On Sunday I had the opportunity to do an informal presentation to a group of GED instructors. It was heartening to be able to give them a couple of new tools and to encourage them to use higher level thinking skills even more than they currently do. Since education is a village effort, I appreciated being invited into their ‘village’ for an hour, to hear their concerns and to provide support.
Teaching is both a solitary and a group activity. We work with students (group) but we most often teach alone and apart. Our teacher interactions usually happen outside our teaching day, on our own time because every minute on site we are engaged in planning, teaching, evaluating our successes, and adjusting for our problems.
I don’t think most teachers realize how much time they spend apart from other teachers, but it is a huge part of the job. When I first started working on training sessions, my teaching partner and I got real excited. We’d create something of value that we could share with others and work on together. Then we realized that one of us needed to be in the classrooms with the students so the second one could share the information in the class. Alone and together.