You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Power of Collaboration’ category.
Terry Amaya is a history teacher at Giano Intermediate School. When this story was told she was a seventh grade math and science teacher at Giano.
It’s been nice to have had a chance to talk with teachers from other schools at the district-wide meetings arranged by Ball. I taught in elementary before this year, and the only teachers we ever communicated with during workshop trainings were from elementary. So it was really interesting to hear the perspective of high school and middle school teachers, and what problems they were dealing with. A lot of their issues were similar to what we were dealing with at an elementary level, like motivating students.
We tried to come up with ideas of how to motivate students, but first we discussed why this lack of motivation exists. What is it that happens to the students? Why do they lose their motivation to learn? What kinds of experiences can we create for them to become motivated? One of the high school teachers felt that some programs were made too available for the kids. For example, the Mt. Sac Community College program that helps Nogales High School students catch up with classes. They’re allowed to take night classes when they fail a subject at school. So we thought, “The students know they can make up the class so they relax about doing well at the high school, and then later try to make it up during the summer or in the evening.” I thought that there are probably many students who actually need to re-take those classes, but I could also see how some would rely on that opportunity. The next time the teachers get together, I would love to hear about some strategies for motivating kids that other teachers have tried that I can take back to my class right away and use.
It’s been interesting and beneficial working with different people. You don’t realize that there are so many other people with so many ideas. And that’s what I’ve enjoyed – talking to others and seeing the excitement in their eyes about what they want and plan on doing. It motivates me to say, “Okay, I’m going to try this.”
Word cloud created at wordle.net.
Lee Austin is a sixth grade teacher at Killian Elementary School.
My last meeting with Ball was a really good learning experience for me. We watched the video about the artist from a Scandinavian country [Andrew Goldsworthy] who was putting together rocks on the beach to make a nature structure that would eventually be torn back down. My first reaction was that this art was pointless because it just gets destroyed. But then when we discussed the movie in our groups, the people in my group pointed out that the movie shows the building up of something and the learning from mistakes.
What the artist was trying to convey is that even though he was frustrated by the process, he was learning and progressing every time he rebuilt the structure. The structure got larger, and the artist was becoming more competent. He said, “That’s my art. I’m getting to know my stones better.” His goal was to make it look like some kind of a conceptualized idea that he had. He said, “I would like it to be this big, this tall, this wide,” but it kept falling in on him. He built the structure like four or five times. I don’t think he ever completed what he wanted, but it just shows that even though our goals may be higher than our achievements, we can still see growth even though we fall short of our goals.
There was an analogy that could be drawn from the movie. Building the structure was like working with your students. You learn to work with whatever stones you have and build the best you can. It’s very much like getting to know your students better even though all of them don’t necessarily build the house that you had anticipated or you don’t always get the cohesiveness of your goals. The structure getting torn down is similar to your class getting rebuilt ever year. Each year you get a whole new set of stones and you have to try to build your model again. You have breakdowns and trials and tribulations, but as you get to know the stones better, you can make a better structure out of it. Then hopefully the structure is better in June than it was in September.
I can see that analogy now, but I didn’t get it initially. My understanding of the video was brought out by the other people. So I think it’s important that people have the opportunity to interact because you can see so many different things from different perspectives. It helped me see a more positive message from that video than what I had understood on my own. I would have never gotten that in a traditional meeting where I would have just sat down, watched the video, smiled and said, “Thank you,” and then walked out the door.
I appreciate the fact that we have an opportunity to interact collegially for we don’t usually get to do that. I am sure you have heard many times that teachers are such isolated professionals who get very little chance to interact. With the Ball Foundation, we have gotten the opportunity to really discuss and collaborate on our thoughts and ideas without a lot of pressure or time constraints. It’s nice to interact with people that I have known for years and find out that some people still have real positive attitudes towards school and are looking on the bright side rather than the dark side of life.
I also shared the story of the film with my students, and like I am doing right now with you, I did the same thing with the kids. I said, “I went to a meeting and here is what I saw. I got to see that the point of this film was that we can learn from each other, and that sometimes, even if we don’t understand something, if we work together, we might be able to help each other understand it.” The students responded positively. They got it, they understood it. I’ve got a really good group of sixth graders, and we’ve done a lot of collaborative work together doing our science lab investigations. The kids are learning to work together and they can see the value of all that interaction.
