3.1 Sharing what works
Common language is an important part of a community of practice. In fact, the reduction of jargon and the simplification of language for sharing tricky topics is a tricky topic in itself. The tricky topics guide website you visited in Weeks 2 and 3 is supporting a tricky topics community by enabling teachers to share their thoughts and experiences and read about other teachers’ thoughts and experiences. However, it is not interactive and does not enable you to directly communicate with others who are working on tricky topics which may be relevant to you and your organisation.
There is however a developing tricky topics community available via IRIS Connect (which you were introduced to in Week 3) and a tricky topics group, ‘Teaching and learning tricky topics’ which you have been referred to through the weeks.
Activity 6 Tricky topics group
Go onto IRIS Connect and access the tricky topics group, ‘‘Teaching and learning tricky topics’ and access the videos and activities of other teachers to facilitate your understanding of the tricky topics process. Share your discussions with other users in the group. It also contains further guidance on how you can develop your own ideas and reflections further using video.
You can also share you tricky topics practice by tweeting to @Tricky_Topics, presenting your work at internal or external conferences or teechmeets, or create your own YouTube video.
A tricky topics movement that is right for your organisation needs to help you to share and understand student’s problems and identify key stumbling blocks in order for the solutions to those blocks to be fully developed, taught and shared. Moreover, it needs to help your colleagues to be able to do the same.