Benefits of Collaborative Teaching #3 - Good Cop, Bad Cop

True confession time ... sometimes ... occasionally ... scarcely ... rarely ... we might get a tiny bit impatient or frustrated with our students  ... hardly ... occasionally ... did we say that already?

We're all human beings. Sometimes you're having a bad day. Sometimes they're having a bad day. Sometimes something just rubs you the wrong way. Whatever the reason, we all have moments when we're not equipped to be our best selves when dealing with a trying situation. So that's where one of the benefits of collaborative teaching comes in. You're not alone. You have a partner. You have backup.

Okay, so another confession ... this isn't really "good cop, bad cop", it's more of a tag team situation but we really just wanted to make an awesome picture of us as cops.

This is how it works ...

 TAG!!!

TAG!!!

TAG!!!

TAG!!!

From the limb,

Levity from the Limb #3

Anybody feeling a little like this lately?

The other day KH was doing a Core Phonics asessment on a kiddo. When they were done, she asked the kid to get her the next person to be tested. It went a little something like this:

Ms. H: Excellent job, Student X. Could you please get me Ryan Reynolds? Thanks.

As the child happily went off, KH started thinking to herself, "Wait, did I just ask her to get me Ryan Reynolds?" As in ...

Yep, Ryan Reynolds. There's really nothing more to say after that except ...

WHY DIDN'T SHE ACTUALLY BRING ME RYAN REYNOLDS?!?!?

That's the only thing that would have saved the day.

From the limb,

Lessons from the Limb #8: "Fight Right", Y'all!!!

So ... we got in a fight ...

Alright, alright, we didn't get into a real fight, but we did have a disagreement - quarrel? dispute? clash? squabble? - about partnering up students, of all things, and we had to work it out. And while we did eventually come to an agreement in regards to student partnerships, the bigger take away we had was about communication and essentially how to "fight right". KH recently read a book called The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin ...

You can find it on Amazon here

... and one of the things that stuck with her the most was the idea that couples with healthy relationships "fight right" - they don't bring up past wrongs, they are able to laugh and joke amidst a spat, they try to really hear what the other person is saying, and they let things go once resolution is struck. While we are obviously not a couple, we think the principles of "fighting right" still apply because in many ways our relationship mirrors the components of a true marriage.

So with the idea of "fighting right" and the desire to improve our communication process, KH launched a conversation basically about how we felt our disagreement went and what we could do better in the future. This conversation, in true KH and KM reflective fashion, became a meta-analysis of our disgreement, almost like a post-game breakdown recapping each moment of the fight and where, if anywhere, commincation failures could be pinpointed with the hopes of avoiding them in the future. Now before you think we're crazy - though we admit you may have a point at times - we did this because we wanted to improve our communication, we wanted to make sure that when we were quarreling that we were still "fighting right".

We're sure that you are DYING to know the details of our squabble but, alas, we are going to disappoint you because this entry is not really about the fight itself, but what we learned from having the fight in the first place and then analyzing it together.

Realization #1: It is important to restate things to make sure that both of us are hearing the same thing.

     Revelation: Sometimes we are talking about two completely different things and we don't even realize it! Fail! Other times, we are saying the exact same thing - we actually agree! - and we don't even realize it. Double fail! Not a productive way to communicate.

     Resolution: We are going to work on following up key agreements in discussions by rephrasing. For example,

Realization #2: It is important to be crystal clear about what we've agreed upon.

     Revelation: Most often when we debate or disagree on things, they are complicated issues - regardless of what you may think after reading about our Alpha Wolf struggles for dominance. We have to sort them out and make a plan one layer at a time. What we have a tendancy to do is keep moving the conversation forward without being explicit about what we have agreed upon and what's still undecided. This either leaves us in the position of ending our conversation in a cloud of amibiguity ...

... or we keep rediscussing things we've already agreed upon. Either way, it's a waste of precious time and, as KM would say, "We don't have time for this nonsense!"

     Resolution: Well, our first plan was to hire a man named Icarus to act as our scribe and follow us around recording our agreements.

