Hintonblogger

I attended a session on creating Online Communities for Novice Teachers and decreasing Teacher Dropouts. One key point that was shared was that if teachers did something 3 times, they would be much more likely to do it and do it well the fourth time.

Another element they discussed was Tapped In. I'm not very familiar with it, but from what I understand is that it is a flexible synchronous and asynchronous community that teachers can participate in. I just wonder what advantage it provides over tools that have a discussion forum/chat - is it because it is a hosted solution that varied groups can participate in with very little advance planning?

Unfortunately, for me, much of what they talked about was using acronyms and, since I had arrived late from some other presentations I had been attending, I didn't get the acrononyms (it kind of sounded like another language). However, there were some interesting elements that came out of this.

1. Just-in-time answers to questions - a lady from Microsoft (I'm not sure how she was associated with this whole teacher group) shared her experience about joining Microsoft 1.5 years ago. She talked about some of the challenges of integrating into a 63,000 person company. The key point she mentioned was an HR JIT answer line that guaranteed a 24-hour answer to questions that had been submitted. I thought that that was a great idea for new teachers - use the online community/discussion forum as a 24-hour answer line and guarantee that if they have questions they can post their question (or message it privately) and receive an answer, suggestion, or offer for help.

2. Establish a relationship with student teaching groups/pre-service teachers at local universities (i.e. ASU, Rio Salado, Univ. of Phoenix) and look at involving them to join in the communication with the first-year teachers.

3. Make it an advantage and not a drain on them.

How do you accomplish #3? My thought is to provide the JIT answer line and also to post a monthly sharing prompt (classroom management problems/suggestions, lesson sharing, rewards) and request/require teachers to respond to that and to respond to one other person. (i.e. post a response by the end of the first week and a reply by the end of the 2nd week).

I'm working with our New Teacher Program coordinator Vicki Jones on designing this and this could help us be more successful.