Teaming in a Middle School

As someone who is contemplating the idea of working at the Middle Level some day, it is important that I am able to recognize what makes these schools successful. The first aspect we are studying in my Middle Grades Organization course is Teaming.

My professor, had us reflect on the following question:

Teaming is the heart and soul of middle school organization.  What are you wondering about middle school teaming?  What ideas in the readings or class discussions have challenged your thinking?  What ah-ha's have you had thus far?

Growing up in my middle school, I always had teams of at least three teachers (6th grade). As I got older, these teams grew larger and larger, so that by the time I got to 8th grade, I had somewhere around 5 different teachers on my team. Because of this, I am very interested to see how a team of just two teachers works. What are the similarities going to be? The differences? It'll be especially interesting for me to explore this, as I will be working in an imitated version of a two person team in my class this semester. This excites me, as I know it will be a great learning process for me. Through the readings, as well as the discussions in class, I have come to realize that in order for teaming to work it needs to be done the right way. However, despite this, teaming can be done and manipulated to work in a variety of different ways. For example, my middle school I believe has a very successful approach to teaming, but despite this, my professor described teaming in her middle school in a very different manner, and it seems to work there too. It will be fascinating to study and explore all of the different approaches to teaming this semester, as well as to look at what manipulations can be made to the different systems in order to make it work appropriately for a given group of students.

My big "ah-ha" moment was when I learned about teams working together to teach multiple subjects simultaneously through some sort of similarity between the subjects. This was interesting to me because I can't think of very many times throughout my schooling where I was able to experience this myself. Through the readings, discussions, and just my general thought process, I can easily see the benefits of it already. This new idea makes me want to study this version of the teaming concept more.