First year teachers tend to avoid it. It typically takes a
veteran teacher to pull the newbie from their fortress of solitude, clutching
piles of paper, screaming, “I have so much to do!” Thank goodness there was a
veteran teacher who pulled me out of my room 13 years ago.
In a faculty room you share the cool things your
students are doing in your classroom; hear about struggles; or express what’s on
your mind?
Going to the faculty room is important, but maybe not for
the reasons you think.
In teaching, we spend a great deal of the day surrounded by
hundreds of students, but in isolation from other teachers. This is why we
should visit the faculty room.
CONNECTIONS—Nothing joins people together like talk of
sports or Survivor, neither of which I like, but these interactions create
continued connections that, in turn, create a sense of comfort. No need for a
rope course to create a team. Go to the Faculty Room.
COMFORT—Once the connections are made, comfort will set in.
Some call this “team mentality” but I see it more as a comfort mentality since
teachers are already in the profession for the same reason. It is just a matter
of a marriage of teaching styles. And that new teacher…once he/she feels
comfortable, he/she will ask questions, seek support, further his/her teaching
craft.
COLLEGIALITY—the third, and ultimate, step. This step
involves teachers working together on a common goal, sharing ideas. Before you
can be a team, you have to feel connected. And when teachers have the comfort
of a team, it allows for collegial work. Through collegial work, research,
integration, weaving, and otherwise brilliant teacher magicary, teachers will
create a school that can impact student learning.
So if you have not been to the Faculty Room, I suggest you
go. Even if it means listening to last week’s episode of Dancing with the
Stars. Arrrrrrrg!
But right now, share what’s on your mind, regardless of
how random. What cool things are happening in your classroom? What obstacles
have you seen lately? What is your opinion on the state of education? What
funny thing did a student say (middle-schoolers are always coming up with the
best similes: His head was like a ball except that it was more square).
Thanks for the dialogue. These shared thoughts may become
future posts or discussions. Check back and keep the Faculty Room going.
Great post, Travis, as usual. I must confess that I’m one of the “Staff Room Outsiders.” Although I’m generally a fairly social person, I tend to avoid the faculty room for three reasons:
1. Time. I try to spend as much quality time at home with my family as possible, and in order to do that, I have to stay on task when I’m at work. Spending 20 minutes talking about TV and sports at school means 20 more minutes I have to spend checking work and preparing for class after school. And that’s 20 minutes I don’t spend with my own family.
2. The nature of the conversations tends to be somewhat negative. Especially this year.
3. Health. The culture at our school has evolved to the point where people feel compelled to bring snacks when it’s their turn to tidy up the room. I try to be careful about what I eat, but school can be a high-stress environment and when you add easily available high-calory snacks, you’re gonna get some expanding waistlines.
But you do make a compelling case for teachers to engage in healthy adult interactions. Perhaps it’s time for me to suck it up and venture into the faculty room.
Back in the seventies, teachers hung out in the teachers’ lounge to drink a Coke and have a little down time. Now there is very little down time due to all of the documentation, testing, etc. Too bad.
Thanks, Travis. I take your point. Yes, team is good as is running alone (whatever “alone” may mean).
It looks to me that all ideas start with an individual, even among those working as a team.
Perhaps others, as have I found professional development use with the creative tension that the team and individual offer.
Good, sly post! 🙂
Traditions are important, back to Mark’s comment, but to what extent should they be held even when they are bein shown to not be traditions any more?
Thanks Sioban for your description of what you do. That is great. Bob Heiny, things like this work just as well. My neighbor works at a box making plant and he is in the process of reworking how they do business. Every day after their meeting, they, as a group (on purpose even if it seemed silly at first), walked the whole plant, talking about what they saw….growing into what they see….eventually becoming what they can do.
The overall idea I want to covey with this post is team.
The second thing is what is on the minds of staff today. What we you want to share?
I work in a large college, and we don’t have a “faculty room” per se, but my colleagues and I wander the corridors and gather in one another’s offices to unburden ourselves of whatever’s troubling us, share lesson plans, or make coffee dates. We often socialize together, and for years my department organized a yearly retreat where we spent a winter weekend at an inn, skiing and eating good food and sharing. I’ve gone through a couple of rough patches in my teaching career, and have sometimes thought of throwing in the towel, but often it’s the thought of my connections with my colleagues – will I ever work in such a supportive, congenial atmosphere again? – that keeps me in place. Our bonds with our coworkers are important no matter where we work, and teachers sometimes need to know that they are not islands, that they are part of a community.
