Member Voices

Being a physical educator is a complex job that requires continual professional development to stay current. This is done in a variety of ways, including utilizing social media to create Professional Learning Communities for teachers. There are numerous teachers who have praised this form of professional development because it's easy to access, timely, and personalized.

On Twitter (X), our organization has facilitated a mentorship program that connects teachers asking for help with mentors who have expertise in that area. It's a simple program that takes minimal time to run and can be replicated on other social media platforms.

Here is how it works:

• Teachers and other professionals sign up to become mentors through a Google Form. It is a free program and there is no vetting process (all opinions are welcome). As of this writing, 49 professionals have signed up.
• Their information is added to the directory. The only “work” involved is copying and pasting their Twitter handles into the areas of expertise they indicated. This takes less than 1 minute per applicant. Areas of Expertise we included: 
  • Adapted Physical Education, Advocacy, Assessment, Class Management, Curriculum/Lesson Development, Diversity and Social Justice, Elementary Teaching, English Language Learners, Field Day, Fitness, Fundraising and Grants, Graduate/Doctoral Education, Health Education Instructional Models, Involvement in Professional Organizations, National Board Certification, Secondary Teaching, Sex Education, Teacher Education (PETE Programs), and Technology.
• The directory can then be used 3 different ways.
  • Anyone can access the directory, find the topic they are interested in, and then reach out to those mentors (a single click copies all the relevant handles).
  • Anyone can post a tweet with the #PhysedMentors hashtag and we will retweet it to get it more exposure.
  • We seek out tweets asking for help and tag the appropriate mentors. 

The key is to make the directory as user friendly as possible. Thankfully spreadsheets have a formula that combines text from different cells into 1 cell. This allows for a single copy and paste of all the mentors' handles for that area of expertise. The formula to do this may look daunting but it just requires highlighting the columns you want to include. More information on the concatenate formula. We also turned it into a glideapp to make the directory more user friendly but that is a little more complicated and unnecessary.