And while we're still holding out hope that someday we'll find him, in the mean time we're going to work on synthesizing exactly what we have agreed to BEFORE we move on, with each of us weighing in with a yes or no to confirm.

This all may seem ridiculous to the outsider, but one of the things we value most about our professional relationship and something we believe is essential to our success as a team is our ability to talk about and learn from our ups and downs. It would be so easy to let things fester or just leave things as they are, to accept the status quo, to not rock the boat and not push ourselves to dig deeper, but we are true believers in continuous improvement and that includes our professional relationship with each other, not just the pedagogy. After all this reflecting and discussing, analyzing and soul baring, our FLY AWAY is this: without communication and trust, collaborative teaching cannot reach its true potential for both the students and the teachers.

We'll leave you with this final reminder:

Stay classy, my friends!

From the limb,

Even When 40 Feels Like 140, Don't Stop Believing

Anyone else ever feel this way after the first week of school?

Whew! We made it through our first week and we are wiped!! We're not usually ones to toot our own horns, but there's nothing like the the first weeks of school to remind you of how AMAZING you are that you sustain this level of energy and activity for 10 whole months. We are definitely missing our stamina; we are going to have to build it up all over again.

Anyway ... what we really wanted to write about is starting the year with collaborative teaching, specifically dealing with all those kiddos. Now usually when we tell people that we teach forty students, they give us a funny look and say something like, "Dear God, where do you teach?" They are so horrified by the number that they fail to do the math: 40 students divided by 2 teachers = 20 students per teacher, a perfectly respectable (and actually difficult to find nowadays) ratio. And we always reply, "No, no, no! It's really great! It doesn't feel like 40 kids at all," while giving them a bright smile and a comforting arm pat (they just seem so disturbed). That statement was true for most of last year, except for three times: the first day of school drop off, Open House, and when we did our Rainforest play.

This year, we noticed there have been a few times when 41 has felt like 141:

Achieving Quiet

Teaching the children the signals that we use to get their attention and then training them to follow the signals takes forever because we have to wait for twice as many students to get used to becoming quiet on a signal.

Transitions

It takes much longer for the children to transition because they are still learning what to do and we have to walk the kids through it a few at a time. The children tend to erupt into conversation during and after each transition, particularly coming in from recess and lunch. They are still learning that they need to transition quickly and quietly so we can move on with our day.

Names/Faces

We learned the children's names by the end of the first day because we're awesome like that :) But 41 feels like 141 when they are trying to learn each other's names. It's a lot of new faces to learn and remember. For us, learning and remembering all of the parents' names and faces makes 41 families feel like 141 because we have so many more families to get to know. We love getting to work with so many families, but we hate that feeling of not remembering people's names.

Accountability

It is so essential to check each child's work in the beginning of the year so they have that sense of accountability and that you are checking their work for completeness and quality. We believe that the more time you put into this on the front end, the less you have to carefully check everything later because the children have built the habit of doing their best work. 41 feels like 141 when you're having to check each child's work before they can move on, particularly when a swarm of them finish at the same time.

Systems

41 feels like 141 when you are teaching the children the systems of the classroom and the behaviors you want them to follow. Good teachers know you have to be explicit in the beginning of the year with exactly what you expect of the children and practice, practice, practice. This practice time can take a lot longer when you have twice as many kids. For example, when teaching the children how we want them to unpack their snacks, lunches, and backpacks. With a class of 20, this takes forever in first grade, but this feels like it is taking 41 forevers with 41 kids.

Gettin' from A to B

Now we all know that first graders in a line, especially at the beginning of the year, can be a bit like herding cats, but with 41 kids in a line it can feel as though our line stretches the length of the school. Other classes have to stop as our line goes by like a railroad crossing, just kid after kid after kid as the line goes on and on. Oh, and the gaps in the line ... oh, the gaps! And the best part is when the kids aren't paying attention and then they start following another line like little lost ducklings. Oy vay!

