This assignment was a great learning experience for me since I have been removed from the school setting for a few years. I have to collaborate with my coworkers every day in my current sales job to make sure our customers are getting the best products and services. It reminded me that collaborating in the school setting allows us to give students our best when teaching.
I think Andrea and I worked really well together. I have more experience in a library and Andrea had more experience in a classroom, so I think we were both able to use our strengths to come up with a great unit. We based the unit on Andrea’s classroom in hopes that she can actually use this unit. This helped us during the creation of the unit as we had a tangible idea of the students’ needs and challenges. I also enjoyed incorporating technology into the unit where we could. Andrea’s situation seemed unique to me since she has access to so much technology but no school librarian or even paraprofessional staffing their library.
We worked together on a large portion of the unit development, and I’m not sure how realistic that would be when I am serving a whole school of teachers. Andrea was very willing to let me work with her in developing the essential questions, the assessments, and the outline of the lessons. I’m not sure if every teacher would be on board with such in-depth collaboration, but it was nice practice for me.
I think our only challenge was finding time to consistently work on the unit. We both had busy schedules and we found Microsoft Groove to be a very useful tool. This let us update files when we had time and we always had access to the most current version of the unit plan. We were also able to meet in person a few times which I think was much more efficient. I think I would encourage a face-to-face meeting with any of the school teachers I collaborate with in the future.
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