ollaboration
s
piritual
ractice
By Susan Spiers Minnicks, SDAWP 1997
Relevance: Voices from the Classroom
Collaboration stems from a willingness to go beyond the limits and capacities of self; itrequires humility and a desire to explore beyond what is known or possible. When westay within the (restricted and restricting) limits of our own resources, our own imagina-tions, our own moral vision, we’ll only go as far as our self-devised goals will take us.However, when we collaborate, negotiation and communication necessarily enter the pic-ture. Shifts in perspective occur, new information is sought and added, others bring detailsand observations, questions and insights we don’t ourselves have. Classroom teaching,paradoxically, is notoriously lonely, unless we create collaborative relationships.A teacher, solo in his or her classroom, works furiously to create connections daily. Weestablish social and intellectual connections by building community, a safe place to shareand develop ideas, take risks, make mistakes and learn and celebrate learning. We buildnetworks with school staff, so practical needs run smoothly. We cultivate positive rela-tionships with parents, learning more about our students and their contexts so we canbe informed, fluid and resourceful as teachers—and hopefully coach parents so they canhelp their children be effective students. With the exception of mandatory meetings withgrade levels, departments, professional associations and administrators, some teachersmay stop at this point. Not all do though, and their students reap the deep and enduringbenefits of extended collaboration. By cultivating collaborative relationships, pushingthem with intentionality and focus, powerful insights and transformed learning occur, forthe teacher and for our students. We typically think of ‘collaboration’ as explicit shared work or tasks, classroom actionresearch or deliberate focused curriculum development, instruction or projects. When we are open to thinking differently, whenever we invite others’ thinking to challengeours, we are adapting a collaborative stance. And whenever we step outside of self,toward something larger or unknown, for purposes of pushing student learning, forconnecting students with the world and their place in it, which gives voice to students’enduring learning and teachers’ reflective practice, it is spiritual and not just pedagogi-cal. ‘Spiritual,’ "pertaining to the spirit, of higher moral qualities" (OED). This qualitypertains when there is a deeply human, experienced and creative sharing, a synthesis, aconnecting, not a mere division of work so as to get the task done. Possible collaborativerelationships include:• Teacher to teacher• Teacher to teacher to groups or teams of teachers• Teacher to parent(s)• Teacher to student• Teacher to groups of students• Student to student• Student to student to groups of students• Teacher to students to world…
Dialog
did was “pushed” in the contexts of peer revision, collaborative projects,book clubs and a level of discussionI never would have thought pos-sible. Building a classroom com-munity where it was safe to give andreceive honest feedback is alwaysa goal; now I understood how itcould be developed and sustained.It became the culture of the class-room, not an epiphenomenon of atemporary protocol such as SocraticSeminar.“Collaboration in education isthe recognition that someonecan see what you cannot. Often we are too close to our own work, our own students, andcan lose our way without oth-ers beside us to point out thesometimes obvious or obscure.It is the most humanizing andrigorous of actions and there-fore the most fitting of our pro-fession.”
—Tiffiny Shockley-Jackson, Peer Coach, Teacher SDAWP 2004
It was through my invitation torespond, “Tell me what you see.Tell me what you think,” that myunderstanding was deepened andempowered; collegial collaborationhelped create a spiritually groundedclassroom. I began to understandhow students were becoming writ-ers through this practice; it waserminating and being nurturedhere, not from other aspects of myteaching or the curriculum. This was feeding that. Collegial examination of student work is a natural step to teacherinquiry. By looking at student writ-
2
In Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, MikeRose works against the negative view of teachers and U.S. publicschools that Hirsch offers. Rosedoes this largely by changing theparameters of the discussion. Whilehe also uses anecdotal evidence, heis careful not to universalize the sto-ries he tells. He uses specific exam-ples of teaching practices that workonly to suggest possibilities, not touniversalize these anecdotes, andnot to claim universal excellence.Hirsch, on the other hand, usesanecdotal stories to claim universaldecline in U.S. public schools; thismay be compelling to some, but itmakes for sloppy and irresponsiblearguments. We need to find more ways to understand and expose thiskind of argumentation. This is notto say that what Rose is doing isnot valuable and responsibly devel-oped--I think it is; it is, however,to say that we need to broaden thekinds of responses made to sucharguments. how much it relies one
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Dialogue, Fall 2007