While we are usually waxing poetic about how amazing collaborative teaching is and all the benefits, we wanted to write this post because we are also here to keep it real. We want you to know that it's not always lollipops and rainbows; if you want to try this - merging your class together with another class like we have - it's going to feel daunting and exhausting and a little cray-cray at times.  In the beginning you are probably going to think, "Forty kids? What in the world were we thinking? WHY???" You are going to have to hold on to your teacher partner as you dig deep for strength and patience.  Just hold on and hang in there...you can do it. There is a silver lining:

Once you get your children trained and your classroom humming, it's magic!

Your children will learn the systems and the expectations, they will get used to moving efficiently in a line, they will make friends with each other and learn each other's names, they will figure out how to transition quickly and quietly ... you will even learn ALL of the parents' names and faces ... and before you know it, you will be sitting back and marveling at how far you've come. You'll be saying:

Yee-ah!!!

Get through the beginning and forty will feel like twenty. We've been there, we promise. Hold on. It's worth it!

From the limb,

We Realize It's Not New Years But We're Making Some Resolutions (Yeah, We're Rebels Like That)

Have we mentioned before that we like to take walks? We live in a beautiful place and sometimes we just like to walk around and soak it all in and, of course, talk ... well, blab up a storm to be more precise. There's something about going on a walk that can help us focus and clarify our thinking around a topic - a trick we like to use when we're feeling stymied or having trouble agreeing upon something. So the other day we went on a hike and during our hike, we came up with 5 resolutions for the upcoming school year that we thought we'd share with you.

Resolution 1: Stop and smell the roses

It is so easy, especially for us, to get obsessed preoccupied with everything we have to do and everything we want to do, and forget to just appreciate what we have accomplished and all of the funny times along the way. There were so many hilarious moments and small victories throughout the year last year and we want to find a way to capture them so we can treasure those memories. For our personalities, we find that being a teacher can be a continuous slog where you feel like you're never where you want to be, never on top of things like you'd planned to be, and like you're never good enough. While we enjoy the challenge of continuous improvement that being a teacher inspires in us, it is still important to find ways to celebrate the little stuff so you don't feel disheartened or defeated; you have to find ways to celebrate how far you've come and to remember to laugh and have fun along the way. So how are we going to achieve this: a memory jar! We're going to take a little time to write down funny or special moments in our classroom throughout the year and then we'll have those to look at whenever we're having a rough day or when we want to look back on the school year. Thank you for that idea, Pinterest!

Resolution 2: Manage our time like a boss

Ah, time management - the bane of many teachers' existences, ourselves included. As a teacher there is so much work to be done all the time and it can be incredibly overwhelming. You could literally work 24 hours a day and still feel like you have a million things undone; it is the sisyphean nature of the job.

Collaborative teaching brings a new variable to time management - managing the limited time we have together. Last year, we ended up having to split up our workload, for example KM (used to be KB - read further about that here: Something Happened This Summer ... and it's Kinda a Big Deal) would plan our reading small groups and KH would plan our math small groups. And while this was fine for actually getting the work accomplished, it kind of defeated the purpose of us teaching together. You see, we wanted to plan together - that was the whole point,!! - so it was a big disappointment when time constraints and schedules prevented us from doing so the majority of the time. So what are two teachers to do - why make a plan, of course! We have rearranged our schedules so that we have a protected work time together until 4 every day after school - barring required meetings, of course.

We are also going to use "to-do" lists and agendas to help us focus our time. We were inspired by the book Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

Amazing read, by the way!!!

We made an "End of the Day" checklist that we will complete everyday as soon as school is out so that no matter what the classroom is ready for the next morning. That will take away the stressful feeling in the morning of having a bunch of things to accomplish before the children arrive.

Click here to download this document

We also made a "Weekly To-Do" list that will guide our activities every day after school. We are hoping this will help us manage our time, make the best use of our time together, and keep ourselves focused on one thing at a time.

