My journey started with a conference in the summer of 2018. I attended the Visible Learning Conference held by Corwin Publishing in Salt Lake City, Utah. While I have attended many conferences, this may have been one of the top conferences in regards to impact on my professional career. But probably not for the reason you are thinking.

Meeting John Hattie at Visible Learning 2018

During the conference, there were prizes awarded for those who were live-tweeting the breakouts and keynotes. Always a sucker for free prizes (especially when they’re education related), I jumped on my twitter account and started live tweeting.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t a winner that day, but I started connecting with other educators on Twitter and was blown away with the amazing content and ideas I was stumbling across. The larger educators were easy to find, and I was loving what they were sharing! Some of the first I stumbled across were:

As I read all the content from these and many other educators, I realized that the best professional development could be done on my own, and about topics I was passionate about.

I remember specifically reading how George Couros said that the two best things he had done for professional growth and learning were joining Twitter and starting a blog. I was already on Twitter so that was the easy part; however, I was much more nervous about starting a blog. What would I write about? Would it even matter? I was a business teacher, not an English teacher. I can’t write professionally. But after more than 8 months on Twitter and seeing the growth that has come from it, I am ready to jump into the blogging world and see where it takes me.

What made me finally start was a blog post by George Couros

3 Ways Blogging Has Helped Me Grow as a Learner

He lists the following 3 things

  1. Open (and Forced) Reflection
  2. Writing to Learn
  3. Building a Library of my Thinking

That list is good enough for me. So, here we go.

-stewart