Teacher Collaboration: Matching Complementary Strengths

Click here to read this entire informative article about collaboration from edutopia.

At Wildwood IB World Magnet School, in Chicago, teacher collaboration fosters a supportive professional culture, lessens teacher conflict, and provides students with schoolwide best practices.

Spreading Best Practices Schoolwide

Teacher collaboration at Wildwood helps to diffuse conflicting adult dynamics, fosters a collaborative culture that puts the students' learning first, and turns a teacher's best practice into a schoolwide best practice.

Teacher collaboration is a top priority at Wildwood. Here is what works for them:
•Teachers share work products on a common drive.
•Teacher preparation time is aligned by grade level, creating grade-level teams.
•Protocols and agendas are set up to help conflicting personalities learn to appreciate each other and work well together.

"So often we hold all the good things we do to ourselves because it becomes kind of a like a competition," says fourth-grade teacher Karl Wiedegreen. "We should be helping each other, and stop holding in all the things that we do great, and share it with others so that they can make those same gains within their classroom."

How It's Done

Virtual Collaboration: Share Work Products on a Common Drive

By sharing work products on Google Drive, Wildwood teachers know what their colleagues outside of their collaboration group are doing. They also know how they're doing it. This enables them to replicate and/or get ideas from each other.
Even without meeting in person, they have instant access to work products, like:

• Unit plans
• Lesson plans
• Curriculum maps

Schedule Time for Collaboration

"Teacher collaboration at Wildwood is really intentional," says fourth-grade teacher Karl Wiedegreen. "It's intentional with the common preps we have. We have grade-level meetings. We have opportunities when we want to come in the morning to work together, stay in the afternoon and work together."

Making time for that collaboration is often a burden that falls to the school's leadership. Mary Beth Cunat, Wildwood's principal, plays a large role in scheduling time for teachers. "A principal must do what it takes to remove the obstacle of 'too much to do' and 'not enough time,'" says Cunat.
Leveraging the master schedule to ensure common preparation time between her teachers is one way that Cunat helps make collaboration work for them.

"When we have our preps," says Wiedegreen, "they're aligned to each other so that those grade-level teams can meet and work together on anything that we're doing in our units. We can look together and say, 'OK, what are we working on? What are we doing? Are we in the same area? Are we at the same pace?'"

"When teachers are able to collaborate and have planning time during the day, especially built into the schedule, you have somebody there, a partner that has your back and will be there --because teaching is quite difficult," says fourth-grade teacher Georgia Melidis. "It's very involved. We wear many hats, and you need somebody there that really understands you, and supports you, and is there sometimes to vent to, or to ask to help problem solve."

Cunat works in other ways to support her teachers in making time for collaboration:

• She provides a substitute teacher for half days once per quarter to ensure collaborative work.
• She provides extra time for peer-to-peer observation.
• She offers to create an agenda for teacher preparation once per week.
• She encourages her teachers to attend conferences, school site visits, and professional development together.
• She invites her teams to share out at school-wide staff meetings.
• She encourages all staff to leave their doors open, fostering a transparent, collaborative environment.

"One of the biggest challenges of any school is when people go into their rooms and close their doors," says Cunat. "That's the way teaching used to be, right? So you have to begin making it not OK to close your door."