Word cloud created at wordle.net.
Gayle Clements is a resource specialist teacher at Blandford Elementary School.
I started with the Ball Foundation with the very first meeting that they had, so I’ve worked with them for a while. Going into this work originally, I thought, “I don’t know how this is going to help me or what it’s going to do for my program.” But in the last six months, I can really see where we are headed and how this work will affect us. It’s like a little curtain has come up, and I said, “Aha! I can see where this is going.” So now it’s a little easier for me to get my feet underneath me and say, “I can do this. I want to do this.”
For example, at the last two literacy meetings, it was very interesting talking to some of the other teachers about what everyone was interested in and what communities of practice people wanted to join. But, at one point, I was speaking to another RSP teacher about the different ideas and different groups, and we both realized that a lot of what was being discussed didn’t pertain to Special Education. Some of it did, but overall the topics weren’t particularly useful to us. However, as we were talking about it, we thought that this was the perfect opportunity for us to create our own community of practice with other resource teachers. We are all very much out of touch with each other, but feel a real need for coming together. So the other RSP teacher and I thought, “Maybe if we started a community of practice – and not just for us, but opened it up to whomever – it would be something that would pertain to us and be a really good way to go.”
We came up with some topics that we’d like to pursue, including interventions for our students, differentiation in the curriculum, the different accessibility for students within our program within the regular classroom, and working with General Ed classroom teachers. We’d like to include regular classroom teachers in this community of practice for their input on how to best reach our students through the regular classroom and through our program.
It wasn’t my original intention to make a community of practice. I went to these literacy meetings to see what this was all about, and I thought, “Do I have time for this? Is this going to be practical for me? I don’t think so.” But when I saw how this could be relevant for Special Ed, I changed. I wasn’t willing to participate in the networks before, but now I think, “I’ll go ahead and do this.”
The possibilities are amazing. I’ve been around for a very long time, and things come in, things go out – it’s all just new labels. But these literacy meetings have given me a sense of purpose as to where we’re going as a district, along with the definite use and practicality of what Ball is bringing to the district. This is a totally different approach, and I think it’s something for the future that will work really well. A lot of times, things are mandated or decided upon at the district office, and then everyone has to try it. There’s no cross discussion laterally or horizontally. So often teachers think, “What else are they going to give us to do?” But by using the format of the communities of practice, we can pull out and work with the best practices. And by it not being mandated by the district, there will be a lot more buy-in.
Word cloud created at wordle.net.
Lydia Dzama is a third grade teacher at La Seda Elementary School.
When I received the invitation from the Ball Partnership to participate in a conversation about literacy, I wasn’t quite sure what it was about. I was somewhat confused because I wasn’t sure what my role was. I’ve had a lot of training with second language learners, and I’m considered an expert and lead teacher in the district on working with second language learners – and now here was a discussion on literacy.
So I went to Rincon Intermediate with no idea what to expect. For me, the experience of coming in and sitting down, the way they had set up the room with these tables, the expectation that everybody will have a voice, everyone will be speaking – it was completely different. I was very much used to sitting and being talked to, never having an opportunity to express my opinion.
As I was sitting there, I was looking around and wondering, “I don’t know most of the people in here. Is this an elementary school function?” I’m seeing office managers, PTA people, junior high teachers, high school teachers. Again, I’m very curious about what’s going on here because this is not the way we do things in the district. We’re normally very separated – “My compartment, your compartment, let’s not mix.” This was unique.
So, sitting at a table, I had the opportunity to have a long conversation with secondary teachers, and hear them express their frustrations about students. Mind you, I’m not saying they were negative – it wasn’t “the teachers before didn’t do their jobs.” These teachers just felt like, “We’re trying so hard to help these students and we don’t feel we have the strategies in place.”
So in the conversation, I told them about my GLAD training. GLAD is Guided Language Acquisition Design. It’s a program that is specially designed to help second language learners acquire vocabulary, while at the same time learning their academic content in a way that is fun and easy for them to remember – poems, chants, songs, pictures. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun. The secondary teachers were saying, “How come we can’t have that?” And I told them that I thought the person who had trained me in GLAD also trained high school teachers.
Then the secondary teachers shared a program at Giano Intermediate where second language learners get pulled out and really focused on in order to help them. I was thinking, “That’s also a really nice thing that you’re doing that I wasn’t aware of.”
