How to Use Digital Tools to Support Teachers in a PLC. Wiliam M. Ferriter
school students in Philadelphia, or a research report released by a national organization detailing the kinds of schools that students most desire, each individual discovery has the potential to spark conversation, improve practice, and change teaching and learning for the better. The challenge for learning communities is aggregating this information—organizing and then sharing it publicly in a way others can easily find. In chapter 1, you will learn to meet this challenge using popular digital tools.
Chapter 2: Cooperating
While sharing requires little real investment on the part of participants, cooperation depends on willing partners who are ready to align their practices with one another. This kind of cooperation within a PLC depends on the ability to come to consensus around shared decisions. Cooperation also depends on collaborative production: together, we need to create content that we are ready to use in our work with students. Coming to consensus around shared decisions and collaboratively producing content, however, can be time-consuming practices simply because they involve negotiated behavior. You can’t work as an individual when you are cooperating. Chapter 2 shows you how to facilitate cooperation using digital tools that foster teamwork.
Chapter 3: Taking Collective Action
Collective action is the most sophisticated collaborative behavior in a PLC because it depends on a willingness of all members to honor the will of the group. “Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants and collaborative production relies on shared creation,” explains Shirky (2008), “but collective action creates shared responsibility by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group” (Kindle location 702). In a PLC, collective action begins by building cohesion—a shared sense of what we believe as a group. Collective action then moves into more sophisticated, learning-centered practices as teachers work together to make sure that all students on a grade level or in an academic department master essential outcomes regardless of who their primary teachers are. Chapter 3 details this process and highlights tools that support it.
Author’s Note
It is important to note that while the print version of How to Use Digital Tools to Support Teachers in a PLC includes suggested tools for helping learning teams share, cooperate, and take collective action, you can always visit http://bit.ly/UDTquickguide to find a constantly updated list of tools and services to use to support the essential skills this book outlines. My goal for extending the How to Use Digital Tools to Support Teachers in a PLC collection to the web is to ensure that the content in the print version of this text remains relevant even as popular tools and services change over time.
It is also important to note that there is nothing revolutionary about the tools How to Use Digital Tools to Support Teachers in a PLC introduces. In fact, if you constantly find yourself standing at the cutting edge of educational technology, you may well be disappointed by the fact that the tools and suggestions inside this text are functional instead of fantastic. That’s intentional, however: when choosing digital tools to support collaborative practices, your primary goal should be to find services and solutions that are approachable to everyone—not just the most tech-savvy members of your learning communities. As you are reading, keep in mind the teachers on your team who struggle with technology and be on the lookout for processes, practices, and products that they can master easily.
Regardless of how you choose to tackle How to Use Digital Tools to Support Teachers in a PLC, commit yourself to finding at least one core practice that you can improve together with your colleagues. Whether you develop a new approach to organizing web-based resources that can move your learning team forward, create digital conversations that allow members of your school community to build consensus around shared directions, or find new ways to track progress by student and standard with products that can automate the collection and analysis of assessment results, take action.
The students in your classrooms are counting on you.
Chapter 1
Sharing
Coney Island—the legendary American amusement park that opened in 1880 outside of New York City—is known for everything from remarkable roller coasters and majestic Ferris wheels to hot dog eating contests and carnival-style sideshows. For millions of New York City hipsters, however, Coney Island is best known for its Mermaid Parade held on the last Saturday in June. The annual parade is described on Coney Island’s website as “a celebration of ancient mythology and honky-tonk rituals of the seaside” (Coney Island USA, n.d.), where participants don costumes that range from the innocent to the extreme. Stately Aquamen and beautiful Ariels walk alongside scantily clad women shaded by turquoise mermen carrying bedazzled parasols in front of thousands of picture-taking visitors in what is seen as the official start of summer in the beach-side community (Shirky, 2008).
For years, pictures of those participants remained in individual collections largely unavailable for public viewing. Sure, small hand-fuls of high-quality shots taken by professional photographers ended up in magazines and newspapers. Yet because there were no easy ways to share photos in the latter parts of the 20th century, the best Mermaid Parade images taken by locals and tourists alike remained undiscovered. That barrier disappeared in 2004, when Flickr (www.flickr.com)—one of the world’s first photo-sharing services—was founded. Designed to make it easy for loosely connected individuals—strangers at a popular parade, fans at the concert of an up-and-coming pop superstar, visitors at sites of historical or cultural significance—to share personal photos, Flickr changed everything for the Mermaid Parade. Without any external coaching or direction from the planners of the Coney Island event or Flickr’s owners, folks at the 2005 parade started to upload their best pictures to the service, adding tags—common labels designed to make searching in online spaces easy—in order to create an organized collection of thousands of images that were publicly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection (Shirky, 2008). “The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ into ‘share, then gather,’” Shirky writes (2008, Kindle location 513).
That same reversal—share, then gather—is now changing the way teachers organize. Whether they are using microblogging services to sift through the online finds of like-minded strangers or systematically building collections of web links with peers that they work with in person, teachers have discovered that digital tools can make sharing—one of the most approachable collaborative practices—easier for everyone.
Finding Sources of Professional Challenge and Inspiration
One of the best examples of the benefits of sharing first and gathering later in education is the groups of connected educators curating content for one another on Twitter (www.twitter.com), a social space that often serves as an entry point for any teacher interested in exploring the impact that digital tools can have on collaborative practice. Users who spot potentially valuable resources in online spaces—blog entries, research reports, student project samples, lesson plans, provocative videos—can publicly broadcast what they are finding in short, 140-character messages, called tweets, with one click of a browser-based button. While individual messages are often shared without intentionality—users are generally not concerned with who sees the content that they post to Twitter—each message draws attention to useful content, which has the potential to save others time, energy, and effort.
Shirky (2008) argues that reducing the barriers to sharing allows tools like Twitter to make it possible for latent groups to “self-synchronize” (Kindle location 540). Because the perceived value of sharing websites with one another has always been low, large groups of users with shared interests—think teachers—never bothered to invest time and energy into organizing the online content that they were finding for one another. However, Twitter makes sharing websites