Wednesday, August 29, 2012

T in the Road

We did some planning for the first week of school yesterday.  Up until now, we've been moving pretty smoothly with making decisions.  However, they've been rather simple things such as where to put things, how to organize things, etc.  
The topic of morning meetings came up, and this is where we came to the 'T' in the road and had to decide right or left.  The issue is complex:

  • students are divided into 4 groups for specialists and lunch because that the is our building's rotation schedule and to have a point person for parent phone calls
  • we are using these same 4 groups in our space for Monday-Thursday morning meetings (Friday is the whole lot of us); we are calling these our base groups
  • there are 5 teachers who will use the space full-time: 4 "classroom" teachers and 1 EL teacher.  All 5 teachers want to be viewed as the teachers equally and share the responsibilities equally.
  • 2 classroom teachers (one of them is me) want to lead our base groups for the first few weeks of school to establish a safe and comfortable feeling for students.  After those first weeks, the 5 of us will rotate amongst all 4 base groups.
  • The other 3 teachers want to rotate through morning meetings right away.  
It's a conflict between what we know and trust as a teacher from the years of doing things the traditional way between completely changing things to fit in with our new vision and 21st century learning.  


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