INTASC Principle #10 - Leadership and Collaboration

The teacher seeks appropriate leadership roles and opportunities to take responsibility for student learning, to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, other school professionals, and community members to ensure learner growth, and to advance the profession.

I strongly value the efforts of collaboration. I set high collaborative expectations for my students and I myself partake in many opportunities to work with others and develop as an educator. While student teaching in 3rd grade, I met weekly with the reading specialist to create enhanced reading activities. In addition, I met with the entire third grade team daily to discuss and share ideas. Several times we combined our classes so that our students would experience the best learning environment possible. In 5th grade, I worked hand-in-hand with the general education teacher that I co-taught with. The most specific example of community collaboration that I can identify, occurred when one of my student's grandmothers volunteered to work with me to create a classroom quilt. It was an absolutely amazing learning opportunity and one I will never forget. (I would be more than happy to share more details about this once in a lifetime project!)