Why Collaborate?

1. Why Collaborate?

2. “Why do we have to collaborate? • I know my job. If I do my job and everybody else does his, we will be fine. • The teachers I work with every day know what to do. • I don’t get it why I need to be working with other teachers when I have my own room to worry about.”

3. We Collaborate to: • Gather evidence of student learning; • Discuss strategies to improve student learning; • Implement those idea; • Analyze the effectiveness of the strategies, and; • Apply new knowledge in an improvement cycle.

4. “Quality teaching is not an individual accomplishment, it is the result of a collaborative culture that empowers teachers to team up to improve student learning beyond what any one of them can achieve alone.” • Carroll, 2009

5. “The key to ensuring that every child has a quality teacher is finding a way for school systems to organize the work of qualified teachers so they can collaborate with their colleagues in developing strong learning communities that will sustain them as they become more accomplished teachers.” • National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2003

6. Teacher collaboration in strong professional learning communities improves the quality and equity of student learning, promotes discussions that are grounded in evidence and analysis rather than opinion and fosters collective responsibility for student success. • McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006

7. High performing, high poverty schools build deep teacher collaboration, that focuses on student learning into the culture of the schools. Structures and systems are set up to ensure teachers work together rather than in isolation and “the point of their collaboration is to improve instruction and ensure all students learn.” • Chenoweth, 2009

8. How Do We Maximize Collaboration Time: • Are the Conditions Right for Collaboration to be Successful? • Some teachers prefer working alone. • Some may feel mistrustful of other staff members. • Some may want to protect their “territory” or resist what they may perceive as interference from outsiders. • Some teachers may mistake critical inquiry for criticism and fear that others will point out their instructional shortcomings.

9. Are the Conditions Right for Collaboration to be Successful? • Time for collaboration can be hijacked by personal conversations or a mandate, project or a crisis that suddenly appears. • Groups can underestimate the task of developing collaboration skills. • Groups can fail to develop operating procedures or group norms.

10. Are Our Efforts Aligned With School and District Priorities? • The most effective collaborative meeting time will focus on issues directly connected to the improvement priorities of the school or district. • Our School Improvement Plan (SIP) • Math Focus to close the achievement gap among our minority students.

11. Are We Focused on Improving Student Learning? • Effective professional collaboration in schools focuses on improving practice in order to improve student learning. • Do we look at the students work, discuss the assignment; look at the link between the work and the standards; the expectations for the students learning; etc.

12. Do We Use Data to Inform Our Work? • Data use circumvents the common pitfall of school improvement efforts, such as focusing on activities instead of results, or; • Making and working from assumptions instead of evidence. • Are we using data as as a part of our group norms so that we can overcome the fear that the data will be used to criticize or evaluate our instruction.

13. Do We Share What We Learn? • Truly productive collaboration leads to individual reflection on instructional practice. • It leads to a conversation among collaborators about what they have learned. • It ultimately leads to teachers opening up their classroom and their practices to each other.

14. How Do We (SCJ) Begin to Make The Most of These Collaborative Opportunities?

15. Open the door. • Let go of the idea that you have to teach in ‘your way’ in ‘your space’. Team teach. Invite people in. Share spaces. Learn together.

16. Talk. • Collaborative planning is a constant conversation. • Share what worked and what didn’t. Build on each others’ ideas. • Talk about how you’ll use shared spaces and other resources.

17. Be open-minded. • There is more than one way of doing things. Be open to new ways of thinking and new ways of learning. Learning can look different from the way it did when you went to school.

18. Include your students. • Ensure you are part of their learning community rather than boss of the learning. Ask for feedback. Talk about the process of learning. Listen to their voices. It’s their learning.

19. Make learning trans-disciplinary. • Learning takes place when we connect new knowledge or ideas with what we already knew. The more connections, the stronger the learning. Create opportunities for connections across disciplines.

20. Share. • Share your time, your ideas and your expertise. Share tasks and resources between team members. Share responsibility with your students.

21. Focus on the arts. • Work with the art teacher and the music teacher. • Use the arts to enrich learning in any subject area.

22. Establish an in-school Professional Learning Community. • Learn from and with your Professional Learning Community. It might be your grade level team, teachers of the same subject or, best of all, a mixed group. • Share practice. • Build on each others’ ideas.

23. Establish an online PLC. • Use social media to connect and collaborate with educators anywhere, any time. • Get the most out of Twitter, Facebook, etc. Ask someone to help you get started on building an online network.

24. Principal Leadership: • Among school-related factors that affect student learning; • Our leadership is second only to classroom instruction. • You are the expert at what you do. • Our role is to provide you the opportunity to collaborate with other experts in your field, your peers, to enhance instruction and student learning!