Teacher Tours of Duty

I have seen the term "teacher entrepreneurs" around on the Internet, but I never looked into what it meant assuming it was referring to teachers who make extra selling lessons or possibly those who facilitate teacher training.

Today I was listening to The Harvard Business Review's podcast (ideacast) and they had two authors on the show who wrote an article for hbr.org called, Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact.

This article is all about how the landscape of business has changed and how the relationship between employee and employer has entered a mutually-beneficial compact where the employee goes to work and builds their own skill set while helping the company prosper. In this scenario, it is expected that employees are "free-agents" and will leave for a better job and the employer should encourage it to maintain flexibility.

While I was reading this I could not help thinking of how similar this is to the international school culture. After all, we are on contracts that last as little as one year. Teachers are generally on the lookout for more professional development. Schools generally encourage [and pay for] it, and they benefit from the connections teachers make to other teachers through the knowledge gained from those connections.

So, if we teachers want to help the schools we work for, one way to do that is by growing our personal learning networks (PLNs) to tap the ideas and knowledge of the teachers outside our schools.

If you teach at an international school, this might be an interesting listen (if nothing else than marveling at how the rest of the world is caching up to international schools.)


No connection to the post - I just wanted to add some color here.

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