Silos

My dad tells stories of how he built silos to pay his way through university.

Sometimes I build silos too, but I'm not supposed to.

My principal often phrases it as "being Kings and Queens in our own castle".

It's too easy for us as teachers to go into our own classrooms, close the door and teach all by ourselves. To build silos, to build our own castle and not let anyone else in.

And that's why I want to say thank you to Martha and Jennica, two amazing teachers that I got to spend a day with earlier this week.

These two brave souls were interested enough in the work I had done last year in the online pilot I led to respond when I went looking for other teachers to collaborate with.

They came to my workshop on GoogleApps this past summer to learn the tools we would use, and then the three of us met before school started to dream how we might work together as 3 teachers from 3 different classrooms from 3 different schools. We each headed back to our own classrooms to get the ball rolling and have been in frequent contact to solve all sorts of issues as we moved forward. This past Monday we met again to plan the second phase of our collaborative project between our 3 classes.

What an amazing experience that day was! I got to spend a whole day with two other passionate, inspired teachers bouncing ideas off of each other, learning, growing, and stretching. Ideas that if I had dreamed them up on my own would never have been half as good. I came home from that day exhausted, but exhilarated and inspired. I can hardly wait to find our which of our ideas work and which ones don't! What's more I learned so much from these two teachers that will flow into the rest of my classroom and I look forward to continuing to communicate with them throughout the rest of the year.

Dad, you may have told me stories of how you built silos, but I hope to tell my children stories about how I broke them.