Collaboration, family style
Like a long overdue post-pandemic dinner party, for three years we have been preparing an in-person collaboration workshop. After many hours of co-planning with long-time collaborator Andrea Honigsfeld, we finally offered this professional learning experience in Singapore, which appropriately enough is one of the great food capitals of the world. I was reminded how eating a traditional Chinese meal with friends or family is a memorable experience and my wise colleague from Shanghai observed “you can’t really enjoy a good Chinese meal by yourself.”
First, there are important decisions about what to eat – choosing dishes that will delight everyone, work well together and respond to individual preferences or restrictions. It’s natural that we want to order multiple courses and sample, share, savor the different textures and flavors along with our dining companions. This multisensory adventure provides a useful metaphor for teacher collaboration. An expertly chosen collection of dishes brings something for everyone. In the same way, co-planning a scaffolded lesson with a deliberate series of activities that engages all learners and integrates language and content is both art and science.
Once the dishes start to arrive, we engage in the subtle dance of rotating the turntable in the middle that holds all the serving bowls and platters. For a brief pause, each person gets a chance to spoon, select or grab a morsel of choice before the dishes begin rotating again. It can get messy – and fun. The running epicurean commentary, punctuated by moaning affirmations, can be as enjoyable as the food itself. “Did you try this?” or “So spicy – I love it.” Like co-teaching, enjoying a shared meal involves both empathy and reciprocal communication. When we co-teach, we react in real time along with our colleagues to witness student learning, as if to ask, “Did you just see that lightbulb pop?” It’s a rare joy to observe an epiphany expressed on a student’s face or to hear the literal eureka moment when a student exclaims “I found it!” Communal eating allows us to meet eyes of someone across the table savoring the same dish and nod knowingly: “I know, right?”
Sometimes fitting all the dishes on the center turntable can be challenging, balancing bowls on top of the edges of platters or consolidating a dwindling dish onto a smaller plate. In the classroom, teachers do this almost instinctively: adjusting the lesson to fit the remaining time, mixing activities, and, if necessary, packing up leftovers for students to take home.
And finally comes a shared reflection on a well-enjoyed meal. What dishes that were favorites and need to be ordered again, or which ones were too salty or too oily and might still remain getting cold. And so we engage in co-reflecting with colleagues about what worked or didn’t, and why. This naturally takes us back into co-planning the next lesson. As if musing over a shared dining experience, teachers can support each other in this essential review and self-evaluation. Like teachers swapping stories on the bus ride home, the best meals inspire us so much that even with a full belly we are still talking about food.
Selamat makan,
Jon Nordmeyer, WIDA International Programs director
*Malay: “happy eating” (four official languages of Singapore: Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, English)
