The Philosophy of Sharing

In any practice, efficiency is defined not by how well individuals are able to generate their own successful ideas, but by how well everyone involved in the practice is able to utilize each other's successful outcomes. A lack of collaboration makes for a very slow-changing, unevenly developed field, and this is exactly the case for the practice of education. So the question becomes why, then, do teachers not collaborate more?  Here are some things we should be thinking about when it comes to sharing what we create for teaching.

Helping others learn as we learn
If you have a problem, share it. If you solve a problem, share it. We know that education does not adapt quickly, and our students aren’t going to wait. In order to work effective change into our practice, we need a quicker way to recognize that more people outside of our district are experiencing the same problems, and an organized way of understanding what others have done to try and solve them. The greater the quantity and diversity of people that are invested in solving a problem, the more thorough and thoughtful the solution is as a result.

The beauty of open source 
In education, there is no common ground for the creation and sharing of academic content. We have not yet completely subjected the way we develop lessons to a “marketplace of ideas” type environment, in which we set our concepts, problems, and solutions out into a common space in order to learn from their interaction. In making our work and the improvement process of that work more open and visible to everyone involved in our practice, we end up developing a culture of contribution wherein the utility of each person’s participation is maximized.

Territoriality 
Striking the right balance between localized collaboration and time spent learning about what the rest of the world is learning about is an important responsibility that we have. There are requirements that we must fulfill for our respective districts and for that reason, local Professional Learning Communities and Learning Management Systems are useful. However, this can have an isolating effect in that when educational progress made in one district exceeds progress made in others, the landscape for education develops unevenly across the nation and the world.

Sharing and professional growth
Everything that we do as educators is done in the interest of the student. Who you are as a professional is measured by what you have been able to contribute to a learning environment, and by being a teacher who shares in an open-sourced format shows that you are committed to your practice. The more you share and contribute, the wider your impact as an educator will be, and the more distinct evidence you will have to help grow yourself professionally.