What's going to work? Teamwork!

I'm haunted by the song everyone knows as The Wonder Pets theme song. "What's going to work? Teamwork! What's going to work? Teamwork!" The Wonder Pets time and time again get the job done of saving baby animals in trouble, but they can only do it if they work together. There are plenty-an-episode where one of them decides to do things on their own - to take the glory and run with it. They quickly find out, though, when they take matters into their own hands and don't collaborate with their peers, that they can get themselves in deep. And before they know it, they become the animal in trouble.

The same can be said about teaching. The Wonder Teachers can only get the job done of saving students in trouble, but only if they work together. We often think of teaching as a solo job. What you do inside your room is no one else's business, you shut the door, do your thing and hope for the best. I think traditionally, that was what educators did, but is that good enough? Do students really benefit fully when teachers have that mentality? I don't think so.

In pretty much every other job out there, teamwork is required to get to the common goal. The same needs to be true in teaching too. It is no longer good enough to do what you need to do and not worry about what anyone else is doing. So what does teamwork in teaching look like? Well, I'm sure it can take on many different forms, but for me, it looks like this:

Walking into the front doors of the school building in the morning I shake the "home" stuff off my shoulders, stomp the life "junk" off my feet and round the corner to my co-worker's classroom. As I walk into the room I am greeted by a number of other teachers from our team who are gathering there to chat, put lunches in the refrigerator, grab a cup of coffee (or tea in my case), and have a few giggles before the students flood the hallways. Friendships are not the only thing that makes a good team. Committed teachers who have the same goal in mind - to give our students the best possible education so they'll be successful citizens - communicate with each other with the personal "stuff" as well as the educational goals of the team. Throughout the day, we pop quickly into one another's doors between classes to run something by each other for ideas, pass along emails with great teaching tools, and share friendly conversations with students. Each day is committed to having a common planning period where the team gathers and discusses upcoming events, field trips, assemblies, state testing schedules, and the like, but it doesn't end there. We also discuss students. We talk about those who are not doing so well and find commonalities and make a plan on how to help this student succeed in every class. We hold team meetings with parents so we can all get on the same page and help that student. Furthermore, we discuss units of study. How can we connect the subjects? What can we do to make sure students see the application of what they are learning with the real world?

Not one of these decisions is made on our own. When we try to fill our own agendas and not think about the 'whole student', we risk the chance of finding ourselves "in deep" and becoming the animal in trouble. The Wonder Pets just might have caught on to something. What's going to work? Teamwork. It's the only way to go.