Becky Bair teaches the intermediate grades in a Pennsylvania public school district. She’s passionate about incorporating technology as one of many tools to help students view learning as an exciting, lifelong endeavor. She writes the blog Teach ‘N’ Life, contributes to the group blog Voices from the Learning Revolution, and can be followed on Twitter @becky7274. In a series of posts here at MiddleWeb, she writes about school climate, teacher culture, and lessons learned about professional collaboration.

by Becky Bair

In my first post and second post, I shared some of the story of our new intermediate school (grades 4-6) launch last fall and the concerns I and two of my colleagues had about the negative impact our initial schedule and student assignment plan had on some rising fourth graders and students with special needs.

Our story continues here.

When my two teammates and I made the original proposal to our administrative team and our grade level team, the key to our proposal was that teachers would have a voice. We really wanted all the fourth grade teachers to look at their strengths and weaknesses and come up with a teaming plan that matched teachers with those students they felt best prepared to teach.

It’s well documented how challenging the change process can be for some people at every organizational level. But it was an eye-opening experience to live through it first hand. We could not understand why everything was being done so secretively at the decision-making levels, and we really weren’t sure which stories or which people to believe. Our plan for teachers having a voice backfired, and it seemed that the same thing was happening with our desire for open and honest communication.

As the 2012-13 school year came to a close, my teammates and I still didn’t know if our suggested plan was actually going to be acted upon in some way, with or without teacher voice. We didn’t know what our teaching assignments were going to be; we didn’t know if 4th grade teacher teams would be reorganized, and we didn’t know how our students would be placed on teams.

It was only after a confrontational discussion that we finally found out that the three of us would be teaching all four subjects as we requested in our proposal. And while the intent behind the changes was never officially announced to all of the fourth grade teachers, our administration did take the step to reassign teams and the subjects some were teaching in order to make the proposal work.

People are angry

As school started this fall, it was clear that people were angry about that. People are also angry that we shoved our fourth-grade teacher community out of its happy place and into rough and murky waters. And I know people are chomping at the bit for us to fail this year so they can say, “See, I TOLD you that would never work!” All of this is simply motivating us to work harder to make a successful year for our students.

Change will never happen unless people are willing to take all of the wonderful discussions happening among teachers in the virtual world, bring them into face-to-face settings and start putting them into practice in real classrooms. After reading this you’re probably wondering, “Why? Why would any teacher continue forward trying to lead change in his or her school after going through these experiences?” Two words: THE KIDS.

Some lessons we’re learning

We have to be strong enough to stand up and do what is right, even though it may make us unpopular. Our kids deserve that much. If you relate in some way to our story — and you probably do if you’ve stuck with this narrative to this point — then you might be looking for ideas or advice about pushing for change in your building. Here are some of the lessons we have learned. And we’re still learning!

• Make sure you put the kids’ best interests first and keep coming back to that commitment when the going gets stormy.

• Research, research, research. Make sure there is a substantial amount of support for (or a lack of research against) your proposal for change. People need to see that you are truly prepared and are not just coming to them with a random idea that you think sounds good.

• Ask for opposing viewpoints and actually listen to them. Change what doesn’t work and advocate for the points about which you feel strongly. Do this very early and at a personal level. If you’ve read our story, you know that we could have done this sooner.

• Be willing to compromise. While you may love your idea, it might be improved. It may be too big a step for your organization. A baby step is better than no step at all.

• Develop a tough skin and be prepared for some storming. It’s inevitable when you suggest pushing people out of their comfort zones. Some “colleagues” will insult you, your idea and your teaching style. The good news: most will grow over time and continue to move through the process. If your change proposal is sound, many will come to see its wisdom.

• Continue to seek out those who haven’t been willing to change and push them to be open and honest about their concerns. If they don’t have any foundation for their negative behaviors, calling them on it repeated times will bring most of it to a stop.

• Finally, and this is a hard one, if your organization is so strongly entrenched in the old ways of doing things or in always putting adult interests ahead of children’s needs, then it may be time to find a place to work that’s a better fit for you.

Weathering the storms

My teammates and I have had some really awful days. We have often questioned why we think we can make a difference. But each time these doubts creep into our minds, we focus on the real reason for this change. A little more than a month into the new arrangement and the new school year, our 4th graders are already benefiting tremendously from the changes we’ve pushed for. The kids are the ones who matter. That’s why we are here. That’s why this school is here.

