Meeting with Colleague

Meeting with my colleague about our interdisciplinary unit was time well spent. It is sometimes hard to carve out time to have these important discussions in our every day teaching schedule. We met for most of a prep period last Friday and I think that it was a productive time for both of us.

We started the meeting by looking over my stage one, which my partner had yet to see. We found some corrections that needed to be made and talked about the progression of her unit in relation to mine. It is really exciting to think about the experience that we're creating for our students for next year. We have extended the collaboration of this one unit to a year-long course that we will teach in a collaborative fashion. Therefore, each of the units we teach in our English and history classes will correspond and correlate. This is super exciting because it will hopefully make for a more rich experience for our students and for us as colleagues.

An interesting layer to this particular collaboration is that my colleague is also taking a curriculum course right now at another college. She is using the same basic text that we're using, but we are getting differing messages about curriculum and how to use the book and workbook from our professors. We've basically decided to meet somewhere in the middle and use the planning guides and materials in a way that will work for us and for our students.

As far as leadership is concerned, the fact tat my colleague is also working from the same text helps tremendously. It is not like I am talking with her about ideas she has not heard. In fact, she is using the same process that we are using to create our unit. I feel like my colleague and I have already worked together for such a long time that leadership is not as much an issue as is being completely cognizant of what I'm envisioning so that I can put my ideas and my vision into words during our planning sessions.

Next week my colleague and I will be meeting with the head of the social studies department. This teacher has been collaborating with my colleague for some time on curriculum and planning for the junior history class that they both teach. Now, we are going to meet together to talk about the conceptual lens we've chosen to use for our classes next year. Also, I'm going to meet with the technology integrator to learn more about the Garage Band program. I've played around with it some, but I want to understand the entirety of what it can do.

It's interesting and cool to me that this one unit as opened up conversation between myself and several of my colleagues. My Alt Ed colleague and I are working more closely together on curriculum than we have in the past and we've reached out to include others in this process. Hopefully, this collective effort will translate to better instruction next year for all of our students!