AP Corner

Opening Your Door

Teaching can be a very isolating profession. We get so wrapped up in our daily practice that some days we never leave our own classrooms. But every campus has a wealth of expertise and experience that can help build and support our practice and make us stronger educators. While it can be scary to open your door for fear of being judged, it's often the opportunity someone needs in order to build their own instructional practice.

There are so many benefits to seeing one another teach:

1. Something you're struggling with may be someone else's strength. In my teaching days, I struggled with building student independence. At the time, I had a colleague who taught second grade who had built a culture of independence and responsibility among her students that I couldn't have imagined if I hadn't seen it. Seeing her students and picking her brain, I was able to plan out next steps that I could implement immediately and helped me transition the culture in my classroom.

2. There are so many intangible moves our colleagues make that we don't even know to look for when we observe one another, but that we walk away with when we do. Whenever I observe a teacher, I walk away with a strategy I wasn't even looking for-- whether it's using an emoji ball for talking chips that encourages all students to participate in academic discourse or it's the introduction of a well structured anchor chart that teaches students how to determine the unknown in a multiplication problem. 

This week, I challenge all of us to take a moment and stop by a colleague's work space for a few minutes and see what we can learn! For more thoughts on the power of opening our doors, check out this article from Culture of Pedagogy: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/open-your-door/