"Now that the schedule
allows teachers to meet, we help each other. We write curriculum
together. The variety of work we do with students is greater." --A New York teacher
explains how collaborative planning time
supports student learning
"Teachers share what
they are doing in a formal way in team meetings. They plan together
and share what they have done. There is whole school sharing
and there are summer institutes where we have more time to reflect.
There is more coherence than in big schools where teachers work
alone." --Sylvia Rabiner,
former principal of Landmark High School in
New York City
Effective teachers are not only well-prepared; they
are also continually learning. Good small schools commit serious
time and resources to collaborative planning and on-going professional
development. This supports both more thoughtful and effective teaching
within the classroom and greater coherence across courses and grade
levels.
Expertise in teaching – as in many other
fields – comes from a process of sharing, attempting new ideas,
reflecting on practice, and developing new approaches. Good teachers
learn from one another, and they need time to do it. In many American
schools, teachers spend their Sunday nights sitting at their kitchen
tables, all by themselves, inventing their lessons for the week.
For too long, we have had the notion that teachers are only working
when they are alone in their classrooms, stamping kids with lessons
on the conveyor belt of the industrial model school. The presumption
of the assembly line school was that teachers would not need time
to plan or evaluate their teaching, because they would merely march
through the lessons in a prescribed curriculum.
Joint
Planning We know, however, that one-size-fits-all
teaching and ad hoc planning miss the mark for most students. High-quality
teaching is developed by creating a deliberate repertoire of strategies
and a well-sequenced plan for content that connects to students’
prior learning, and doing so in collaboration with other faculty
so that knowledge is shared. This shared planning is something that
many other countries and some unusual schools in the United States
build into their structures for schooling.
At successful schools, teachers work together
to develop the curriculum, to develop lessons that will work with
their students, to look at student work, and to evaluate their lessons
and troubleshoot for future classes. If teachers do not work together,
it is impossible to develop a collective perspective in the school.
This means that curriculum will be fragmented, problems of practice
will not be addressed, and students will fall through the cracks.
Time
for Collaboration Of course, collaborative planning takes
time. Since most U.S. teachers have only one 45-minute planning
period a day (often less in elementary school), they have nowhere
near enough time to engage in this work, and the time they do have
is not generally scheduled to allow collaboration with other members
of a department or teaching team. But if collaborative planning
and professional development are a priority in school design, it
is possible, even on a meager budget, to reallocate resources, organize
the schedule, and assign enough staff as teachers so that teachers
teach fewer hours during the day and have at least five hours a
week to work together. (See examples of school schedules below.)
In schools in industrialized countries in Asia
and in Europe (where they don’t spend much more money per
pupil than the United States, but they spend it differently), teachers
spend between 15 and 20 hours of a 40- to 45-hour work week in their
classrooms with students. Thus, they have 20 hours or more per week
to plan lessons, to meet with students and parents, and to work
together and learn from one another. This collaborative work includes
developing curriculum and assessments, observing each other’s
classes, and participating in study groups and other professional
development activities.
Carefully
Crafted Lessons In Japan, it is common practice for teachers
to try lessons out on one another. For example, a teacher might
use her colleagues as the audience for a new lesson on fractions.
These teachers would plan and role play the lesson with her, and
then critique it. Then when she taught the lesson in her classroom,
her colleagues might participate in a research lesson, observing
her teaching the lesson in the classroom, taking notes on what happened,
and then debriefing it together. Researchers Jim Stigler and Harold
Stevenson have called the shared lessons that result from this type
of planning “polished stones” because they are so carefully
crafted (1991).
A
Collective Perspective These collaborative adult learning experiences
not only enable teachers to adjust their pedagogy to help students
learn more; they also provide opportunities for school staff to
revisit the school’s vision and goals, develop a collective
perspective on teaching practice, and create a stronger school culture.
They also provide time for teachers to talk together about individual
students to figure out how to best support them.
To make this work possible, good small schools
devote resources to building in significant time for teacher collaboration
during the work day. Of course, since resources are always precious
in our under-funded schools, this involves trade-offs: For example,
schools that significantly reduce the amount of time teachers spend
in the classroom each day may have to settle for slightly larger
class sizes. Nevertheless, without expert teachers who are continually
learning and growing as professionals, much of the other work that
small schools are doing will not be successful.
