*I originally created these posts for the micro-blogging education site Staffrm, which shut down mid-2017. I wanted to re-share these early forays into the blogging world but have not edited any of these posts from their original form. *
I’m a 2014 Teach First Ambassador and this year I will be stepping down from my role as Action Network chair in the East Midlands after two years. “What’s Action Network?” I hear you ask. Well, there is an Action Network within each of the regions in which TF works consisting of participants (still on the 2 year programme) and ambassadors (those who have completed it). The work of Action Network’s fall into 4 key areas:
Now, ‘community’ comes up a lot within Teach First and indeed it comes up a lot within education more widely. In this case, we consider ‘community’ in a wide sense, encompassing participants, ambassadors, mentors, tutors, staff, pupils, parents and schools (I’ve probably missed some out there!). During my two year tenure, we have focussed on two things: improving our means of gathering feedback and running events to improve wellbeing. In both of these cases we have centered our efforts on TF Participants but are increasingly working with Ambassadors too. We would love to work in even broader areas but as full time teachers who do this work on a voluntary basis, we are still growing our capacity to do this effectively so have focussed on the areas we can have the biggest impact in so far. In addition to this, representatives from ANs meet four times a year at the National Action Network to discuss and feedback on ideas within TF, plan projects and make suggestions for improvements. So what does the East Midlands Action Network (EMAN) do? Over the past two years we have been instrumental in setting up a zoning system to help with expenses for travelling to CPD, have held two teach meets, two weekends away to promote teacher well being, facilitated a buddying system for new teachers and fundraised to help address the NEET problem - one of the most prevalent in the East Mids. Coming out of EMAN, two of our reps have also set up The Broader View, which although I don’t have the space to discuss much here, I thoroughly recommend you check out. We’ve got lots more in the pipeline, including another weekend away and a policy event - exciting times. As Chair of EMAN, I have enjoyed taking a wider view of education policy. EMAN has enabled me to stay in touch and take part in discussions around how to improve TF and what can be done to tackle educational disadvantage, including the Challenge the Impossible campaign. Especially in the first couple of years of teaching, it can be easy to have tunnel vision. The classroom is all consuming and it can, frankly, become easy to be disillusioned with the state of education when the vigour and enthusiasm of Summer Institute seem distant on those dark December evenings. For me AN provides an outlet and allowed me to reconnect with why I joined TF, a reminder of what can be achieved.
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