Podcast: Encouraging Teaching in Teams
While teaching in a team has always had benefits, today it is a requirement. The complexity of desired outcomes we are looking to produce can no longer be accomplished with the skills and resources of an individual. Almost all other industries and professions have recognized how employees and customers are best served by teams while schools have continued placing individual teachers in classrooms with sole responsibility for student success. Consider why instructional coaches and school leaders should be working to build and support teaching teams.
Watch “Teaching in Teams (What Schools Could Be)” here.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.230] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:00:29.280] – Steve
Encouraging Teaching in Teams. I recently had the opportunity to view a video titled, “Teaching in Teams,” produced by What Schools Could Be. Work on building teams in Mesa Schools in Arizona, in partnership with the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University, is featured in the video. The link to the video video is in this podcast lead-in. Watching this video, I was sparked to record this podcast, reviewing why building teams is an important activity for instructional coaches and all school leaders. My career as an educator was birthed, incubated, nurtured, developed, and seasoned on teams. My student teaching was a year long experience in a grade four classroom with a master teacher, two student teachers, a graduate assistant, and visiting professors. My first year as a teacher, I was on a four teacher team that worked with 120 grade five and six students in one large room. While students left early once a week to create team time, nearly every day ended with the team around the table figuring out what happened today and what are we going to do tomorrow. After five years in that setting, I became a Grade 1 teacher, teaming with an experienced primary teacher in a double classroom.
[00:02:22.220] – Steve
I survived the transition to primary grades, thanks to the team approach. My teammate and I were also on a seven-teacher K-12 team. After a few years, I became the team leader for the K-12 staff, and then I joined my principal’s school leadership team. So in weekly meetings, working with the principal and the other team leaders, I learned to plan for student learning K-8 and coordinate student, teacher, parent, system needs across the school. My last 30 plus years as a teacher and administrator, trainer, and consultant have been built and supported by a team of talented individuals, bringing scheduling, design, art, technology, publishing, communication, travel planning, et cetera, bringing all those skills to create the services that I am out on the road providing. I have I always felt that working with the team was a benefit. I think today it’s a requirement. Back at the start of my teaching career, I think it was okay to be a great loneranger teacher. You could be a great biology teacher, sneak in the back door of the school, teach your four block periods of biology, and as long as students’ biology scores were good, everything was fine. But today, today, in many, many of our schools, the biology teacher is somewhat accountable and responsible for students’ writing skills.
[00:04:09.260] – Steve
And the ELA teachers are accountable for students’ ability to work with and interpret their biology textbook. You see, you can’t be addressing students’ social emotional skills and executive functioning working as a single teacher. It really requires a team. The complexity of the desired outcomes that we are asking schools to produce today can no longer be accomplished with the skills and resources of an individual teacher. John Maxwell, writing in the “17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork,” states these benefits for working as a team: Teams involve more people, thus more resources, ideas, ideas and energy than would an individual. Teams provide multiple perspectives on how to meet a goal and thus create several alternatives. On teams, people share credit for victories and the blame for losses, creating humility and authentic community. Teams, he states, can simply do more than an individual schedule. This strikes me as a valuable set of benefits for making the investment in building effective teams in schools. Most importantly, for educational leaders working to transform schools your students deserve the best you can provide, and that most likely means creating high functioning teams. Listen to these comments from the Teaching in Teams video that describe what I would label as common sense reasons for teaming.
[00:06:07.650] – (Clip)
This expectation that every single teacher in 3.2 million classrooms across this country are all going to be the same, the same skills and same experience and same everything is just not humanly possible. We don’t expect that in any other working environment except schools.
[00:06:25.960] – (Clip)
Us as school administrators, as leaders of education, can create for teachers the type of learning environments we would like them to create for students. Number one, we need to, in our time together as adults, engage in cooperative learning, engage in wrestling with big ideas.
[00:06:42.470] – (Clip)
If we think it’s so important for kids to learn from each other, to find meaning in their work with each other, then how in the world can we do that at scale if those who are teaching them are not learning from each other?
[00:06:58.540] – (Clip)
When we meet as team in the afternoons, we get to talk about what worked, what didn’t work well. It’s just really helpful for me to reflect and then implement these strategies that other teachers use.
[00:07:12.950] – Steve
My finding is that many educators have not had the team indoctrination that I experienced as I entered the education teaching field. Most educators have not really had team experiences in their work in schools. Sometimes teachers will tell me that they have strong teams in their school. And when I asked them to share an example of why they say their teams are strong, they tell me something like, “we share everything.” Now, while sharing is nice, it’s a far step from teaming. I have found that what most school personnel label as teams are really franchises. Teachers who are franchised may work together well to discuss possible solutions for a struggling student. However, when the meeting is over, it’s up to the teacher of the struggling student to decide what to do. The teacher is not responsible to inform other members about her decision or about the outcome. Now, when teachers are on a team, the team will decide together the strategy to implement. The teacher serving student is accountable to implement the plan, seek additional support from the team if needed, and report back evidence of progress or lack of progress. The Teaching in Teams video presents these research findings from teachers teaming.
[00:08:52.150] – (Clip)
Team-based teaching is rolled out in more than 100 schools in over a dozen states. You might be wondering, does this even work? While early, so far, evidence is good. Teachers have lower turnover rates and report being more satisfied in their work. They are more likely to recommend teaching as a career. They end up taking fewer sick days and needing less frequent substitute teachers. They feel more supported and less isolated. Lead teachers have turnover rates 40% less than other teachers in their same school. Team teachers are also more likely to be evaluated as highly effective. For those students, the outcome is just as good. Although team talk classrooms aren’t putting focus on test prep, third graders in team classrooms make as much as 1.4 more months of reading growth compared to traditional models. Even better, students also report feeling higher levels of teacher engagement and that they have more opportunities for collaboration with both their teachers and their peers
[00:09:50.330] – Steve
I encourage you to take 25 minutes and watch the Teaching in Teams video and decide how teaming might be increasing missed or initiated in your school. The video includes some initial thoughts on getting started. Randy Mallerwein, the Assistant Superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, closes the video with this comment about building teams. This is the right work for the adults in schools. It’s the right work for kids, and ultimately, it’s the right work for communities. I agree. If you’re seeking a thought partner to consider your next steps in developing teaching teams, I’d be happy to explore possibilities with you. You can always reach me at barkleypd.com and again, thanks for listening.
[00:10:54.840] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
