New year, new career

So the new school year is about to start, and with it my "next phase" career: back in the classroom after 13 years away. Away but not removed, as I've tried to make those years about collaboration and co-teaching and teaching my own lessons in other people's classrooms -- and as I write this, it occurs to me how teacher-centered that really is. So the challenge this year is to stay focused on student learning in my 4 classes and to manage to run a viable library program at the same time. My guiding lights for this adventure will be the surprisingly current (for my situation, at least)Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman and Weingartner, Mindset by Carol Dweck, Readicide by Kelly Gallagher, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading by Cris Tovani, and A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. As part of my daily practice in the reading seminar class, I will be blogging my reflections on the learning I'm doing about collaborating with students to guide their learning, collaborating with peers to enhance student learning, and balancing the needs of the library program and my classroom teaching. Comments encouraged!

Leaping into collegiality

Heeding Karl Fisch's urging to follow Seth Goodin's advice to "write poorly. In public" here I am. Tomorrow marks a big day in our professional growth as a school, and I'm eager to see how we will respond to the challenge. The difficult leap we are trying to take is one that we've been contemplating in one way or another for the last seven years. You see, we've had a one to one laptop program for that long, and while many things have changed about the way we go about education, it's been a source of puzzlement to me why, despite this marvelous tool, academic life really hasn't changed much from when I went to high school thirty years ago.
Fresh from library school I was a true believer in the concept of teacher collaboration, and saw myself as a willing collaborator with the teachers in my building. Perhaps it was my blind enthusiasm, or my naive assumption that what I was doing with people was collaborating, but I really thought it happened. Then I moved to a new school, thinking I would continue in this mode. Maybe it was age, maybe it was those pesky laptops, maybe it was a borderline personality disorder, but that role ended, except for a few notable instances. And it puzzled me, this situation, until, after some discussions with a colleague I went looking for some literature and came across "Getting to No: Building True Collegiality in Schools" by Robert Evans in the Winter 2012 issue of Independent Schools Then the light came on. What we had, as a school culture, was congeniality, not collegiality! It explains so much about why we have struggled so to address a whole spectrum of important things, from transformative use of technology, to curriculum mapping, to authentic assessment, to Common Core, to library and information skills, to professional evaluation.
So, tomorrow, we're discussing the article. All of us. Together. Specifically. And we're really going to try to effect change in our school, and to build a real learning community. I am guardedly optimistic. But perhaps that's part of the problem. One cannot be guardedly anything if any progress is to be made. We just have to leap.