Teaching is a Team Sport

We teachers have been admonished by the experts in the field of education to open our classrooms to each other for more collaboration. We did just that with our
Teaching is a Team Sport faculty meeting this past Monday. Here are some photos to illustrate.

Our varsity cheerleaders greeted Titan teachers to the D-wing cheering to the Titan fight song blaring over the intercom. They showed us "the way to go home" or at least, to our 13-minute classes, with room signs and smiles.

Carol and Greg taught us how to organize staff and student folders on our West network as a way to manage assignments and student work submitted in electronic format.

Bobby and Julie Ann demonstrated storytelling in math to help students memorize the seven steps for investigating a function. Let's see if I can remember: name, graph, table, intercepts, domain, range, special features. Now how to solve the function - well, that is a different story.

Drew raised the achievement of his students through higher level questioning, using not just who, where and when type questions but why, and "how does this relate to the world" type questions.

Park blogs his daily lesson plans and student assignments so that they can be accessed at any time from any computer with Internet access. Several teachers told me the next day that they had already set up their own BLOGS. I went to Park's classroom to tell him and thank him for his efforts and I found him demonstrating the concept of acceleration to a student. Is YouTube your next step, Park?

Terra and Janet found out everything their students KNEW about ATOD . Next students stated what they WANTED to know through further investigation . They are certain to LEARN something new using this KWL strategy, teamwork and lots of sticky notes which engaged them in an important lesson on Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs. ATOD!

We celebrated our winning teamwork with rootbeer floats served by our counselors Dave, Toby and Lily. Thanks, Counselors, Admin and Office Staff for your help. Way To Go, Titan Teachers!

So Much to Learn, So Little Time

This should be the lament of all of your students, you talented West teachers! I was going to do quick visits last week of ten to fifteen minutes but the time sped by at the hands of the teachers and students alike, and most visits lasted thirty to forty minutes. In visiting nine science classrooms and twelve math classrooms, I obtained a wealth of information about subjects, classroom atmosphere, teacher styles and student group personality. This was my goal - to get to know you. The more I know you, the more I like you. I want to do my best to support you.

In this blog, my "support" focus is on teamwork - an essential element of accomplishing most any large project. Most of you employed it in some way in your classes. First, I have included information about cooperative learning taken from a Steve Barkley post some time back. Check it out .

Here is a handy chart for tracking different groups within a classroom - some are preset by the teacher to allow for mixed ability groupings or differentiated learning; others allow for student choice. For larger groups, combine the smaller ones. Try it, you'll like it .

Finally there is a guideline for creating a networking station, also from Steve Barkley's Performance Learning Systems, where students can post to receive help or to give help in certain learning goals. We could all use this one.