The characteristic elements of TeachMeet

TeachMeet in context

The idea for TeachMeet originated with three Scottish educators – Ewan McIntosh, David Noble and John Johnston – who knew each other online but had never met face to face until the Scottish Education and Teaching with Technology conference (SETT Citation2005). A meeting was proposed; ten people signed up to attend in the Jolly Judge pub in Edinburgh on 24 May 2006, and here TeachMeet was born (Hallahan Citation2010). The basic format of that first meeting is one which has persisted to this day – make arrangements to meet in a social setting, turn up willing to share a story from your practice, and listen to stories of the others who are there.

TeachMeet is a form of unconference; an unconference is typically defined as a participant-driven meeting (Unconferece, Citationn.d.). The first instance of an unconference took place in 1984, via the Open Space Technology (OST) devised by Harrison Owen (Owen Citation1997). OST is an open-source phenomenon, as in ‘there is no overarching organisation, no patent or trademark, and no global marketing budget: just lots of good people, active practice and shared stories’ (OpenSpaceWorld.org, Citationn.d.). The agenda is set by those who volunteer to participate. Owen (Citation1997) states that OST runs on passion bounded by responsibility. In 2003, an unconference format called Pecha Kucha (pechakucha.com, Citationn.d.), featuring lightning presentations, emerged and was quickly adopted and adapted widely. By 2005 the OST unconference format had inspired BarCamp (Barcamp.org, Citationn.d.). In 2006, a fusion of the user-generated content of OST’s offspring Barcamp with the lightning presentations of Pecha Kucha, interspersed with in-built conversation time, became the TeachMeet standard format. By 2016, an analysis carried out by Amond, Johnston, and Millwood (Citation2018, 242–245) of data recorded online for UK and Ireland TeachMeet events, found that ‘ten years after the first TeachMeet, there are an average of 30 such events taking place per month across the two islands. Thus, there is at least one TeachMeet occurring somewhere every day’, attended by educators ‘from Initial Teacher Training through Primary, Post Primary, Post-16, to Further and Higher Education’. At a fundamental level TeachMeet in 2024 still operates as it did in 2006 – an event is announced for which volunteers sign up to present or attend, and during which practice is shared and discussed in a convivial atmosphere. An informal online search for instances of ‘#teachmeet’ during June 2022 (Amond Citation2022) shows that although there is still no incorporated organisation called TeachMeet, almost every day, somewhere in the world, there is notice of a TeachMeet happening.

TeachMeet in formal academic literature

A small body of critical academic literature discusses TeachMeet directly or in parallel with similar unconference formats. A common thread in this literature is its possible role in continuing professional development (CPD). Bennett (Citation2012) coined the phrase ‘guerrilla CPD’ to denote the radical nature of TeachMeets whose intention is to provide teachers with a forum for sharing their practices outside of the classroom and outside the structures of normal staff development. Bennett concludes that TeachMeet offers one way in which principles of building community within formal CPD programmes can be organised effectively. Others report positive reactions to TeachMeet used as a training activity for librarians (Walsh Citation2011; Tumelty, Kuhn, and Birkwood Citation2012; Jones and Edwards Citation2014; Hammersley-Fletcher and Lewin Citation2015). Amond, Johnston, and Millwood (Citation2018) report a growing use of both ‘community’ and ‘network’ as tags used by TeachMeet participants in online discourse. The most recent journal articles all show an increased appreciation by participants for incorporation of TeachMeet into professional learning programmes (Engeness, Brynildsen, and Nagel Citation2022; Charles Citation2021; Basnett Citation2021).

In the parallel literature – not mentioning TeachMeet directly but dealing with similar events – a key source of academic critique and analysis is the work of Carpenter and Linton (Citation2016) and Trust, Krutka, and Carpenter (Citation2016), analysing teachers’ exit feedback from Edcamps in the USA. They repeatedly report that participants felt that Edcamp content was more relevant than other PD available to them, appreciating the format’s interactivity, autonomy, choice, informality and spontaneity. Vital recommendations and conclusions presented in these analyses are that principles associated with unconference approaches to professional learning are likely to influence the professional development landscape in years to come.

TeachMeet in the ‘Grey’ literature

In this category the sources of literature which mention TeachMeet include official agency documents and reports from commissioned studies.

In official policy documents and reports, TeachMeet appears in fleeting statements about the importance of acknowledging the positive effect that informal and self-directed professional development activities may have on teachers, and referring to TeachMeet as a ‘professional learning event’ (AITSL Citation2014; Cosán Citation2016; DENI Citation2017; Department of Education in New South Wales, Australia Citationn.d.).

