Post 9: Collaboration

 As I am taking PME 811 - Innovation & Teaching, I am also taking PME 810 - Integration Planning and Assessment. Something that is of interest to me is how do schools, teachers and districts collaborate?

In my other course I am learning about Professional Learning Communities. I of course have been a part of Pinterest for a long time and love all the different ideas one can get when logged in. I am also a part of Conscious Teaching on Facebook, which is a group that I discovered when I went away on a Pro-D conference two years ago. 

So, I never realized until recently that Professional Learning Communities are a great resource if your district/school does not allocate collaboration time.

I have done some research asking friends and colleagues who come from other districts, what it was like in their experience and how does collaboration work? It seems it is either driven from the district level which has to be allocated by the principal or it just comes from the principal's allocation and is something they value. 

It really is a shame that it has to rely on the two big stakeholders in order for their to be good collaboration. I am not saying that good collaboration can only be from allocated time, but at least it is a starting point. I new a principal who valued it but once they moved on, the next principal never allocated collaboration time in. 

I think back to COVID and I would say that when we were teaching from home and online, it was actually easier to invite collaboration with colleagues. Being an Inclusion Support Teacher, I was in charge of Childcare Worker and two EA's as we were a very small school. However, I knew how much they valued the time, and it was really good collaboration that we were getting out of the meetings, so I was more than happy to keep the meetings going, we often would meet twice a week if we could over zoom.

I think more now than ever it is important to have collaboration time, as we are moving away from teaching one dimensional and going into UDL and learner or interest based learning. 

I am tying collaboration into curriculum because I think this is how we can get new ideas and resources on how to implement curriculum and assessment, we can talk as a team how we want to do rubrics and make them in line with our school goals.

I hope that collaboration is valued more and people put the time in. 

I wonder, how does your school or district value collaboration time?