"It takes collaboration across a community to develop better skills for better lives." - Jose Angel Gurria
C O L L A B O R A T I O N
WORKS WITH RELEVANT STAKEHOLDERS
In my experience, within the first few months of teaching, stakeholders are some of the biggest advocates and mentors a new teacher can lean on for support. From parents to fellow staff and administrators, these stakeholders are all mutually invested in student success, and rarely lack appreciation for extra communication about how students are faring throughout the school year. The stakeholders I've first depended upon are parents/guardians, my mentor teacher, my fellow first-year teachers, my school's counseling staff, my school's testing coordinator, and my administration.
Collaborating with Parents and Guardians
Parents and guardians are vital stakeholder group within the classroom. After all, they choose to share their students with us every day, and entrust us as educators to provide their children with quality educational experiences. In the sixth grade, parents are generally eager to hear about their students' progress and assist with their students' understanding whenever possible. As instructors, we communicate with parents first through the ParentSquare application. This ensures a timely trail of communication that can be documented and is easily accessed via mobile app and text message by parents and guardians. Additionally, we can share important dates via a calendar system, make class-wide announcements to parents and guardians of a specific group of students, and even share photos.
Parents and guardians, in turn, utilize the application for notifying teachers about any upcoming or unplanned absences due to illness or appointments, allowing us to collaborate to ensure their students stay on track with their work without missing too much of what happens in the classroom. Parents and guardians also utilize the app to update teachers about vital updates regarding their students' medications or behavioral management methods that may impact their learning experiences in real time. This provides us as teachers with the most up-to-date information to provide the best accommodations and differentiation for students in need.
Collaborating with Counselors and Testing Coordinators
Along with collaborating with parents and guardians, my school's counseling staff works to manage student social interactions and personalize behavioral management methods that benefit the individual. Counseling staff works to manage students categorized within the Tier system for behaviors, and checks in with teachers on a daily and weekly basis about student needs to ensure their learning is uninterrupted as much as possible.
One example would be the Student Check-In and Check-Out Form, which evaluates the student's ability to remain focused in the classroom among other social skill goals the individual is currently working on for their success. As a
teacher, I monitor students with a variety of individual needs and whether
they have positive and/or negative interactions with their peers. Finally, I evaluate the student's ability to adhere to school rules and procedures. Multiple students may utilize this form, all with different end goals in sight, personalized to their specific circumstances. This is another way the stakeholders in my school allow me to provide educational experiences that serve the students and their success in the best way possible. This isn't possible without the students' weekly check-ins with these specific students, where they promote emotional and social skill development and help students understand their form results for the week.
On the other end of the spectrum, my school's testing coordinator and remediation staff specifically target students who struggle to maintain a grade average of at least a 60 in their courses. These staff members review core skills with students within small group tutorial class periods, boosting their ability to achieve success in their core classes. These staff members are thoroughly experienced, with many decades of teaching experience between them, and are well-versed in assisting students in their areas of weakness. Our school's testing coordinator categorizes these students and assigns them to remedial staff for the best chance to help students succeed. These stakeholders look at student success at a macro level, then zoom in closer to understand the students who need deeper understanding of their core classes. While this usually looks like the aforementioned enrollment in Tier tutorial courses, this can also extend to the removal of extracurricular privileges for students who don't participate with or respond to remediation efforts.
Collaborating with Administrators
One of the most important stakeholders I collaborate with is my administrators, who consistently support my decisions regarding behavior management and classroom praxis. I am very blessed to have an administration that consistently backs its teachers instead of allowing students to control the narrative when it comes to behavior management and parent and guardian interactions. This allows areas for growth within faculty, as we are confident in our methods and that we will be supported for our choices.
Additionally, our administration consistently supports teachers through evaluations that provide feedback and supportive tips on how to continually improve our classroom practice. They, again, have decades of experience between them and maintain a humility of understanding that they are not directly in a classroom setting any longer while balancing that with their own teaching experiences to compare to. My administration ensures that we receive the foundations for providing quality educational experiences, and does not condescend to us or present unnecessary hurdles for our workflow.