Leading and collaborating as an educator means standing out and taking action to make the learning environment the best that it can be. Classroom teachers are the ones that consistently keep everyone in the school community stay connected: students, staff, administration, and parents, so it is important for them to feel comfortable playing the main role in communications and collaborations between these groups. In education, showing leadership can be shown in a variety of ways: taking ownership of one’s classroom, setting high expectations for oneself and students, taking part in professional development opportunities, and educating oneself on current best practices for educating diverse classrooms. Furthermore, being a good collaborating educator means being open, fair, and honest with those people who are a part of the student’s academic and personal lives. Three strategies for being a good leader and collaborating teacher are volunteering for events that take place within the community, inviting colleagues to co-teach lessons, and taking initiative in one’s school team leadership groups, such as PBIS (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports).
Volunteering in Community Events
Volunteering in community events as a teacher has so many benefits. Attending events such as family event nights is a great way to show students and families a commitment to making connections and cultivating relationships. Since helping out with after-school events are usually optional for teachers, attending these events shows leadership because the teacher is taking part in extra opportunities to connect and help the school community. Doing this helps with collaboration in the classroom as well because these types of events allow conversations that let the teacher know more about the family and the student – giving more opportunities in the future for the guardian and the teacher to be on the same page when discussing student academic affairs. During my time studying education at Hollins, I have been able to attend a few different after-school hours events hosted for the families of Roanoke schools. Books and Breakfast, hosted by Star City Reads/Turn the Page, has families come in on Saturday morning to pick out free books and eat a free breakfast. In this event, I have seen families and staff, including myself, truly connect over a story and a hot meal.
Co-Teaching
Co-teaching is an instructional strategy used by many school classroom teachers to foster collaboration, teamwork, and effective teaching. Co-teaching allows each teacher to play multiple roles – the leader of the classroom, the helper/assistant, and the observer. This type of teaching is beneficial because it allows teachers to collaborate on how to make their teaching better and more effective. During student teaching, I was able to teach side by side with my supervising teacher, which meant allows having someone with more knowledge about teaching than me to watch my work. This made my teaching better because I always had the opportunity to ask objective questions like “How can I teach better?”, “How could I handle this situation next time?”. Through this type of experience I was able to play both roles of leader and learner, and see how collaboration makes me better in this profession.
Click the link below to see how co-teaching took place in a focus activity between myself and my supervising teacher. Notice how although I am the leader of the class at that time – my supervising teacher is able to seamlessly insert information about the activity to better students understanding and then pass the lesson back on to me.
School Leadership Teams
In both of my internship opportunities, my supervising teachers were both on teams that centered around bringing a newer behavior management plan to the school called PBIS, or Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. The teams attended meetings that discussed data collection of students’ behaviors, looked for trends in behaviors and why they were present, and what ways they would 
move forward with increasing positive behaviors and decreasing negative behaviors. The small team of teachers and administration from each school were being leaders of the new structure by sharing what they learned with other teachers and helping to be the first to implement strategies like “Check-in Check-out” with students struggling with behavioral issues. “Check-in Check-out” is a procedure where a student with a classroom behavior checks in during the morning time with a PBIS teacher to discuss their personal goals for the day, and then checks out with this same teacher at the end of the day to see if they met their goals. This process, related to PBIS, also encourages collaboration on student behavior across the grade level teachers, because it has teachers from one-grade mentoring students from another grade.
