My People. My Connections.

Who do you learn from? In order for me to answer this question, I needed to take a moment and look at my Professional Learning Network (PLN). Common Sense Education (2017) defines a PLN to be “any network you create to learn from and share ideas with others”. I made myself a map of my PLN to have a visual representation of my professional PLN as a middle school teacher. I was able to categorize my people into four major categories: Luther Burbank Middle School, Burbank Unified School District, Kagan Team and social media. As I added information to my map, there were a couple realizations. First, the majority of the people in my PLN are of similar interests, goals, pedagogy, and mindset. A second observation is that every single connection in my PLN has a common thread of social media. While I may not have met my Kagan Team, school site colleagues or district colleagues through social media, we all have our own social media accounts in which we follow each other, have access to the tools and resources we each share and there are commonalities in the people we follow. While this is great that we are all connected in this way, it can also be concerning. Where is the diversity? Where are the different viewpoints? Where is the uniqueness?

My PLN Map with a needle and thread in the background to represent that Social Meida weaves throughout each of my Professional Learning Networks in one way or another.

It is interesting to see how I surround myself with like minded people and those who are similar to me. Perhaps I do this because it provides me with a level of comfort. But Menon mentions that this safety network can become a problem when “we are on a precipice, when we are in trouble, when we need new ideas, when we need new jobs, when we need new resources. This is when we really pay a price for living in a click” (2017). Rather than living in my comfort zone PLN, I need to branch out to new networks just as I require my students to sit next to and work with different classmates throughout the year. As Menon said, I need to “be more intentional about traveling our social universe” (2017).

Throughout my day to day, there is a definite routine at work. Every morning, I walk to the office with my teacher bestie, who also happens to be my neighbor. At nutrition, I talk to the same teachers and use the same restroom each time. A group of us all meet at the lunch tables by my room every day and eat lunch together in our lunch bunch. Rarely, do I venture to a different part of campus to interact with different people. Even during our staff meetings, the same groups of people sit and interact with each other. It has just become routine. However, this year will be interesting as I will have a second classroom for the yearbook class which is in a different hallway than my current room and I will be interacting with different colleagues to “widen my social world” (Menon, 2017).

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References

Common Sense Education. (2017, July 21). What's a PLN? And 3 ways teachers can get connected [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju54C5A3RCw&feature=emb_logo

McHorney-Enokian, S. (2023) PLN Map [Infographic]. Canva.

Menon, T. (2017, March). The secret to great opportunities? The person you haven't met yet [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/tanya_menon_the_secret_to_great_opportunities_the_person_you_haven_t_met_yet/transcript