Thread by @_beebs, Right, I have spent a week thinking about this, so here goes…Why [...]

Right, I have spent a week thinking about this, so here goes…

Why Teachers Shouldn’t Post Student Work On Twitter.

Or, an #edutwitter thread that will make me regret a foray into The Discourse.

#teaching #teachers #ukedchat #schools

Claim: Posting pictures of exceptional student work/results is unhelpful and in the long term self-destructive.

(N.B. Yes I have thought about this, yes I know social media can be used well, but in this way it isn’t and it appears to be growing trend)

Right, so you see a teacher getting exceptional work out of a kid which they’ve posted on Twitter. You feel inadequate. Your confidence is knocked. You hit like anyway. Not sure why. Should be supportive. We do a tough job.

The work is ultimately deeply unrepresentative and just highly curated work of one or two exceptional students. Or, on closer inspection on one or two occasions, it’s just been a lot of copying dressed up in a flashy resource without real depth of thought.

Often it’s totally without prior learning context, resources, or demonstration of teaching technique. It’s just outcomes and results. There’s no sharing or collaboration. It’s hollow and performative.

Everyone who views it feels the sting of inadequacy, whoever posts it gets short-term validation and then maybe a follow up shot of impostor syndrome. Yet, the people posting aren’t cold or doing it to put anyone down. So why do we do it?

Because we are conditioned and encouraged to.

Because ultimately, the neoliberalisation of education, with all its corporate trappings of accountability (targets, appraisals, the spectre of “requires improvement”) forces teachers - as with many other professions - to feel like it’s no longer enough to do your job.

You have to continually justify your position to yourself and others. A professional anxiety.

(As a sidenote/example, this is why people attend so much CPD, which often makes you feel productive and engaged but ultimately rarely has any long-term impact on your day-to-day practise. I can count on one hand the amount of genuinely transformative CPD sessions I have had).

Posting pictures plays into this mentality entirely. You become your own PR manager, and social media is a way to do that, trying to make yourself LOOK excellent. A go-getting and innovative teacher who gets results, and ultimately turns you an unreal version of what you are.

This subconsciously plays teachers off against each other, and then normalises the idea that we should be ranking and selling ourselves. By posting pictures of work, we push people down and give ourselves a temporary boost up. But it’s not enough, there’s no actual reward.

So we have to do more. And so it goes on…

At that point, we know what we are doing is performative and the likes mean nothing, but we keep doing it anyway, because we feel like if we stop then we become less than what we are. A fraud. Failure no longer becomes an option when everyone else is winning.

The structures of modern neoliberalism which embody competition, “productivity”, precarity, and criminalisation of free and unstructured creative time, has bled into education. This unconsciously shapes our behaviour.

We are forced to perform pointlessly (Twitter as a my main example), for no material reward other than to stave off an artificially created professional anxiety, at the expense of the wellbeing of everyone who witnesses it.

Competing with each other using the pretence of celebrating student work, framed carefully for the purpose, just atomises us and naturalises in us a smiling but cut-throat corporate culture within a profession where those rules shouldn’t actually apply.

Don’t play the game, because no one wins.

Work hard and share, but collaborate and support.

/End

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