Rebecca's words from yesterday's ranting circle are still with me: So are we going to do anything about it? I heard those words ringing in my head again as we talked about the weight of assessment and how powerless we feel to it today. But we are a group of almost 20. As the kid in Melissa's video said, "It takes one person to change something little and more than one person to change something big." So, I want to start thinking about how to change things.
What I think we can start changing is the way teachers interact with and talk about each other. Yesterday, we talked a lot about how teachers are in constant competition and tend to have a lack of respect for each other. Today, Carrie and Aileen pointed out how newer teachers are called "baby teachers," which does not respect the work they have put into being teachers and the ideas they can and do bring to their students. Lacy pointed out to me today that this competition is driven by the fact that testing and evaluation pits teachers against each other. I think there is a way we can get people thinking about how this competition affects us and how much more effective and efficient we, and our students, could be if we all worked together. I also think it'd be important to get administration involved - not just approving it, but actually taking part - because the whole building should be part of the community.
Lacy told me to start thinking through this on my blog so here is some thining. First, she talked about open verses closed doors. I have been trying to mull over the benefits of closed doors. So far, I haven't come up with anything positive. I feel like whenever I've closed doors it's because I am either shut out by others or I'm shutting others out because I am scared of what they may say and offer or because I don't want to do the work of pushing my ideas against others. This is just what I have done; I would really like others to contribute reasons they have closed doors before so I can think through and push against those reasons for my own thinking and argumentation. Open doors would allow us to reflect on our practices constantly because we would be sharing with and seeing how others are teaching in their classrooms. Open doors would also allow us to work with writing across the curriculum more easily. Like at SI, teachers could collaborate for the most beneficial lessons and concepts for their students to learn. It would also help ease the tension between grade levels. Teachers above or below a certain grade level will be able to know where students are coming from and where they are going so that teachers could collaborate to cover all the gaps. Now, some negatives to open doors... the first thing I think is that it's scary. It would require stepping out and allowing yourself to possibly be shot down. It would require the right kind of environment - one like SI - or people may end up squashing potential instead of increasing it. Building this kind of environment would take time (which teachers already have little of), patience and a voluntary desire to build the collaborative community. It would also be easier with administration on board, which won't always happen.
As for how to start enacting this change... Melissa brought up the idea of all of us taking something back to our schools and working to enact change throughout the year. We could use each other as support - keeping in contact through Twitter, the blogs and the site - and, maybe, try to meet after 3 or 6 months to talk about where we are in our progress and what we can do from there. (This has the added benefit of keeping us all in contact and keeping the community together instead of most of us falling away, which, let's face it, usually happens when groups separate.) We could maybe talk to our principals/department heads about adding some of the activities we've done in SI to staff meetings, starting with some simple community building activities and working toward our candid conversations that push us to reflect on our teaching. Before we leave SI, we could talk about specific activities and language to take to them. (For example, all teachers and administration can share stories - like the riffing or ranting circles - about times of competition or collaboration and how that affected their jobs.) We can collect research or stories from past SIers about how a collaborative community has influenced their teaching and improved their classroom environment and led to more student learning. If those in charge don't accept it, we could still work on it in small teams - the tenth grade team or the social studies team or even as small as the eighth grade English team. The small teams may eventually bring others, even if its one by one stragglers, to the community and it can build from there.
This is just some preliminary thinking. I've never tried to change something like this before but I really believe this is the perfect group to start the revolution.
