Shakespeare nailed it when he wrote that in our lives, we play many parts. There is something else, I've discovered, that Shakespeare also knew--we often express our true selves in soliloquy.
Let's take one of the most iconic tragic heroes for example, Hamlet. In Shakespeare's longest tragedy, the protagonist is quick to insult, drop a pun, or express his discontent, yet most of the time, his commentary is delivered in as few words as possible. He is a man plagued with internal crisis, keeping his ideas tightly locked inside until...
The soliloquies. There are five. During these dramatic outpourings of inner conflict and bottled emotion, Hamlet is all of us.
As a classroom teacher for the past eighteen years, I have spent more time alone in my room than I have collaborating with colleagues. I have bounced ideas around with myself, doubted myself, congratulated myself--alone.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to bottle up my ideas and then shout them to a concrete wall with dramatic flair. "To collaborate, or not to collaborate" has never been the root of my existential crisis. I am at my teaching best when I can feed off of the inspiration and professional genius of my colleagues, but truthfully, those moments are few and far between. The biggest barriers to breaking down the silo are time and change.
TIME: I arrive at school at 6:45am after a 30 minutes commute across town. The bell rings at 6:55am. This slim ten minutes doesn't allow for me to fraternize with my colleagues and create dynamic vertical lessons. Sure, I could get there earlier--which means getting up earlier--which means waking my 9-year-old up earlier--so she can go to morning care even earlier. Not an option.
I have a prep every other day. Not every day. During the time I have, I make the most of it--however, some of my colleagues don't have the same prep time as me. Such is life.
After school, I can relish in my free time of 40 minutes, before I race across town to pick up not one, but two carpools, from two different schools. Time, isn't always as flexible as I need it to be.
This problem of lack of time is shared. Fortunately, we have organized time on campus to meet with one another, and it has made a huge difference. We have dedicated time each Monday for one hour and each Wednesday for 30 minutes. Making sure to clear our schedules of lunch duty, student store, clubs, conferences, and other meetings, has allowed us to sit with each other, during this dedicated time, and ensures that we can communicate beyond email. This gift of time has been truly a gift, but...
CHANGE: Just like me, many of my colleagues have learned to multi-task like champs. Educators would earn gold medals if making copies, while answering emails, while grading papers, while eating a Lean Cuisine was an Olympic sport. We are used to making the most of our time. There is no other way to survive; no other way to scale the mountain of daily duties.
So, you'd think that if given the time to commiserate with colleagues and reinvent the wheel of curriculum, we'd jump for joy and celebrate the opportunity. Not always. Time is such an abstract, yet highly coveted commodity that when we get it, we literally don't know what to do with it. More time for collaboration? What does that even mean?
The catch-22 is that the change from "here's absolutely no time to do all the things" to "here's some extra time to all the things", doesn't feel much different. Oftentimes, the strategy, intent, or purpose of this new "time" is missing. Educators nearly border being superhuman, but even so, we need guidance and structure. We are the makers of plans. We love plans. We need to plan our time to plan. If not, we spiral into that aforementioned existential crisis and end up soliloquing on the freeway, stuck in mid-day traffic, collaborating with me, myself, and I. Time given; time wasted.
Let us, fellow educators, use the silent soliloquy as a dress rehearsal for when the curtain rises and we are given time to share our talents, our successes, our groundbreaking innovations, and do so in a way which best uses our coveted time and the time of others.
We need to change the way we think about change and reevaluate the way we use our time. Though it be much easier to close our doors and sink into the silo, we owe it to ourselves and our students, to change. If our ideas happen in silos, their reach is very narrow--when we share our ideas with others, they evolve into tangible entities that can impact the teaching and learning within our schools.
Yes, having other educators into our rooms and in our lesson plan books may be strange at first. But remember, as our dear Hamlet once said, "this too shall pass."
