By Matt Enlow, Posted May 11, 2015–

How do we go about becoming better teachers? There is no shortage of books that will gladly tell us (three in particular whose titles begin Teach Like . . .), and there is absolutely nothing wrong with reading these books. But none of us should blindly follow someone else’s script for How to Be a Good Teacher. We should be writing our own.

We can do so by looking at everything we do with a critical eye. Why do we teach particular subjects or units the way we do? What do we hope our students come away with by the end of the school year? By the time they graduate? Are we serving their best interests?

But as we go about developing professionally, there will always be this tension: What are the “best practices” of teaching that all practitioners ought to embrace and which practices can be considered mere suggestions, to be considered and taken or left by individual teachers according to their particular students and circumstances?

I for one am always going to err on the side of greater teacher autonomy and freedom. Instead of giving teachers marching orders and artificial bars to be cleared, we should trust that teachers, left to their own devices, want to improve their teaching and will eagerly seek out new ideas, carefully consider them, and decide which ones have the best chance of working for them and their students. Throughout this process, they will engage with other educators to share ideas, discuss pedagogy, and challenge one another’s firmly held beliefs about teaching math.

But where do we find these new ideas, the colleagues to discuss them with, and the time to do so? After all, conferences are expensive, budgets are tight, and we barely have enough time to prepare for tomorrow. But what if I told you that some of the best professional development I’ve ever been a part of is 100 percent free, available to anyone anywhere in the world, and consumable twenty-four hours a day, in time chunks as small as you need?

The Math-Twitter-Blog-o-Sphere (MTBoS) is an online community of math educators—with backgrounds in everything from elementary grades to college—that essentially serves as the largest faculty lounge in existence. On Twitter, at any given moment, teachers are sharing all kinds of things with one another—a successful lesson; a not-so-successful lesson; a breakthrough with a student; a flash of insight; a question for the room; a fun problem; a half-formed theory; an embarrassing moment; a request for feedback on a new idea. Some math teachers maintain blogs, where they can write about their experiences at a bit more length and then get feedback in their comments sections (which you actually should read, contrary to the standard Internet advice). Never have I learned so much from so many people I’d never met in person before!

MTBoS is an incredibly welcoming community, and it is a blast to be a part of something that is driven purely by the desire to do better for our students. To join the conversation yourself, (1) get a Twitter account, (2) follow me (and maybe some math teachers I follow), and (3) use the hashtag #MTBoS to introduce yourself.

You should always decide for yourself what works best for you, but there’s really only one nonnegotiable: Come join the conversations in the MTBoS!

Matt Enlow, matt.enlow@danahall.org, preaches the gospel of mathematics at Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He is a regular contributor of (mostly) original math problems to Brilliant.org and tweets (mostly) mathematical musings at @CmonMattTHINK.