Collegiality Redefined, Scrutiny Maintained

Collegiality is something I truly value about the teaching profession. As a student teacher, I recall being amazed by the range and reach of collegiality. I would arrive at a school a novice and stranger, marvelling how many seasoned veterans would openly share their resources and insights. Occasionally I would also be confronted with a hoarder, someone determined to keep a good thing all to themselves. I quickly picked which side of the fence I would stand on and vowed to be a resource sharer for the entirety of my educational career. Being the father to two young boys, sharing is a topic I get reminded about a lot.

But until recently, my sharing practice has been relatively localized. Resources would be shared with teachers within my department, or acquaintances from within the division. Much to my delight our school division recently began the use of a portal site which allows teachers to post and exchange resources they have developed. But these days, I really have to ask myself if I want to limit my idea fishing to only my division? Why not cast an even larger net?

Well, the immediate response is that the Internet is swamped with things calling themselves "resources", many of which are bunk or simply not applicable to my instructional goals. As an example the query, "Teaching English" results in Google returning about 40,600,000 results (0.15 seconds), so that's a bit of an overload.

Thankfully Todd Finley's recent post on Edutopia entitled, Radical Curriculum Sharing at the Open High School of Utah, gathers a number of valuable links that promote what Finley calls, "drag-and-drop curriculum planning". And while I am excited about the lesson plan swap opportunities being highlighted, I feel like there's still no fast-track to classroom use. As much as I trust my department colleagues across the hall from me, I've never been able to take another teacher's lesson plan and use it verbatim. This I suppose is the part of sharing resources that will always be the same with me, I critically scrutinize everything (my own work included).

While completely re-inventing the wheel is sheerly redundant and overly time-consuming, tweaking and refining an existing wheel makes for a smoother ride. Looking out at the horizon of increasingly good educational resources, it seems to me there's a lot of wheels out there. Maybe they've always been out there rolling around, and the simple practice of sharing online seems to make it easier to kick tires and see which will work.

Photo by Mykl Roventine http://www.flickr.com/photos/myklroventine/3265009300