True Teaching Collaboration in Action

Teach Thought 30 Day Challenge ~ Day 7 ~ Who is or was your most inspirational colleague?

Today is actually Day 12 of the 30 Day Challenge, but due to moving into a new apartment this weekend and an aggravated health concern that has moved my surgery up to this Tuesday I've gotten behind. It is my intention before Tuesday to catch up!

As promised from Day 6's blog, here is the picture Robin Williams sent me. 

His role in Dead Poet's Society is what made me want to leave the riches of the business world and enter the world of education to enrich others as he did in the movie. 

I owe him a lot and dedicate my these blogs to him. I hope to contact his wife some day and let her know how much Robin touched my life and continues to touch the lives of my students year after year. 

The colleague who has inspired me the most is our art teacher here at Sand Lake Elementary, Beth Elliston.  

She cares so much for her students that she transforms her room each year to create an experience they will never forget. One year it was a giant iPad, the next the Tardis from the British show Doctor Who, and this year it's Sherlock Holmes from the BBC. 

I've never seen a specials teacher more committed to creating an entire experience that leads to a huge increase in learning. Before her an art teacher was just an art teacher. Now an art teacher is a developer of the mind. 

Secondly, she is an amazing collaborator. She helped me transform my room into the famous art museum in Paris, the Louvre, where students spent the year transforming themselves into masterpieces. The next year she encouraged me to transform my room into a giant ship where my students travelled and explored the world of knowledge. This year it's a TV studio with a Tardis where we are time-travelling scientists using reading and math skills to interview famous people while we navigate the past, present and future. 

Yet she didn't stop there. She would ask me and other teachers what standards we were teaching and spend hours figuring out how to integrate them into her art lessons. 

More than once I and the other "regular teachers" would hear our students make connections to the big ideas of reading, science or math that we were teaching. When we asked with pride, "You remember that from when we went over it in class?" we heard, "No, I learned it in art class".

It's true what Marzano says about multiple exposures being needed for knowledge to truly take hold in the mind. 

Because of this we are truly lucky to have her teaching the way she does in our school. 

Through her caring, creativity and collaboration, Beth Elliston has not only taken teaching art out of the dark ages, but helped me take my own teaching own teaching farther than I've ever been able to on my own.