Open the Window…for Collaboration
If you’re starting at a new school or work setting, congratulations! It can be hard to be the “newbie,” but it’s also a good thing because you start with a clean slate. A school full of teachers can be intimidating, to say the least. Everyone has their grade level teams or already established friends; it can be hard to break in to that. Today’s post is all about how you can open the window for collaboration with teachers.
Collaboration is so very important to what we do. You have to have a working knowledge of what’s going on in the curriculum to help your speech/language students succeed in the classroom. So how to open the door (or window) and start this? I’ll tell you how!
1. At the beginning of the school year (you know, those staff development days), take time to stop into classrooms and introduce yourself. Ask how the summer was. Make chit-chat; you’d be surprised how far this goes!
2. When you’ve made a tentative (by tentative, I mean the first of 493105 changes), I stop by personally and see the teachers to let them know which students I have and what time I’m planning to pull/push in for speech. We can then tweak it if necessary. But it’s face time.
3. Say hello and make small talk at the copy machine. We all know we spend a lot of time waiting for that! It can be a good time to talk about a multitude of different topics.
4. If you go to get students, you can see what the class is working on. If you want copies of vocabulary words, you can send a quick email to the teacher asking for it. Especially with the older grades, additional work on vocabulary can meet speech/language goals as well as provide extra exposure.
5. Little gestures: pay attention if someone seems to be having a bad day. I have given teachers a bar of chocolate or something small when I know they’re going through a rough patch.
6. Tell teachers if they have questions to ask! Sometimes, once they feel that you’re approachable, it can make all the difference!
Doing these little things can help pay off in a big way! I truly love the teachers I work with. I take pride in having a relationship with them where they can ask you questions and trust your option. It makes for a great working environment and one where you can put the students first.