It’s All About Relationships

I spent two days last week at a conference, one day of which I blogged about here. While the conference itself was a great opportunity to update skills and learn new things, once again the best part of it was meeting fellow tweeters, catching up with old friends and building relationships with fellow educators. This opportunity does not come very often and for some teachers possibly never. So a big thank you must go to the ‘See Share Shape’ organisers who provided us with this opportunity for free.

The best part about these two days was however that I was not alone. I was lucky enough to go to this conference with five other staff members from my school. That represented nearly half our junior school staff. At least two others were following along the day’s tweet stream #seeshareshape. Others would have been there I know but for holidays, wedding planning and sickness. I have never been to an event with so many other teachers from my school before and it certainly made for powerful learning and powerful connections. I am sure we would all agree that we will return to school next week better for having spent time tweeting, sharing, eating and talking together. Particularly because it was at an event that was not at our school. The opportunity to also meet with other teachers we only know through twitter was great too. Interestingly as we were networking, learning and sharing together, so too were a group of Melbourne based educators as they held the first ever TeachMeet Melbourne. If you could not make that meeting they have created a fabulous wiki based bank of resources already. Great work Melbourne!

To my mind as we were all joining together, whether in Melbourne, at the conference, or at home, we were all busy building relationships. Busy building relationships that will help to connect and bind us as teams. Whether they are school based teams, district based teams or twitter based teams. A team that works together, learns and shares together has to be a powerful force for change. And that again is at the core. For the sake of the future and all the students in our schools, teachers have to grow, teachers have to learn, teachers have to change, to develop and become 21st century educators.

Teachers who do this while in teams will not only be powerful forces for change. Together they will have much more fun doing it, than if they tried to run solo.