Time Well Spent: My Most Remarkable Year of Teaching
Bill Ferriter teaches sixth grade language arts and social studies at Salem Middle School, where he serves on a leadership team working to build a professional learning community. Bill is a National Board Certified Teacher and was named 2005 Wake County Teacher of the Year.
The past 180 days have been some of the most remarkable of my 12-year teaching career. I joined the faculty of a new school that is determined to establish itself as a professional learning community as described by Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker. My school year ended about a week ago, and I've been struggling to reflect on what it is that we accomplished this year.
Each time that I've started to write, my thoughts have wandered across topics too broad to truly summarize our efforts. Pinpointing one or two successes of the past year was proving to be a challenge and I was growing frustrated. That's when Carl got involved - at least, that's when Carl's thoughts got involved. You see, Carl is a teacher from Pennsylvania whom I have never met. In fact, I don't even know his last name, but I owe him a debt of gratitude.
One day, he decided to post comments on the "Teacher Voices" blog of the Teacher Leaders Network. While his thoughts were related to a strand of conversation about teacher recognition, he crystallized the key component of our school's work during year one in our professional learning community. What he wrote was:
It seems to me that doing collegiality right requires thorough inculcation, not just a half-hour here or there. Does your experience show that? - that it takes a long time and a lot of effort to develop meaningful collegial relationships and expectations in a school?
Carl couldn't have been more right because "doing collegiality"
has been both the greatest challenge and greatest reward of our school's
first year together. Our entire first year, it seems, has been about building
trust and establishing positive working relationships with the members of
our professional learning teams.
At times, the going was tough. None of us had ever spent significant time
collaborating and we didn't even know where to begin! This lack of experience
caused great frustration and we often wondered what we had gotten ourselves
into.
I can remember walking into meetings with my teammates convinced that we were going to get nothing done, and walking out convinced that I had been right. There were times where I wasn't even sure that effective collaboration between professionals so used to working in isolation was even possible or worthwhile. After all, I had been successful without collaboration in the past - why did I need a learning team now?
Throughout the year, though, norms and expectations were formed and our work became more efficient and productive. We learned about one another's personalities and professional backgrounds, recognizing that both would influence our interactions. We established and agreed upon formats for lesson planning and reflection. Most importantly, we began to see one another as true members of a team committed to the same goal: success for all students.
With determination, we are now at the point where we have an inherent trust in one another. Each new experience allowed us to value our strengths and to understand our weaknesses. We became something much more than a group of teachers "working together." We became a team, and now we feel safe to move on to the real work of professional learning communities: looking at data and identifying effective practices.
It took a full year, though, for us to reach that level of comfort and it was by no means easy. It involved a willingness to let go - to recognize that our collective efforts are more meaningful than anything that we could have done as individuals. Trust at this level has rarely been a part of school culture, and only time and commitment made it possible in our school.
In the end, though, it is definitely worth it. The teachers of our school are more energized and productive than ever before. We are excited about our work and about where we are going as a community. Because of this positive energy, I believe we will have little (if any) teacher turnover in the next few years. We are also going to see our student test scores soar as we collaboratively examine instructional practices in the non-threatening setting of our professional learning teams.
Perhaps my colleague, a young woman in her fourth year of teaching, described our year best when she said:
The collaborative work that my team does motivates, empowers, and supports me in so many ways as a professional. As a cooperative team we receive constant feedback and assistance that helps each of us develop professionally. I would say it took about a good five/six months (and our willingness) for our team to develop the type of open relationship that's needed to work collaboratively, but it is by far my most satisfying professional (growth/development) experience. You are right in saying that it takes time, but it's time well spent!
Bill Ferriter's article comes from the diaries of the Teacher Leader Network.