Full Circle

As Xmas approaches and I have reached the end of my first term teaching part-time at our local college, I am reflecting on circularity. 

41 years ago, in the summer of 1976, I graduated from Drama School in Edinburgh and immediately started a post-graduate Teacher Training Diploma at Moray House School of Education. I lasted the first term. I dropped out.

Not yet 21, and within the first two weeks of that first term, I had found myself out in a school on teaching practice - a mere three years older than my oldest pupils. I quickly realised that I'd had very little life experience, hadn't travelled, had never performed professionally in theatre or television and now stood at the threshold of the rest of my life as a Drama Teacher - potentially spending from age 5 to age 65 in some kind of educational or school-related activity - and with no sense of myself as a rounded, experienced and credible performer or teacher.

So I stepped away, the first time in my life that I followed my gut (my heart?) and instead, I found a job with a lighting supplier, working in their retail lighting shop, delivering and installing theatrical lighting, and occasionally operating the follow-spots at the Usher Hall or the Lyceum Theatre. Within a year, I and several other ex-drama school colleagues started a touring community theatre company in rural Dumfrieshire, thereby earning my Equity (Actors' Union) Card and so becoming a professional actor for another 12 years.

The story of that 12 years is perhaps for another time, as, unsurprisingly, acting proved to be too precarious and unreliable a profession to guarantee a regular income. A move into IT Training, own business, followed by Training Management, then HR & Learning Technologies management in both public and private sectors, illness and redundancy, brings us up to date and to my current part time role our local college, assessing and tutoring Digital Marketing Apprentices.

And so, I'm teaching again.

Proper teaching, but this time as the rounded, experienced and credible professional that I knew I wasn't back then. It's been - and continues to be - a journey, where every day is, and has been, a school day. As I say in my social media profiles, I know a little about a lot and a lot about very little. What I don't know, I either learn by making my own mistakes, or I rely on others to teach me - from their experience and from the multitude of different sources we all have available to us via digital channels.

The experience of visiting my Apprentices in their different workplaces, assessing their Diploma work in the context of their employer organisations, has been fascinating and enlightening. By getting them to research and share their findings in the classroom and in our Google+ Education Community, we all learn from each other. Just this week, I brought social learning into the mix, when I co-hosted a Twitter tweetchat about social media for business and marketing, with Mike Osborne (@MikeOzzy), others from my online personal learning network and my classroomful of young digital marketing apprentices.  Learning by doing, by participating, by sharing.

 

It's a richer and more rewarding kind of teaching than I ever envisaged when I set out into the world of work 41 years ago. What goes around comes around. Circle closed.