Today, the last "teacher work day" before students come tomorrow, I realized something that has not changed. Teacher talk. Teachers can spend literal hours talking about teaching. Do we talk about your children? Probably; it's our job to help them grow and learn. We rejoice with them when we do so successfully, and get frustrated when we can't help them reach every goal. More often, though, we just talk about "how to teach".
"How to teach" is our favorite topic of conversation. There is no outline, no agenda, just laughter, curiosity, and soaking up knowledge. What about when they can't hold their pencil? Try a giant crayon. How did you get them to write complete sentences? I used the peers that had it down as the 'sentence police'. What about the one that blew snot bubbles to get out of standing on the wall at recess? Oh no, you'll have to be a teacher to hear how to solve that one!
In the space of one hour at lunch today, seven of us learned more about classroom management from each other than we did from the "professional" that lectured us for three hours straight last week. Because everything we attend must be structured, outlined, documented...on and on with the adjectives, we are never just given meeting time to just sit around and talk.
Here's a novel idea, school districts, state CEU agencies, instructional specialists, etc.; create a meeting and call it Peer Mentoring. Have a sign-in sheet, a cold classroom (from what I've seen it's a necessity for these meetings), snacks, water, and just let the teachers be. Let them talk. Let the experienced ones tell how they do this and the novice ones tell how they do that. Let a group of teachers use their experience and knowledge to build each other up. Teacher talk. The meeting of the future.
