Collaboration 2017-18
October 3, 2017
Today we met as a team with Hilary to reflect on our Children's Rights unit. This was the first year we taught this unit as a full, half trimester unit using the C3 social studies standards. I felt this meeting was an excellent example as our collaboration as a team with the assistance of a learning coach. Each of our team members shared what we thought went well about the unit, as well as what some of the challenges were. The meeting was highly productive, very focused, and extremely helpful. We noted that it was difficult to simultaneously teach and plan the unit. We found some of the standards difficult to tackle so early in the year with our third graders, and also felt the unit required some skills that needed much more practice and attention to be successful such as asking questions, making claims, and doing research. Hilary helped our team to recognize that we could apply what we experienced and learned during this unit to help us plan upcoming units since many of the skills will apply to multiple disciplines throughout the year. Some of us recognized the great service learning potential for the unit as well as our students' enthusiasm for the topic of Children's Rights.
I greatly appreciated Hilary's excellent facilitation of our meeting as well as the thoughtful responses shared by my teammates which helped me to clarify my own feelings about what could be improved in the unit next year, as well as, what we should focus on for upcoming units this year. Here are the notes from our meeting:
Today we met as a team with Hilary to reflect on our Children's Rights unit. This was the first year we taught this unit as a full, half trimester unit using the C3 social studies standards. I felt this meeting was an excellent example as our collaboration as a team with the assistance of a learning coach. Each of our team members shared what we thought went well about the unit, as well as what some of the challenges were. The meeting was highly productive, very focused, and extremely helpful. We noted that it was difficult to simultaneously teach and plan the unit. We found some of the standards difficult to tackle so early in the year with our third graders, and also felt the unit required some skills that needed much more practice and attention to be successful such as asking questions, making claims, and doing research. Hilary helped our team to recognize that we could apply what we experienced and learned during this unit to help us plan upcoming units since many of the skills will apply to multiple disciplines throughout the year. Some of us recognized the great service learning potential for the unit as well as our students' enthusiasm for the topic of Children's Rights.
I greatly appreciated Hilary's excellent facilitation of our meeting as well as the thoughtful responses shared by my teammates which helped me to clarify my own feelings about what could be improved in the unit next year, as well as, what we should focus on for upcoming units this year. Here are the notes from our meeting:
November 15, 2017
After reviewing the results of our co-teaching survey, Leontheen and I enjoyed a reflective conversation about our co-teaching relationship. We wrote the following reflection to celebrate our successes and set goals for improvement.
November 29, 2017
Following the Adaptive Schools Training which some of our team members attended, we decided as a team to increase our efforts to more closely follow some of the Adaptive Schools protocols. Team members volunteered to try out roles such as time keeper, facilitator, and note taker. We agreed that volunteers could rotate fulfilling these roles and later in the year those members who didn't volunteer for a particular role could be given an opportunity after having seen in modeled by other teammates.
I feel that added these built in roles and structures to our team meetings will help to increase our focus and productivity as a team. I believe our meetings have been running smoothly already, but sometimes it has been a challenge to cover all of the topics we need to discuss. Time keeping and having a dedicated facilitator should improve the efficiency of our team meeting.
February 2, 2018
Having worked very closely as a triad during the first half of the school year, I've found both John and Leontheen to be extremely open to ideas, willing to share their viewpoints, and ready to help with anything at anytime. They have been hard working, dedicated, good natured, and perhaps most importantly, funny. Several times throughout the year we've had conversations assessing our effectiveness as a team and established goals which have helped us to function as co-teachers and a triad more effectively. One example, is that we were struggling to find the time to digest all of the dense, packed reading and writing lessons. We often spent most of our triad meetings laboring over a few lessons trying to understand how we could implement each individual lesson. This process was so arduous that it was simply impractical and impossible to prepare for the following week despite spending two, sometimes three planning periods. To remedy this challenge, we decided to divide up the reading and writing lessons. Each triad member was then responsible to read and summarize several sessions(lessons) and enter the summary into a template. Then, as a triad we were able to discuss each session much more easily and the planner has become a very helpful tool when preparing for each day's lessons.
April 3, 2018
One way in which I've practiced collaboration this year, has been as leader of the elementary vertical science team. I have planned agendas and facilitated discussions and helped to organize the sharing of our teams' hard work during the vertical team share meeting. I enjoyed my team working with the science team and found it helpful to identify experiencing the challenge as team members of finding engaging, curiosity igniting phenomenon which could be referred to and applicable throughout an entire unit. This was no easy task for many team members and we chose to spend the bulk of our time seeking phenomenon and sharing our ideas. All members contributed and remained positive despite often feeling drained by the end of the day. Linked below are our agenda, as well as the slideshow of phenomenon we created together. One thing I would do to improve would have been to be more diligent in making sure a note taker was assigned and we recorded our discussions during our meeting. We often became engrossed in either discussing phenomenon or simply researching that we forgot to take notes during some meetings.
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