used as an opportunity to send a quick email update or survey.

Another way in which maintained momentum was by acknowledging and celebrating that our teachers were using Twitter for a variety of purposes. For some teachers, it was an opportunity to connect with like-minded educators far away. For others, it was a vehicle to share resources, ideas and experts for specific project work. Overall, we found it was important that all teachers felt that the work mattered, that there was a social connection, and that the gratification came in real-time (Wenger, 1998).

Twitter Tips

We began to notice a certain flow to our interactions on Twitter. When we opened up the account, we would always check our notifications first. This is where we could see who liked, retweeted, and interacted with our account. If someone mentioned us by name, we would respond here, either by liking and retweeting or with a written response. From here, we would click on our user lists. This is a functional available through Twitter, where one can put users of a certain type into a list or category. In this case, we made a list for users within the HIgh Tech High organization and one for teachers at High Tech Elementary North County. The list was a quick way for us to see what others within our organization were tweeting so we could be sure to acknowledge it in some way.

A director at another elementary school within our organization said that she used calendar reminders to help her get in the habit of tweeting. She set three reminders throughout the day to help her remember to tweet. As she got in the habit of looking for material to tweet, she was able to remove the calendar reminders. The key was the consistency of the tweets to help build a following and a habit of sharing work.

An additional tool we used to help guide our tweets is the Twitter Analytics resource within the profile settings.  We could access the number of people who clicked on the links we provided as well as how many people saw the tweet. This helped guide what and how we tweeted. We would often spend some time reflecting on our most impactful tweets. Tweets with photos had more clicks than those without. We also learned to use hashtags that were followed by large groups of educators, such as #PBLchat and #deeperlearning. The use of hashtags increased the interaction rate with our tweets.

Limitations

The nature of technology-based research creates a learning curve that might not be present in other venues. While we planned for some technology support in our initial meetings, there was still a variance in comfort levels for using Twitter.

In addition, the measurement of feelings of connectedness are challenging to isolate to the use of Twitter. While we saw an increase in feelings of connectedness, particularly within the organization, this could have also been due to the time of year we began our inquiry or other teacher-initiated contact that did not happen on Twitter.

Future Inquiry

As we review this data and think about the next steps for our inquiry, we are curious about the impact of these larger social networks for teacher retention. How could teacher belongingness to a self-selected, curated group of educators, increase retention in the field? Are the methods of validation of work through retweets, favorites, and mentions impactful for teacher job satisfaction? What are the implications for teacher retention?

In this venue of Twitter, we are at the mercy of that platform and will have to adapt if it changes. Recently there was speculation that Twitter would expand beyond the 140 character parameters it has set on tweets. What will happen if this platform changes? Is part of the success with Twitter that it is quick-moving, short snippets? Will educators eventually migrate to something different? Twitter happens to be the space where educators are fulfilling their needs to connect with a larger community, and where will they turn to next if that platform changes? Some educators are finding the walkie-talkie app Voxer to be a place where they can create deeper bonds and share more significant dilemmas, pedagogical approaches, and wonderings. Will educators continue to migrate toward platforms where a smaller group can create deeper bonds?

During our PDSA cycles, we had access to a larger network through Twitter with the already-established @hightechhigh account. How could a school, district, or network of school harness a larger network to bring a larger audience to their work? A Twitter account needs an identity or a “so what” of why it exists to give the audience a reason to engage with that account. Where are the opportunities for a larger network to support teachers as they are just beginning to reach out and share their work via Twitter? Ultimately, how can educational groups with varying resources personalize support so that purpose, quality and value for sharing work can be found in any condition?

 

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