So during this articulation that was happening between me as an elementary teacher and them as secondary teachers made me realize that we have the same problems, same concerns, and same passion about our students. It wasn’t negative. We all wanted to know, “What else can I do?” I love being in a group that is proactive and not negative – where we’re putting our heads together to share ideas and strategies and there’s more openness. There was bonding going on. People were saying, “You can come visit or e-mail me or just call if you want more information.” This kind of meeting was something that had never happened in this district on such a huge scale.
I walked away from the meeting still not sure exactly what was going to happen, wondering if this was going to continue. You know how some things develop, and then they’re dropped. At least I came away with an appreciation for conversation with others, and the realization that we’re so separated in this district. But we did continue the conversations. And now it is such a natural thing to be mixed up. You’ve got your high school teacher, your office manager, and there is no awkwardness. Everybody is confident that what they have to say is important, that it’s valued, and that everybody is listening to what we have to say. The biggest outcome of all this work is the collaboration.
With the restructuring that the district is doing, we’re going to have a loss of resources and we’ve got to be willing to share our expertise. And that’s what I’m seeing – this building from within the ranks of teachers. The principals aren’t saying this is what you’re going to do. It’s now coming from the teachers when we see a problem. “How can we solve the problem?” We’re going to help each other out – and that’s what I mean by collaboration. I don’t think this happened prior to the Ball Partnership because we had never taken the time to sit and talk.
I like that Ball was very clear about letting us know what they were about and what they were trying to do. They weren’t going to give us money. It wasn’t like, “Here’s your money. Go ahead.” They really wanted us to figure it out for ourselves. And that’s what this has all been about. It’s not about a school site or the elementary division; it’s about the whole district. It’s about all the students. It’s also about the teachers and the support and strategies that we need, and the opportunity to have our voices heard. Starting from that first meeting – that to me had the most impact.
I have a lot of confidence that we can withstand this restructuring trajectory. I would like to think that every school site will tap into their teacher experts. There is now this sense of respect of each other as colleagues, along with the respect to listen to each other. What Ball has done has really taken people from behind closed doors. That closed-door classroom that is across the nation could become a more open door, more transparent; to then start having those conversations about our changing belief system, and turning it all around to truly believe that all children can succeed.
Word cloud created at wordle.net.
Katie Elder was a Staff Development Specialist when she told this story. She is currently on medical leave.
The opportunities that the Ball Foundation has given us to collaborate with each other have made a difference for me. When I chose to become a high school teacher many years ago, one thing that was interesting to me was the solitary nature of the work. I could go into the classroom, close my door, and do my thing, all by myself. It was like that for years and years of my teaching. One of the things I’ve learned through the work with Ball is that not only do I now see the need for collaboration, I also recognize that two heads are better than one. Because more people are involved, there’s more opportunity for creative thinking and moving projects forward. This work has also changed me as a person. I now want that kind of collaborative working relationship with people. I look for opportunities to bring other people into the conversation, to encourage bigger thinking and more ideas and more avenues to move forward.
As a staff development specialist, I’m responsible for the implementation of some of the district staff development initiatives. For instance, my partner and I conduct workshops on dynamic lessons and classroom management for brand new teachers in the fall of their first teaching year. We also do teaching training in the spring for all the second year teachers. The work with Ball has changed the way that I work with these teachers. My thinking has opened up about how our programs might look and how we could do things differently.
To give you an example of this change – my partner and I implemented a very different model this year by making the whole new teacher program more collaborative. We asked the teachers what they wanted to work on, and we actually created the curriculum based on their needs. The teachers could choose from topics like discipline, assessment, or differentiation. The workshops were well-attended even though they weren’t mandatory.
Before, the program was dreaded which was partly the state’s fault. It was very form-heavy. The teachers felt like they were jumping through hoops, checking off boxes that really didn’t have the intended effect of improving their instruction. Now they feel empowered to use different models of professional development, like maybe go watch another teacher teach. Or find someone who’s good at something that they don’t feel as good at and collaborate with that person.
The teachers love this model. We’ve gotten great response. The idea that they have choice and that they actually have a say in developing the choices has made everything better. Everything feels more open. I’m sure that it’s not a coincidence that we’re working with Ball and having these collaborative kinds of conversations.
Word cloud created at wordle.net.
