Starting a discussion here about an international teacher "documentary" project I am looking to undertake

Hi everyone,

I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on something I'm thinking about doing. Your input would be appreciated as I haven't bounced this idea off anyone yet.

My background: I have a background in education and in college I studied learning sciences, organizational change in education systems, the social policy of education, the economics of education, with a focus on how culture affects cognition. I currently work in education consulting but spend 0 time in the classroom. I have been a volunteer teacher very regularly over the past 6 years.

Now, I am thinking about launching something called the Teacher Project (not the decided upon name--there isn't one of those yet, but I need something to refer to in this post). The idea would be to go to one country every month for the next 3-4 years and interview a teacher there who is one of the best K12 teachers in the country. I would ask them about their pedagogical methods, equity of access to quality schools in their country, structural trends in their education systems, personal questions about why they got into teaching, what a good day looks like, what a bad day looks like, etc etc (of course taking time before hand to thoroughly research their country's education ecosystem to ask tailored questions). I would also try to photograph their schools so that I could put this in a blog or book, just to showcase what teachers around the world are like. (Should I try to make a documentary?)

The idea would be to raise up the profession of teaching through these teacher profiles, but also to highlight the challenges teachers face. At the end of it all, I would hope to come away with some common themes and some good insights. The main reason behind wanting to do this is that I don't get much time in the classroom and have always wanted to learn more about international public education.

Money isn't an issue. I am thinking about getting an education travel agency to set up the flights and help me create a shortlist of schools / teachers who I should reach out to. I work about 70h a week so although I'd like to do all the leg work myself I don't think that's feasible.

What do you think? Ideally I'd like to hear criticisms (and some encouragement would be cool!) but more than anything I'd appreciate any posts I can respond to and the opportunity to really talk this through.

Thanks so much!

Submitted January 11, 2018 at 07:36AM by __bubba http://ift.tt/2Fr2WQn