"Ephemeral Teacher Swarms" aka Part-Time Temps

If you think that TFA is the only corporate game in town intended to de-professionalize teaching and crush public education, think again.  The privateers have more schemes ready to launch as the TFA bubble loses gas, and here is just one of them from the CBE-based KnowledgeWorks, which is another Gates hothouse item that he hopes will grow to choke out public space.  

I suppose it is only appropriate that, as the planet dies from greed, poison, and neglect, some of our Ivy League under-employed and thoroughly positivized millennials should spend their days and earn their bread by coming up with privatizing schemes for Bill Gates that are redolent the rhetoric of eco-consciousness.  

This document and the clip below is aflutter with "stewardship" and "learning ecosystem" talk.  By far, my favorite new fragmented teacher role is "data steward." 

Seven Possible Educator Roles 

To help education stakeholders imagine what kinds of educator roles might contribute to flexible and rigorous learning ecosystems that enable both learners and the adults supporting them to thrive, this paper explores seven possible educator roles.

1. (1)  Learning Pathway Designer – Works with students, parents, and learning journey mentors6 to set learning goals, track students’ progress and pacing, and model potential sequences of activities that support learning experiences aligned with competencies. 
   
   
2. (2)  Competency Tracker – Tags and maps community-based learning opportunities by the competencies they address in order to support the development of recon gurable personalized learning pathways and school formats. 
   
   
3. (3)  Pop-Up Reality Producer – Works with educators, subject matter experts, story developers, and game designers to produce pervasive learning extravaganzas that engage learners in ow states7 and help them develop relevant skills, academic competencies, and knowhow. 
   
   
4. (4)  Social Innovation Portfolio Director – Builds networks in support of meaningful service-based learning and community impact by linking student action-learning groups seeking to develop core skills and knowledge with organizations seeking creative solutions. 
   
   
5. (5)  Learning Naturalist – Designs and deploys assessment protocols that capture evidence of learning in students’ diverse learning environments and contexts. 
   
   
6. (6)  Micro-Credential Analyst – Provides trusted, research-based evaluations and audits of micro- credential options and digital portfolio platforms in order to provide learners and institutions with comparative quality assurance metrics. 
   
   
7. (7)  Data Steward – Acts as a third-party information trustee to ensure responsible and ethical use of personal data and to maintain broader education data system integrity and effective application through purposeful analytics.
   

Some of these roles would be likely to involve full-time employment for a single organization, while others could reaect more ad hoc, network-based employment structures, at least for some of the people occupying them. Some of the roles might attract current teachers and administrators; others might attract people from other backgrounds, including the data sciences, anthropology and ethnography, neuropsychology, and media design. 

Regardless of an individual’s employment arrangements or background, educator swarms will likely form to meet the needs of individual learners or cohorts of learners. Educator swarms would be flexible and often temporary teams of educators that configured to meet learners’ needs and then reconfigured differently as needs shifted. Those swarms could span organizational boundaries as well as the line that we draw today between the formal and informal or community-based learning sectors. Furthermore, the configurations of future educator swarms could be far more ephemeral than many of today’s teaching assignments.