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Keywords

small learning communities, cross content collaboration, teacher collaboration, teacher instruction

Submission Type

Research

Preview

"Coombs, what are you doing here?” Matt asked as he walked into the room, geared up for history class with Mr. Preece. “I’m here for your class,” I replied with a smile. I knew where this was going; we’d had conversations similar to this before. “But this is history,” he retorted. “We don’t have your English class ‘til next period. You and Mr. Preece don’t even seem like you’d be friends.” Mr. Preece and I raised our eyebrows at Matt’s comment, but the sentiments he expressed were similar to those we had heard before. As this and other exchanges like it throughout the year demonstrated, students are not often use to teachers collaborating, sometimes seeing their teachers and classes distinctly independent of one another. For this reason, having Brian (Preece), their history teacher, instruct them about reading strategies and writing approaches and Dawan (Coombs) their English teacher, engage with them in discussions about history was initially disconcerting for many of the students in our small learning community. Even in this setting, many were, in their own words, “floored” when two teachers would show up to teach a lesson together and then became further “stressed out” when they found out how much we, as their teachers, communicated with each other about our course content and them as our students. However, over the course of the year students began to value these types of collaborations and to understand how content in one area informed the study of others.

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