Improving my understanding of Collaboration and Co-Teaching Part 4

 WHAT?

The final webinar session was all about troubleshooting co-teaching - when things go wrong and review the previous learning from the other webinars. Mark Osborne also shared tools that we could use during the bumps and humps along the collaborative journey.

The troubleshooting information was split into 2 separate categories - removing barriers and taking action

Removing Barriers 

The infrastructure is important and the image below illustrates what needs to be inplace to give co-teaching the best chance of succeeding.

There are a number of challenges that we will face together.

To manage each of these challenges we need to be mindful of the key skills needed to work through these challenges. Level 1 and 2 are the teachers in a co-teaching situation. 

Another aspect that as co-teacher we need to be aware of what builds relational trust.

Taking Action 

Approaching conflict depends on the reason for making changes if there needs to be any, or understanding of what happened before, or the person’s passion - a number of factors can come into play before you tackle the problem. 

The Conflict Resolution Instrument is a way to deal with conflict and understanding. It is a powerful tool for dealing with conflict as it gives you a framework, giving you a variety of ways and how you should think about approaching conflict. Remembering that conflict can be good for learning.

SO WHAT?

 

The infrastructure needs to be in place for us, the five pillars are essential to making this work. There is some real unpacking for each other, and making sure that we set up the foundations.

There are constraints within the common timetable that needs to have flexibility so that we all have the opportunity to share our creative ideas. To do this we will need to use the co-teaching cycle to guide us on our approaches.

 

Our roles and responsibilities will need to be discussed early on so we each know where we stand. We need to ask each other what is needed of ourselves - Level 2 - Contributing Team Member. Are these the skills we are using?

We will need to build relational trust with each other by sharing the praise and taking blame (mirror and window), visibly work to get better at your job, be direct with people on issues, seek to understand why people do what they do, be open to being wrong and provide opportunities to share their strengths.

As part of the team, we will need to think about how we deal with conflict so that we don’t destroy relational trust. There are pros and cons depending on the situation and hopefully we stay in the collaborating space most of the time so that everyone wins. Time can be a factor if a decision needs to be made quickly.

NOW WHAT?

 

I have so many questions for my colleagues and I am wondering how to meet the challenges that we will face when they have missed out on this PD. It is becoming more important that they really need to check out the first 3 webinars before we met to discuss where to begin.

What will we see in our environment? In the children’s books? that says that we are on the same page?

Where to from here? Getting my colleagues on the same page. Maybe make a time to watch the first couple of webinars together, giving them the opportunity to check it out beforehand. I will do this next week - give them the heads up (front loading) and make time for a chat (informal). Then create a time to watch together and make some plans for where to next.

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is a success.” – Henry Ford