Fantasy Teaching

An interesting thing happened on Twitter today. Dr. Chris McGee (@cmcgee200) and Josh Stumpenhorst (@stumpteacher) had conversation starter of what teaching would look like it teachers were drafted like pro-athletes. The conversation had a root in the educational practices of Finland and their great successes.

As an aside, did you know that in Finland, students do not start school until the age of 7 and receive all post high school career training for free? Pre-service teachers in Finland go through extensive internships and training and receive salaries on par with other educated professionals in the country. The training is so extensive and challenging that only 10% of the participants complete the program! You can read more here.

Once the idea of a pro-draft was discussed, the conversation took a turn to how might a fantasy teaching league look and how would the "owner" of a league might score points. The conversation started with a few people and eventually had dozens of people contributing. The conversation started around 11 AM CST and within 2 hours had over 200 contributions.

The contributions ranged from serious to silly including:

• +2 points for giving borderline students an opportunity to publicly succeed (@wmchamberlain)
• DQ'd for using sarcasm to put a kid down (@jmarkeyAP)
• +2 points for admitting, out loud, in your class, that you just learned something from a kid, and being proud of it (@ktvee)
• +1 point per hit for playing Dodgeball with 200 kids and letting them hit you (@stumpteacher)
• -2 points for splling errrors (@jaymelinton)

The amazing thing about this conversation the contributions were all about what we want our learning environments and schools to be. These are some great tips and observations about small changes we can each make in our classrooms and schools to make it a better place for the students and the teachers. Why can't we make our fantasy a reality?

See the storyfi of the #fantasyteaching conversation below. If you want to contribute, please do by tweeting with the hashtag #fantasyteaching!