My Piece(s) of the Puzzle

So, I was sitting in an in-service today, listening to someone who seems--well--just so much smarter than me.  Have you ever had that feeling?  Anyway, he was describing some models of support for learning, and connecting the dots between different pieces much faster than I was leaving me wondering if I was smart enough to be able to do this at my school...

...and then came his zinger:

When co-teaching (as the support teacher), you don't need to know the content to the same depth the same as the classroom teacher.  You just need to know what piece that you can do to help.

Wow, that was exactly what I needed!  I just need to know what my piece is, and I need to know my piece well enough to fit into whatever content there is.  As someone in a support role, I can come into a classroom with modified material, with centres, with structures or resources; I don't have to always have the whole puzzle built.  I think that this idea, of having to provide all of the answers all of the time, is one that stalls so much of our energy. 

We spend too much of our energy worrying about what we can't do, and not enough time sharing what we can do.  Take out primary reading groups, for example.  We have divided our grade 2s, 3s, and 4s into levelled reading groups.  The strongest students are in larger groups, and the struggling readers are in the smallest groups.  Each group has a different teacher, and each group is given different instruction and focus depending on the strength of each group.  In my case, my initial contribution was time:  I agreed to lead one of the groups which added another teacher to the mix, increasing the number of groups while decreasing the number of students per group. 4 months into this approach, teachers are sharing their pieces--learning ideas and structures that are working--in a way that is leading us towards our next step in the learning process:  writing.  And, while we struggled a bit when we started our reading groups as we searched for the "program" that we were all going to use, we learned that by supporting each other we could build that plan together, with each of us contributing our own set of talents.  So, as we approach a new look at supporting writing I think that we will be much more comfortable looking around and comparing each others strengths instead of trying to find a standard one-size-fits-all program.

A collaborative approach affords us the opportunity to each bring our own "pieces" of expertise to the table, instead of stalling the process until we have the whole puzzle solved.  My teachers do good work everyday, and I believe that "the answers" are present in our staff meetings to most questions that we can pose.  New jargon and gimmicks, new shiny packaged ways of doing things work far better when they rely on the expertise in the room over trying to re-teach and re-tool every few years to the latest trend.

You just need to know what your piece is.