standard 1.7

At SPARK Academy, we value teacher collaboration as much as we value student collaboration. Collaborative time within and across grade levels provides our faculty with opportunities to improve and grow.

Our school and school system is committed to providing our teachers time to collaborate. We provide dedicated time each week for grade levels to meet and collaborate, for the most part, on both Tuesdays and Thursdays. During this dedicated time, all grade level teachers have a common and extended time for deep discussions on teaching and learning. The Tuesday collaborative time is used for long-term unit planning and the Thursday collaborative time is used for short-term planning. This year, our focus continues to be unit development and powerful task design. Twice a month, the Tuesday meeting is facilitated by our Instructional Partner.

Our specialists and resource teachers also have a collaborative time. Collectively, they developed a name and focus for the team and call themselves the SEAL or SPARK Educators Assisting Learners, Team. The SEAL Team meets every other week on Tuesdays to develop our school-wide success skills and teaching strategies. Below is our weekly schedule, with the extended collaborative times highlighted in yellow. The SEAL Team meets from 8:00 to 8:45 every other week on Tuesdays.

During our SEAL Team planning time, resource teachers and specialists share ideas and ways to integrate their content with the classroom units. As a result, the Media Specialist, SPARK Lab Specialist, Music, Art, and PE teachers are all able to do activities and lessons that relate and extend what students do in the classrooms. For example, as our first grade students studied properties of light and sound, our Music teacher created a performance opportunity for our first graders that demonstrated sound and used blacklight to enhance the performance.

In Art classes, our second graders studied and created cave paintings to coincide with their visit to Cathedral Caverns during their study of rocks and landforms. Students also created insects during their study of plants and animals.

Because of our shared planning time, the SEAL Team is able to stay informed on what is going on in each grade level. It is critical that they have a team to share ideas with, as our SEAL Team teachers are the only teachers in the building in their particular curricular area.

Our administration provides opportunities outside the school day and school year for extended collaborative time. Each school is given three flexible professional development days at the beginning of the school year that can be used and scheduled at the school’s discretion. This year, SPARK Academy chose to schedule three consecutive days during the summer for teachers to have dedicated time for unit development. As grade levels developed units, our SEAL Team planned for our initial success skills roll out to the faculty during our annual retreat.

We held our annual faculty retreat right before the school year started. We use this time to discuss topics and initiatives that affect all students in the school. This year, our two main focuses for discussion were our school-wide success skills and examining the success of our Showcase evenings. As a result of these discussions, we made changes to the structure of our Showcase evenings. Those changes are explained in depth as part of our response to Standard 1.5: Performance-based Assessments.

As a district, Athens City Schools is committed to reflective teaching practices. To that end, our professional learning days last school year, along with our learning day in October was also dedicated to unit planning and refinement. Our teachers were given time in the morning to work in grade level teams on unit design. We then met in teams including teachers from other schools and grade levels to share and reflect upon our work. This provides insight for each of our teachers, allowing us to hear how what we are teaching relates to the learning at other grade levels. Is also gives us the opportunity to hear how other schools within our school district are approaching the same grade level standards with their students. We always come back to our grade levels with new ideas and ways to improve our units of instruction.

This cycle of continuous reflection and improvement is part of who we are and how our school operates. We subscribe to the belief that we can always do better than we did before and there are always new things for us to learn. Our school and our school system is committed to educator collaboration and will continue to support opportunities for growth and refinement.