It was the summer after my second year of teaching middle school English. I was a young 20-something with a little experience under my belt, keenly aware that teaching adolescents is the hardest job in the world and humble enough to seek any help where I could find it. As a result, I found myself getting up at an ungodly hour at the start of my summer break to drive 75 minutes to a college campus to join the National Writing Project cohort of teachers I was lucky enough to be invited to join. There, I engaged in the most generative professional development of my life: writing alongside other educators in a therapeutic waterfall of recollections of my most difficult students, interactions with parents, teaching quandaries. In those hours, we vulnerably shared what worked and what didn’t work. We mined our teaching lives while sharpening our writing lives. In so doing, we developed a community centered around storytelling.
Thirteen years later, I was hired as a teaching/learning administrator at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, an infant-12th grade independent school located in the Jackson, Mississippi metro area. I immediately noticed that the faculty at our school were doing stellar work in their individual classrooms and had revelatory insights when we had one-on-one coaching conversations, but their stories rarely traveled beyond that. I then embarked on a mission to cultivate a collegial, professional culture modeled on that word-steeped summer that changed my teaching at the start of my career. At our school, teacher-composed blogs and teacher-hosted podcast conversations have become crucial vehicles for sharing teachers’ lived realities, paving the way for stories that rejuvenate teachers’ minds and hearts.
Telling the Story of a School Through Blogs
Blogs are exceptional vehicles for storying because they feature an informal, first person perspective and eliminate many traditional barriers to publication. In addition, their multimodal nature opens up the ways in which a story can be told, including through images, video, quotes, and text bubbles. Through hyperlinks, they also make visible the intertextuality and overlapping nature of teachers’ stories, which can be easily linked to one another.
The faculty at our school were doing stellar work in their individual classrooms, but their stories rarely traveled beyond that.
When I first launched our faculty-centered school blog, I established the blog as a place to “feature faculty members that are taking risks, trying new things and making a difference” in order to “emphasize the myriad flavors of innovation and inspiration taking place in classrooms ranging from effervescent three-year-olds to seniors on the cusp of world-changing themselves.” I ended that first blog with a not-so-subtle plea for faculty contributors: “Thank you in advance for sharing your stories with us. We will become better teachers, better humans because of it.”
At that time, of course, I had no idea what stories would come. We kept the parameters exceedingly wide open. “Want to send a picture of your mood meter with a caption? Great! That’s a blog!” “Want to write a five page essay on the problematic metaphor of teaching as a vending machine? Perfect! You’re in!” Along with my counterpart, who worked primarily with PK3-4th grade faculty and then later with a group of rotating faculty representatives across divisions, we eagerly solicited any stories that came our way, serving as editors and transcribers and thought partners as needed. From the start, we envisioned this blog as a space primarily for our faculty and administrators—in this way, we ensured faculty could feel more comfortable sharing their lived realities, even the messy ones about challenges in the classroom.
I have found that a wide variety of blog formats can be successful in telling teachers’ stories:
- Interviews: a transcribed Q&A between faculty members to share particular teaching techniques they have tried (e.g., “Two Flavors of Flipped”).
- Teaching tips: practical advice from the author or from colleagues featured by the author (e.g., “Can We Talk About Building Positive Relationships?”).
- Deep-thinking posts: to raise epistemological pedagogy questions, rather than to offer quick, practical tools (e.g., “Let’s Talk About Grades. Let’s Talk About Ungrading”).
- Survey blogs: featuring comments and ideas from a wide swath of faculty who chose to fill out a particular survey (e.g., “School Dreams”).
- The very large bin I call “everything else”: any other stories or reflections that fall from the proverbial pen (e.g., “I Accidentally Took My Kids to See the Book of Mormon”).
Most blogs traverse outside of these categories to incorporate multiple elements. For example, the recently published “Misadventures of a Writing Teacher” by 7th grade ELA faculty member Susan Pace incorporates teaching tips (“let me explain how I set up this cool FanFiction project for my 7th graders”), confessional elements (“let me be real about much I struggled to give them timely feedback”), and playful observations (via images of students’ scribbling on the markerboards, illustrating “the secret lives of students.”). We’ve found the most impactful blogs are often the most candid, and our truest stories showcase the complexities that make up our school days.
