chapter 2 reading reflections

In chapter two Jeff Whipple portrays where he worked with several different forms of classes and he clearly believes that cross collaboration through teachers is much more effective than being isolated. He claims the isolation handcuffed him in his approach to teaching by not letting him share ideas and communicate with others his teaching actually suffered. One great quote I found from Whipple was “if we’re going to connect kids, our teachers need to know how to connect to each other.” What I liked about this was he shows teachers that we must work together in order to accomplish our goals and to help children accomplish theirs.

 He also mentioned respect was monumental when dealing with other teachers if you don’t respect and trust the other teacher it will be hard to build a relationship to create ways to develop helpful feedback from one another.

The other big push from Whipple in this chapter is to have courage to try new things and develop some adaptability for planning your lesson.  Incorporating digital age products can be a good example of a new strategy that can be helpful not just for teachers but also students.  Teachers can use these strategies and reflect on them by meeting after school and talking about what worked and what didn’t.

Elise Mueller used a similar strategy when starting at a new school, she used collaboration as her tool for beginning her teaching process. The next concept she discusses is learning organizations which is a very neat idea for teachers by assisting them to glean strategies from others as well as organizing their schedules and keeping their sanity. Finally we need to emphasize teacher as the designer role so that they may be fluent in project based learning to help with the future success of our students.