To reach desired outcomes for all students, all teachers must
act as leaders outside of their classrooms. Complementing traditional teacher leadership
roles, technology now provides new opportunities to leverage teacher leadership
and influence the teaching profession. Blogging, content curation, and
participation in online educator communities are three ways teachers can
provide electronic teacher
leadership.
Blogging
Aspiring teacher leaders sometimes are uncertain of how or with
whom to share their ideas. They may lack an official leadership role, such as
department chair, or can be worried about how peers will receive their ideas.
Blogs can provide educators both voice and audience. Teachers who in the past
would have interacted only with colleagues in their building now can reach out
to educators worldwide. For example, Australian teacher Kathleen Morris has
shared what she has learned in recent years about using technology in her
elementary school classroom with a global audience through her blog Primary Tech. English teacher Larry Ferlazzo’s prolific blogging about English Language
Learners and a wide variety of other education topics has given him a chance to
provide leadership far beyond his California high school.
Content Curation
Some teachers may not see themselves as the rock-star blogger
types, but technology provides leadership opportunities of all shapes and
sizes. Teachers can also lead in their profession through content curation. Teacher
curators wade into the ocean of information available on the Internet to collect,
organize, comment, and vet content on a particular topic. Some e-teacher
leaders use Pinterest, a popular service
that allows users to pin web content to virtual bulletin boards, to curate
content for the benefit of colleagues. For example, North Carolina elementary
school teacher Laura Candler’s forty-eight
boards on a variety of education topics have more than 60,000 followers.
Various other tools, such as Scoop.it, and Pearltrees, provide similar opportunities
for teachers to provide leadership by separating the wheat from the chaff for
virtual followers.
Online Communities
For e-teacher leaders seeking more interaction than is typical
of the curator-follower relationship, various online communities create dynamic
and reciprocal leadership opportunities. For example, the English
Companion Ning, created by high
school teacher Jim Burke, includes 260+ interest groups, some with more than
3000 members, and features many active discussion boards where teachers take
informal leadership roles by offering advice, providing mentorship, and sharing
resources. The micro-blogging service Twitter is another example of an online
community in which many teachers are leaders. Twitter’s open nature helps
teachers connect to and share expertise with both local and far-flung educators
with similar interests. Educational hashtags are used to create communities
within the twitterverse and many teachers take prominent roles in these spaces;
it is not uncommon for teachers who are active on Twitter to have several
thousand followers.
Lines between these three types of e-teacher leadership are not
strict, and some teachers integrate a variety of activities into their
e-leadership. For example, Georgia teacher Vicki Davis writes her Cool
Cat Blog as well as being an active Twitter user with more than 60,000
followers.
Furthermore, many teachers who experience e-leadership
empowerment will become more active leaders within their school buildings in
traditional face-to-face ways.
Today’s social media and Web 2.0 tools have great potential to
facilitate e-teacher leadership. This
type of leadership can be for all types of educators: for introverts and
extroverts, for veterans to share their accumulated wisdom, and for novices to
bring new ideas to the table. By
reducing constraints on communication related to time, place, and hierarchy,
and helping connect and give voice, technology enables many classroom teachers
to have a real impact on their colleagues and their profession.
