Bridging Silos

Novices partner with veteran teachers on the path to board certification

By Erin Gilrein

Categories: Career pathways, Teacher leadership

Growing up in rural America, we passed silos on our way to school filled with silage, a combination of whole maize plants, beets, grass, and alfalfa. While the ingredients varied from silo to silo, these products made a healthy and sustainable feed for livestock when nutrition was scarce. Indeed, they were the lifeblood of farms during winter. As educators today in a suburban high school on New York’s Long Island, we don’t see too many silos on our way to work, but we see them in the prevailing structure of public education: silos of disconnected departments, curricula, and personnel, each filled with committed, thoughtful, hardworking educators dedicated to student learning, but not often working together in the same space with the same vision. This silo

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Authors

Erin Gilrein and Jennifer Wolfe

Erin Gilrein ([email protected]) is a board-certified high school English teacher and Jennifer Wolfe ([email protected]) is a board-certified high school social studies teacher in Oceanside, New York.

References

Haynes, M. (2014, July). On the path to equity: Improving the effectiveness of beginning teachers. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Knight, Jim. (2014). Focus on teaching. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Manning, J. & Zirogiannis, B. (2015, September 1). Choose your own adventure: A lesson in professional learning. [Web log post]. Available at www.teachingchannel.org/blog/big-tent/2015/09/01/choose-your-own-pl.

McDonald, J. & Allen, D. (1999). Tuning protocol. Bloomington, IN: National School Reform Faculty.

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. (2014). Five core propositions. Available at www.nbpts.org/five-core-propositions.

Thorpe, R. (2014, September). Residency: Can it transform teaching the way it did medicine? Kappan, 96(1), 36-40.