"Teaming for Excellence"
Carole Carlson, Principal
Dartmouth Middle School, San Jose

Why Teaming?

Structuring middle schools in interdisciplinary teams is an efficient, effective way of organizing instruction for young adolescents.

In addition to providing consistency in academic and behavioral expectations, teaming provides adolescents the feeling of belonging to a small group with common goals and whose members are supportive of each other.  Effective teaming results not only in a more consistent, productive academic program, it organizes the school to provide for the affective needs of middle school students.

Teaming better meets the needs of adolescents by:

• Facilitating flexible scheduling within the team
• Providing structure and consistency in both discipline and curriculum
• Coordinating the learning process – helping students see the “wholeness” of learning
• Providing necessary reinforcement of specific learning skills
• Creating a “family” atmosphere/sense of belonging/smallness within bigness
• Providing for the unique guidance needs of adolescents
• Providing a reasonable transition from elementary to high school
• Offering the opportunity for special activities, recognition and experiences.

The concept of teaming supports recent educational research calling for the humanizing of the educational process, and revitalizing the school setting by empowering staff and providing them formal opportunities for collaboration.  Teaming changes the roles of teachers and alters the environment in which they work by providing the opportunity to combine their interests, skills and training in an organized way to better address the needs of their students.

Teaming provides support for teachers by:

• Providing a supportive, collegial peer group – reducing the isolation of teachers
• Encouraging collegiality that provides resources and ideas for both instruction and discipline
• Encouraging sharing of information enabling teachers to “know” students and better meet their individual needs and diagnose learning problems
• Sharing the workload
• Empowering teachers to make decisions that affect their students
• Ensuring a structure that can allow teachers to integrate instruction and/or emphasize specific skills
• Utilize leadership and/or administrative skills

Clearly, interdisciplinary teaming is not a panacea for all the problems associated with delivering instruction in a middle school.  It is, however, a structural organization that facilitates identifying problems and working collaboratively for solutions rather than in isolation.  It provides the opportunity for teachers to coordinate and reinforce subject matter when it is efficient and educationally advantageous for students and it empowers teachers to share their innovative, instructional expertise with each other.