My Co-Conspirator

Last summer, I wrote about the importance of your relationship with "the teacher next door."  This time, I want to talk about a different teacher in your school that it is also important for you to cultivate a relationship with - your co-conspirator.

Your co-conspirator is the person who teaches the same kids you do.  It is possible that your co-conspirator is the teacher next door, but in my experience, most schools are not necessarily set up that way.  Mine is in the room that is literally the farthest away you can get from mine and still be in the school building (Was this on purpose?  Hmm.)  She's our 8th grade English teacher.

This is Kellie's first year teaching at our school, but she has been at the school as a parent for three years.  I taught her oldest daughter last year, so I knew she would be a fun person to conspire with when they hired her.  At the beginning of the year, we had a self-imposed meeting to see how we could work together for the good of our eighth graders.  While I also teach physics to juniors and seniors and she teaches some 9th grade English, we both have every eighth-grade student.  They also have the same history teacher, so we occasionally loop him in into our ideas.  We started with a fairly short list of activities which kids could experience using both of our classes, but the more we talk, the more ideas we have.

Our first activity was at a very low level of collaboration.  We asked the students to record a Story Corp interview with someone over fifty.  She followed up on the interview with activities in her classroom, as did the history teacher.  I followed up with blog posts about inventions, comparing their answer on the most important invention to that of the person they interviewed.  It was interesting to see where they lined up and where they did not.  While the students had follow-up activities with each of us, we didn't connect those activities at all.  If you are nervous about collaboration, you should consider something like this because there is little pressure.

We have also had some mid-level collaboration on the 8th-grade blogs.  I will sometimes require that students use a magazine article, video, or image in their post.  When I do that, I require that it be properly cited in MLA format, which is what she teaches them.  Using skills from two separate classes in the same assignment creates an awareness in our students that their lives don't exist in separate unrelated blocks.

Our biggest collaboration so far has been the infamous Mars paper.  I've blogged about this paper before, but this year it provided a great opportunity for cross-curricular collaboration.  She was already going to teach them about persuasive writing and constructing intelligent arguments, so this provided an opportunity to use my topic for that purpose.  They learned argumentative style using They Say . . . I Say technique.  They had debates on the pros and cons of putting a man on Mars, in which more nuances could be brought out (like how it is different if private funding is available through companies like Space X than if we are talking about all taxpayer funding).  They wrote their thesis paragraphs as blog posts and turned in their best paragraph in English so that peer editing could take place.  The final products I got were far better than they would have been without the time spent doing that, and a lot of thinking and reasoning skills were developed.

We are already working on ideas for next year to increase our level of collaboration.  For obvious reasons, this has academic benefits for our students.  However, I think there are benefits beyond the material to this level of collaboration.  First, our students see us enjoying each other while we work together.  We met together to discuss rubrics and schedules, and students saw us laughing together.  I remember thinking that all adults hated their jobs when I was a kid, and I think it is great for them to see that we can enjoy each other.  Also, we are a small enough school that a student can't tell one teacher one story and a different teacher another without getting caught.  That is good for our students.  Finally, I think it is important for students to know that their lives will not exist in class periods.  Good writing matters across all areas of communication.  Math will be part of your life no matter what.  Every day is the history of the future.  Science is everywhere.  Working together in these ways allows students to make connections they might not otherwise make.

If there is a teacher in your school whose student list overlaps with yours, consider making them your co-conspirator on whatever level your school situation allows.  You will enjoy it, and it will benefit your kids.