It takes me a while to write something that makes sense, even then I’m not too successful. So the conspiracy of responsibilities that plague my schedule have found it easy to keep me from reflecting on them in this blog in the past couple weeks. Yet I had an experience yesterday that I am compelled to share. Knowing that I could only make my point by showing what happened, I’ve decided to use a screen shot video.
For years teachers have kept their work materials hidden in their file own cabinets. The nature of the school environment and class schedule prevented any real collaboration with their colleagues. Even in a high school with 2,500 students, a teacher could feel completely alone on the job, as if they were one person up against 125 students a day. Yet most teachers will tell you that they are thieves; they steal, borrow, re-write and re-configure lesson plans from their peers whenever they can get their hands on them. If a teacher is lucky, they will work in a school with colleagues that are always willing to share rather than those who seem to have a proprietary interest work materials.
Amidst all the talk about technology in education, we need to acknowledge the power of these tools to facilitate collaboration among teachers. Schools with teachers who maintain their work materials in a digital form and store them in a common environment provide their students with the collective energy, expertise and excellence of the entire staff. This two and a half minute video demonstrates a small example of this process in action. As much as some can dismiss this as inconsequential, the process itself scales easily. Although this is just an improvement of one sentence of a set of directions for a social studies lesson, yet it demonstrates what could be done with unit plans, the standard course of study and the entire curriculum.