I’ve been relatively quiet recently on social media (honest), and I’ve tweeted far less (really) and barely blogged since before Christmas. Much of that time has been spent on my various side projects in education blogging, which often don’t tend to get the publicity they actually need and nothing like the readership of this blog. So I thought I’d give a quick guide to those parts of the education blogosphere that I am either involved in, or I’m most interested in and encourage you to get involved in them too.
I should probably start by mentioning this blog. It’s been going over nine years and there is a guide to all the posts here. I am hoping it will be more active this year than last year, and it will remain the first place to keep up with my opinions and issues that have interested me in education.
Most of my other projects are under the “Echo Chamber” banner. These have been built around publicising the best of the education blogosphere, or simply promoting all UK education blogs. The Echo Chamber blog can be found here and is my attempt to share the best of the education blogs. The growing nature of the blogosphere has made this a bit of an impractical task, and there is plenty of work still to be done to improve that service, but if you like what you find on this blog, then this should be a way of finding similar blogs. Non-UK blogs that I like can be found on the Echo Chamber International Blog.
As well as my selections, the Echo Chamber also tries to help you find your way through all the UK education blogs. My latest count found over 3000 education blogs written by people in or from the UK. Various lists can be found here and it includes a spreadsheet where you can add details of your own blog. To get some perspective on the whole of the blogosphere, there is Echo Chamber Uncut which attempts to link to every new post from every UK education blog with a working RSS feed. You may find it impossible to keep up with it, but you can browse it looking for things of interest. If you use the “search” facility it should help you find posts on topics that particularly interest you. There are also “mini-Echo Chambers” that share posts from bloggers from particular sectors or teaching particular subjects. If you teach the relevant subject then you should probably follow one of these blogs:
There are also mini-Echo Chambers for:
I’m always looking to expand the number of mini Echo Chambers, but these efforts have become somewhat bogged down in an attempt to create an Echo Chamber covering all the primary blogs. I hope to complete that soon, and then I will be looking for volunteers to create blogs for other subjects. So, if you are a teacher of MFL, geography or any other unrepresented subject, who also uses wordpress, please get in touch. Details of all these Echo Chambers (including Twitter accounts) can be found here.
The newest part of the Echo Chamber is a diary of events for teachers which can be found here. Please comment or use Twitter to contact @annaworth if you have any events to add. I am also thinking about what else should be added to the Echo Chamber in the future.
Another blog I run is Labour Teachers. If you are a Labour supporting teacher, please get in touch if you help write for it. However, in the interests of balance here are a list of the main party political education blogs.
Labour
Conservative
Liberal Democrat
The newest blog I have created is Starter For Five, a blog compiling advice for new teachers which can be found here. You should be able to follow it to get advice as it is posted. You can also add advice from this form here. Please make use of this.
That’s pretty much it for things I run, but other people have created some great resources for teachers. Let me point out a few places of interest.
- Staffrm is a blogging site for teachers. It specialises in short posts and a generally positive vibe. It’s a particularly good place to start if you want to begin blogging.
- researchED is an organisation for helping teachers find out about (and challenge) education research. It holds regular conferences.
- Teachmeets are events for teachers (often free) in which teachers share ideas.
- Knowledge organisers (for collating subject knowledge).
Obviously this is all my own personal guide to what’s out there for teacher bloggers, and I have concentrated on my own work and my favourite sites. Feel free to suggest what else is important in the comments.
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Scenes From The Battleground 
11 Years Of Blogging
October 25, 2017Yesterday was the 11th anniversary of my first blogpost.
I haven’t done very much blogging this year, although I’ve started again recently. I’ve tended to spend more time on Twitter as that reaches a wider audience and there has been good reason to keep active there, as it has become more hostile to anyone opposed to progressive education.
In fact most of my news for the year would have to be about the social media fightback by progressives. After years of losing ground, there seems to have been a major change of tactics among progressives. Instead of claiming to be the authorities who are being ignored by upstarts, they have rebranded themselves as victims of oppression by evil right-wing traditionalists who must be opposed by public shaming and abuse.
When in December, an Australian educationalist argued that criticism of learning styles was a racist attack on the poor, I dismissed it as an irrelevance.
But actually this became pretty indicative of the rest of the year. Progressives stopped appealing to their own authority, and started trolling. Anyone who had a different perspective was a racist and a bully. Every school that tried to tighten up on discipline was engaging in child abuse. Every school that departed from progressive education was denying SEND students of their human rights. That, alongside personal abuse, and claims that those who opposed them were the true bullies, became the dominant progressive narrative of the year. Initially, I documented this (also here) calling on the “mainstream” progressives to disown the trolls. By the end of the year a lot of the previously “mainstream” progressives had adopted the same tactics. I’ve had to block more people in the last year than the rest of my time in Twitter put together. Progressives who work as consultants or lecture on university courses appear to have concluded that, as long as their hatred is focused on educational traditionalists and individual schools, it won’t harm their careers to call people names on social media.
There has also been a rise in the number of people trying to get tweeters into trouble by tagging in their employers or pretty much any authority figure into tweets. People tagged into hysterical condemnations of traditionalist edu-tweeters this year include the NSPCC, the Norfolk police and, my own favourite, one tweeter even reported me to Marvel Comics and the actor Benedict Wong (from Doctor Strange). My advice to any non-progressive edu-tweeter, be very careful about entering any kind of debate if your employer is mentioned in your Twitter bio or you are using your real name.
It would be easy to dismiss this stuff if people who behave like this weren’t influential in education, but as I said, but a lot of hostility and even some abuse, has been from people who work in teacher training. I’ve written a couple of posts this year about educationalists who try to silence debate
This has focused my attention on what people actually encounter when training to teach.
Other topics I’ve covered this year have included:
Behaviour Consultants
Obedience
Michaela School
The Great Debate
Some good things from this year:
Anyway, thanks to everybody who has been supportive, particularly my other half, Gwen, who completely supports my avenging, and my colleagues at work who have shown a real interest in social media.
Here’s looking forward to another year of blogging.
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