Teaming

Abstract: I love the way the team meeting worked within this chapter. Rather than meeting separately with each teacher to discuss student progress, it is far more logical to have a large group meeting where each teacher offers insight on the student, and the parents are asked to offer their own perspective on the student's learning. Ideally, the student will be involved in this conference and an open conversation will occur naturally. Also, I love the idea of teachers collaborating based on assignments. While each teacher has valuable content to teach, it is likely that students will become overwhelmed and disinterested if they are thrown a magnitude of information without regard for the rest of the student's workload. Through team teaching, it is possible to at least partially avoid this problem by coordinating schedules and finding the ideal time to assign specific work. Additionally, this method permits teachers to work toward a functional, collaborative unit which integrates multiple subjects.

Synthesis: I hope that I am able to have a positive team experience such as these listed within the chapter. I intend to hold conferences with all teachers in my team in order to promote a strong group atmosphere and assist the process of involving all members of the team. Although I experienced teams while in middle school, conferences were all held separately as opposed to as a team, and I would really like to change this in my future experiences. In addition, I really want to work to collaborate with my team teachers to ensure that student work is spread out between classes. Rather than over assigning for one night in each class, we should instead work to ensure that specific work is given or specific nights, and thus spread out throughout the week. This way, we will be able to avoid overwhelming students and hopefully encourage better work. While students are capable of completing multiple projects in a short span of time, they are likely to become over whelmed by the work load and much of the work will suffer. Thus, I hope to ensure that all work is spread between teachers and students are given adequate time to complete projects based upon the extent of content.