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Group therapy
If you’re looking for a fast, free way to connect with fellow professionals, LinkedIn and Google Groups are a great way to do it
The right help and advice can be a tough thing to find, especially when you have such little time to fit in searching for it around your busy working day. Impartial advice is often an even more elusive prize. The Department for Education and private companies are always queuing up to offer their thoughts, but that’s usually in order to justify the latest sweeping cuts or sell you something, respectively. Your peers, however, should be the ideal group to offer you unbiased thoughts based on shared experiences, and if it’s a group of them, all the better. That’s why an increasing number of education professionals are forming LinkedIn and Google Groups. These are an excellent way to stay in touch with what can at times feel like a
disparate peer group. While school collaboration is now much improved, extra opportunity to share success stories and cautionary tales is always welcome. If you don’t have a LinkedIn or Google account yet, they’re very quick to set up and searching for appropriate groups takes seconds. They are a place for people to raise discussion topics or ask job-related questions, and get quick feedback from similarly interested parties. A recent example posted on the Academies Resource Group on LinkedIn, entitled: ‘Is Michael Wilshaw right? What other ideas can we come up with?’, discussed the chief inspector of schools’ assertions about paid governors and the Data Dashboard. There are also discussions about more everyday, but equally important issues, such as: ‘Does anyone have any advice for us setting up Parent Pay within our primary school?’ If you’re thinking of setting up a group yourself, that’s also a very simple process with step-by-step instructions to ensure that even the biggest technophobes should be able to muddle their way through. It’s then simply a matter of inviting some fellow professionals to join, to start building up your numbers. When creating a group you’ve got a decision to make about accessibility. If you decide to make it unrestricted, it’s likely that you’ll end up with greater numbers, and be saved the task of individually approving every prospective member. While a large group will, on the face of it, simply give you access to more brains bulging with advice, it may be a wise decision to target a more exclusive clientele. With no restrictions, educational suppliers are quick to get in on the act and the group’s feed can end up looking like a list of adverts.
Last but not least, I would
SEND US YOUR THOUGHTS
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advise you to disable the function that sends an email notification every, yes every, time a thread in your group is commented on. You can keep up to date easily enough, without having an inbox clogged-up with updates. It’s time to get involved and start contributing to the debate, you’ll be glad you did.
april 2013 \
www.edexec.co.uk
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