Two commissioned project reports focus on TeachMeet. One, a brief NESTA project report (Doust Citation2013, 13), concludes that these

TeachMeet in informal and ‘Fifth estate’ literature

There is a large volume of informal literature concerning TeachMeet to be found in the web-based communication that has been called the Fifth Estate (Cooper Citation2006; Dutton Citation2007). This includes reflective and insightful thoughts on TeachMeet shared by many as blog posts and the comments in reply, in open mailing lists, in news media and social media reports. As the original TeachMeet participants were using web-based communications to organise their events, it turns out they were recording the early days of TeachMeet as they were happening. The rise of the blogosphere (Cooper Citation2006), and its companying commentsphere (Potthast et al. Citation2012), offers individuals a place to think out loud, and others to reply to those thoughts (McIntosh Citation2007; Connell Citation2009; Anderson Citation2013; Morrison-McGill Citation2016). Another location for these call and response conversations is in mailing list forums, an early one exemplifying a positive self-promoting effect of TeachMeet e.g.

News media reports about TeachMeet all have a common reporting of the atmosphere, the informality, and self-determination as the reason teachers are attracted to TeachMeet in their professional learning (Davitt in Guardian Citation2008; O’Gallagher in BBC Scotland Citation2009; Valentine in Irish Times Citation2015; O’Ruairc in Irish Times Citation2016). In social media, Twitter has been used by TeachMeet participants since at least 2007. Since the use of the hashtag became a way to aggregate comments about a single topic, the timelines tagged with #teachmeet have become a round-the-clock stream of text, images, and links pointing to TeachMeet. Words and phrases seen repeatedly in random checks made on these timelines during the research include ‘inspirational’, ‘brilliant and transferrable ideas’, ‘opportunity to catch up’, ‘share knowledge and expertise’, ‘there certainly is power in collaboration’ (noted in a random Twitter search for #teachmeet, 2 December 2021, 12:27pm). This substantiated the research aims and confirmed that the phenomenon deserved investigation.

TeachMeet in the ‘Other materials’

The earliest information about TeachMeet is written in wikis, making them the closest thing to a historical primary source (TeachMeet Citationn.d.). A lively discussion took place on the now defunct ScotEdublogs wiki over several days, in order to decide upon a name; the outcome of the discussion was that the term TeachMeet was adopted and reported in a blog post (McIntosh Citation2006), along with the first source of explicit information on the rules of engagement for a TeachMeet event. There is no one global official website for TeachMeet; descriptive information is found in regional event sites, event management wikis, online booking engines, and media sharing sites. This widely scattered information about TeachMeet served as rich contextual data, helping to identify gaps in knowledge and form research question. Content is a variety of mixed media which reveals aspects of TeachMeet – images, sound, video, source code, presentation slides; some are mixed with text. Each event page stores the consecutive lists of people who had self-nominated to speak, to help out in some way, to sponsor, and to join the audience. The language used is unconventional – nanopresentation, enthusiastic lurkers, breakout, electronic fruit machine, TeachEat, MC. That last two-letter acronym, MC, traditionally denotes the term ‘master of ceremonies’; nowadays it also refers to the ‘mic controller’ of modern urban rap culture. Recently, the wiki as the organisation platform of choice has yielded to the free-to-education hosting offered by booking engines such as Eventbrite (eventbrite.com, Citationn.d.).

A vast amount of material is scattered across the many internet sites which store uploaded media files – there are recorded audio podcasts (Delaney Citation2015; Johnston Citation2017; Calderwood in Fryer Citation2015), hundreds of videos on YouTube and Vimeo, thousands of photographs on flickr.com and instagram.com, multimedia slides in many languages (over 900 at slideshare.net, Citationn.d.), and open source code for shared resources that relate directly to TeachMeet (Higgins Citation2015). That list is not exhaustive, merely indicative of what has been uploaded tagged as #teachmeet, demonstrates the liveliness and popularity of the phenomenon, contributing to the motivation to undertake this research.

As for the gap in the literature to date – although the body of formal academic literature directly addressing the topic of TeachMeet is sparse, it is growing; references to TeachMeet in the grey literature are also sparse but on the increase. Reports on the practice of TeachMeet within conference literature are becoming more frequent. A large disparate and widely spread body of extant dynamic social media discourse on TeachMeet exists in a variety of formats. Informal language in the literature reviewed reveals the most common descriptors to include learning, social, participants, professional, sharing, informal, CPD, community, open, network, and unconference. What the research did not discover, locally or globally, is documentation that would denote business, charity, or official organisation status for TeachMeet. Searches revealed no evidence of charter, company rules, application process, mission statement, manifesto, CEO, Board of Directors, staff, nor legal status. Other closely related participant driven organisations e.g. Edcamp (digitalpromise.org) have morphed into highly organised funded foundations. Even TeachMeet’s de facto parent in terms of being a ‘non-organisation’, the Open Space Technology group, operates a central website curated by volunteers (openspaceworld.org/wp2). Although there is some recorded evidence of what happens during TeachMeet events, much of it is randomly scattered and without context; in many respects, to borrow a metaphor which Timperley et al. (Citation2007) uses to describe formal teacher learning, much about the essential elements of TeachMeet remains hidden inside a ‘black box’. This points towards a gap in knowledge which this paper may contribute towards filling.