Click here to download this document

One of the best things about working together is that we are such good friends and we have a lot of fun together. This is a double-edged sword, though, because it's easy for us to spend a half-hour recounting something funny that happened in the classroom that day, and then one of us has to go and we've lost our common planning time ... whoops! Soooo ... we've both made a commitment to use these tools and our own discipline to focus the time we have together ... and then we'll spend that half an hour recounting a funny thing that happened in the classroom on the phone that night instead of vice versa.

Resolution 3: Share the stove and remember there are only 4 burners

Ok, this one's a bit complicated ... stay with us! Basically, we created an analogy to express our frustration about not working together on the same things during the year. As we mentioned before, out of necessity we split up the workload last year in order to keep up with all the lesson planning we needed to accomplish. So we ended up each tending to our own stove, if you will. Additionally, we each have our own interests and ideas that we want to pursue so we ended up adding our own pots to our own stove. You see what we're saying here? This resolution is to remind us of two things:

1) We want to work together on things. That's why we're doing this. That's what helps us grow as educators and get stronger in our teaching. We need to make sure that we are cooking at the same stove and working together instead of doing our own thing.

2) There are only so many burners on the stove. Sometimes we tend to get overexcited about a new idea and want to start working on it right away. While that enthusiasm and drive to innovate is an important component of growing as an educator, it has to be tempered with reality. There is only so much time and mental energy available for new ideas. We want to make sure when we are doing things that we are putting the adequate resources behind them to do them correctly or else, what's the point? We have to remember that we only have room to be working on and innovating so many things at one time (thus the 4 burners). We have decided that everything else will go in "The Oven", a notebook that we have created to capture our ideas and things we want to learn more about or explore, until we are able to give adequate attention to them.

Resolution 4: Simplify, simplify, simplify

Yeah, we're so good at this resolution that we couldn't even simplify its title; three "simplifies", really? The irony is not lost on us. And while we've almost made an oxymoron out of the title, it serves as a good reminder of the intention behind this resolution. You see, both of us get caught up in new ideas and elaborate schemes (We blame all of those amazing teaching blogs out there and don't even get us started on the time suck that is Pinterest!). In all seriousness though, this is actually a good thing because it pushes us to be reflective, to take risks, and improve ... but, conversely, it can also lead to unnecessary overcomplication of things. Even with the best of intentions, if you have too many balls in the air, the more likely you are to be dropping balls or not paying the kind of attention you should to each ball. We think it's better to narrow our focus so that we can do our best work on what's most important. So, we're going to use the following criteria to analyze our decisions and any new ideas we have for our classroom:

1) Does this enhance the work we are already doing?
2) What are we going to replace with this new idea?
3) Can we use things we already have in place to achieve some, if not all, of this new objective?

And if all else fails, we'll just keep repeating "simplify, simplify, simplify" ... sounds simple enough, right?

Resolution 5: Get off your log and blog

Ok, the title of this one is a little silly, but we really do enjoy maintaining our blog. First, you have no idea how hilarious we find ourselves when we draw our comics - it's pretty ridiculous - and we defnitely get more laughs out of it than anyone who views them possibly could. But, more importantly, we have great conversations about what's happening in our classroom and being forced to synthesize it in order to write about it, optimistically in an engaging, but probably more realistically in a semi-coherent manner, helps us clarify our own thinking around what we're doing. For example, if we cannot present a strong argument for what we're doing in our classroom on this blog then we should probably take a more critical look at what we're doing. Finally, this blog is a great way to capture small victories, moments of growth, and moments of hilarity that we experience throughout our school year. It's a way to look back and see how far we've come, and maybe inspire other people to try something new. While blogging in retrospect over the summer as we've been doing has been fine, we'd really like to keep up on our blog in real-time so the experience is more reflective of our growth in the moment instead of feeling a bit like we're monday morning quarterbacking ourselves. So the moral of the story is that even things that you enjoy can take discipline sometimes. We need to have the discipline to keep up on our blog for your enjoyment and, even more importantly, our own!

