Over the past thirteen years of teaching, I have seen the entire spectrum of experiences that come with attempting to build a course curriculum with a group of teachers. At it’s worst, egos and selfishness can create a miserable team environment, but at it’s best, working on a grade level team can reenergize even the most tired souls and make a drastic, positive impact on the education of the students being served.

So you’re leading the team…

Maybe you’ve been asked to lead a grade level team. Maybe you’re on a grade level team that has no appointed leadership and you’re ready to take the reins. No matter how you arrived at this moment and this blog post, you’re probably wondering where to start and what exactly your role should be. As your team works together during this school year, here are a few things to always keep in mind.

LISTEN.

There’s nothing worse than being part of a team and knowing that your leadership never listens to your idea, or worse, never solicits new ideas or conversation. At the end of the year and before any summer revamping starts, I like to send this Google Form out to my team to get feedback on their experiences over the past year. I find that a combination of in-person meetings and email/survey types of communication is great. Some of my teammates are a bit more reticent to talk during a team meeting but have so much to share via email and Google Docs/Forms.

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ORGANIZE.

There are a lot of moving parts when working on a curriculum team, and it’s your job to keep them all organized - digitally and physically. My team meets weekly, so I make sure to always have a few things organized for each team meeting:

An email reminder the day before about our meeting
A brief agenda in that email with our goals/topics that will be covered
An ask for any other items from the past week that should be addressed
During meetings have someone take notes
Keep your curriculum map/pacing guide updated regularly
Link common assessments and assignments on the curriculum map so that everything is easy to find in one place - not scattered and hard to find with random titles in Google Drive
If you are using Google Drive, come up with a simple naming system for documents or folder system so that everyone can find what they need when they need it
Send out a brief recap of the meeting at the end of the day for all who were unable to attend and so that everyone knows the focus and mission of the upcoming week
Bring or bookmark the school calendar for every meeting so that as you plan lessons and assessments you can cross-reference dates

CONTROL.

Yep, I said it. These meetings need to be controlled…by YOU. If your team has a habit of chatting off topic for the first fifteen minutes, there’s something you need to handle. Leading a curriculum team means taking on a position of leadership that you might not have taken on before and this can feel quite strange and even intimidating. But remember, you’ve got this. Control the situation by redirecting the conversation to the agenda that everyone got in their emails (see why organization is important?!). When teachers come in to team meetings bashing other teachers or even students, it’s your job to stand up and let them know that kind of attitude is not welcome in the meeting. You are in charge — you’re not a dictator, but you must take responsibility for the quality, productivity, and character that you expect from your team.

SPARK JOY.

Your team is going to have high and low times during your year together, and that is totally normal. As much as you can, find ways to spark joy in your team meetings or even in your interaction with teammates outside of meeting times. Can you remember a birthday? What about sharing a positive student story each week? Is there somewhere for your team to visually celebrate wins? No matter how small, take the time to gear your meetings toward the positive side of experience and frame your time together in terms of making progress toward a collective goal that everyone genuinely cares about.

REMEMBER YOUR WHY.

Why did we start in this profession to begin with? I can guess that for most of us, it was the kids. It’s always the kids. As things in teaching get more and more complicated and inane demands are thrust onto our plates, it’s easy for teachers to start drifting away from their original purpose for joining the force. Keep reminding your team of your WHY. Who is this lesson serving? How does this plan reflect the people in front of us? Are we talking about rigor or busy work? Challenge each other to focus on what’s best for kids - not what’s easier for teachers.

SET AN EXAMPLE

If your team has planned a lesson together and when you teach it the lesson completely bombs, be honest! Share that experience! Being a good leader means having the willingness to “step into the arena” (Roosevelt) and that “arena” is a metaphor for VULNERABILITY (Brene Brown Daring Greatly). Teachers on your team will appreciate you sharing your failures and discussing a rebuild for the next go around.

…AND SHIFT YOUR MINDSET TO “OUR”

When I think back to the glory days of the most productive, cohesive team of teachers I ever worked with, I can pinpoint our success one one common denominator. We stopped saying “my” kids and “your” kids and started saying “our’ kids. We were the English 2 TEAM. These were ALL of our kids. We visited each other’s classrooms - and I mean I legit would unannounced and uninvited walk into my teammate Kyle’s room to announce the most random and unrelated information: “Mr. Etheridge! Last night my cat barfed up last month’s birthday confetti.” Things like that. For one week, we designed a short unit about getting ready for college and we organized a Teacher Swap: each teacher shared her college search journey with each of the sections of English 2 until all students had heard all teacher’s stories. The students became one big group that we, as a team, were trying our best to help achieve the highest success possible. This dynamic didn’t last forever and it was hard to build, but when we got there, it was exactly what education is supposed to be.

Good luck on your curriculum team journey! As always, let me know how I can help!