Back in October the Algebra team was invited to present at a Taste of TMC (Twitter Math Chat) mini conference hosted at Seven Hills School. I was excited to have a “dress rehearsal” for our presentation that we would be doing at the California Mathematics Council in December. What I didn’t realize was that in addition to practicing our presentation, I also learned about a whole world of professional development amongst math teachers on Twitter. The two teachers who put on this conference were active participants in Twitter education chats and many participants of the conference knew each other virtually and were meeting in person for the first time.
I learned about popular hashtags math teachers use on Twitter when they are sharing lesson plans, questions they have for other math educators, or problems they are trying to solve in class. I started devoting 10 minutes a day to professional development on Twitter. I would follow certain hashtags and engage in discussions with other teachers. I would get so many ideas for how I could improve my teaching and lessons I could try. I never would have thought Twitter could provide so much (free!) professional development.
A lot of our Algebra program is based on research done by Jo Boaler so I was excited to follow her. When I would post about something we have done in Algebra that was inspired by her work or one of her suggested lessons I always tagged her, never expecting her to read all of the posts she’s tagged in every day. I also followed YouCubed.org which is the nonprofit she co-created with Cathy Williams at Stanford University to “inspire, educate, and empower teachers of mathematics” while also sharing out the latest research on how students learn mathematics.
After tagging both Jo and YouCubed quite a few times on Twitter I finally got their attention! Jo emailed me (!!!!) and asked me to fill out a survey providing more information on what we are doing at Carondelet. I immediately filled it out but then didn’t hear anything in response. I soon forgot about the survey. In January I got another email from Jo and Cathy asking if Cathy could come observe our program. Cathy’s visit provided us with some much needed validation that we are on the right track with our Algebra program and despite the resistance we should keep moving forward.
Cathy went back and shared with Jo what she observed and we were invited to be members of a panel discussion at their Mathematics Leadership Summit at Stanford University this past month. Cathy shared out with the participants from all over the United States, Canada, Australia, and Scotland about our program and then invited myself and Kristina Levesque up to the stage to answer questions about our program.
What amazes me is that all of these connections are from using social media for a few minutes a day to connect with others. It has made me realize that there are so many resources available to us and it doesn’t have to be through a conference (although those are great too!).