As we near the end of another academic year, it seems like potentially a good time to reflect on our professional learning. There’s only one week of term left here in Scotland, and even if you don’t finish up this week there’ll only be a maximum of a few more weeks left of school before those precious summer holidays eventually arrive.

So, before you finish up why not make some time to reflect upon your practice this session as a blog post here on Pedagoo.org? What have you and your students achieved this session? What impact has it had? What have you yet to achieve? What will you aim to develop next session? What support could you use to achieve this? Is there any way other members of the Pedagoo community could help out?

Remember it’s dead easy to write a post on Pedagoo. Just create an account then click on + New Post.

I normally like to try and lead by example. but unfortunately I missed a lot of this year due to illness, so I’m very much looking forward to getting back to teaching properly after the summer. However, I can reflect on the growth of Pedagoo this year. Pedagoo is now two years old and this year has been huge. We now have nearly 1000 registered users on the blog, over 8000 twitter followers and more than 250 likes on Facebook. We have a regular stream of posts on the blog, with new people posting all the time and #PedagooFriday has exploded! We’ve held TeachMeets in Glasgow, Newcastle, London, Gateshead and Edinburgh with more events planned for next session. And we’ve had the growth of PedagooLocals and our new PedagooMag. There are so many enthusiastic folk to thank for all of this marvellous activity that it’s simply impossible to do so successfully…you know who you are!

So, where next for Pedagoo in the coming academic year? For me, the challenge for the future is how do we try and maintain the sense of community we started with as we grow ever bigger? As we grow we increasingly risk either becoming something we never intended to be, or at the very least being perceived as being different from what we’re aiming to be. An example of this is the fact that we occasionally get approached for sponsorship (we don’t have a bank account, let alone any money!), and I am now sometimes referred to as “Fearghal from Pedagoo” as if Pedagoo were a real thing. Pedagoo began life as a group of enthusiastic teachers, a collaborative blog and a domain name. We aimed to share and develop our practice positively and in public, and that remains as true today is it did two years ago. That’s why I’m always keen to encourage new folk to post on the blog, and for previous posters to share again. Pedagoo only exists if members of the community share and discuss their practice, so whatever we do in the coming session should, for me, be geared around encouraging more of this to happen.

If you have ideas for how to take Pedagoo forward, please share them as a comment below…otherwise, I look forward to reading your reflection soon…