For the past month, we’ve encouraged our grade-level team to move forward — to realize that every meaningful change process includes a storming phase. We continue to assure them that the storms produced by climate shift will help us all grow and become more focused on our students’ successes academically, emotionally and socially.

Next: Brighter Skies?

Becky Bair teaches the intermediate grades in a Pennsylvania public school district. She’s passionate about incorporating technology as one of many tools to help students view learning as an exciting, lifelong endeavor. She writes the blog Teach ‘N’ Life, contributes to the group blog Voices from the Learning Revolution, and can be followed on Twitter @becky7274. In a series of posts here at MiddleWeb, she’ll write about school climate, teacher culture, and lessons learned about professional collaboration.

by Becky Bair

In my first post, I shared some of the story of our new intermediate school (grades 4-6) launch last fall and the concerns I and two of my colleagues had about the negative impact our initial schedule and student assignment plan had on some rising fourth graders and students with special needs.

Our story continues here.

After getting the administration on board with our teaming idea, our next step was to go to our grade level team and get them involved in the conversation. We were very excited to share our ideas with them. While the 12 classroom teachers and six itinerant teachers had never worked together prior to this year, we had come together pretty nicely. Sure, there were some philosophical differences that had yet to be hashed out, but if you accept Tuckman’s stages of group development, we had formed quite nicely. And we believed that people would be very open to talking about our teaming proposal and how it would benefit kids and adults.

We felt our proposal was a win-win situation for all. Students would be working with teachers whose instructional and management strengths matched both student needs and the subjects they would be asked to teach. Some students would also have fewer transitions and fewer teachers throughout the day, helping them feel more comfortable and confident.

After years of not having a voice, the adults would be in a better position to evaluate their teaching strengths and weaknesses and work with a team and students they felt were a good fit for them. Parents of the most challenged learners would have one contact person rather than three or four.

And the same would be true for our push-in teachers: Our ELL teacher, our math enrichment instructor, our autistic support teacher and our gifted teacher. Instead of having children scattered across all three teams, these teachers would have one team with whom they would work.

The storming phase begins

Even with all of these positives, we decided to first talk to our teammates individually or in small groups. Every group has more vocal individuals, and we wanted to make sure that each team member had the chance to listen as we shared all of our information. We also wanted to make sure that people who were not as comfortable speaking in large groups had the chance to ask questions or make comments.

So early one morning, with our main idea points neatly copied, the three of us headed out to talk to our respective groups and make plans for a large group discussion. The responses were not exactly what we had expected. I suppose Tuckman would say that we were beginning the “storming phase” for our group.

Our initial contact with our fourth grade teacher colleagues gave us a mixed bag of responses. Some people loved the idea. Some people really didn’t say much of anything. And some people got very, very angry. We assured each teacher that we were just introducing a possibility and that there would be group discussions about it so everybody could have a voice. Our goal was an open, honest conversation about strength-based assignments and what would work best for the kids.

“Open and honest” is not exactly what happened in the wake of our first sit-down chats. Stormy discussions, to which we were not invited, took place. The conversation often stopped as we walked into the room. We were blamed for “ruining” the positive spirit and the good year that our team was having. Our teaching methods were questioned in meetings where we were not in attendance.

All of this was terribly frustrating because we felt we’d done nothing wrong. Some  people accused us of going behind their backs to administration. That was the furtherest thing from our minds. We simply believed there was no reason to bring the idea before the whole group and have everybody invest time and energy mulling it over IF there was no way any change could even happen.

Some other teachers felt that we were criticizing their teaching ability. How could we? Sadly, we don’t get to see each other teach, so we have no right and no basis for saying that anybody was a good, bad or mediocre teacher. And even if we were lucky enough to learn from each other through visitations, we would never judge our coworkers based on our time in their classrooms.

Trying some damage control

In response to many negative comments, each of us, individually, went and talked to people in an attempt to have open and honest communication. We apologized for making people feel as though we went around them to higher-ups — or that their abilities were being judged. We might have handled that better, we said. But that is all that we apologized for. We were acting in what we deeply believed was the best interest of the most vulnerable kids in our new school, and that is what we constantly reminded ourselves as we went through the remainder of a suddenly very prickly school year.

Additional meetings were held with our entire grade-level team and the original administrative team that we’d met with. People were not open and honest in the meetings, and at some meetings insults flew. It also seemed like very little got accomplished for a variety of reasons — the biggest one being a fear of change.

