What Are You Waiting For?

Photo by Artem Maltsev. on Unsplash

For some of you, summer holidays are winding down and the school year is about to begin. You have read my posts. You know my argument. I have shared intimate stories of success and failure. So now I ask you… What are you waiting for? 

Not the excuses, but the real reasons you aren’t willing to build a learning community? Is it permission you think won’t come? Is it fear of failure? Or is the deep conditioning that says a good elementary teacher handles it alone?

Here’s my counterargument to your hesitations.

The Permission Problem

Your principal may not give you the green light. That's not a reason to wait — it's a reason to start small. One colleague. One experiment. No announcement required. You are not trying to revamp the system. At this point, you’re testing the waters. At this point, you are ready to investigate, and there’s one conversation worth having before the school year begins.  

The Failure Problem

We tell students that failure is where learning lives. But so few of us actually believe that in our own profession. As a whole, most teachers are perfectionists — we don't call in sick, we don't ask for help, we don't admit we can't reach a kid. Richard DuFour's work reminds us that helping all students learn requires collective effort, not individual superheroes. Steve Barkley champions collective teacher efficacy — what a team believes it can accomplish together — and the research shows it has the single highest effect size on student learning ever measured. Not an individual teacher's skill, rather a team's shared belief. I’m just sharing my first-hand knowledge on the subject that these experts have been touting for years.

The Conditioning Problem

You didn't learn this way as an elementary student. And your experience at teacher's college didn't teach it. Decades of silo practice have reinforced the “truth” that you should be able to do it all yourself. But years of uneasy teaching experiences (missing students, feeling less-than, wishing you could have done more, exhaustion, etc.) tell you otherwise. You just haven’t broken free because breaking that conditioning requires checking your ego at the door and accepting that someone else on your team might reach a child you can't. That's not failure. That's professionalism.

The Smallest Possible Start

You already know what to do (it's been in every post I’ve written this summer) because it has been lingering in your mind. Find one trusted colleague. Make the ask. You don't need a full team community. You just need one person willing to experiment with you. Someone to co-plan, co-teach, and co-assess with you. Someone you can trust to teach students in a way that will move them along their learning journey, and someone who you know has all the students’ best interests at heart. Not just the ones on their class list.

Our profession is different from what it was 50 years ago; frankly, it’s a million miles away from where I started 20 years ago, or even just 5 years ago. And what I know now, more than ever, is that we were never meant to do this alone. You are better when you are part of a team. And the students deserve better!

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." -Helen Keller

…Now, go find your person!

Note: This post was edited with AI as an assistant to refine structure and readability. My ideas, voice, and words remain intact.