Survey by observation

The working definition of ‘observation’ adopted for this study, combines elements of the various explanations from experts (Bryman Citation2012; de Walt and de Walt Citation2011; Marshall and Rossman Citation1989; Mullings Citation1984; O’Leary Citation2017; Smart, Peggs, and Burridge Citation2013), is that of a systematic method of collecting first-hand information by observing and describing events in a specific social setting. It is a method in which the main instrument is the observer (O’Leary Citation2017; O’Loughlin and O’Loughlin Citation2015). Planning the observation schedule followed Popper’s idea (in Smart, Peggs, and Burridge Citation2013, p. 6) of using expectations to build a checklist: in this research, the list was compiled by combining knowledge from researchers’ ten years of experience of participation in TeachMeets with descriptions found in wikis and blog posts.

The observation schedule involved overt non-participative observation of fifteen events. Two broad sets of data were being sought – a quantitative ‘stocktake’ of elements in current events using a binary checklist of the presence or absence of elements listed in an inventory compiled in the early days of the research, and documentary notes on activity visible as the event was taking place, as what Guba and Lincoln, (Citation1994) call a chronolog.

Selecting which TeachMeet events to target for the observation schedule had to be pragmatic; the process needed to be opportunistic while remaining purposive. Opportunistic in that knowledge of past events meant the researcher could predict dates of some events with reasonable certainty (e.g. fringe event attached to annual conference); but as the nature of TeachMeet meant that some events are announced only shortly before they occur, planning had to be agile, reactive, and pragmatic in terms of geographical reach. Identifying targets to observe was largely guided by watching social media for events tagged as #teachmeet. It was purposive in that it aimed for the observation schedule to include as wide a variety of events as opportunity would allow.

Data analysis

Finding from analysis of quantitative observation data

The quantitative data was in the form of statistics enumerating details of each event and a binary list denoting the presence or absence of some thirty characteristic elements. These data were entered into a spreadsheet for Descriptive Statistics analysis.

Findings from interpretative phenomenological analysis of qualitative observation data

The qualitative data comprised one continuous document for each event comprising a handwritten timestamped description of actions and interactions observed over the course of the event. The written observation notes were transcribed in preparation for the IPA, in which the researcher employed a ‘double hermeneutic’ cycle of interpreting the notes they have written about the descriptive notes taken during the observation of each event, in order to provide a cross-case interpretative description of the elements observed to be giving life to the TeachMeet event.

In this analysis the researcher was interpreting descriptions of what had been seen and sensed at each event; the interpretation had already begun during the event as part of the observation process, in the choice of one word or phrase to describe a whole room of people rather than specific actions – examples of this are notes about an audience, such as ‘delighted’, ‘listless’, ‘appreciative’, ‘fun, fun, fun!’.

Over and over, in interpreting the observation notes, it became obvious that there was a definite set of factors that seemed to have the potential to affect the demeanour of those in the room and combine to contribute to the flow of the event. Across the range of events these included hospitality, random speaker order (although not often seen the effect was strong when it was there), the hosts’ agility with the technology, diversity in the attendees, the dexterity of the MC(s), the content and context of the presentations, the freedom to move about and to converse at will. Of those factors that were at play within the events, three were identifiable as what an IPA identifies as superordinate, interpreted as such to denote the powerful effect they could be observed to be having. The three superordinate factors at play across the range of events observed were interpreted as (i) the role of the MC as catalyst, (ii) the power of the nanopresentation, and (iii) the social dynamics in the room.

Summary of findings pertaining to the characteristic elements of TeachMeet events

Combining the analyses of all the observation data yielded findings which address the research question What are the Characteristic Elements of TeachMeet? Analysis of the observations revealed elements working not in isolation but as part of complex interactions between them. The characteristic elements of a TeachMeet can be best presented not as a finite list or recipe but as three sets of elements working together:

• Ø At the level of organising, TeachMeets are events taking place out-of-hours evening or weekends, prepared for and attended in a voluntary capacity, with an open invitation for participation;

• Ø In the conditions of the venue, TeachMeet events are characterised by a signature combination of elements. The technical elements of reliable infrastructure and connectivity combined with the human elements of explicitly relaxed rules which encourage freedom of movement and communication both within the room and on social media;

• Ø At the core of each TeachMeet event, what gives life to the event is the unique interplay of three elements,

  • o the catalytic role of the MC

  • o the power of the nanopresentation

  • o the Open Space dynamic of the event.