Kay
Kay is a first grade teacher. She has a son in another first grade class at Nueva. Kay has a Masters in Special Education and taught Special Ed for five years in public school. As her young son grew older, she began researching the schools in the area and fell in love with Nueva's small class sizes and its philosophies; she also wanted her son to could attend Nueva. She applied for a teaching position at Nueva and was offered a position soon after. She has been a member of the faculty for three years.
She collaborates often with Rebecca, the other first grade teacher at Nueva. The first grade teaching pair have created some innovative lessons that have been very successful and popular; some of the kindergarteners hear of the cool units they'll learn about and enter first grade excited for the year. Kay and Rebecca also work so closely that they practically co-teach. They have shared planning time, allowing the two teachers to explore topics and ideas together. Kay values this collaboration opportunity highly and Kay, often wishes that more inter-grade collaboration opportunities were the norm at Nueva.
Horizontal collaboration within a grade happens frequently partly because there are only two classes per grade level (except for Kindergarten), but very little vertical collaboration occurs across grades. There are Lower School subject specialists who teach students throughout the lower school and therefore interact with the lower school faculty across grades. Besides special subjects, grade-level teachers rarely interact or work together on curricular issues aside from one-a-month faculty meetings. Occasionally, task forces will form to try and reform scheduling system to allow for more overlapping prep time for various grade level teachers. However, changing the schedules is not an easy feat and attempts have not been very successful.
What she offers: Literacy is especially important for Kay. She has a great sense for differentiated learning and is quite sensitive to the various learning styles of her students. Her literacy lesson plans, therefore, cater to these needs and have resulted in highly capable and prepared readers and thinkers at the end of each academic year.
She is a huge proponent of the Social Emotional Learning (SEL) model and constantly stresses positive social-emotional interactions moment to moment. She wishes there were more cross-grade teacher conversations about SEL since it's common to different grades, particularly in the Upper School where she believes adolescents really need the individual attention of adults.
Questions she's dying to ask other teachers:
- Do you see issue X in your class?
- How is student Y doing now in 4th grade?
Kay's Scenario
At the end of a tiring school day, Kay goes to the iLab Teachers' Corner to post her students' project drawings from that week. Heidi, an eighth grade science teacher, is there making a fresh pot of coffee. As she reaches over to get the sugar and milk, Heidi notices the vivid colors of the children's works. She asks about the project as Kay puts up the drawings. Heidi's curiosity spurs a conversation between the two teachers; Kay is particularly excited because she rarely had opportunities to speak with upper school teachers before the iLab Teacher Space was created.
With their coffee mugs in hand, they settle into a little nook, which furnished with a couch, lamp, and coffee table. There is a bookshelf separating them from the rest of the room and are provided with a sense of privacy. Their conversation leads from talk about lessons and future projects for their respective classes. Eventually, their conversation takes a turn to their personal lives, sharing bits and pieces of their recent summer vacations.
From their conversation, Kay and Heidi agreed to work together on a inter-grade science project. The two teachers had expressed concern about teaching scientific reasoning, something that needs to be refined each year as students progress from one grade to the next. Specifically, Kay's students need to learn basic scientific reasoning, while Heidi's students need to apply the scientific method in designing their own experiments. Kay and Heidi devise a rudimentary a plan: Heidi's eighth graders will come in and teach scientific method to Kay's first graders. The both agree that the new iLab would be the perfect place to get the two classes together. They walk over to the computer across the room, look at their calendars and iLab room reservation calendar. They reserve a space for a Tuesday 5 weeks later. They make plans to touch base the following week to hash out ideas, draft the lesson plan, define materials needed, which will most likely be available in the iLab.
Heidi
Heidi is a young and energetic eighth grade science teacher in the upper school at Nueva. It is her first year at Nueva; she taught science for four years at a public middle school in the suburbs of San Francisco. The public school standards-based structured curriculum was stifling for Heidi, but she appreciated the interdependence and sense of shared mission between teachers that the standards brought. She was attracted to Nueva by the smaller class sizes, its progressive philosophies, and the "emergent curriculum" culture of Nueva where students are encouraged to explore topics of personal interest to them. Her science curriculum has a lot of what she calls 'side trips' and lets the course of a semester be shaped by students' emergent inquiries. She enjoys this style and feels most creative when co-generating lessons with students.
