I just received the following email from one of the table discussion leaders at our NCTE conference session on teacher voice. Let this inspire still more teachers tweeting the public about our work. Now let us all enjoy Thanksgiving!

Hello Steve (and everyone),

I wanted to pass along an anecdote from our table. My focus was on the ways social media can be harnessed to show the truth about day-to-day teacher practice, namely by showing all the positive work teachers do. I suggested that a small yet powerful way to advocate is to tweet or post to facebook about a good thing that happened in the classroom that week and, if possible, tag politicians or the DOE. One of the teachers took me up on it, tweeted about her classroom and tagged the local mayor. While we were still sitting there, the mayor responded to her, followed her back, and retweeted it to all of his followers, further sharing the good work. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced proof-of-concept so quickly!

Even better: after the session, a few of the teachers at my table continued to interact on twitter and determined that they will be tweeting weekly on the hashtag #publicEd, in short making the best aspects of their classroom and practice public (respecting privacy of course: long discussion about that). The #publicEd hashtag is often used by politicians, policy types, and reporters, so we are hopefully more visible. Today I saw a few more tweets tagged this way with positive content from teachers on twitter who weren’t even in the room. All good things!

Thank you so much for letting me be a part of this: I feel so inspired by the teachers I met at my table and by all of you.

–Andrea