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Originally Posted by 33girl
I guess I'm not quite understanding what a "team" is as far as school is concerned? Are all the science teachers or all the 4th grade teachers a team or what? Shouldn't the whole school be a team?
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The whole school is a team on some level, but you often work with much smaller groups for specific curriculum or planning issues. You can make teams different ways: sometimes by content area, sometimes by grade level, sometimes by content and grade level if your school is big enough.
The idea is that is a small enough group of people who teach the same thing that it's useful to plan together or refine lessons together. Or sometimes you have vertical teaming to develop the progression of what's taught in a specific area over several years.
I'm in about my 20th year and would say in my experience forcing team collaboration picked up steam in the last 10 years. I think teachers have always done it informally, but making sure that you compelled teachers to collaborate whether they thought it was the best use of their time or not really only became a thing in my district five or six years ago. It can be very helpful depending on where you are in your career, how honestly you trust each other, the philosophies and egos of the individuals involved. It can be an absolute professional nightmare as well.