Maybe we don’t live in a black and white world after all. Maybe working alone doesn’t always equal isolation, but maybe sometimes it does. Maybe what works really well for one teacher doesn’t work at all for another. Maybe Travis’s post wasn’t really about the faculty room, maybe it was about creating a thread that is an open place for us to visit, vent, share…just like in the lounge.
Maybe there are more engaging arguments to pick 🙂
How about this: as a secondary teacher I am often irritated by some of the traditions that are clung to in high schools. Prom and homecoming, spirit weeks and dress up days, for example. Now, I’m 30, not some curmudgeon looking to crush fun out of the school experience or shout at the neighbor kids to get off my lawn. However, it seems that such a small proportion of students actually participate in and enjoy many of these activities. Not only are we clinging to an antiquated school system, schedule, but some of these social events seem to harken to the days of debutante balls and times when nothing mattered but Friday’s football game. I’m wondering what other schools to engage their student body (philanthropy, community service come to mind) that provide some social interaction but don’t feel forced (like the dress-up days…hawaiian shirt day! about 3% of the kids dressed up…despite the rolls and rolls of butcher paper promoting it… what is the value?)
I launched this in my own faculty room recently and was treated as a heretic. I don’t get it.
Total side note: one of my frosh is doing an awesome stop-action lego short film to reinterpret the first act of Romeo and Juliet. When done, I’ll have them youtube it and link to it from here.
Are you sure, Travis that you want to suggest that working alone as a teacher equals isolation? Perhaps I missed your point.
Teachers I have known over the decades do not hold that view. Instead, they pick and choose when, where, and with whom to interact, usually not in the faculty room. Does that make sense?
@Mark, I will pass that information along.
@Bob Heiny, There is nothing wrong with working alone. The post is a reminder for those teachers who will benefit from it. Again, it is not the norm for teachers to isolate themselves, and we do not by choice, but by how classes get scheduled. I do most of my thinking alone, but I like to share it with other teachers.
Travis, I think the struggle for differentiation you bring up can best be remedied (and research has shown this again and again) by reducing class sizes so that teachers can forge greater connections with individual students, thereby understanding their discrete needs more and having the time to develop and adapt curriculum to serve them. Of course, that’s not something we as teachers can always do, its based on funding and a much bigger picture. I teach in a “program” called the Freshman Success Academy at Camas High School (http://www.camas.wednet.edu/chs/staff/mgardner/Academy.htm) which is aimed at easing this same transition as kids move from 8th grade to 9th grade. I find is really strange that it is called a “program” in one respect, since the main aspect of our classes which differentiates us from the “mainstream” is that instead of classes of 28-32, we have classes of 18-20. We are required to teach the same curriculum in Math and Science, we cover the same literature and do the same writing assignments in English. Yet, our kids for five years now have had higher average GPAs than the rest of their class, and various other benchmarks have indicated (either by comparison to their peers or to their own past performance) that this simple change of increased teacher contact facilitated by smaller class sizes has resulted in greater success.
Even in the smaller group, I still struggle with the broad spectrum of skills. For example, we just completed a writing process about To Kill a Mockingbird where we analyzed indirect characterization and used text-evidence to discuss how characters changed over the course of the novel. The average paper was 3.5 pages long (MLA format) and knocked my socks off. However, I also had the extremes: a handful of kids who gave me insightful, moving analyses with powerful voice and command of the language. At the other end, formulaic rhetoric peppered with convention errors so great as to make the text nearly unreadable. I conferenced with each kid, which gave me the chance to individualize feedback and offer face-to-face training, but I cannot do that with every writing assignment and with every reading session.
