Outside the Box Part 2: My Colleagues

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In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer, wrote, “If we want to grow in our practice, we have two primary places to go: to the inner ground from which good teaching comes and to the community of fellow teachers from whom we can learn more about ourselves and our craft”  (Palmer 141).  Every teacher remembers his or her own time as a student, and we hope gives credit to those folks, the first people outside the box of our own classrooms to inspire our best work.  Those honored teachers are Part 1 of the experiences we bring to that effort.  Part 2 comes later, for if we are lucky, we also have the opportunity to observe our colleagues, and recently before our winter break, I had just that chance. 

On this particular day, our kindergarten class was studying the short o vowel sound, the sound we hear in box, fox, outside, or socks.  After an exciting lesson together on the rug, (imagine a teacher who can make vowels exciting!) some students completed a practice exercise compiling a small book, and in this book, they read about and drew many strange animals and objects, each inside a box.  As I watched those students hard at work, one drawing a big gorilla to put into a box, I realized that I was doing exactly the opposite, stepping outside my classroom box. 

Palmer says that, “[w]hen we walk into our workplace, the classroom, we close the door on our colleagues.  When we emerge, we rarely talk about what happened or what needs to happen next, for we have no shared experience to talk about.  Then, instead of calling this the isolationism it is and trying to overcome it, we claim it as a virtue called “academic freedom”: my classroom is my castle, and the sovereigns of other fiefdoms are not welcome here” (142).  Whether or not I agree with the latter part of his reflection is a subject for another day, but it is true that the nature of our profession is such that we usually have few opportunities to see our fellow teachers at work. 

My pre-holiday observations were a part of our faculty development/evaluation at Sage.  While the process is still quite new for us, the classroom visit portion basically goes like this: each teacher is assigned an intense observation team every three years, and team members are to observe that teacher at least twice during the year.  My work life has been a little crazy lately, so I didn’t schedule my recent observation times until the last minute.  Yet instead of resistance about visiting their “castles,” both of my colleagues, a kindergarten teacher and a 4^th/5^th grade math teacher, were most gracious, warmly welcoming me to watch them at work.  In doing so, they not only moved toward melting their own isolation, they also gave me an opportunity to share my experience and dissolve my own seclusion.

If I had to choose one word to describe both of my colleagues that day it would be joyful.  Of course, teachers are always a little nervous having someone observe, but it was clear that after a few minutes, the kids fully absorbed all their attention, and I was forgotten.  The enthusiasm of these teachers and the conversations and writing that followed my visits energized my return to my own students.  The same has been true for every observation I have completed over the last two and a half years.  While ostensibly the process is intended to help the teacher being observed, I benefitted as much or maybe even more. 

So thanks to Julie, Rick, Gina, Shauna, Manisha, and Gary, the teachers I have been privileged to observe since we started this process at Sage.   Along with those folks who inspired me as a young girl, they have reminded me of what is best in the classroom, even though they teach completely different age levels and subjects from my own.  The content doesn’t really matter; rather, it is the teaching.  In sharing their experiences, they have made me a better teacher.