Teaming Up:  Collaboration Among Teachers and Across Schools to Improve Student Learning

A Minnesota Principal recently emailed Dr. Connie Walker, Director of the TEAM UP Project, asking several questions about the project.  She received the following response:

Thanks for your email requesting information about TEAM UP.  As of Summer 2011, we’re in our last year of the Middle School project.  We have worked with a total of 16 elementary and middle schools in Minnesota.  We have found the project to be an amazing experience for both us as teacher educators, as well as the many teachers with whom we have had the privilege of working.  We take great pains to minimize the idea that an outside “project” or “program” is what we do.  When putting together a “team” of four schools, we first considered schools that the Minnesota Department of Education has identified as failing to meet achievement standards particularly with the subgroup of English language learners.  It was also important to us to bring together teachers of urban, suburban, and rural communities to share their talents and their teaching challenges.  We approached schools to ask if they would be interested in putting together a small team — no more than seven — that included an English as a second language (ESL) teacher and multiple grade levels  in elementary schools or an ESL teacher and content area teachers (math, science, social studies, language arts) in middle schools.

The TEAM UP effort allowed for theses small groups of staff to address the issues most pressing concerning curriculum, instruction, or assessment for LEP students, while exploring what “best practices” would have to say about how to implement changes in those areas.  So each team developed a school Action Plan that it could revisit during the course of the two-year process.  Each individual teacher designed his or her own path for professional development by putting together a Personal Professional Action Plan and spent two years working toward personal teaching goals that could address their work with  EL students.  Since each school is its own context, each had very unique and particular structures, components, and ways of providing for the needs of its students.  For our part, we encouraged collaborative efforts on several levels — the team itself (which in many cases has proved to be the “go to” group regarding ESL issues at the school), and pairs and groups of staff within the school, as well as between the schools in our project.

We can’t say enough good things about the kinds of “successes” we have observed, but such successes have to do with individual personal changes, some structural changes within schools, and changes in practice and teacher collaboration.  That being said, such changes aren’t the result of an overlay of a new curriculum or drastic changes in what or how teachers teach.  It’s much more subtle.  No school has witnessed wholesale restructuring in every classroom.  If you were to observe, you might be in a classroom in which the ESL and grade-level teacher collaborate to provide instruction.  Or a science teacher and ESL teacher teach together to maximize the development of science content learning for all students in the classroom.  What would be much more informative would be a conversation with those educators, to get behind what they do and how they do it.  And as we have found, two years with teachers only begins to peel apart the complex layers of that process.

If we have learned one thing in our efforts, it’s that the old models of professional development toward change in practice are based upon traditional views of imposing change from above, and don’t reflect the reality of professional educators and classrooms.  The TEAM UP project allowed for long conversations to take place on many levels about the needs of learners, the community, the staff, and the school — and how to move toward meeting those needs within the framework of federal and state guidelines.  Each school, each teacher, each context is different and working from the inside-out has allowed for very specific efforts to be realized.

What resources did we use?  Hundreds — articles, books, websites that over the course of the two years were guided by both what the teachers themselves indicated they wanted to explore, and what we knew was important from our own experience as teacher educators.  We told them often that our work allows us to find and develop information that responds to two questions:  What does research say about how to facilitate academic language learning in schools?  What are effective teachers doing to maximize both language and content learning at school?

Resources played an important role in teacher learning.  We purchased for each school a comprehensive library of material forteachers that they could read, discuss, write about, and share with colleagues at their school.  We also purchased individual books for teachers related to their content areas (listed on this website). We copied articles, and had teachers visit websites that addressed specific issues.  As you might expect, teachers share web information on a regular basis.

Staff development took on a life of it’s own in each school.  TEAM UP teams began to be asked to conduct small staff development presentations within their buildings on what they had learned/were learning, and our goal of having information disseminated in buildings continues to be realized through this process.  Interestingly, principals and school staff began to realize that staff development that came from their own staff specficially tailored to needs at their own school was far more valuable than bringing in a presenter from the outside.  Teams developed their own school-site websites where resources and links were developed and deposited for the entire school to use.

Success is measured in many different ways.  While we are interested in having our teachers attend to changes in student achievement, more immediately we pay attention to participants’ energy as they work, their enthusiasm for collaboration and co-teaching, and their thirst for knowledge about how best to serve the wonderfully diverse populations in their schools.

A long answer to your questions!  Hope this was helpful.

Sincerely,

Connie Walker