Professional+Development

=The Importance of Collaboration for Professional Development=



In the article linked below, you will find interesting information about how teachers can become better at assisting students with literacy. Most of the advice offered in the article seems like common sense. The articles states that educators should work together to come up with effective strategies to assist students in literacy, regardless of course content area. I have always been a firm believer in classroom collaboration. When social studies teachers work in conjunction with language arts, English, science, and even math teachers, it's far easier for students to grasp literacy concepts. As you may have seen in my biographical information, I used to work in the history of science and technology. This may seem like an inconsequential part of history to some, but social studies teachers can work with science and English teachers to come up with lesson plans that work for everyone. Let me give you a little example. Say that I am teaching students about the Kennedy Administration and the Space Race. While I'm teaching the history of that time, you may have an English teacher who chooses a post war era novel for students to read. In addition, a Physics teacher may talk about the Physics of lifting a rocket off of the earth and breaking through atmospheric pressures. Each content area teacher is covering their own portion of the story, yet each lesson scaffolds on another to make the students daily lessons a cohesive unit and increase understanding. While this is all common sense, and collaboration should be normal in the school environment, it's difficult to find literature that backs up what seasoned teachers could easily tell you. In an era of data driven learning, it's important that we find statistics to back up strategies we had only had anecdotal evidence for prior. In this article, you will find that the teachers all agreed that no single literacy strategy worked for their students or for their own professional development. Different strategies may be preferred by different teachers or schools, but the important part is to be flexible, focus on what works for you, and work together to come up with plans and stick to them. It takes time and effort for teachers to come up with these types of plans, but our own interest and enthusiasm can go a long way in aiding us become the best teachers. If we become our personal best teachers, then we can help our students become better learners.