As much as she enjoys shaping her curriculum with her students, Heidi yearns for more collaborations with teachers in other disciplines and grades. She had one very successful collaboration experience when an upper school art teacher saw, while passing by Heidi's classroom, pictures her students had drawn of nerve cells. Together, they planned lessons surrounding this theme and organized an art exhibition of the students' work, which was open to entire Nueva community. She observed the energy and creativity brewing in the room during this cross-disciplinary activity.
Although Nueva is a small school, Heidi does not often meet teachers from other grades. She sees other upper school teachers in faculty meetings, which are formal and already have a set agenda); it is not a forum to talk about lessons, cross-disciplinary curriculum design -- it's administrative. She never gets to interact with lower school teachers and would like to integrate more with them so they know what their students will eventually experience in her grade and also be informed about what her future students are experiencing now.
Her classroom space can also be a constraint in her teaching. There is a dire need for better storage, as much of the science equipment and multimedia tools Heidi uses to demonstrate ideas and theories, are haphazardly placed around the room. There are no secure places to put these instruments. Students' in-progress projects are also left in random open spaces, risking the chances of possible damage. She would love to see the classroom better organized, or at least provided with better display and storage spaces for student work.
Heidi's Scenario
Heidi needs some new ideas for her in-class activities. She remembers that the iLab Teachers' Corner has bookshelves brimming with teacher resources. She leaves her classroom, relieved to take a breather from the her classroom and not have to sit in front of the computer today. She walks into the space and quickly scans the room - she notices that the fifth grade teachers are mapping out some history lesson on the rolling white board, with the sixth grade team looking on. On the opposite corner is a small group of four teachers poring over freshly brewed coffee and celebrity gossip magazines. She smiles, knowing that sometimes, that's all it takes to unwind after a day's work. Heidi spots the bookshelf housing the archive of past projects, an iLab tidbit that was emphasized during the iLab orientation. She finds bound books and paraphenalia, as well as photos and videos that are also accessible on the Nueva intranet.
Heidi is looking for a science project that would fit in with her current unit on the skeletal system but discovers other intersting projects along the way. She finds one in particular that she likes - a third grade project about nutrition. Students tracked what they ate for a week, and made charts of their foods, food groups, and the nutrients and vitamins, found in the foods. This project sparks an idea. Heidi wants to incorporate what she just saw to the eighth grade science unit on the digestive system. She knows that one major way to assess if the students fully understand a theory is to teach it to someone else. She decides that she wants her students to teach the digestion to third graders.This eighth grade teacher notes that the archived project was led by the third grade teacher, Eric. She walks over to the phone a few steps away, looks up Eric's extension, and dials. Eric picks up after a few rings. After a brief chat, they arrange to meet in the iLab in the Teacher's Corner the next day after school.
The next day, Heidi and Eric seat themselves at one of the comfortable seating areas, roll in a whiteboard, and begin their planning session, brainstorming wildly. The two devise a plan, one for each class and one for the joint project. They realize that there is a lot of preliminary preparation that needs to happen before the classes come together. The eighth graders need to learn and understand as much as they can about digestion and the digestive system in order for them to be able to actually teach about them. These students also needed to be prepped to answer questions from the third graders. So Heidi and Eric compile a list of possible and anticipated questions. This list will guide Heidi and the class in brainstorming and preparing for the project. But there is no way that the two teachers could come up with every anticipated question. Because the each eighth grader will have his own laptop, he will also have the freedom to do a quick google search for answers during their time with the third graders.
Eric and Heidi agree that the iLab would be a good space to utilize for the joint project and reserve an iLab space for a time and date two months from today. This date will help them work on a timeline. They both agree to check in once a week and wrap up the planning session tired but satisfied. Heidi is enthused that she was able to take advantage of the resources Nueva has and is excited to be working with someone who is just as passionate about cross-grade level collaboration as she is.