Teacher Collaboration: Spreading Best Practices School-Wide (Transcript)

Karl: When we work together, we are able to create something great for our students. That collaboration creates an amazing school environment.

Mary Beth: One of the biggest challenges of any school is people go into their rooms and they close their doors and that’s the way teaching used to be, right? So you have to begin making it not okay to close your door.

Karl: So often we hold all the good things we do to ourselves because it becomes kind of like a competition.

Georgia: But when you’re able to collaborate with your colleagues, it really affects the students’ education.

I’m not sure we’re having the exact same idea.

Mary Beth: In terms of building a team, you have to think about where are the strengths.

Georgia: Our principal saw that I have this strength and he has that strength, so when she put us together, it was hard at first.

Okay, there are differences in opinion.

Karl: Yeah, big time.

The truth is, is that we didn’t really like each other.

Georgia: Because we were very different people, different styles.

Karl: But when we started working together, we were both passionate about working, we were both willing to put the time in.

Mary Beth: They started talking to each other. “Well, what text are you using? How are you making that connection? How are you going to run your writing conference?” IT was like the conversation of the month.

Karl: We’re both understanding that the main goal as a teacher is to get those students to learn.

Georgia: Okay, got it.

Karl: Got it?

Teacher collaboration at Wildwood is really intentional. In our schedule, when we have our preps, they’re aligned to each other.

Georgia: I wanted to also talk to you about our current budgeting activity. Do you think they’re ready to take a whole four day, three night vacation with the thousand dollar budget?

Karl: We didn’t do this last year as far as doing the activity. We did the questions, we did everything like that, but we didn’t do the activity.

Georgia: We didn’t prep them as much.

Karl: Right. That whole area in that project.

Georgia: They struggled.

Karl: Was what they struggled on.

Georgia: Remember, because last year we also had a few issues with the itemized lists, that they weren’t being specific enough with the costs.

Karl: What we can do to help them out with that is like every morning, we can have a little mini activity that will have budgeting that they have to do. Then moving on into the big activity, which is this vacation.

Georgia: Yeah, perfect, I like that, because it’s just a little bit, we’re building every day, so that’s a good idea.

That relationship, when you can bounce ideas off of each other, it’s to the benefit of the students.

Karl: We should be helping each other out and stop holding in all the things that we do great, and sharing it with others so that they can make those same gains within their classroom. And that’s really what’s important about it, is that the collaboration creates that equality for all students.

Schools That Work

Wildwood IB World Magnet School