allows us to work as participatory researchers. The opportunity to work with David and his ninth-grade students filled many needs for us as teachers, also. The opportunity to collaborate with David allowed us to get to know his students, see them work hard to understand the ideas we were discussing and to exhibit that understanding in the projects they created.
We saw this as an opportunity to learn from the best – from an incredibly experienced teacher and from a classroom full of ninth-grade students, each of whom would bring with him or her a unique set of interests, passions, experiences, and exceptionalities. Talking with our pre-service students about the “realities” of K-12 public schools while sitting in a college classroom can feel disingenuous. We were eager to work with and learn from educators and students who understood the realities of schools and classrooms in ways that someone who is never seen in a K-12 school without a visitor’s pass stuck to her shirt could truly understand.
We were also eager to co-plan and co-teach with an educator we highly respected. Teacher collaboration, however, was not something any of the three of us could claim as an area of expertise. Even though we have nearly 80 years of teaching experience amongst us, we have relatively little experience co-planning and co-teaching. This is not surprising given that teacher autonomy seems to be the norm and not the exception (Inger, 1993) in the classroom. Strieker, Gillis, and Zong (2013) contend that it is not just that teachers don’t collaborate, but that they really are not equipped to do so, asserting that collaboration is , “…one of the skills that classroom teachers often lack” (p. 160).
Recognize the Power of the Group
Our students’ perspectives. While the main focus of this work was to engage these students in lessons that would allow them to show the talents we all knew they had, we also wanted to share David’s teaching story with others. Therefore, Sharon and Jenny sought and received IRB permission from our institutions to collect data during the process. This included interviews with some of the students following the completion of the culminating project.
One area of interest for us in the interviews was to find out the students’ perspective of our collaborative teaching. We were interested to learn whether the students noticed a difference in their previous experiences in classes without collaborative teaching. One student stated, “We were more involved [when we had three teachers collaborating]… we had more to say.” This statement was interesting to us in relation to how we interacted with the students differently than if we had been in a classroom alone. At times, we were able to allow more involvement because while one of us was leading the whole group discussion or activity, the other two were able to observe students’ reactions and hear side comments that the “lead” teacher might not have heard. This allowed us to bring these comments and reactions to the whole group’s attention, therefore allowing more students to participate in the conversations.
A second student had similar impressions of the change that came with the collaboration between us. The student stated, “… more students participated including me…I started getting more involved. He [David] would want more different people to answer the questions. And not the same everyday people. He just suddenly called on different people.” This student’s comments support David’s contention that collaboration helps the teachers to differentiate instruction. Often times while one of us was leading the discussion or activity with the whole group another one of us would support other students who wanted to join the conversation by encouraging them to share their thinking when they seemed tentative about doing so. After sharing their thinking with one of us, they seemed more willing to share with the whole group. It
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