How 11 Teachers Became 150,000: The Story Behind the Edcamp* Community
*Probably the most engaged community I’ve ever worked with.
This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into extraordinary communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a small strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
If you enjoyed this post, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more stories from extraordinary communities.
Over the last few weeks, my partner in crime Kevin Huynh and I had the opportunity to work with Edcamp.
If you’re not a teacher, you might not have heard of Edcamp. But if you are a teacher, you probably have (or should!).
Raw enthusiasm and some serious people power helped Edcamps spread to all 50 states and over 30 countries. To date, more than 150,000 educators have participated in Edcamps. One teacher we interviewed had attended over 40. (I haven’t been to 40 of anything!)
What is an “Edcamp”?
Edcamp events follow a very simple template.
Local educators meet on weekends in school classrooms. There are no speakers, only conversation topics that the attendees drum up together when they arrive.
The insights that emerge from Edcamp conversations get passed across districts and disciplines — from private schools to public schools, from computer science teachers to band instructors.
Two insights stuck with me from my time with Edcamp:
- The Edcamp founders “sparked” a flame. They identified a need and offered a first stab at a solution.
- Their spark spread far and wide because out in the world there was “kindling”—kindling born of frustrations in the broader teaching community.
Sparking the flame.
One of the folks Kevin and I interviewed from Edcamp was a teacher named Ann Leaness. She helped host the very first Edcamp in Philadelphia in 2010.
Ann and a few other educators dreamed up the idea for Edcamp after attending an “unconference” for coders called Barcamp. Inspired by their experience, they decided to organize a similar gathering for educators and tweeted out the details in hopes that more folks would join them.
One hundred people showed up to the first Edcamp, some driving from as far away as Maryland.
That first Edcamp was the spark for what would become a much, much bigger fire. Soon enough another event sprouted up in Virginia, then NYC. Now it’s a movement.
Lighting the kindling.
Great communities like Edcamp start with a spark—a small group of people create something new and invite others to get involved. But how far something spreads from its initial spark depends on if there’s kindling out in the world.
Does a broader group want what that initial group created? Is there an untapped but widespread desire for it?
In 2010 when Edcamp started, the Bush Administration’s “No Child Left Behind” was in full effect. Teachers were being evaluated excessively on student test scores, and the media was critical of the teaching profession — in particular of tenured teachers.
That left passionate educators like Ann feeling disheartened. Edcamps created a space for teachers like her to meet in person and find pride in their profession again.
Edcamps also flipped another pain point for teachers on its head: Professional Development (PD).
Typically, school districts mandate that teachers sit through mind-numbing PD sessions to stay certified. At Edcamps, teachers actively participated in their PD as a clan. Instead of passively listening to generic Powerpoint presentations, they took ownership of their personal growth.
The Edcamp founders felt both of those frustrations themselves—the negative sentiment about education and the pains of prescribed PD. That’s why they started Edcamp for the Philadelphia community. But they couldn’t have imagined just how many other people their solution would resonate with. Turning those two simple pain points on their head was cathartic for hundreds of thousands of educators the world round.
If the design of Edcamp was artful in its simplicity, the need for Edcamps was undeniable. The kindling was there waiting to be lit.
To learn more about the Edcamp Foundation, visit their website and follow them on Twitter.
Special thank you to Jacob Krupnick for letting us use his photographs of a recent Edcamp in Brooklyn.
This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into extraordinary communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a small strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
If you enjoyed this post, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more stories from extraordinary communities.
