Sharing Ideas

Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.  (Peter Senge)

This is what we do as teachers…help one another, be it our students or our peers, grow as individuals and as professionals.  We do this by sharing what we know with those around us.  As the old adage says we have as much to learn from those we teach as they do from us.  The question comes when we ask ourselves what is the best way to share what we know and learn from what others know.

One way is through informal conversations with our peers.  Listening to fellow teachers talk about what’s going on in their classrooms, asking questions, and not being resistant to suggestions or trying new things are some ways to share information and gain insight into resolving our own concerns.

Another way to share is through collaborative learning groups.  These could be made up of peers who are interested in a specific topic…math workshop, classroom management, trends in teaching social studies.  This avenue can be as formal or informal as the group would like for it to be.  Here’s how you could facilitate starting a group and keeping it going.

• Send an email to your colleagues within your school to see who’s interested in joining the group you have in mind.
• Set an organization meeting time and place.  Be aware of what will work best for most people.  Once you meet you can get input on the group’s best times and places to gather.
• Plan so that the meetings actively involve the people attending.  This makes the time spent together more fun and productive.
• Create a group email list so participants can easily stay in touch with each other.  Find out if this is the preferred way of people want to stay in contact.
• Schedule future meetings along with the time and place.
• Decide on the agenda and the format of the meetings.  Will one or two different volunteers contribute instructional ideas each time or will there be a topic (increasing student interest in learning math facts) each time with everybody contributing?
• Stick to the ending time.
• Follow up each meeting with having someone send out important points of discussion which were raised.
• However you decide to hold your meetings, make sure you do it often enough to keep everyone involved and interested, but not so often that people feel burdened by the commitment.
• As a group periodically review how things are going.  Feel free to change any parts that aren’t working well.

Need one last push to share your instructional expertise and learn from others?

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.”   Ralph Waldo Emerson