The Community Starts With Us
(Leadership in My Classroom Series — #2)
A successful co-teaching relationship is essential to creating community in co-taught classrooms. The classroom community starts with us. The co-teacher relationship can be tedious, tumultuous, and stressful, but it doesn’t have to be. And when you create a good partnership, the students benefit.
Since September of 2019, I have been fortunate to have had the same co-teacher for my English 2 classes, Mikey Sabaka. To prioritize student learning, Mikey and I meet weekly to discuss student needs, curriculum, and what’s going well. In our three year partnership, we’ve experienced it all: the pandemic, virtual learning, physical altercations, illnesses… you name it. But we’ve also experienced the highest of highs: students with all types of learning disabilities thrive in our classroom. It is not easy. It is exhausting; but it is so, so worth it.
Years ago, a good friend of mine (and fellow GMWP teacher), Micah, used a “gas/brakes” metaphor to describe successful relationships. She used it to describe marriage: one person is the gas while the other is the brakes. Ever since she introduced me to this metaphor, I have thought it to be great. I have observed so many partnerships around me where one person is the “gas” and the other is the “brakes.” In other words, one person in the relationship is the trip planner, the money spender, the impulsive doer, while the other is the safety net, the cautious one, and the one following behind to make sure all of the details are taken care of.
In my own marriage, I am the brakes.
In my co-teaching relationship, I am very definitely the gas.
But what’s the same in both relationships is the essential tenet of trust. Mikey is a saint for following my whirlwind planning and incessant enthusiasm. I trust him, he trusts me, and this trust has developed over the course of our years working together. I know that he will give it to me straight when something doesn’t work or could have gone better. We are both better teachers because we have the opportunity to work together in the planning, implementing, and reflecting stages of teaching. And the students are better off for it.
At the beginning of the year, when I came to Mikey with my plan for focusing on community and using circles, he was tentative but willing. When students joined our class on the first day of school, they joined a circle. When one of our classes had a physical altercation on day two of the school year, a restorative circle followed. After a few weeks, the RJ coach anonymously surveyed the students about their relationship to us and the class and how circles influenced that relationship. The results (shown below) were overwhelmingly positive and at worst indifferent.
For Mikey and I, starting the year in circle was mostly a successful experiment. Yes, we observed that 1–2 students indicated circles were not their jam. Despite that, our classes feel like little families. Attendance is good, risks are being taken, and mistakes are being made. Just this past week, a student who typically struggles in English told me he liked our class and gave me a fist bump. Despite reading at a second grade level, this student feels connected, supported, and like he belongs in our classroom. That’s all a win for me. And it’s something I cannot take sole credit for.
If you want to create community in a co-taught classroom, you need to prioritize the relationship with your co-teacher. It’s dependent on trust, and the community starts with you.
