Teacher Collaboration

“The biggest obstacle in the US is the single-minded obsession with testing and accountability with little or no effort to help teachers improve.”

Les Foltos, Director of Educational Innovation at Peer-Ed, a Seattle, Washington based educational training company, makes a compelling case for real teacher collaboration, not the kind that focuses on testing or assessment, or data, but one that focuses on what's happening in the classroom between the teacher and the student (the kind of collaboration that usually happens after our PLC or CLT meetings that focus on everything but real collaboration and reflection among teachers).

Foltos says that he grew up on a farm and that if all he did was weigh his cows every day, rather than feed them to fatten them, he'd probably have lost his farm. He argues that administrators should connect teachers with purpose focusing on common problems in classroom. In one study with about 70 teachers, he found that only two teachers had a class project replicated and that was by the teachers who graded it.