Thursday, March 20, 2014

RSA#1 – Peer Coaching as Collaboration



One of the core concepts behind a PLC (Dufour, 2004) is the idea that teachers need to collaborate.  Dufour (2011) brings up a great point in that many other professions and jobs require employees to work together to achieve goals and that teachers shouldn’t be an exception to that.  Teachers should be doing everything they can to help their students learn, and getting ideas from other teachers seems to make sense in order to achieve this goal at challenging schools in particular. 

I was curious about how to do this beyond discussion, and looked for specific strategies on what exactly teachers can do in order to improve their instruction to increase student teaching.  Discussion and sharing is great, but sometimes merely discussing ideas isn’t enough; through experience I have learned that we learn by doing.  As I was researching, I found an article that suggested teachers need to observe and help each other out (Jewett, 2012). 

In this article, Jewett (2012) addresses the hesitancy of teachers to be coached by each other because they felt like evaluations.  In order to overcome this, Jewett expressed that as teachers resisted an expert/student approach and looked at things more as co-learners, the process went smoother.  They were able to help each other rather than one teacher pouring into another.

Quite frankly, I disagreed with this approach. While I do feel that teachers can learn from each other, a better set-up would be for a mentor-mentee approach, especially between seasoned and novice teachers.  I would rather learn from an experienced teacher I respect than someone who is in a similar place as me.  While those conversations could be beneficial, I feel I could learn quicker from a veteran.

Dufour, R. (2004). What is a “Professional Learning Community”?. Educational Leadership, 61(8). 6-11.  http://staffdev.mpls.k12.mn.us/sites/6db2e00f-8a2d-4f0b-9e70-e35b529cde55/uploads/What_is_a_PLC._DuFour_Article_2.pdf

Dufour, R. (2011). Work Together But Only if You Want To. Kappan Magazine, 92(5), 57-61. http://www.kappanmagazine.org/site/misc/Kappan92_MustReads1.pdf

Jewett, P. (2012). Adding Collaborative Peer Coaching to Our Teaching Identities. Reading Teacher, 66(2), 105-110.  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/TRTR.01089/abstract

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