Skip to main content

Polyphony: Collaboration vs Coordination in the Classroom (Part 3 of 5)

"Construction" designed by Diego Naive at the Noun Project
Anyone interested in what successful collaboration looks like in a classroom might visit Deerfield’s American Studies class.  The integrated course has been team-taught by veteran teachers Frank Henry (English) and Bernie Baker (History) for over thirteen years. It’s two teachers in the same classroom with the same students for two periods in a row. They prep every class together, grade every assignment together, and even write comments on papers together; every returned essay has ink from two different pens on it. “There is no economy of time,” says Henry. “It’s not a more efficient way of teaching. But, the cost is negligible compared to what we believe students are getting out of it.”  

The American Studies course began in the late ‘70s and had been taught by a string of other teachers. Frank Henry began teaching it when he arrived at Deerfield in 1982, and Baker joined when he came to Deerfield in the late ‘90s. In earlier iterations, the course had been two separate classes: a history class and an English class that shared the same students and coordinated their syllabi. They ran side-by-side, which enabled the teachers to plan related material. The decision to move to a single, team-taught class ushered in a new experience. “While a lot of the material might be the same,” Baker says, “the dynamic changes: the way we think about structuring the curriculum, the way we think about assessing kids, the way we’ve learned to pick up techniques, ideas, attitudes from each other. All of that is possible when you’re in the room together and you’re thinking about the same group of kids because you’re spending so much time talking about [the work].”
It isn’t easy, and they’ll share their disagreements. “Especially if you’re going to do it for the long haul,” says Baker, “the closest analogy is a marriage. You’re constantly finding ways to negotiate, accommodate, and see how together you can build something that’s significantly greater than what each person would put together by themselves.”

Henry frames their differences: “I’m a big fan of particularity, and Bernie wants them to see an arc.” But planning classes and assignments hasn’t meant simply finding time for both of these approaches, it has meant integrating them. Over time, Henry and Baker have found a shared intellectual space, a course trajectory that incorporates both of their visions. “It’s constant—and by design—built-in professional development,” says Baker.  The result has been new ways of understanding the material and new ways of teaching. “We have, over the years, slowly developed more coherence,” Baker says. And Henry adds, “That coherence, that consistency of approach... is also one of those compounding effects of two being more than two.”  They describe a course in which the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

This kind of collaboration in the classroom is spreading in other interdisciplinary capstones that are emerging in Deerfield’s curriculum. Different voices are working together not only to bring niche expertise to particular problems, but also to achieve a synthesis of understanding—and of teaching practice. True collaboration like this stimulates growth. It isn’t simply a group of people working in concert towards a common goal. It’s a collective broadening of thinking, an interchange of perspective, an arrival at an unknown place. 

Next: How Can We Imagine This in the Curriculum?

~

This is the third in a five part series about collaboration.


These posts appear together as an article in the Winter 2014 issue of Deerfield Magazine.
blogger analytics
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Four Ways to Measure Creativity

Assessing creative work has been a bugaboo for a good long time.  In schools it's the constant refrain: “How can you grade creative writing?”  or “It’s a poem: however it comes out is right.”  In businesses and elsewhere, people demand innovation--and are stymied with understanding how to measure it. But this is not the bugaboo we think it is--in the classroom, or in the broader world of creative work.  Here are four different ways to assess creativity, each designed for different settings: 1. Measuring How Creative a Person Is - The Guilford Model 2. Measuring How Creative a Work Is - The Taxonomy of Creative Design 3. Measuring Creative Work Against a Program - The Requirements Model 4. Measuring the Social Value of Creative Work - Csikszentmihalyi’s Model Notably, in each of these cases, what we mean by "creative" changes a little.  Sometimes "creativity" refers to divergent production (how much one produces, or how varied it is).  Sometimes "c...
8 comments
Read more

Taxonomy of Creative Design

Strategies to improve creativity are many, but they are also diffuse.  Little ties them together in a way that offers a coherent vision for how creativity can be understood or developed incrementally.  The Taxonomy of Creative Design, a work in progress, offers a new theory for doing so. Since creative work can be measured along spectrums of both and form and content, the Taxonomy of Creative Design offers a progression from imitation to original creation measured in terms of form and content.  In doing so, it organizes creative works into an inclusive, unifying landscape that serves not only as an analytical lens through which one might evaluate creative work, but also as a methodical approach to developing creative skills. Here is a closer look: Imitation Imitation is the replication of a previous work.  It is the painter with an easel at the museum, painting her own Mona Lisa; it is the jazz musician performing the solo of the great...
11 comments
Read more

A Cognitive Model for Educators: Attention, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval (Part 2 of 14)

So how do  people learn?  What are the mechanics of memory?  Can we distill thousands of articles and books to something that is manageable, digestible, and applicable to our classrooms?   Yes.   In brief, the cognitive process of learning has four basic stages: Attention : the filter through which we experience the world Encoding : how we process what our attention admits into the mind Storage : what happens once information enters the brain Retrieval : the recall of that information or behavior Almost everything we do or know, we learn through these stages, for our learning is memory, and the bulk of our memory is influenced by these four processes: what we pay attention to, how we encode it, what happens to it in storage, and when and how we retrieve it. Here’s a closer look at each: Attention: We are bombarded by sensory information, but we attend to only a small amount of it.  We constantly process sights, sounds, smells, a...
Post a Comment
Read more