Our guest post today is from Shelly Sanchez Terrell, an English language teacher to children and adults in Germany and the VP of Educator Outreach for Parentella. Her passion for improving learning for children worldwide drives her to organize free online conferences and forums for educators to pass their passion on. These award winning projects include #Edchat, The 30 Goals Challenge, The Reform Symposium E-Conference, #ELTChat, and the Virtual Round Table E-Conference.

Passion: PASS It ON

My experience with passion has shown me that passion is often consuming as in your thoughts running wild with ideas keeping you up in the wee hours. It’s lying in bed with your mind planning, organizing, contemplating, reevaluating till you have to get up and produce. Passion is action because you have to release the insurmountable creativity and energy boiling within you. It’s often an unedited you with your thoughts on paper napkins, sketches in journals, or audio recordings of deep thoughts.

Passion is infectious. It spreads. When I feel uninspired I just have to listen to a song, watch a TED Talk, read a Seth Godin book, or talk with my Passionate Learning Network (PLN), and my thoughts are set back into motion.  Here’s one of my favorite passionate speakers who has inspired me and over 13 million others with his message!

Passion Must be Shared

What I’m sharing isn’t new. You know what passion is because you have your own experience with passion or have been inspired by a person’s passion. What you may not realize, though, is that passion must be shared in order for you to really experience passion’s potential. Passion has the ability to change minds and inspire action. Only when your passion impacts another human being do you feel its intensity. Gather a group of passionate individuals and you create movements, make history, change lives, transform the world, and transform yourself.

Education and Passion

In education we need a gathering of educators, parents, students, and community leaders passionate about learning as an antidote to the boredom, mistrust, stress, and blame raging through education systems worldwide. Daily schools have the opportunity to spark a passion for learning but often desensitize children.

We need passionate educators to begin passing the passion on. Our passion must become viral. In order to do this we must gather and spread the message and impact others like Nick Vujicic does in the video above. Imagine if all our students are impacted by our passion daily. Imagine if all the children that entered school found their passion and ran with these passions like Ana, the student blogger, is doing in this previous passion submission by Franki Sibberson.

What’s Your Movement and Message?

I think social networks and online educator communities with passionate individuals are part of the solution. I believe if all educational stakeholders are surrounded by the passionate individuals in our online communities, they will feel inspired. We need schools where inspired educators help students find their passions and explore these passions even if it is passion for art, music, a sport, or subject.

Therefore, in March 2010 I asked fellow passionate friends to help me create the We Connect creative commons video and wiki.  Over 50 parents, teachers, administrators, and kids from over 12 countries participated in providing short video messages of why they connect online. All I did was combine the submissions and add the background music. Various concoctions of this video have been presented to audiences worldwide in order to inspire educators to participate in online communities.

Who will you inspire? What movements will you create? How will you pass your passion on?

** The title of this post, Pass it On, comes from one of the We Connect submissions by a student named Hannah Hardy.

Shelly is @ShellTerrell on Twitter. And you can connect with her on her blog: Teacher Reboot Camp.

Photo on Flickr by Grzegorz

We are tweeting nuggets of the conversation using the hashtag #passiondriven