The Renaissance of Research

What makes an expert? If you went back 10 years or so ago, you’d have probably cited the fact that an expert was a professor or a published author on a specialised topic. The fact that they’d had their work published gave them a halo of credibility and authenticity above the rest of us working at the chalk face. But move forward 10 years to the present day and we find something quite different. With the boom of the internet and the emergence of social media and blogging, millions of teachers across the globe are now able to publish their own work via these mediums to a global audience, giving them the confidence, credibility and authenticity that they never had before. Suddenly we have an explosion of experts in our schools talking about their work in classrooms with a core aim of sharing this outstanding practice with others in the hope that they too will learn from fellow ‘experts’. And the best part about these new breed of experts? They are accessible. They are contactable via social media channels, they appear and speak at teachmeets and more important than anything else……they still teach in our schools. We are not trying to learn from the so called ‘experts’ of the past who stopped practicing what they preached and forgot what it was like to do the things they were preaching. More and more we are learning from experts who are living and breathing it with us.

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