Summertime and quite honestly- the living isn’t really all that easy. This is the time of year that I reflect on what went well last year and what I am going to change for this year. As folks in the education profession know first-hand, we don’t really “get the whole summer off” as my non-teacher friends jealously assert. We attend conferences, we go to extra classes and, yes, we have time to mow the lawn a couple of times. I know that I’m not alone in this information seeking and gathering pursuit because the other teachers in my building are also engaged in a like manner.
But I have noticed a disturbing thing that happens when we all get back to school each fall. We don’t have an efficient mode of sharing our epiphanies with each other. We can be totally blown away with a new approach for teaching reading or writing or. . . fill in the blank. But when September arrives we are back to business as usual even though the teacher across the hall has learned a method that really changes his life. We miss out on the opportunity to build collegiality. According to an article I found at Successful Teachers Successful Schools, “Today’s teachers must interact with each other more than ever before. . . collegiality greatly impacts teachers’ morale, happiness, and satisfaction”.
With that in mind I began to think about a way for staff to share what they learned over the summer with each other this fall. I came up with a short survey that we could fill out on our first staff-training day. Something simple, direct and informational that could be used for building connections all year long. Here it is:
We DON’T Know What You Did Last Summer- (But We’d Like To. . . )
Name:_______________ Subject you teach:_______________ Grade level:______
Training(s) you attended:__________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
Top three ideas that you use in your classroom:
1)____________________________________________
2)____________________________________________
3)____________________________________________
Tips and tricks?
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
I will compile the results and then share them with the whole staff. [Ed’s Note: We’ll be interested to know what you found from your colleagues too!] From that point we could invite someone to present at a staff meeting or we could form groups based on our like interests. A couple more great outcomes of this would be:
- Sharing new and exciting information making all of us richer for the experience of one.
- We would have “go-to” people identified right up front and that might save time as well as help us to build relationships with our colleagues.
I’m going to try this at my school this fall. I’ll be excited to discover if it helps us build collegiality. At the very least, I’ll find out which conferences I’d like to attend next summer.
Pamelia Valentine is a guest blogger and teacher in the Shelton School District.
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