LinkedIn Answers: Worth your time to read?

Is LinkedIn a good source of professional development for teachers? Recently, I started receiving emails from LinkedIn called Expert Answers. I’ve been ignoring them for a while but maybe it’s time I didn’t? What can we learn from the crowd at LinkedIn?

Background: Using AI and the LinkedIn Community (probably questions copied from group posts) LinkedIn produces a short blurb called Collaborative Articles with a question and tips for teachers to resolve the question. I got emails about two questions:

1. How do you avoid burnout as a reflective teacher?

2. How can you teach English language learners more effectively?

Under the question, in the left sidebar is a short introduction to the question and a series of tips that teachers can use. These tips were probably taken by AI from our group posts, but there remains the possibility the tips came from other websites. There is no attribution to the source of the tips, so their validity can be seen as questionable. On the right side there are responses to the tips from LinkedIn members. At the bottom is a section for further ideas contributed by members. At the very bottom of the page is a section of related articles on the general topic (in our case, teaching), and the usual assortment of learnable skills in buttons. The layout seems focused on readability with a slight touch of style. But is this feature worth your time? Is the AI giving you decent advice? What about the responders- are they of any help? Let’s break down two of their attempts here.

 How do you avoid burnout as a reflective teacher?

In the posting here, the AI breaks down the advice into 5 sections: Define your purpose, Set realistic expectations, Seek feedback and support, Use a variety of tools and methods, and Schedule and prioritize your time. The AI produces a blurb of about a paragraph on the advice listed in the section topic, and members respond to the blurb on the right. I found the advice from the AI to be fairly boilerplate and broad. In the tools section, it wrote “Reflection can be done in many ways, using different tools and methods, such as journals, portfolios, surveys, rubrics, checklists, or video recordings to document and analyze your teaching.” Well, yes, that is true, but collecting that info and analyzing it can be very time-consuming. A pity that the app didn’t mention any specific tools/templates that would be useful in reflective teaching. The respondents to the LinkedIn article didn’t mention any specific tools either, so I can’t quite fault the app for it. It would have been nice to have an example; a “see if this survey would be helpful for you” approach. 

An example of a good AI blurb was in the Define your purpose section. The AI poses some good questions like “How do you want to grow and improve?” that should be answerable by all teachers. Can it be answered by all teachers? That’s a difficult question because teaching in ESL isn’t a climbable pyramid. You can become a head teacher, but you can’t run the department. You can win the top teacher of the year award for your institution but that doesn’t mean you’ll get a raise. The “Practice self-care” was also a good section, but the best advice came from fellow teachers responding to the blurb.

Fundamentally speaking, the blurbs the AI presented were only slightly helpful while the advice from teachers felt more helpful. Keep in mind that not all the respondents were ESL teachers and some of their advice is based on their experience in regular teaching. Overall, I found the article to be slightly helpful.

How can you teach English language learners more effectively?

I found this article to be far more useful and clearer than the first article. The AI produced better examples with much clearer objectives. For example, in the section “Create a supportive environment” it mentions the use of scaffolding, a common yet often overlooked teaching tactic. The other blurbs mention a few things but don’t provide a solid example, but it’s not like we can’t go to Google and type in “graphic organizers for ESL note-taking” to find something on our own. The responses were also a bit more helpful, since the vast majority of respondents are teachers and even a few are ESL teachers. Conan Magruder had a good insight on the topic of cooperative learning and scaffolding, especially how cooperative learning doesn’t help all students. Samrat B also had a good tip on using effective feedback with adult learners.

I think this article shows how AI-generated content can start conversation and be of use. At the very least, it can point you to responses that are far more detailed and specific than the blurbs.

Final verdict

The LinkedIn emails can be helpful if you’re searching for ideas on a problem in your teaching experience, though you’ll find the blurbs to be less helpful than the responses. I found it to be more helpful for teachers with much less experience than me, as well as those with more flexible learning environments and teach their students more than once a week. If you are a LinkedIn member and get these in your mailbox, I suggest you check the title and delete if you don’t think it will be helpful.