Is sharing part of your job?

In his video Sharing: The Moral Imperative, Dean Shareski exhorts teachers to participate in a sharing culture.

You need to be sharing online and sharing regularly… Because you owe it to others, to teach students beyond your classroom and your district. It’s an ethical responsibility.

As a future educator, I think it is important to know that sharing is essential in our job. We are teachers because we love teaching. We spend lots of time developing lesson plans, preparing materials and coming up with new ideas on how to motivate our students and encourage their learning every single day. 

I agree with Dean Shareski when he says that not only students from our classroom can take advantage of the hard work we do, but also students and teachers around the world. We can teach but also learn; learn from sharing ideas, participating in discussions, sharing opinions and knowledge, and getting constructive feedback.

We can share in our school and school district, but we can also share online and make this information available for anyone anywhere. We can help other teachers improve their strategies, but also learn from them about what we can do better ourselves. We can discuss, comment, ask, even inspire others! People from different backgrounds and cultures can also help us become better teachers when they are part of our Personal Learning Network.

We can also encourage our students to share. By doing this, they will feel that their work is valuable and that their opinions are important. I will teach Spanish, so in my classroom I would like students to be able to connect with people from different parts of the world and not only practice the language but also share what they learn at school. I think this will be beneficial for everyone that takes part of it.

In the article 3 Reasons Why You Should Share and 3 ThingsYou can Do to Start Sharing,  Silvia Tolisano lists some steps that we can take to start sharing. I think it is very important, as she mentions, that educators realize that in today’s world there is a need for us to share. It is also important to know that there are many tools available, such as our blogs or Twitter (in my opinion, the most appropriate for professional use), just to mention some examples, and that we can start sharing little by little until we feel more confident and it becomes part of our lives.