Chris introduced me to a concept a few months ago called the virtuous circle. According to Chis,

On the web, the virtuous circle is that which is formed inside communities as investment of intellectual capital (information) into the community increases one’s social capital (standing), in a potentially ever-increasing manner.

A Google search turns up several references to the virtuous circle. The Wikipedia definition takes examples of this phenomenon from macroeconomics and business pointing out how economic growth and employee productivity are tied to investment. The opposite of this cycle is something we’ve all heard of - the vicious cycle. Taking a quick peek on the internet I even found The Virtuous Circle Website. From a business perspective, these folks advocate corporate social responsibility as a means toward improving business performance and reputation. They outline a 5 step plan toward achieving these outcomes (which I paraphrase):

  • Defining values;
  • Identifying Impacts;
  • Developing a strategy;
  • Developing a practice;
  • Communicating and building reputation.

This rubric and the virtuous circle have direct relevance to the practice of blogging by educators. What they outline as their process is a good approximation of what teacher research is all about. The positive outcome of investment of intellectual capital by teachers is more than merely an increase in reputation, however, but also a trend toward the refinement of our professional practice. Teachers work in isolation from each other more than any other professional community that I can think of. Blogging by teachers gives us a way to share what we know and what we do. Weblogs also give us a platform from which we can speak to audiences outside of our professional community.

The virtuous circle came to mind for me when I saw Bud’s post about teacher research. This was interesting because I, too, have been using teacher research as a blog category. I started using it when I began a project for Chris’ class last semester. Teacher research was a significant part of my MEd program. I thought it might make a useful link so that Chris could easily follow the progress of my project. Later, I began using teacher research as the category for a plugin (that has a few bugs so I’m not linking to it) that will cross-post from my blog to the teacher research wiki that I began. The wiki is still in its infancy as a resource, and I expect to make more use of it this school year as a place to keep my teacher “field notes.” When I started using the blog category I didn’t know that my blog automatically publishes all of its categories as technorati tags. I was a little surprised when I discovered that I was, and still am, the only blogger to have any blog posts at technorati with a teacher research tag. So it’s pretty cool that Bud decided to use that as a category, too. I’d like to suggest that we (not just the two of us, but any teacher-bloggers) could aggregate our classroom research very simply by pinging technorati with that tag. We ourselves could in this way participate in a powerful instance of an educational virtuous circle devoted to classroom research (a subject that is itself worth writing more about). Thanks for the great post, Bud.

Serendipitous case in point: Bud posted some links to definitions of teacher research. One of them was written by Jessica Willis, who works (or worked) as a graduate assistant in the Reading Endorsement Program at UAF that I also participated in. She did a nice job of summarizing the topic, too, by the way. The site where Jessica published her work is sponsored by the Northern Latitudes Literacy Network, whose mission statement I played a large role in writing since we formed that group while I was in the graduate program at UAF. The domain name for my website is a spinoff from that organization’s name, in fact. So here it is, the virtuous circle coming back around. Teacher bloggers, keep on! We’re participating in the construction of something on the web that is historically unique, and we’re building a resource whether we know it or not.