Collaboration with Colleagues: Stage 2 Performance Task

 I met with the regular classroom teacher of my 4^th grade student on October 19, for 20 minutes. The previous week I sent an email to request this appointment and briefly described the nature of my project.  Since my student does not go to the regular classroom very often, I arranged for her to spend a little time reading to this teacher so the teacher would have an idea of her capacity. At this stage of my leadership development, I felt it was important to initiate this activity so this teacher could more accurately determine if the project I am designing will be appropriate for this student.

Although I felt a little uncertain as to my ability to clearly describe the different stages of my project, the teacher was very interested as I shared the information on my Integrated Unit Planner, Stage 1 and 2 and the rubrics.   After I explained my project she looked at the documents more closely.  She feels that including photographs in the timeline will make the project feel familiar, meaningful and concrete for my student. She suggested breaking the steps into small enough chunks and not making the sessions too long for the sake of my student’s attention span. She feels this project is reasonable and workable.

I also talked about the final stage of this project, which is teaching one of my student’s friends (who is also in this teacher’s class) how to make a timeline and brochure for her family.   The teacher looks forward to helping me facilitate the inclusion of this friend, before it is time to begin that stage of the project. 

I was also (finally) successful in connecting with another professional who is a very intelligent and creative special education teacher. She had a treasure of thoughts for me to consider and I left inspired and energized by her contributions.  As my project develops I plan to meet with her again for more input. At that time I hope to be so at ease with the technology I am using for this project that she will have the opportunity to be inspired by the new skills I have and perhaps want to use them. She does not yet use technology to the extent I am learning to use it.

At the end of the semester after the meetings with my colleagues have been completed I will show my gratitude and respect for their time and guidance in a small but significant way.