Is It Me or Is It You? Finding the Fulcrum of Experiential Subjectivity

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Generating Knowledge From Teacher Research to Meet the Challenges Within Public Education

Abstract

After 28 years as a 2nd grade, 3rd grade, and Basic Skills teacher along with serving as Math & Language and Intervention Specialist, I am currently Elementary Teaching Specialist at a suburban elementary school. My “students” are friends and colleagues she previously worked alongside and now supervises.
In this role, I work as a curriculum resource, coach, mentor, motivator, test administrator, fact finder and problem solver. One of the most important facets of my role is planning and running grade level meetings with teachers from each grade level. There are four grade levels, K-4, with three teachers on each team plus special area teachers, child study team members, and intervention specialists. In total, there are thirty teachers working in the building, and I have weekly contact with each teacher in team or individual settings.
Teachers work as a collaborative team in a multitude of areas including curriculum, pacing, instruction, data collection and analysis, assessment, holistic scoring, student progress, parent concerns, standardized testing, classroom management and motivation. During weekly meetings, I am also responsible for communicating information as conveyed by the principal and content supervisors to the teachers. I also serve as test coordinator. One primary responsibility is to prepare for the administration of several state-mandated standardized tests. It is a demanding job that requires a fine balance of teaching, mentoring, professional development, counseling, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and a strong dose of common sense. It is a challenging position for which I am extremely grateful and well-suited. Reflecting on my role(s), it is amazing to be a resource to the teachers in my building and district, and I consider it an honor to work with such an overwhelmingly excellent group of educators.
However, my research stems from a very personal failed professional relationship I had with a team during the 2015-2016 school year. I view this failure as my first professional hurdle as an Elementary Teaching Specialist. I struggled to understand how my professional relationship with the three teachers could fail when other grade level team relationships thrived. We struggled to transform from a group of individuals into a team. By the end of the school year, I had all but given up on them. I am not proud of that fact, but my level of frustration and disappointment led me to abandon my efforts to unify us as a team.
Reflective research practices such as journaling and other explorations into my own subjectivity inspired me to extend those techniques to my work with the professional learning communities I was charged with developing. Drawing on my own creativity and experience, over the course of 5 months, I saw an unimagined transformation in the culture of my teamwork. A shared exploration and enhanced appreciation of my teammate’s “experiential subjectivity” developed into a strongly committed professional bond around the concept of collaborative inquiry and planning. Inspiration from Parker Palmer, Chimamanda Adiche and other reflective practitioners, provided the transformative pathway for a unified team, based on shared subjectivity, to strongly emerge.

Author

• Mary Beth Duffin-Hickey, Bridgewater-Raritan School District