So those are the resolutions we came up with. Wish us luck in keeping them up and, assuming we are able to keep up Resolution 5, we'll be keeping your apprised of our progress. Happy New Years first days of school!

From the limb,

We're B-AAAA-CK (and we're sorry we left, too)

Hello Everyone,

Happy summer!!! We have been out for a few weeks now and are finally getting our heads back together after our whirlwind year. We want to start by apologizing for beginning our amazing blog, making you fall in love with us, and then ... poof ... vanishing ... no word, not even a post-it note break-up ... just gone! We began this blog with the best of intentions and then we became completely swept up in the reality of running our classroom and we just plum ran out of time and creative energy to invest in our blog. And we feel really bad about it ...

Guity face

Sheepish face

But you can't change the past, you can only move forward so we are going to try again and hopefully this time, now that we've passed the "this is my first year teaching this way" hurdle, we are optimistic that we will have more time and mental energy to invest in this baby - our blog.

The reason we actually started this blog was as a tool to support our reflection and share our experiences teaching in a collaborative classroom together. While we did not end up sharing out most of our reflections via this blog, we still engaged in the process continuously throughout the year so we thought we'd take this wonderful gift of summer vacation to do a little post-mortem (sorry for the morbid terminology, but it's really the most accurate word for it) of our school year and share what we learned, even though it will not be in real time.

Besides summer is really the best time for reflection and planning for next year, so really you might say we planned it this way. Yes, that's what we'll say ... we planned it this way ... yeah, that seems just right.

From the limb,

Lessons from the Limb #7: One of Us Had a Cold but We Survived!!!

Okay, it happened ... the dreaded moment ... one of us needed a sub. OH MY! Poor Ms. B held on for two days fighting a nasty cold before she succumbed to it and needed to stay home. Now getting a sub when you're sick is drama enough when you're teaching in a classroom by yourself. It's always a balance between needing the day to be productive but not wanting to leave too much essential instruction in case the day goes awry. You would think that having a collaborative classroom would negate that issue but it actually added another lay of complexity. On one hand since Ms. H was going to be there, we were able to continue our instruction without worrying about the way our lesson plans were interpreted or carried out. On the other hand, we are no longer running our classroom as a whole class for the majority of the day. In fact, we had just reached the point where our children were getting independent enough that we are able to pull small groups. We were so excited to get here, we were all planned, and then BAM!! Ms. B gets sick. Classic! We had to can all of our small group instructional plans and go back to whole group because it was too complex to hand over to a sub. It was interesting because Ms. H was able to run the classroom and keep the children on pace instructionally, but it felt like we were losing ground because we had started to tap how much differentiation could occur when the two of us are in the classroom.

Having this experience with a sub taught us a few lessons. The first FLY AWAY is that in a collaborative classroom when one teacher is absent, the day does NOT grind to a halt. Though you may not be able to carry out the day at the same level of rigor and productivity as you would when both teachers are present, even teaching in whole group all day is probably providing the children with more instruction than if the day fell entirely into the hands of a substitute teacher.

The second FLY AWAY has to do with the collaborative relationship. Ms. H got a first hand taste of how it feels to be thrown into a collaborative situation with someone with whom she had no prior relationship. Ms. H had to keep complete control of the day and tell the subs what to do all day (She was basically Ms. Bossypants - though Ms. B might argue that is her natural state :). There was no collaborative relationship, there was instead a hierarchy out of necessity. Of course, this was of no fault of the substitutes - they were both lovely, helpful, and flexible - but there is just no way to replicate the relationship and the synergy that we have through our relationship and the time we've invested in forming our classroom and our vision together. The FLY AWAY is that without the time, the trust, and the communication between two teachers trying to collaborate, the experience becomes completely different. In this case, all of the responsibility fell on Ms. H for the entire day and she became the "boss" of the classroom. Had the substitutes been different people, this could have manifested into a daylong power struggle with the two teachers. Thank goodness that it did not!! In order for collaborative teaching to really work, in our opinion, you need trust and communication, and the time to get on the same page in order to make your vision work. We're not saying that this is realistic in terms of having a sub, but the experience further emphasized the ingredients for successful collaboration for us.

