The ability to collaborate with colleagues and other people in your educational network is becoming an essential teacher skill. This is particularly true in middle school. Advocating for student needs is so important and we hold team meetings to discuss both students and middle school families. I find myself learning from my coworkers during our common planning time. Likewise, high quality teaching is nearly impossible to do alone. In addition to coworkers, teachers can and should seek educators on social media and use teaching resources published online. I follow educational leaders on Twitter and Facebook and I use Open Up Resources daily for research-based math lessons. Just as the world is changing, education must adapt and it would be ineffective to expect each individual to make time-consuming adaptations along the way. By working together and sharing our knowledge, we are better able to devote time to the more important, student-specific tasks such as building relationships, tracking academic progress, and making lessons work for your students and classes.
Teachers are not the only people in the teaching and learning model responsible for collaboration. Students are expected to graduate with basic communication skills. For these reasons, they are placed in groups and asked to complete tasks together. They are required to discuss academics with one another and use online collaborative tools with their peers. As a result, the students who participate in these activities will be better prepared for collaborating with colleagues in their future working environment. Similar to education, very few significant achievements are possible alone. Students benefit from teachers’ collaboration just as they benefit from collaboration with teachers and peers.
Math with Ms. Hollander 
Your blog post reminded me of the old saying, “it takes a village” in reference to raising a child/children. This is also true for teaching! I do not know what I would do without my colleagues. We bounce ideas off of each other, help each other, support and guide each other. Collaboration resources both in-person and online allow all of us continue to better ourselves and our teaching strategies. As you mention, just as we collaborate professionally, we need to help our students learn to work collaboratively and efficiently.
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Hi Bethann,
I totally agree that collaboration is becoming essential to teaching. I also find a lot of value in our team meetings. It is very important to gather with other educators that have the same students. Having this collaboration time can help us see the student’s educational experience as a whole instead of only in one classroom. It is always shocking to hear how different some students act in different classes. I could have a student that is a rock star for me and then totally misbehaves in another class. Finding this information out helps us to better approach the student. Sometimes we pull students into our team meetings so that they know we are all on the same page. Our current middle school schedule is changing and one of the things that may be going to the wayside is daily team meeting. This is definitely something that a lot of teachers are worried about. We really rely on that time to collaborate and hold parent meetings. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future.
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