One form of collaboration is throughthe examination of student work.By systematically examining stu-dent writing, in a reflective con- versation with other teachers, wenotice not only evidence of what we’ve been teaching, but what nextsteps we could take with instruc-tion. By inviting others to help uslook at student work, we’re askingfor fresh eyes, for other ways of see-ing and thinking, for an objectivearticulation of what’s being taughtand demonstrably learned. A fur-ther benefit is that by engaging inthis practice on a regular basis, webecome adept at naming what wesee, at confirming what studentsare doing (or not,) and posing deep-er questions about instruction. Thispushes our conversation away fromStudent X and what we know abouther, the stories we could tell abouther, her family, her circumstances,and helps us develop clarity about what she’s doing as a writer. Wedevelop insight toward what’s beingtaught, how it’s being learned, whatnext steps are and/or how we mightintervene or mediate. Collegialcollaboration in examining stu-dent work keeps our focus on the writing, not the content, anecdotesof efforts, cuteness, or the storybehind the text; it forces objectivityand clear, intentional conversationsfocused on instruction.Last year I asked our peer coach, who is also a Writing Project Fellow,to observe students describing theirindependent vocabulary work. Thisis an evolving classroom practice where students are responsible for(a) choosing 10-15 words which arechallenging or unknown to them,(2) composing a piece in any genre,and (c) presenting it to the classon the document camera. After afew weeks of observing them and watching an informal demo, shehanded me a little diagram. “Susan,this is the center of your classroom,look!”She handed me a scrap of paper where she’d written ‘word-defini-tion, spelling, grammar/syntax,usage’ in the center, and then con-nected the following with radiatinglines:1. Understanding the process:personal, individual process andtopic, genres to publish;2. Understanding genres: the pur-pose, context, structure and usesof different genres;3. Technology: using the Internetfor words, images, fonts, graph-ics and information, becomingadept at computer graphics, and4. Self-identity and reflection:students seek and develop con-cerns, construct a social identityand authorial persona throughtheir writing.It took me a few weeks to under-stand this as more than just a cur-ricular map of sorts. I knew she was showing me what she’d seen,a gestalt. I had to stop seeing itmy way, which had been historical,and see it from her perspective, which came from our shared ques-tion: How can the study of words,the vocabulary component of anEnglish classroom, be somethingmore? Once I understood how thispractice created a room of purpose-ful writers, I could then understandhow to finesse it further towardan ambition we all dream about:a responsible literary community.The skills and cohesiveness thesestudents developed unintentionallythrough the vocabulary work we
We develop nsight toward what's being taught,how it is being earned,what next steps are and/or how we might intervene or mediate.
Dialogue, Fall 2007
ing, conducting observational dis-cussions, suggesting and explor-ing new instructional strategiesbecomes the next, natural step. Trialand error as part of our belief sys-tem, based on research, observationand collaboration, serves to improveinstruction. This doesn’t have to bea formalized plan, either. This canarise naturally from observing stu-dent work in other classrooms andasking about it. “What were they working on? Did you model first?How many times/ways? How muchtime did they have for this? Did youpractice, it becomes intentional,supportive, powerful. It needs tobe acknowledged and sustained;teachers need time to confer witheach other.Reflective inquiry can lead to col-laborative work as well. Just lis-tening to teachers talk about their work, the objectives and their strat-egies, can be inspiring. Sometimes we’ll see just one detail, hear just afew words, and we’ll “click” with anidea we’ve been incubating or real-ize why something we’d tried didn’t work as well as we’d liked. Open,safe exploration of an idea; it’s asthreatening as a walk through agarden with a friend. It’s a friend-ly discourse of teaching we shareeasily and comfortably with manyother arts: cooking, child rearing,quently. My reassurance that whatthey had to say was consistentlythoughtful and provocative, “yourcomments and questions are really what keep this class advancing,”seemed to be the confidence boosterand moral impetus perhaps they’dneeded. The girls were shy nomore. The observations and ques-tions of the observing colleague,though, were priceless, and helpedme establish a new level of responseand participation in the classroom.They started talking about theirtalking, and attempted to draw outother girls. Their spirits grew, werestrengthened—and so were mine.Student collaboration in the analy-sis and discussion of student workenerates a meta-narrative that’scritical to a learning community. Byteaching the vocabulary required todescribe academic and rhetoricalcontext and the text structures of various genres or assignments, weask our students to begin to takea step back. By collaborating withus, initially, we look at mentor textand determine what the author isdoing. Here they begin to learn the whys and hows of developing richtalk about writing. In combination with evaluative rubrics, studentslearn to talk objectively and criti-healthcare, why not teaching? Theconversations at lunch and in theparking lot filter back to the class-room…if we let them. Professionalsin other fields observe and queryeach other regularly; one would be afool not to keep abreast of the latestin medicine, law, dentistry, fashion,cooking, painting…it behooves us tobe aware of the community we’repart of and co-create. Isolation canonly breed ignorance, obsolescenceand drudgery. Professional ethicsrequire critical self-reflection. In casual conversation with m col- Samuel pointed out, “It’s not thatthey’re not prepared, and it’s notthat they’re not engaged…have youasked them?” Oh, those “a-duh” moments I socherish. No, I hadn’t asked them.And I’d had multiple opportunities,as most of the girls met me early atmy door and hung out there sociallybefore school started. They had noproblem talking then. So I askedthem. We don’t talk?” “Really?” “I nevernoticed…we talk when you call onus, don’t we?”And so I told them what I’d observed, what Mr. C had observed, and why I wanted them to speak up more fre-
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