Bringing the Story of a School to Life Through Podcasts
For teachers who prefer speaking words to writing them, our school created a faculty-hosted podcast. These episodes are driven by questions, a stance that naturally invites inquiry. We have found that just a few open questions (e.g., “How has this issue played out in your classroom?”, “Can you tell me a story about _____?” and “What do you wish administrators knew about this?”) can lead into a rich 45-minute conversation. The inherently multi-voiced format of a podcast fosters a more dynamic, dialectic conversation than a single-author blog post ever could.
Some of our faculty prefer this format because it’s less time-consuming and more informal than writing something; they can choose to show up for a podcast recording without preparation and simply speak their mind in the moment. For those who prefer more prep time, faculty hosts and I collaborate to send out questions ahead of time.
The real value of these podcasts centers around the fact that we are creating space for a variety of faculty from different corners of the school to come together.
Topics can vary widely—recent episodes include “Parent Teacher Conference,” “Bridging the Faculty/Admin Divide,” “Unpacking Accountability,” and “Motion Pictures Meets Reality.”
Whether we are discussing the latest Abbott Elementary episode or vehemently debating the limitations and affordances of standards-based grading, we find ourselves at the most ancient human site of meaning-making: sharing our stories through talk. And while it feels great to hear members of our community share that they listened to the latest episode on the way to work, the real value of these podcasts centers around the fact that we are creating space for a variety of faculty from different corners of the school to come together to explore a meaty issue of relevance in our profession.
Making Time for Storytelling
Okay, I see you rolling your eyes: “Sure, blogs and podcasts sound great, but who has the time to run these? And what faculty member, in today’s era of carefully protected time commitments, might be willing to contribute?” After running these storytelling platforms for five years, I’ve learned a few tricks at my school that I hope may help other time-pressed administrators and teachers:
- Form a blog/podcast team that represents teachers at your school: Each year, we solicit applications for a group composed of one faculty representative from each division. This group meets monthly to plan faculty growth initiatives, including blogs and podcasts.
- Highlight a range of voices: Not all faculty members will be particularly jazzed to write, while others may be terrified to speak on a recorded podcast. For this reason, we encourage faculty to share their stories in the ways that suit them best or to reach out to colleagues for collaboration as needed. Being committed to highlighting a range of faculty voices means being creative about the ways we might invite participation.
- Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good: By far, the biggest barrier in soliciting faculty participation is not lack of expertise or high-quality things to share, but convincing faculty that what they have to offer is of value. They don’t need to perfect a draft before sharing it with colleagues.
- Pick a theme and clear timeline: Humans often feel more free to play within constraints. The most effective way we've found to inspire creativity is by co-constructing realistic deadlines—typically every two months—and collaborating to shape blog post themes. We do this by asking faculty, “What’s in the air?” Past themes have included “building positive relationships,” for example.
- Ask for the help you need: I tend to struggle with not doing all the things, but I have learned along the way that initiatives like these aren’t sustainable unless I ask for help. You know your own strengths and weaknesses. You may love the tech side of editing a podcast, or you may need to outsource that to students or other tech-minded folks at the school. You may be a fabulous editor/proofreader, or you may need to see if an English teacher might be interested in helping you do a final read of blog posts.
- Be mindful of how various stakeholders may experience the stories you share: More than once, the blog and podcast have gotten me in sticky situations with faculty or administrators who felt that someone’s lived reality or argument was critiquing the school or not representing things fairly. The moment that a blog or podcast conversation might raise some eyebrows, I loop in whoever might be impacted and talk through the best next steps. This has resulted in some discomfort, but also some powerful conversations between the author and other stakeholders in the school.
The Value of Storytelling
I see ripples of impact from these blogs and podcasts every single day in my work. As I leave an interview with basketball coaches, someone stops me to say, “This is the first time we’ve felt our experiences are respected by someone in our academic program.” A blog about how a teacher creates digital conversation opportunities leads to a faculty member asking more questions in the teacher’s lounge so they can incorporate it, too. More people sign up to “shadow a student” after one teacher shares his positive experiences with the program. A 5th grade teacher reads a focus group summary I published with 5th graders about checking for understanding and recognizes that some of their feedback on tone could really be taken to heart to increase his impact.
But so much of the value of these initiatives is intangibly community-shaping. It’s not about creating the perfect product, being published, being read/downloaded, or going viral. Telling the truth with words about our experiences is a crucial mode of self discovery. This thing we do called teaching can be weirdly isolating. Writing/reading a blog like this or having/listening to a conversation like this gives us an avenue to feel less alone, to experience that huge sense of relief: “You mean you’ve felt or experienced that? Me too. Perhaps we can help each other.”
