To get straight to the point: I am not an avid or successful Twitter user. The mere thought of saying something that matters in 140 characters makes me want to hide under my desk.
But recently I have become increasingly aware of the potential for Twitter to support my work. I often find myself deep in discussions of how to make a policy shift work, when to introduce a certain idea to a group of educators, who to engage as stakeholders in a project, or what aspect of an initiative to tackle first. These are all important – in fact, they are the nuts and bolts of my job. And they are complicated, often layered in details, and sometimes take weeks to unpack.
Twitter offers me something else and something equally important. It forces me to hone what I want to say to something simple and succinct, and it makes me ask myself what is the most important aspect of my work. Usually when I tweet I find that I don’t want to share the how, when, or what; I want to share the who and why — and that almost invariably is teachers and students. It often forces me to strip away the context and step back from the details, giving me a moment to remember why I do this work and why I love this work.
Here’s an example from the last Iowa Department of Education Competency-based Education Collaborative meeting that I have been supporting:
This morning’s best answers to why everyone here is committed to CBE all included one word — students #iacomped
I wouldn’t argue that this is a great tweet, but in that moment it helped me clearly understand and voice why we gather 150 educators from across Iowa monthly to work towards CBE. It is the potential impact on student growth.
I will never be someone who takes tweeting lightly. I am pretty sure that I will never find myself intuitively sharing what I am doing at any given moment. It will always take time for me to draft a tweet. But I also believe that Twitter will help me keep my focus on why I do this work and who this work is really about.