A New Take on Professional Collaboration

As the year goes on I am noticing that when faced with a common task, I address it in an uncommon way, or at least differently than I have in the past. I believe this is the result of the incredible amount of collaboration I have been involved in this year. (Props to my tweeps here!)  

 

This week it was time for my student intern Tamar to present her first lesson.  She is a senior who as part of our school’s educational intern program assists me in class.  The topic of the lesson was “Roman Social Structure: Plebeians and Patricians and the Twelve Tables”

Our planning began with just a basic lecture format.  As we continued to plan Tamar kept throwing out things to plan to the lesson. So I kept adding to them as well. Rather than play the role of limiting her and keeping the lesson basic as I usually do, at some point I decided to let her run with it, make it bigger and see what happens.  By the time we were finished we had a lesson that divided the class into groups, gave brownies to the patricians, confined the plebeians to the floor, increased the conversation among the students, and had them discussing the injustice of a variety of legal scenarios.  Oh, and it took less time than what I used to do, seriously. 

I gained valuable insight into how students think and view learning.  My intern Tamar gained an understanding or what it means to collaborate. Meanwhile the students in class went into the lesson with a completely different mindset knowing that the lesson was created by one of them.  I always want my class to have a culture of learning that is about “us’ rather than me and them.  I am proud of the discussions and collaboration that creating that environment generates. I wish I had thought to have students make lessons for me before.  It got me thinking…

While it is standard in the twitter-verse to see collaboration between teachers, I want to challenge you to bring students into planning a lesson.  I think it might make a great incentive for students or serve as a way to connect kids who are disengaged otherwise.  It is another way to hand them the reigns and let them control the path and procedures of their own education.

 Can I also mention that I love the idea of breaking down the divide between teacher and students as I was teaching about breaking down the wall between Plebeians and Patricians?  It’s kind of poetic really.