Synergy

I am going to take this opportunity to answer some questions that have been sent my way. Some colleagues have asked if I have started cross content collaboration. I have and I am absolutely loving it. I took this habit into consideration when starting to lesson plan. I was starting to plan a cross content and cross grade level lesson combining the students' English class with their Health class. In addition to this, we also included a professional development focus of taping into student voice. When Ms. North, our health teacher, and I sat down to plan this, we first had to think about what middle school team was hoping to get out of this lesson. After reviewing our team focus and desired outcome, we then took turns explaining what each of us wanted to incorporate from our content. By truly listening to one another, we were able to find texts and activities that covered it all! What was wonderful about this is the engagement and excitement that came not only from us teachers, but from the students as well. It is all about the students, but they can tell if we are excited and they will feed off of that. What we found is that we were able to cover more content in one day by combining our classes. Something that would have taken two days and may not have been as exciting and memorable took one day and allowed for amazing collaboration and wonderful student feedback on how we can make it better for them.The phrase that comes to mind is "work smarter not harder". I am now talking with the other content teachers and looking to do this again!