It’s time, to raise your voice

Teaching is part of a complex system, full of conflicting ideas and unclear goals. For many teachers, we remain content and quiet, toiling away in our own classrooms with our own students. Ambition being a dirty word, or something for people other than ourselves. Yet, perhaps there are many among us who have things worth sharing: ideas that can assist others, challenge preconceptions, and move our profession forward?

 

And what if it was the right time for you to share beyond the walls of your school? Not just within your own school building necessarily, but elsewhere as well? What if it was your time?

 

For me, this time arrived during 2019, when I first took the leap to speaking at conferences, after attending many. Since then, I’ve spoken and written about education in many spaces, conferences and fora. I recall that making that jump from teaching and tweeting to speaking and sharing was a monumental jump, requiring a big leap of faith that challenged my view of myself as a teacher.

 

Up until this moment I assumed I was an average teacher with little to share with others, this is partly something I think all teachers struggle with. As a serving, caring and humble profession it can be challenging to consider that we might be able to assist or share ideas with people other than our students. Ideally this would be a way to extend the sharing and caring within our profession, the power of new and creative solutions to the many ongoing challenges we face as teachers.

 

It meant spending hundreds of hours at first, refining PowerPoint slides and memorising the things I was to say to the point where I could likely still perform these talks, even now, some three years later.

 

The experience of attending a conference as a speaker is dramatically different to attending as a viewer, always referred to as ‘delegates’, it means joining a community of like-minded teachers also presenting. It something I believe every teacher should have the experience of doing at least once, or at least of presenting to their peers and staff within their schools.

 

It provides you with the strength to realise that what you know and do has great value, whether it has been researched or proven elsewhere, or whether or not it’s new to others than yourself. Always remember, there is a long pipeline of adults looking to become teachers, and at each stage these teachers, or teacher-to-be will need guidance and new ideas. This is where you could have value, think of what types of teachers, or what stage of teaching will most appreciate your ideas, it might be many, or perhaps it is just the newest of the new teachers. Either way, there are thoughts to share and ideas to pursue.

 

Since taking this leap of speaking and being willing to share my ideas, be they useful to others or not, I’ve had some very positive responses. The teaching videos I’ve shared to YouTube have had close to 700,000 views and my knowledge continues to develop as a result of putting my thoughts and ideas into the world. This is but one small illustration of what is possible if you take a leap and consider the things that you have to say may have value.

It may be time, to raise your voice. The world needs to know what you know.

 Running word count: 63,318