Once upon a time, “EduTwitter” was full of promise and highlighted teaching at its best. Collaborative and kind, it was a place where good practice and fantastic resources were shared freely and without prejudice. It reduced workload, created community and was the best CPD I’d ever come across. In some parts, this is still what it’s all about, and communities like #TeamEnglish are invaluable to so many on a Sunday night when needing inspiration for Monday morning.

But storm clouds have gathered over this collaborative utopia and ideology has reared its ugly head. There’s something about the faceless nature of social media that unleashes inner demons. Attacks on both school and individuals by small but increasingly vocal and polarised groups online attempt to make false dichotomies to divide us. Some of these individuals appear benign and claim to be tolerant but their intentions are clear: to advocate and impose their own ideology on other professionals.

This trend seems to be mirroring the crisis in democracy, with social media, once the great hope of the Arab Spring and oppressed people, proceeding to attempt to divide Western Civilisation in two. But the truth is, the majority of people are not ideologically driven. Most people hold a diverse range of beliefs; some conservative and some more progressive. It depends on their own experience and values.

In the political conversation, the system is designed to create this tone of debate. The adversarial nature of British education has evolved to include two large tents of ideas that thrashed out common ground and challenged their opposition. Yet even this appears to be in meltdown. The discourse has been so nasty and polluted with insults that it now simply doesn’t function. Such an approach is beginning to rear its head in teaching.

Ideologues stir up trouble on Twitter

I experienced this once. After writing a political piece about the general election, I made a maybe misguided but obviously hyperbolic statement about teachers who vote Conservative. It was designed for professionals to read and I made assumptions about the ability to make inferences about my frustration. However, it was twisted and taken out of context and before I knew it, I was added into threads in which small and cult-like group of fellow teachers (sometimes from faceless accounts) attacked me. It was sobering to realise how desperate ideologues are to stamp a claim on the social media landscape.

Most of us aren’t defined by catch-all labels like progressives or traditionalists. I, for one, am happy to teach at the front and directly instruct but I also don’t see group work and learning carousels as the root of all evil and have had great success with these methods. Equally, I like high behaviour expectations and believe students should be excluded if they endanger their colleagues, but I am deeply suspicious of silent corridors and think there is something very wrong with schools off-rolling large numbers of children. I don’t think I’m alone in this position.

I am a fierce advocate of pluralism in education and think that only through schools having a variety of approaches do we reach for that unattainable yet noble aspiration of making education work for every child in this country. However, the more the profession accepts this new discourse, the more we limit our ability to try new and bold ideas. We cannot accept this as the new teaching reality and we cannot be sucked into a false debate that distracts from the real challenges and battles the profession must face.  

So next time you’re on Twitter, think before you engage with this rhetoric. If we don’t feed the beast it will disappear with a whimper rather than continue to shout down the silent majority.

Joseph Bispham teaches at Forest Gate Community School and starred in Educating the East End. He worked in politics before moving into teaching and tweets @MrBispham.