We are all here as learners, and the purpose of sharing our thinking here is to support one another and grow as professionals. Quite often we are isolated in our individual schools, and these courses may be one of the few ways to build connections and community around our own professional growth. Therefore we ask you to take these conversations seriously and contribute in a way that supports your learning and the learning of others.

In order to build a trusting and safe space for professional growth, as a participant in any course, you understand that specific identifying private information you learn about the other participants and their colleagues, students, and school environments is to be kept confidential.

In addition, you understand that you should also keep confidential any identifying information about school-based colleagues, students, parents or community members, that is shared with you within the course. This means that you will keep all observations, documentation, conversations, information from forum discussions, private messages, private learning communities, virtual conversations etc. gathered by yourself or others in your course(s) confidential.

When you are sharing in our forums, this space is a recognized confidential and private community. Your information will not be shared with others outside of the Eduro Learning online courses community of participants. As a participant, you may choose to refer to your school-based colleagues, students, parents or community members by a pseudonym or initials (to protect their privacy even within our forums).

You are welcome to share the issues, challenges and strategies that come up in this course in public spaces, on your blog, in Twitter chats, in personal reflections, as long as no identifying characteristics of individuals are shared. We often use the phrase “praise locally, criticize globally” when thinking about sharing challenges or issues in public spaces. You may want to address a challenge at your school, but instead of identifying the school (yours or anyone else’s), you can say “in many schools…” or “often times…” rather than specifically identifying the actual school, person or place.

You understand that specific identifying private information can be appropriately shared in this class, but those specifics should not be shared outside of your coursework. The nature of our work as educators and the connectedness of school communities (particularly international schools) around the world means that we may come across the very people that are discussed in these forms. You understand that it is expected that you will be mindful and protective of the professionals and respectful of the trust they have given you.