Teacher collaboration

Watch! Edutopia. (2015, August 26).?Teacher collaboration: spreading best practices school-wide?[Video]. YouTube.?https://youtu.be/85HUMHBXJf4

What stood out most for me is teacher collaboration (Edutopia, 2015).

Listening to the teachers share so openly the fears they had and how they were overcome by aligning to the passion for teaching that connected them was quite a change maker for me. I would like to try it out.

I loved the camaraderie that emerged among the teachers while working together. It is the greatest kind of professional relationship and I have always hungered for the same. I did experience it in short spurts but my inability to form relationships always came in the way.

Kids collaborate so beautifully (Skooler, 2020) using strategies. So why can’t teachers do the same for the sake of helping learning improve and also be role models for the kids? The structure exists for the same (Tran, 2015) but most of the times, running from one class to the other, the energy for the same diminishes. Hence, we need some clear processes that can help.

(Tran, 2015) talks of most schools having a clear vision that is hung on the walls at the reception, but it does not seep to the teachers. This could be for the jargon is hard or because creating a vision statement does not involve the teachers.

During CIS accreditation for our school, the entire staff had analyzed the vision statement in small groups and then their ideas were collated for the central team to work on. Finally, a statement came up that was simple and had influence of the entire staff. We found that the teachers related better to the statement post such an exercise.

?(Tran, 2015) also talks if exploring individual ideas to be aware of alignment and non-alignment of the teachers around the thought of teacher collaboration. It is not easy to open one’s classroom doors, especially when one has been used to keeping them closed for one’s whole teaching life! Imaging someone who has been teaching for 40 years in a closed classroom to suddenly open the doors for the policy makers decided so! It would lead to chaos.

Individual ideas need space to come forward where a ‘Venn diagram’ (Tran, 2015) of aligned and non-aligned ideas can emerge.

If teacher collaboration is a vision, the meaning of the same needs to be an iterative staff exercise and not the policy makers.        

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