The CRT story unfolding - it's truly impressive.

Back in 2008 when I first became a VIT CRT Network coordinator I had a local understanding of issues facing CRTs mostly through personal experience.  Along the way VIT helped interested coordinators become more familiar with the overall situation for CRTs as a workforce for the state (and to some extent the rest of Australia as well) through directing us to certain documents in Coordinator meetings.

Along the way we were given a document that opened like this;

Teachers working in casual relief and emergency positions (CRTs) struggle to establish an identity within the profession. The nature of their work and professional isolation often means that they are marginalised by their colleagues and perceived to be a ‘lesser’ group of teachers. While this view of CRTs may have been justified in the past, CRTs deserve to be respected, as members of the profession because all teachers registered in Victoria are now required to meet and maintain professional standards.

Dawn Colcott - VIT

It is very encouraging about how far things have come since those times with CRTs getting more and more avenues to become connected all the time.  I thought that this week I'd give people a look at one of the ways I am able to observe this process as a VIT CRT Network Coordinator.
 
When I write editorial posts on this blog about 25% of them are picked up and posted to Facebook groups, re-blogged, stuck up on pinterest and put in various forums around the traps (in a greater capacity than I do myself).  Many online things such as Blogger.com give you more "behind the scenes" statistics than just how many views and comments you are getting.  Information like geolocations of where your views are coming from by country, which links people use to come to your blog and so on.

I love watching it happen from behind the scenes not because my view counters skyrocket but because it lets me see a few really important things going on in the background.

What gets re-shared and where it goes gives me a good idea of how general populations dotted about the place are thinking.  If a topic is carried somewhere it shows you some little pocket of where that particular topic is important, what's a hot topic generally and what's not and so on.  It's a really good look at how not all CRTs have the same issues as everyone else and it's also a really good look at how CRTs function as a community.  Social media is having an enormous impact on the isolated nature of CRT work in the past.

It's sort of like those class experiments where they take a picture and then float it on Facebook as an experiment to see how it travels.  We've probably all seen them with the comments underneath about where the poster is from so the students can see where it's reached.  I just do the same thing time and time again across multiple social media outlets (blogging, Facebook, Youtube, pinterest and so on) and watch it all unfold into a big, wonderful picture.

One of the fascinating things is how some of the things I'm saying or for CRTs are being taken into pre-service teacher forums.  They are starting to understand that the way in which we work has many parallels with the nature of their Uni prac placements and the valuable source of knowledge we CRTs provide to tackle those situations in a way that will help them excel. 

This can also be seen in many Facebook groups like Relief Teaching Ideas where pre-service teachers are joining to get access to CRT advice even when they already have access to Uni lecturers, vast libraries of text books, mentors and the like.  And we just help. 

This isn't just "being nice to future colleagues" when you look from an overall perspective.  Where education frameworks are concerned there are a couple of distinct advantages.  It helps those on placement come to grips with the students quickly in order to maximise the learning advantage that those placements are meant to offer.  Universities, as a rule, also don't say too awful much about CRT work either, we are helping to fill those particular gaps.  We are also helping these CRTs to get a running start in the profession by helping them find many resources both in regards to student lessons/activities as well as classroom management and so on.

All of this just confirms something I (well, as a lot of us really) had always known.  We CRTs are here, we're valuable AND there's always a bazillion of us willing to jump on board and help.  What's going on, both visible and invisible, is a credit to CRTs and giving Australian educational bodies solid reasons to take a new and fresh look at the capability and dedication of their respective CRT cohorts.  Like any other teachers our value to education systems extends well beyond what we do in classrooms.

Having been able to watch this revolution from behind the scenes is well is truly impressive from that "education framework" perspective.  It gives me a really good look at how the traditional professional isolationism that's been associated with the nature of our role in Education has been detrimental to education as a whole, not just our ability to preserve student outcomes when the classroom teacher is away. 

We are leaving that isolationism behind and our education systems are emerging all the better for it.

Keep up the excellent work everyone!

Regards,

Mel.