Speak up more

I was in a session at the ISTE Conference 2015 where George Couros was speaking about having an innovator's mindset. If you have never seen or heard George speak, you need to ASAP! He is the Tony Robbins of education. He is lively, entertaining, funny, and extremely on point as to what we need to change in education. During his presentation, he posted this on the screen:

This picture looked a lot better on my phone than on this blog. It says: What if every teacher tweeted one thing a day that they did in their classroom to a school hashtag, and they took five minutes out of their day to read each other's tweets?

What impact would that have on learning and school culture?

He goes on to say that we would never see a worksheet because no teacher would post 'hey, look at this amazing worksheet my students worked on at their desk!'

But would that eliminate worksheets from the school? You would see amazing things happening around your school every day. You could look at that hashtag and say 'hey, that looks awesome! I could totally use that in my classroom.' But, more importantly, your will look at those worksheets and think 'I could totally do better than this.'

Now think about how the school will change over the course of the year with this shift in mindset. We would be pushing our colleagues and our students to raise the bar because we will have a 'I can do better' mentality on everything we do.

We need to speak up more as educators. We need to blog, we need to tweet, we need to take pictures of our classrooms and the great things that are happening in them. We need to inundate the digital world with all the positives that are happening every day.