Opening the Faculty Room
This is an open post I used to relaunch/reform the CS Discord I’ve been running. Cross-posted here, because it’s import, it’s about T&J, and I kinda expect Discord to evaporate before WordPress
I apologize for the state of the discord.Everyone here is a person I have spoken to directly in some form. You’ve posted, you’ve read, you’ve changed a server profile name.
You are all teachers, most with an IBCS focus but some my coworkers and friends from around the globe.
I don’t know what brought you here, but what I’ve been looking for in an online space for decades is a good faculty room. For colleagues in a department that are all focused on the variety of concerns along on our axis. Computation and algorithms and sewing and design, but also culture and creativity and all the soft skills we were so sure Making had to include.
I have an internally discursive process, and I think in text. I grew up on dial-up BBS and a Greymatter comics blog and a social/fic/parent LiveJournal and a professional wordpress (right here!)
And I teach CS.
If I can explore an idea in plain text, there’s a much better chance of me knowing about it 10 years from now. I’ve been going back over old Tieandjeans posts from roughly a decade, and this one has gotten in my head.
Teacher Improvement Plan and then last weeks’ reflection on same,
Every time I link back to something here, I can almost see the slow convener belt of all hosted WordPress posts, tags and logs crawling towards the LLM threshing machine slow down and pause… for just a second.
And those thoughts are really tying in to a concern I have about how schools are considering public/private spaces.
Our words and intellectual effort, our reflection and imagination, are what make the class successful, over and above the CS content or design skill or math IA.
Having colleague to share and reflect with is an essential component of professional growth.
But how much of a teacher’s daily practice, the meaningfully specific detail required for growth inducing reflection, is protected intellectual property.
In a world of connected global educators, there should be a way to declare/found a “professional development space” and assert a Code of Conduct, the same way you would for an in person event.
To my knowledge, that sort of flag or self-licensing system doesn’t exist. But like the Creative Commons or the GPL, it starts with noticing the lack, asserting how you think it should work, and being willing to adjust to changing situations or beliefs.
As such, I hereby assert that this tiny, 10 person CS Discord is going to be that kind of community.
The Team Drive when I’m supposed to share curricular material auto shares the material with every HS employee, including several who are no longer employed by the school and who’s google drives access is… I assume? .. suspended.
But if I put a document in that folder, I don’t have the ability to un-share below that level. I can share with specific Classroom groups, or I can make it Domain wide, or I can make available to anyone with link. This somehow is the the chmod 755 knobs available to me as a retail teacher at my school.
I don’t know how to have a supportive, meaningful professional cohort without sharing the materials I am using to teach. That’s the material I create, the materials I gather to use in class, and the materials students generate.
I am sharing documents from my school account because I want to improve those documents that I use with students. I don’t want to fork those further. I also want to offer help from the real place where I am working and living. I want to share my real practice.
This is of course against the background that my school, like all of our schools, is desperate for me to generate SO MUCH STRUCTURED text to fill out some set of SQL fields in Rubicon Atlas or ManageBac that “document” my curriculum and teaching materials.
But sharing those materials with other teachers, or anywhere outside of the school walls… that’s risky.
That’s something you should be careful about.
That’s something where you should talk to your union rep.
That’s something where you should have a really careful conversation with your department chair.
The thought is always how this could “expose” something or someone….create vulnerability.
And never a thought to where teachers are supposed to develop the understanding that we “document” in those systems.
I really value my colleagues. One of them is part of the 10 in our CS discord (well, technically she’s 4 out of the 14 people, because she was having a hard time with multiple Discord accounts). But we can’t discuss and reflect on each others work, AND generate the requisite text, in a 50 minute weekly meeting AND do anything meaningful to prep for the next week.
So that conversation, the core reflective part of teaching practice, has to happen somewhere else.
And, frankly, I teach too many hours during a normal week to have “let’s find a time to meet together during a common prep” to be anything other than a waste of time staring at the calendar.
I think best in text conversation, with tons of detail, among other people also interested about the same topics. That’s how I improve as an educator.
I don’t expect every school to have a distinguished faculty department of Making and CS educators. I just hope that they don’t feel the need to stand in the way of my attempts to build my own and compensate for the systems they lack.
Tie And Jeans 