Teachers: Go Back to School, In Your Own Building!

In this golden age of global com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion I some­times for­get that I teach in a very small dis­trict (except of course dur­ing gloomy bud­get meet­ings), with really great peo­ple. On Fri­day I did some­thing that I have been mean­ing to do for a long time, but have con­tin­ued to put off for one rea­son or another, I attended a class right in my own build­ing. Dur­ing my plan­ning period I asked if I could sit in on a class that my neigh­bor, Mr. Sher­wood was teach­ing about eco­nom­ics. Mr. Sher­wood was very hos­pitable and enthu­si­as­tic about me sit­ting in and imme­di­ately the stu­dents took notice of my pres­ence. It was great for me to see dif­fer­ent con­tent and teach­ing styles. This expe­ri­ence was so pos­i­tive that I plan to attend at least on class per week if my fel­low teach­ers will allow me to. I will even do the course­work when I can. Maybe I will learn even more than I intended to.

Here are the ben­e­fits as I see them:

• You get to see what other teach­ers are teach­ing, and how they are teach­ing it.
• You get to build closer rela­tion­ships with your colleagues.
• You can help your col­leagues by offer­ing pos­si­ble tech­nolo­gies they could integrate.
• You model life­long learn­ing for students.

Here are some pos­si­ble prat­falls to avoid:

• Don’t over par­tic­i­pate. After all the stu­dents are there for a grade. Con­tribute to the les­son when it is appropriate.
• Be care­ful about offer­ing too much advice to col­leagues. Here is where you are going to have to feel the sit­u­a­tion out. The real pur­pose here is to build bet­ter rela­tion­ships with your fel­low teach­ers, not to make them do it your way.

Be sure to thank who­ever it was that let you par­tic­i­pate, and then fol­low up with them at another time, and then don’t look now but you are talk­ing about ped­a­gogy. So I chal­lenge each of you to try to do the same. If you have already done this, or if you plan to please share your experiences.