What Makes Effective Teacher Teams?

Collaborative Learning Teams

This article discusses elements they thought lead to effective teacher teams. I found this through Alexis Alexander’s excellent EDT 6 course!

An excerpt is below:

NCTAF’s Six Principles of Success for Professional Learning Teams

Shared Values and Goals: The team should have a shared vision of the capabilities of students and teachers. They should also clearly identify a problem around which the learning team can come together, with an ultimate goal of improving student learning.

Collective Responsibility: Team members should have shared and appropriately differentiated responsibilities based on their experience and knowledge levels. There should be a mutual accountability for student achievement among all members of the learning team.

Authentic Assessment: Teachers in the community should hold themselves collectively accountable for improving student achievement, by using assessments that give them real time feedback on student learning and teaching effectiveness. These assessments are valued—not because they are linked to high stakes consequences—but because they are essential tools to improve learning.

Self-Directed Reflection: Teams should establish a feedback loop of goal-setting, planning, standards, and evaluation, driven by the needs of both teachers and students.

Stable Settings: The best teams cannot function within a dysfunctional school. Effective teams required dedicated time and space for their collaborative work to take place. This required the support, and occasionally, positive pressure from school leadership.

Strong Leadership Support: Successful teams are supported by their school leaders who build a climate of openness and trust in the school, empower teams to make decisions based on student needs, and apply appropriate pressure perform.

Open Educational Resources

As I was trying to figure out what outsiders might be interested in discussing the development of a teaching and learning center at a community college, I went to ISKME (http://www.iskme.org/), which led me to the article below.

It’s clear that open access education might give many people more access to high-quality curricular content, but what’s not clear is how to encourage the disenfranchised to seek these free resources…

Open House Survey Results – Spring 2010

In Spring 2010, we surveyed staff and faculty during our open house these questions:

  1. As a teacher or staff member at BCC, what one thing do you do for students that would inspire or be helpful to your colleagues?
  2. What is one thing in your work that you would like to change or improve to better student success at BCC?
  3. How might the campus–colleagues, Title 3, the Teaching and Learning Center, etc.–provide the resources, support, and/or community to help you share your expertise and inspiration or help you improve your practice?

A few highlights:

On what they do to support students:

  • I listen! Listen to their concerns and trials of life and refer them to others as need be.
  • Try to get to know student goals — figure out where they want to go/what they want to do and encourage that.
  • Keep pointing out relevance to their personal lives (how an assignment in excel can help future business majors).

On what they would like to improve:

  • Even though it happens to a degree, I would like to see more connections between students and the variety of real world organizational cultures in which they may work. It will help them to understand why they are here from a variety of employers’ perspectives.
  • Have more time to meet with students in group settings to address some of their same questions or concerns.
  • Connect students to resources beyond the scope of my classroom.
  • How to motivate students (other than making the connection between subject and real life).
  • More activities, creative group discussions in class. More ways to scaffold assignments.

On what the campus can help make these improvements happen:

  • Encourage and support cross-disciplinary collaboration.
  • Regular workshops on classroom dynamics, cultural diversity, tips for teachers.
  • Hold informal get-togethers to exchange ideas — structure events by topics: error correction, group-writing, classroom management, etc.
  • Perhaps students, especially at the basic skills levels, take a class on how to succeed in college. for example, taking notes, doing homework, reading the book.

To see a full listing of how people answered the same questions during the TLC’s open house in May 2010, click here: TLC Survey Spring 2010.