Introduction
Making Classroom Walls Disappear:
Twitter as a low-risk, high-support method of sharing student work and teacher practices
Wendy Fairon and Amanda Massey
May 23, 2016
“A great gardener, a great farmer, depends upon on plants growing under their care. Otherwise they’re out of business. The irony is that every farmer and gardener knows that you can’t make a plant grow. You don’t stick the roots on and paint the petals and attach the leaves. The plant grows itself. What you do is provide the conditions for growth.” –Sir Ken Robinson
Introduction
When Wendy made the move from a large district school to a small, local charter in 2009, she immediately missed the daily opportunities to share the work of her classroom and receive feedback from her grade-level partners. In Wendy’s new role, she was the only English teacher for grades seven and eight; she knew that she would need to find ways to connect with other educators to inform and push her practice. Wendy had a deep desire to celebrate the work in her room as well as connect for feedback and seek out additional methods for impacting student learning. In many ways, she desired connections to her classroom and the learning taking place within it- her students and her own. Wendy had to actively seek out opportunities to connect with others, share the work of her classroom, and move her learning beyond the walls of her school. Wendy met with teachers outside her school, joined the National Writing Project, and created a Twitter account.
In 2004, Amanda was a first-year teacher in a school with only one Kindergarten class. She spent part of her time immersed in the thrill of autonomy and innovation but longed to share what she was doing with others. She felt the most connected to her colleagues when sharing student work or looking at work done by their students. Her first-year teaching colleagues were all working in different elementary grades across the school. They celebrated one another’s work often, connecting mostly around writing. Occasionally, Amanda would Xerox a particularly humorous or striking piece of work and distribute it in her colleagues’ “mailboxes” in the staff workroom. What a pleasure it was to be able to surprise her colleagues with these unexpected “gifts,” and to share the joy she experienced from striking student work. Amanda remembers the act of looking at teacher and student work from another classroom made her feel energized and inspired, especially when thinking about how to apply or incorporate the parts she found engaging into the work she was doing with her Kindergarteners.
We embarked on a 10-month long Improvement Research project with the goal of connecting High Tech Elementary North County teachers with a wider audience for the work they were facilitating in their classrooms. Our original question was, “How is teacher practice impacted by curation of work and active participation on Twitter?”