I hold the highly unpopular opinion that at the secondary level, the language arts, like mathematics, should be tracked based on skill readiness and demonstrated literacy. Granted, there is merit in heterogenous mixings where strong writers can influence poor writers, for example, but I thing what ACTUALLY ends up happening is that we simply teach to the middle and the two extremes are both underserved. I’ve discussed the idea of rather than having English 9, 10, 11, 12, as most high schools do, we have English 1 thorough 12 (each is one semester). As kids enter as freshmen, they are in a one-semester literacy and composition course which then establishes their placement the next semester, into mixed-grade courses. Sure, I see lots of problems, all of which might be listed but subsequent posters on this discussion, but I believe that in the end we will be able to do a better job of “meeting kids where they are” to help them advance, rather than just taking a scattershot, blanket approach because of limited resources and crowded classrooms.
I would argue, Bob, that most people who enter the profession do so because they have an inherent drive to connect with people. I worry that those who have time management concerns that make them work through lunch their whole career might benefit from a little balance.
Teachers are human beings, too, despite the sentiment from much of society that we are higher-salary-demanding leaving-kids-behind teaching-to-the-test complainers who only work nine months a year. In order to be a good teacher, I’ve learned, I must have balance and not be a martyr for other people’s children. Sometimes that means putting off a stack of papers to go to the zoo with my family or delaying entering grades because my son wants to build a fort. I’ve decided that I can handle an angry parent wanting to know why something isn’t graded yet. I simply could not stomach one of my sons turning to me in twenty years and asking why I didn’t make more time for him. As much as society and this profession expects us to eat, breathe, and sleep for our students… doing so drives good teachers to ruin or (in better economic times) straight out of the business.
(deep breath…)
Cute cartoon! Respectfully, some teachers (people) like and are productive working alone, even though most teachers and teacher prep faculty appear to prefer working as groupers. Some people don’t like groupthink or communitas, so they have other time management priorities than time in the faculty room. What’s wrong with working alone, if that’s what a teacher wants to do and students meet performance criteria?
One of my colleague’s is experiencing difficulty in figuring out how to differentiate within the classroom. The writing abilities of the students in the class is vast: some cannot create sentences consistently, others are employing literary techniques like foreshadow and figurative language. The grade level is 6th grade. 6th grade is often a transition year for students from the elementary model to the secondary model. IT is often the first time students have more than one teacher or are learning complicated, hard concepts. It seems the academic expectations jump at this point, not to say that it was “weak” before, but the system expects a leap of learning in this grade. Those who do well, do well in seventh grade where it is a shock for parents and students because of the secondary model. How best to differentiate for those below grade level and those above, while meeting the needs of all students, while teaching the curriculum. Thoughts?
I’d venture that there IS a correlation between whether teachers have connections with other colleagues and how long they stay in the profession. I was one of those first year teachers who was wrestled out of my room (out back of the building in a leaky portable, no less) to go to the staff room for lunch. I still remember the two teachers who persuaded me to do so, and probably never appropriately thanked them.
I have a great lunch crew right now–and I’m lucky that when we do talk about kids or curriculum, it always spins toward problem solving as opposed to spiraling negativity…which has been the case before in other groups. It is so rejuvenating to have adult conversations where we can level-headedly discuss politics or pedagogy, religion or family, whatever we want…no one ever leaves with their feelings hurt over some disagreement, because disagreements get handled like adults–not always what we get in the classroom or even the main office. Yes, there are moments where it takes a turn for the silly and even obscene, but I wouldn’t trade it. Many times I’ve hustled out at the bell, aching from hearty laughter. Best of all, I know that around that lunch table are a group of teachers to whom I could turn for professional advice if I needed it, thanks to the camaraderie formed in that 25 minutes of duty-free lunch.
…I know this isn’t exactly what the original post from Travis was really asking for, but I though I’d share anyway (that’s what the faculty room is for, right?)
Ohhhh, a research topic. I like that.
Love the cartoon Travis! Spot on——-
If you don’t visit the faculty room you begin to feel like you are one man (or woman in my case) on an island. The job can get very lonely without other adult connections. I wonder ———- if those of us that visit the faculty room stay in education longer? This would be an interesting research project.
Travis –
I agree with your take on the faculty room. At my school there isn’t a single faculty room but dept. offices where a lot goes on in the morning and at lunch. It is at these places where I’ve built my greatest partnerships among other teachers. The sharing of ideas has been the most valuable aspect for my teaching, I need these interactions among my peers.