Transparency is not a four letter word

A few days ago, Cincinnati Reds manager Bryan Price went on a profanity laced tirade with a reporter about the amount of information he released about an injured player. His main point centered around how that information could be a help to his team because he knew it could hurt his team by giving opponents information that may alter their game plan.  How much information should be revealed to the press and what information is really necessary? 

His concern was basically about transparency and social media has made everything transparent.

But just because the information is easily shared does that mean we are entitled to it?

Within the last 5-10 years, social media and the Internet have made a long-time isolated profession of teaching much more open and transparent. In the past, we taught in "our" classrooms and worked with "our" students and were very protective of both. It wasn't practical or possible to get information out very often. So we worked with them over time and released "reports" every so often. Now those reports can go out every week, or every day, or every hour, or even real-time.  But how often do we need to?

There are so many positives to sharing information about what we do in the classroom and how it is done. There are just as many ways to share it and so many incredible people doing so constantly. It's a win-win for teachers and therefore, most likely, their students.

How much that happens with students in the high school classroom should be shared and how frequently? Everything? Do we give students a chance to work things out on their own with teacher help first? Those discussions have been ongoing in my building for quite some time with the various sides all having one thing in common - what's best for the students. That makes the answers as varied as the students themselves.