For seven years, I was a teacher at an urban high school in Chicago. I knew that I needed to collaborate with other teachers to create a supportive, yet high expectations environment in which students could achieve, and I certainly wanted as much advice as I could get. However, I was so overwhelmed with the scale of the educational gap I was tasked with helping to close and the high expectations of my school that I coped by isolating myself.
Networking and relationship building always felt secondary to all of the things I needed to “get done.” I did not understand the purpose of networking, and brushed aside feedback that I needed to work on creating more trusting relationships with staff. See, even though I thought I was collaborating with other teachers, I saw my classroom as an island: I, alone, was responsible for what happened within those four walls. Students would fail or succeed by my skill and efforts, primarily. As you might predict, that was hopelessly nave.
The truth is that, like all organizations, schools and classrooms are open systems. By that, I mean that they are subject to influence by the external environment, be it other classrooms, the neighborhood or city a school is in, or movements within national education. If leaders can stay cognizant of this external environment, they are much more likely to support the growth of their organization.
In my case, that means that my students would never reach their full potential if I continued to isolate myself. Once I started to awaken to that truth, I started to realize how much I had been neglecting the power of teacher communities and professional relationships.
A few years down the road, I joined a Facebook group of AP English Language and Composition teachers, who shared instructional resources, lesson ideas, and commiserated about the daunting AP test our students would take at the end of the year.
That Facebook group was my first exposure to a bountiful social technology community. Despite the fact that we had, for the most part, never met in person, we shared a purpose: providing our students with a rigorous education and preparing them for the AP test in our individual classrooms. Even though I had received formal training in how to teach the course, without these fellow AP teachers, I never could have provided my students with the same quality of academic experience.
My experience with this community of practice (as professional communities like this one are called in academic circles) pushed me to find other ways that I could build relationships and learn from others. I started to engage with teachers in my school and district in a totally new way.
It is in the spirit of learning from others that I am so excited to engage in writing in this blog as I work towards my Certificate in Designing for Organizational Effectiveness. I am especially excited about this because one of the organizations I hope to work with is focusing on their Employee Value Proposition and how people can reframe problems and difficulties at work as learning opportunities. I have a lot to learn about this organization, but I know that asking about how they collaborate and share with one another will be one of my first questions.
Jenny Nance 