The frustrating thing about teaching is the lack of time we experience every year. Without fail, April rolls around and the school year just begins to snowball to a close. It goes too fast and teachers are forced to rush to get lessons completed and other tasks accomplished. This time of year can make collaborating very difficult, which is what Jim and I experienced during my Power of Words/Book Thief Unit.
Jim was not able to read The Book Thief himself, so he wasn't able to make mention of it with his classes as he taught the Holocaust time period. He was able to go over many different examples of the power of words with his students, such as speeches and other pieces of writing throughout history (not just during WWII). Unfortunately, I was just finishing up my unit while Jim was just starting to get to that time period.
Our conversations were the most valuable part of this collaboration experience. In our final meeting we reflected back on the entire experience and how wonderful it was to listen to what one another teaches, when, and with what tools. The theme idea I had for my unit was something Jim found to be equally important in his Honors European History class. We both plan on making this a yearly theme next year in each of our courses, with plans to center an essential question around it for our students.
Another wonderful thing that came out of this collaboration was an idea to have a common final project for the year, between both myself, Jim, and another colleague from the English department, Meadow. We all have sophomore honors students, so we've decided to have students do a creative project linking the texts they've read this year and those characters and themes from those novels with actual moments in history or real people they've learned about in history. We would be allowing students to choose how they present their understandings, whether it's an i-Movie, a painting, etc. but students are not allowed to just write a paper. I'm very excited to roll this final project out to my students and I think they will appreciate an assignment that will count in both courses and that will give them a chance to link what they learned for me and show how they see it as relevant to history. Even though this isn't directly related to my unit, I believe it will be a valuable collaboration project and that students will benefit greatly from it.
Overall, I've thoroughly enjoyed my collaboration experience with Jim Burrell this year. He is an intelligent, creative, and supportive partner to work with. He has an appreciation for the content I teach, as I have for his. He's willing to try new things and bottom line, he loves kids. He likes teaching and enjoys making his classroom a fun and rewarding experience for his students. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat and I'm looking forward to further collaborations with him in the future.
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