Middle School Teaming

In Middle Grades Organization we were asked to reflect on Teaming. The prompt we were given was: Teaming is the heart and soul of middle school organization.  What are you wondering about middle school teaming?  What ideas in the readings or class discussions have challenged your thinking?  What ah-ha's have you had thus far?

Just last Thursday I met with my Cooperating Teacher that I will be Student Teaching with. He works on a five person team teaching grades 7 and 8. As we were talking, he mentioned that just last year the principal allowed the teachers to vote on whether they wanted 5 core teaching periods (with less students) or if they would prefer 4 core teaching periods (with more students) but they would have, from my understanding, 2 opportunities to meet as a team each day. The teachers overwhelmingly voted in favor of having more team time. After spending the week learning all about teaming, I started thinking about the students that will be in those large classes. Where I come from in Pennsylvania, we emphasized having the smallest classes possible, so it is an entirely different concept for teachers to choose to have classes in the range of 25-30 students. I understand the importance of working with your team more often, but how does increasing class size in order to do that affect students and their learning? I cannot wait to be in that classroom so I can see how things really do work for that school and why their larger class sizes are still as successful as their smaller ones. 

Looking back over the readings from last week leads me to believe that maybe increasing class size will not negatively impact students learning due to the fact that teams that work well together typically enhance student learning. I suppose that after my Education courses last semester, I am thinking about personalization 24/7 and how we can make learning relevant to all of our students, which seems like it would be something difficult to do with a class that size. This may simply be my inexperience talking, but I definitely see it as a concern, at this point in time.

The biggest "ah-ha" that I have had is how much teaming in my school district (in Pennsylvania) would have helped students. At my school district classes were not intertwined, teachers had to discuss students either at lunch or after school, and they had no time to coordinate with each other. I know in the near future that I will be lucky to land any teaching job, but after completing the reading and meeting my cooperating teacher (and part of his team), I feel very strongly that I working in multidisciplinary teams at the middle school level is truly the only way that teaching should be done.