Learning & Leading Through Technology

• Continually and persistently push for improved teaching practice in appropriately challenging but nonthreatening ways

Collaboration in Social Media

Because of our early success, I was selected as one of the 10 Success at the Core fellows—teachers, principals, and coaches—asked to lead the charge in illustrating effective use of social media as a tool to deepen collaboration and professional learning.

With the assistance of the social media team at VOX Global, a strategic communications firm with a diverse set of education sector clients, we formed a Facebook community to share ideas and a blog for deeper reflection and collaboration. Each of us contributes to the blog and uses Facebook and Twitter to share links to materials and resources. Success at the Core fellows are contributing Core Connections blog posts to an audience of more than 5,081 readers.

Here are some more analytics that reflect the level of audience engagement:

• Educators have posted hundreds of comments in the Core Connections discussion group.

• We have reached more than 3 million Facebook users, resulting in nearly 46,000 likes, comments, shares, and clicks.

• We have 2,263 Facebook page likes and 518 new Twitter followers. In addition, we’ve received 600 Twitter mentions and 200 retweets.

Obadiah Dunham, a principal of Leota Junior High in the Northshore School District of Woodinville, Washington, is one of our fellows. He uses the leadership development modules to help his team plan strategies for implementing new statewide reforms, and then he shares the experience of that collaboration in tweets and blog posts.

As part of the collective bargaining agreement with teachers this year, Dunham’s school district established “collaborative time” in their weekly schedule. Every Wednesday, students are released 95 minutes early so that staff can collaborate.

At Leota, the school’s leadership team turned to Success at the Core’s resources to help them develop a common understanding of effective collaboration and ways to structure their time together to best support student learning. The result was increased collaboration within the school and across the greater education community at minimal cost to his district.

“Part of my job is to help staff understand how they could reach all students,” Dunham said. “Obviously, a

10-minute video itself is not enough to
change a staff culture, but it provides
a springboard for continued dialogue
about reaching the learning needs of
each student. That continued dialogue
is now playing out not only in our staff
meetings, but even through our per-
sonal social media channels.”
To be honest, using social media for
professional learning, as opposed to us-
ing it for sharing family news, has been
challenging for my colleagues and me.
Knowing that so many people—many
strangers—are reading my comments
and recommendations (or likes) makes
me feel more pressure to be accurate,
helpful, and interesting! But I also feel a
sense of duty to my profession to share
with others, which social media allows,
and I have learned a great deal from
following others in my networks as well
as new “friends” I’m making online.
Our group of 10 fellows has penned
more than 50 blog posts in the past
18 months about how we are working
with leadership teams in our school
districts to improve instruction, build
capacity, and adopt new reforms like
the Common Core State Standards.
Readers have shared these posts across
their social media platforms hundreds
of times. We have attracted a consider-
able following on Facebook and Twit-
ter. Most important, we are personally
seeing improvements in the class-
rooms we touch, as we eagerly await a
formal evaluation of the program’s im-
pact from a third-party research firm.
Like any professional learning
process or approach, online tools and
social media are only as good as the
time and attention you personally
invest in them. What excites me, how-
ever, is that our ability to learn from
one another, connect, and collaborate
—all behaviors teachers tend to love—
is better than ever.

—Ailene M. Baxter is the former principal of Ferrucci Junior High School in the Puyallup School District in Washington. She recently completed her EdD in educational leadership and policy studies through the University of Washington in Seattle. She currently serves as a director of human resources in the Puyallup School District.

“Part of my job is to help staff understand how they could reach all students,” Dunham said. “Obviously, a 10-minute video itself is not enough to change a staff culture, but it provides a springboard for continued dialogue about reaching the learning needs of each student.”