Every parent knows that the most important factor in a good education is a great teacher. Finding great teachers is one big important challenge, but keeping them and helping them grow is an even more important one. In our school, we believe that keeping teacher learning at the center is a critical factor to modeling the kind of learning we want our students to do. That is, if our teachers want to learn, so will our students. Because of this, we see our role as facilitators of teacher learning.
One important way we do this is through teaming. Each teacher is on a grade team (the 6th grade team, for example), and also a vertical team (the math team, for example). The grade teams are responsible for celebrating, monitoring, and studying their shared students (all of our teachers except the arts and special education teach only one grade level). They plan trips, write letters home, work together on advisory planning, culture and tone. The vertical teams are responsible for the professional learning of the school. They devise and ask questions such as "how can writing become an expression of student thinking in humanities," or "how will big, murky mathematical problems increase student problem solving skills?" or "how can peer critique, drafting and feedback deepen a student's artistic ability?" or "how can listening to and documenting student thinking during writing help us make more informed decisions about what to teach to our emerging readers?" among others. These teams, and the leaders of each team, ensure consistent practices across the grade levels, create the professional development plans for the year, and report back to one another about their learning.
At the center is this idea: the experts about our children are their teachers (at school anyway!). As school leadership, if we bring out their curiosity about children and how they learn, our school will continue to grow and change for the better all of the time. And, it is a big win for everyone: happy, curious teachers who are given the professional responsibility to push themselves to continue to grow translate into happy curious students who do the same.
