much more than I have taught them, I have come to understand that being a good teacher means, first and foremost, being a good learner. Having the opportunity to collaborate with two master teachers whose breadth and depth of experiences in K-12 classrooms far exceed my own put me in the position to learn from two of the very best.
A Work in Progress
We contend that involving collaboration in teaching allows teachers to be more effective and allows our students to have learning experiences that are different than they have experienced before. We recommend you consider your collaborative relationships and projects as works in progress and avoid excessive rigidity or predetermined outcomes, instead let the collaboration get messy. The creative process is often messy; it seldom ever works out the way it is planned.
David’s perspective. Having collaborated over the years, I am convinced that having teachers plan and teach together is a superior way of helping students learn. That said, we know what the barriers are in terms of allowing teachers to work with this format. Institutionalized resistance to the format of co-teaching (collaborating) is real and inhibiting.
However, I would like to make a case for collaboration, rather than dwell on the logistical and often short-sighted reasons why it cannot happen.
Let’s first accept that the act of collaborating is fundamentally better than the traditional way of teaching. Let’s accept that empowering teachers to collaborate with like-minded colleagues is a form of creative and psychological liberation. With that belief in mind, here are the benefits of collaboration for me, as a high school English teacher. Collaboration is more intellectually engaging and therefore, more fun.
Professional development opportunities most often center on using technology and trying to increase student engagement. Perhaps that should be the case. However, in my teaching experience professional development has seldom centered on teacher engagement. It is taken for granted that teachers will gladly carry any load they are given and do so enthusiastically. I disagree, and I can attest to having thousands of conversations with my colleagues over the years that indicate otherwise. Therefore, at least some of so-called professional development should center on things that excite teachers. For me, collaborating with a like-minded colleague fits that bill. It would be easy to take this idea and scoff at it, but that is a huge mistake. Research article after research article indicates that teacher burn-out is real and that teachers feel overwhelmed and buried under the weight of meaningless administrative tasks (Day, Sammons, Stobart, Kington, & Gu, 2007; Gu & Day, 2007; Montgomery & Rupp, 2005; Valli et al., 2007). Teaching and learning, before it is anything else, should at least be fun.
Additionally, collaborating with other teachers affords more possibilities for delivering instruction. Collaboration affords teachers to do things that cannot be done with only one teacher in the room. For example, while one teacher is doing a mini-lesson, the other could have a small group of readers in a circle in another part of the room doing a close reading. Another example is that when students are doing independent writing, both teachers can be active consultants in the room. I love to brainstorm with students when they are writing and having two voices doing this task is way more effective, especially if the class has 30 or more students.
Sharon and Jenny’s perspectives. As university faculty, we try hard to choose research activities and service opportunities that allow us to be in classrooms as much as possible. This allows us to work as participatory researchers. The opportunity to work with
32