Sharing is Caring

When I started teaching English composition as a first year MA student in 2007, my program took a rather "sink or swim" approach to training teaching assistants. We were given three half days of orientation, a sample syllabus, and a department-approved textbook the week before our classes began, then we met weekly throughout the semester with other new TAs in a teaching practicum led by the Director of Composition. The practicum functioned as part formal pedagogical training, part practical planning session, and part support group. Sharing was absolutely essential to its success, as well as ours. Having never even taken a composition course myself (I tested out of them), I was particularly desperate to hear people say "I tried this activity in class and it worked," so I could figure out what to do in my class.
"Teacher Research" and the beauty of failure:
I soon discovered, however, that my favorite resources were the published articles we read that followed a simple formula: I thought x activity would be a great way to teach y, but it blew up in my face, and here's what I learned from that experience. I might not get a specific, concrete classroom activity out of such articles, but I did get a sense of camaraderie with other teachers, as we all, even the seasoned professionals, seemed to be figuring this out as we went. Such sharing of classroom failures also encouraged me to remain flexible in my teaching. Just because an activity worked in one class didn't mean it would work in another, or that it was always the best way to teach a particular concept. I eventually came to express this philosophy in these terms: It's not just acknowledging that I might be wrong, but remaining certain that I am not completely right (an idea I first saw expressed in this book by Kate Ronald and Hepzibah Roskelly). Keeping my fallibility always in mind helps me to try new strategies and to accept that some of them will fail.
If the teachers who came before me had been unwilling to be transparent about their classroom failures, as well as successes, my classroom would be a very different place today.
Student Safety in the transparent class:
The key to sharing both successfully and wisely, though, comes when we remember to protect and respect our students. Sharing our frustrations with student behavior or mistakes in the safety of our face-to-face practicum was okay, but to voice such comments online is unfair and often simply unkind. It's a tricky balancing act between only sharing the positive, success stories, giving a false impression of what teaching is actually like, and sharing our failures in ways that end up disparaging students rather than focusing on what went wrong on our end.
I see this play out in my Facebook newsfeed all the time. A big block of my friends on Facebook are fellow composition teachers, so I know I have a sympathetic audience for things like my recent post about the perpetual frustration I feel when a student emails me after missing a class to ask "Did I miss anything?" and my overwhelming desire to reply, "No. We were so devastated by your absence that we just couldn't find the will to go on." It's good to feel solidarity with my colleagues in such a moment, and it is certainly better to talk to them about my frustration than to actually send that reply to my student, but it is also important to remember that each student who sends that email is making that mistake for the first time and needs to be granted the opportunity to learn from it while maintaining their dignity. Anonymity is essential for that. When it comes to sharing a student's exact words, though, one should get their permission first.
Sharing is Caring (Except with the flu. That you can keep all to yourself):
In the end, then, I agree with Dean Shareski that we have an obligation to share our teaching practices with others. I could not have become the teacher I am today without the sharing of other teachers, and I believe others have benefited from the materials and activities I have shared with them at conferences and in informal meetings. I would add, however, that sharing our failures can be even more important for building a community of teachers.