While our grade-level team could agree that groups of identified students should be on one team to best meet their needs — and to make things a bit easier for the teachers providing special services — little else got accomplished.

Even though it was evident to all involved that there were teachers working with identified students who didn’t have the skill set to best meet their needs, nobody would volunteer to move. “But I love my team!” “My team works so well together!” they said. Our mantra was: “It’s not about the adults, it’s about what’s best for the kids.”

As the end of the year rolled around, we still hadn’t made it through Tuckman’s storming stage. Even though we wanted teachers to have a voice, that didn’t end up happening because people at all levels struggled with and sometimes openly resisted the change process.

Next: Action from on high

Becky Bair teaches the intermediate grades in a Pennsylvania public school district. She’s passionate about incorporating technology as one of many tools to help students view learning as an exciting, lifelong endeavor. She writes the blog Teach ‘N’ Life, contributes to the group blog Voices from the Learning Revolution, and can be followed on Twitter @becky7274. In a series of posts here at MiddleWeb, she’ll write about school climate, teacher culture, and lessons learned about professional collaboration.

by Becky Bair

Last school year was a big year for my coworkers and me. We were pulled together from teaching jobs in five  elementaries and one middle school to staff a new intermediate school with grades 4-6. While the transition was challenging, I felt that it went extremely well. When you move to an existing school, you don’t really grasp how much is already in place in terms of procedure and culture. When you help open a new school that has no history or traditions, you have your cultural aha moment!

With everything that could have gone wrong in such a situation, much went right in our new building. But one thing that didn’t go well, at least in the minds of three of us, was how we as a building were meeting the needs of our youngest learners and students identified with specific learning disabilities. We felt our new school and its new structure was creating a volatile climate shift for some kids.

In all three grade levels, teachers were assigned to teams of four. In 4th and 5th grades there were two humanities teachers (teaching communication/language arts and social studies) and two STEM teachers (teaching science and math), with the understanding that reading in the content areas would be the responsibility of all four teachers. Additional teachers worked with each grade to conduct reading and math clinics for remediation or enrichment. This meant some students could have up to four different teachers each day: Humanities, math, science, and clinic. For some kids this setup worked out fine, but for others — especially 4th graders — it was just too much. Add four different teachers to a new building and a new structure, and you’ve got some confusing times for kids and their parents.

Students with identified special needs were spread out across all three of the 4th grade-level teams, making it challenging for our itinerant learning support teacher (ILST) to meet the Specially Designed Instruction (SDI) plan of all of the students in her caseload. We had some teachers who had little experience working with identified students. We also encountered some “philosophical challenges” in regards to adaptations and accommodations for various learners.

Our proposed solution

Concerned about all these issues, two of my fourth grade teammates and I spent a lot of time researching an alternate method of teaming that might better meet the needs of all of our students as they transitioned from smaller, neighborhood-based primary schools to our larger, districtwide intermediate school. Our proposal, after a great deal of research, suggested that our identified learners and other average-ability students likely to have difficulty with the transition between schools be assigned to a classroom with two regular ed teachers and the ILST for the whole day.

We initially presented this idea of one large, co-taught class to a team of administrators and met with a tremendous amount of pushback from some of them. The biggest area of concern was separating all of the identified students from the other teams. While we were more focused on the idea of a strength-based, community approach for these students, we listened to and heard the concerns of the administrators.

Another meeting was scheduled. We used a Google doc to collect questions, concerns and suggestions, and we continued to search the Web for other research and success stories about teaming and grouping. After a few weeks we came back with a second proposal. This one had all of the identified students on one team of five teachers: the ILST, one Humanities specialist, one STEM specialist, and two teachers who taught all four subjects. Under this plan, the identified students would be part of a larger group of mixed ability students, but they would still have fewer transitions between teachers each day because two of us would resume teaching all four subjects in the traditional manner.

This could be the key?

It took quite a while to get people to really understand this set-up, but a majority of the administrative team was open to the idea. They agreed that this might be the key to helping our students transition easier and find more success in 4th grade.

After gaining the support of the administration, our next step was to talk to our co-workers. My teammates and I were adamant about the fact that we wanted to be the ones to present this idea to our fellow 4th grade teachers, and we were granted the opportunity.

Little did we know what would be waiting for us when we talked to our teammates.

Next time: Stormy Weather