Sharing best practices – useful tool to educators.

Sharing experiences may be daunting but there is a whole developmental process in it.

Maybe I am talking about the same idea, yet again, but I attended a conference this past week and much was discussed about the need of continuous development for people working in education. This job of ours require us to be always in our feet studying, catering for our students.

Julie Tice, teacher trainer, BC, Lisbon, said that “reflective teaching means looking at what you do in the classroom, thinking about why you do it, and thinking about if it works – a process of self-observation and self-evaluation”, but I would add that this reflection can be shared with peers.

It is said that human beings learn from their mistakes, but wise is the one that learns from the mistakes of the others. Sometimes, no mistake is needed, but simply sharing Best Practices, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘everybody can be great because everybody can serve’.

Best Practices can be speed up when teachers focus on observations, keep records, develop students’ feedback, record lessons, you name it. That is a way more experienced teachers and not so experienced ones implement a repertoire of best practices leading to a big difference in their teaching and their school.

These days, I read a blog on 50 Best Practices for Language Teachers [https://community.eflclassroom.com/profiles/blogs/50-best-practices-for-language-teachers] which provide many ideas worth reading and trying out.

The www.theguardian.com, published an experiment done in a school in February which ‘spiced up’ best practices exchange – different departments taught each other a lesson. The idea came up from discussions with teachers who felt the need to freshen up their sharing sessions. Overall the experiment was really successful model to showcase best practice that can easily be transported across schools and developed to fit the needs of different institutions.

From the teaching itself to assessment, no matter what you do that provide successful results, is a valuable resource for enhancing learning and should be shared. News must be spread so teachers develop together providing better results to their learners.

We are not alone in our profession and if we walk together, we all benefit from it.