Figure 2: Gay marriage. Student poster in support of gay marriage.
Recommendations and Roadblocks
What could three experienced teachers learn together about collaborating and co-teaching despite the fact that all three of us learned to teach and spent the greatest amount of time in autonomous classroom teaching situations? We were eager to find out.
Looking back, one thing we learned is we have recommendations for others wishing to collaborate in the way we did, with a K-12 teacher and two university faculty, with the “tough” students, and using a heuristic device as our guide.
Choose Your Partners Wisely
The first thing we recommend you understand is that a bad partnership in the classroom can cause more problems and discomfort than it is worth. Do not let anyone talk you into collaborating with someone you are not sure about or uncomfortable with. Our own personalities, teaching experiences, and expertise helped us create a successful co-teaching situation that allowed us to collaborate effectively. While we each identify ourselves as teachers, each of our careers look different than the others’ careers. We found the differences in our careers to be a strength in our collaboration.
David. I have been a high school English teacher for over 30 years. I have taught a variety of courses in several public school systems and have a two year stint as a teacher in a prison under my belt as well. I am an avid reader, a writer, and a visual artist. Learning and doing the process of creating has helped me with teaching. Art and art history are my passions and I love integrating them into my classes whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Sharon. After teaching in public elementary schools for nearly 20 years, I now teach pre-service teachers. I still read aloud every chance I get, but now my pre-service teachers and I talk about how they might use these books with students, in addition to predicting, making connections, asking questions, etc. The biggest change in my teaching responsibilities is the variety of teaching I get to do. As part of my work, I have the privilege of working in other’s classrooms. While I enjoy most aspects of my job, this is one of the parts I enjoy the most. One such opportunity came about as part of the collaboration described here.
Jenny. Like Sharon and David, I am a teacher. For the past twenty-six years I have been paid to “teach”. Twenty-five of those years have been in the college classroom (primarily working with pre-service teachers), with just one year in a high school classroom. I was much more comfortable with what it meant to be a teacher in my earlier years in the role than I am now; I’m quite certain that’s because I didn’t used to think about it too much. Over time and with experience working with students who have undoubtedly taught me much more
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