WHAT?
As part of the 2nd webinar, Mark started with a refresher on the tree analogy (preparing for Co-teaching) and how they connected to the team culture of co-teaching – practice, infrastructure and culture. He also asked for some feedback on what resonated with us from the week before webinar.
It is important to understand what co- teaching as compared to what it isn’t.
The 5 Elements of Culture
1. Mahitahi (working to a common goal) – the team coordinates their work to achieve a small number of common, publicly agreed-on goals. These goals could relate to WHAT you want to achieve (teaching and/or learning, class culture, behaviour etc.) or HOW you will go about achieving it (team function, collaboration).
2. Pukenga (using each other’s strengths) – share a belief system that each of the co-teaching team members has unique and needed expertise.
3. Ako (learning from and with each other) - demonstrate parity by alternatively engaging in the dual roles of teacher and learner, expert and novice, giver and recipient of knowledge or skills.
4. Whakaroto (employing distributed leadership) – use distributed leadership whereby tasks and functions of the traditional lone teacher are distributed among all co-teaching group members.
5. Whanaungatanga (building and maintaining productive relationships) – use cooperative processes that support collaboration including face to face interaction, interpersonal skills, trust, respect, positive interdependence, performance, monitoring, evaluating and individual accountability.
SO WHAT?
As part of building a great environment for my partner and myself, we need to work together to create our vision/goal for where we want to aim for – our Mahitahi and how we will use our principles and practices to make this happen for ourselves and for the benefit of our students.
One of things to do for our Mahitahi – we need to make sure we have understanding of what our/own expectations of what a ‘good’ team member are. We need to unpack a few scenarios to understand each other’s perspectives and what ‘our’ 6-8 group norms are for meetings, planning, evaluating etc.
To establish Pukenga, we need to understand our strengths and each other’s strengths. We have started a ‘user manual’ already, my buddy has put in heaps and I have just scratched the surface. I do have some understanding of how she ticks – we need to do this also with our ‘other’ teacher that will be sharing our class. What grinds each other’s gears? Look at the possibility of doing personality tests – what kinds of people are we? We need to build a foundation of trust.
There is an expectation in Ako – there is a sharing of skills expectation where the importance of being a good learner is paramount. At times, I will need to be the lead, the expert in an area and at times I will be the learner in the situation learning from the others in the team. By using the tools such as ‘Spirals of Inquiry’, Inquiry circles and other reflective practice tools where we are looking at data on what we are doing well, what we can improve on ‘our’ problems of practice we are establishing a way forward.
To make Whakaroto work, we need to be mindful of how we operate day to day, making sure that we still do what we do in our own classes and not default expectation for sorting out behaviours to one person, teaching the same ‘ curriculum’ content and leaving one person with an uneven amount of work to do – we will need to establish distributed leadership early on and be flexible to make changes to this as the year progresses. We need to think about our skills and adjust what we do according to the competence and commitment of the team members.
Whanaungatanga is so important and communication demands increase – some is day to day, business as usual, or there may be time where face to face communication is essential. Infrastructure will be needed – emails, online google sheets etc. We need to use tools and opportunities to share communication. How will we use assessment – collection and data to plan?
NOW WHAT?
Looking forward, I need to establish a relationship with my co-teaching team and create a way forward together without taking over. I need to be mindful of creating goals for myself – holding onto my ideas lightly and being prepared to challenge my own ‘norms’.
I am excited to be working with these colleagues and I am aware that we are all at different stages of family life needs, this is where communication will be key to helping us through the ‘trickier’ times and guide us forward.
“There’s always a new challenge to keep you motivated.” ~ Sean Connery
