Conversations

How does your school/district currently support and/or encourage collaboration between teachers? There is quite a bit of collaboration between teachers of the same discipline, but virtually none with teachers of other disciplines or grades. It seems that much of the collaboration is designed to make all of the teachers to do the exact same thing, which I am not a huge fan of. We can collaborate and share things that we are doing in our classes, but we are each unique in the way that we teach and what works for us. So the push for everyone to do the same thing really doesn't work for me.

How much do you seek to collaborate with teachers and how do you accomplish this? We have time set aside each week to collaborate with teachers that teach the same course as we do. Other than that I seek out teachers that have the same approach as I do, and we may discuss things outside of that designated meeting time.

To what extent do you think collaboration is of growing importance for teachers seeking to implement a 21st century classroom? With this being such a new trend in teaching, I think it is very important for teachers to collaborate about implementing technology into their teaching. Technology is sometimes difficult to work with, and there are things that could go wrong. If you have some people to bounce ideas off of and talk about what works and what doesn't work it will make it that much easier to come up with something if your initial plan doesn't work.