Example of a “4” Response

TO: All Teachers
FROM: Mr. Roe
RE: Collaboration Among Teachers
DATE: January 30, 2007

Teamwork is a valuable tool for reaching shared educational goals. Through collaboration, teachers can share their ideas, develop new strategies on working with challenging students, educational problems can be solved, and evaluation of new techniques can be completed. In this memo I will discuss why collaboration is important, how we as teachers can collaborate, and challenges we may face in the process.

By working together, teachers will be able to assure parents that their child is being taught the same information as another student in the same grade by teaching the curriculum simultaneously. This allows for education to be fair and if a student needs to be placed in another classroom, there is no question as to what the student has already been taught. In effective collaboration, teachers will feel respected, share in the decision making process and accountability of the outcomes, create clear goals, and value all team members’ ideas.

There are several ways teachers can work together to increase the cohesiveness in their team. Team building exercises are important in building relationships and confidence with each other. This also allows the team to identify strengths and weaknesses throughout the team. Once these are determined, tasks can be assigned to certain members such as making copies for the team, developing activities and centers, and working together on lesson plans so that each child gets the same opportunity to learn.

Some challenges to collaborating may include such issues as personality differences, organizational skills, and time. However, let’s embrace these challenges and make them positive. Personality differences may assist us in exploring new ways to educate our students, allow us to step out of our comfort zone, and learn more efficient ways in doing things. Some teachers may be more organized than others and want to support those of us that are not. There may be short cuts that reduce the amount of time we spend doing our lesson plans, copies, etc. Finally, making the time to meet with your team may be difficult; however, making a commitment to meet once a month, may improve the efficiency of your job and classroom environment tremendously.

I hope that we can put some of the above strategies to use, despite challenges we may encounter at the beginning. Working together will support our school community as a whole, teachers and students alike. If you have any suggestions on other ways to collaborate, please feel free to contact me.