The final FLY AWAY is that things always go wrong when you have a sub. What is up with that? In our case, on Wednesday, one of the students accidentally set off the fire extinguisher. WHY?!?!?!!?! It sent this powder all over the corner of one classroom. This caused Ms. H to run around like a crazy person trying to wrangle 41 overly-curious first graders and get them packed up for the day. Oh did Ms. H miss Ms. B in that moment. Bottom line is we all survived and Ms. B is feeling much better. And while Ms. H loved her dear teaching partner Ms. B before, her absence made the heart grow even fonder :)

From the limb,

First Day of School ... In Ten Words

We survived our first day of school! These ten words describe our experience and feelings:

1) excitement

2) thirty-nine

3) smiles

4) houses

5) teamwork

6) flexibility

7) squirmy

8) procedures

9) supported

10) tired

We hope everyone else had a wonderful first day of school as well. Now off to collapse in bed ... zzzzzz!

From the limb,

Lessons from the Limb #2: The Legend of the Wolf

     Once upon a time there were two teachers who ruled over two independent domains.  Both of these teachers believed in the same things and worked closely together.  Then came this amazing opportunity - work together, combine kingdoms, unite forces.  They thought they were prepared.  They talked it all through.  They agreed on everything.  "Reader's Workshop?" one would suggest.  "Absolutely!" the other would reply.  "Morning Meeting?" one would put forth.  "But, of course," the other laughed back.  When it came to the big picture, everything was fairy dust, rainbows, and unicorns.

      But every interesting story must have a conflict, a plot twist.  When it came time to sort out the details, to get to the real work, something changed.  Out came the moon and these charming closely-aligned, collaborative teachers were transformed into:

ALPHA WOLVES BENT ON DOMINANCE!!!

     How does it end for our fairy tale heroines?  Is their alpha nature to be the downfall of our tale?

      As the moon slid back behind the clouds, the alpha teachers reverted to their normal forms, their rational selves.  They talked it out and realized they had learned another FLY AWAY: 

     You have to keep your eye on the bigger picture and communicate.  In the end, it really doesn't matter what font size your use or what color paper is chosen.  In the end, what matters is communication and taking care of your partnership.  Sometimes you have to cede control over the little things so you achieve a big picture vision that you couldn't do alone.

Still, better be careful around the full moon. Awwwww-whoooooo!!!

From the limb,

40 is the new 20

Yesterday Kristie was rolling through the office when she spied a towering, uh ... tower of boxes from Office Depot. 

"Whose boxes are those?" she snorted to some colleagues, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder at the ridiculous pile. 


"I don't know," they replied, "but those are a lot of boxes!"


"Yeah, who would order that much stuff? Jeez!!!" Kristie stalked over to the boxes to take a look at the fools who would order this much stuff.


This is what she saw:

This was her reaction:

Kristie eyes the boxes holding our classroom supply order

While ordering our supplies for next year, we were continuously boggled by the sheer quantity of supplies we were ordering. 40 Word Study notebooks ... 90 zip pouches ... 120 binders, oh my!!! It's natural to focus on the number forty when considering our upcoming work, to think that all we're are doing is essentially doubling everything. But then Kristie pointed out ...

40 smiles everyday

40 minds to mold

40 hugs

40 families to share this experience

40 "I love you, Ms. B and Ms. H"

40 lives to touch

When you think about it that way, the towering pile of supplies becomes a towering pile of possibilities and new beginnings. 

Now, where are we going to put all of these boxes?!?

From the limb,

Our Feelings on Collaborative Teaching ... in Haikus ... You're Welcome!

So many children
So many many backpacks
Where will they all go?

Working together
Each one uber controlling
Can we get along?

Organization
Color-coding up a storm
Bins! Bins! Oh the bins!

Sharpening pencils
Kristie is on point for that
Kristin doesn't care

Overwhelming risk
Together we are stronger
We will overcome


From the limb,