Over the past two months, Sarah and I have been working with some of our teammates to create units, math stations, and creative writing projects for next school year. As a team, we sat down and looked at our standards and objectives in each content area. We each took a few units/projects to create and enhance meaningful lessons/activities that meet the standards of first grade.
We have been meeting weekly to plan out next year, month-by-month. Although, this process has been time consuming and at times overwhelming, we have accomplished more in the last two months than we have in the last two years. We have found that collaboration is key to success in many ways. As professionals, we are able to bounce ideas off of each other. We are also working on accomplishing our goals that we set on our professional development plan at the beginning of the year. We made a goal to use technology in our classrooms, and we feel that we have exceeded that goal. Collaboration has helped us become a stronger team and better teachers. All this collaborating with benefit our future students!
~Heather and Sarah
Wow! That is fantastic. Way to divide and conquer. I completely agree the more minds the better. It is great to hear that there are teams out their using each others strengths and accomplishing your goals. Kudos to you!
ReplyDeleteAgreed, that is great to hear! As a Sped. Teacher, we do come together in building meetings. However, we are frequently working on individual student goals within our groups (difficult to create collaboration). As the EBD teacher, I especially feel, at times, that I don't have the opportunity to collaborate on my content (i.e., behavior/social skills) the way other teachers do.
ReplyDeleteWow! Way to be on top of it, 1st grade team! We've been moving toward this as a district music team, too, and I can totally identify with the simultaneous feeling of being overwhelmed and inspired. One of the neat things about a team like yours or mine is that there's a good mix of experience and interest levels - you have veteran teachers who can suggest things they know will work, and you have newer teachers who are more likely to come up with something totally outside-the-box because they haven't yet hit on a particular way of doing a certain thing.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds awesome! Is this something that you are willing to share with the rest of the first grade team? Could the rest of us sit in on the meetings as well and help so that we are all on the same page/sharing ideas? I love the idea of colloberation and sharing ideas. It benefits all our students and makes us all better teachers.
ReplyDeleteSara, the plan is to share it at our team meeting on Friday! A few of us have common prep time so we have been trying to lighten the work load for everyone else and we will share everything on Friday! Please bring your ideas to the meeting as well!
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