Teaching Partner Communities of Practice (with nowhere to practice)

Yesterday, professional learning pulled me away from the hiring and planning work that is in full swing at the slightly strange offices of our not-yet-real school. Teaching partners were invited to join Communities of Practice around APS in order to learn more about our instructional areas of interest. For the morning session, I chose to visit Arkansas Elementary to learn about Number Corner in the Bridges curriculum, and to observe an early career teacher working with students on the first day of a new month. In the afternoon, I opted to visit Dartmouth Elementary, where I observed students writing about a fictional trip to space. 

My choices of destination for yesterday's Communities of Practice were driven by my desire to learn elementary curricula that teachers will work with next year at our school. I've done most of my teaching and coaching work in the secondary grades, and I've always specialized in literacy, so it is important for me to get the best working knowledge of the tools as possible. It is really helpful to see other content areas. In the short time I've been on the Highlands' planning team, I've heard a ton about Wonders and its implementation across elementary grades in APS. With all of the Wonders buzz, and I've been anxious to see classroom teaching and talk about how it is going with teachers.

While the Bridges curriculum is less of a hot topic, Number Corner is another subject that comes up in conversation in elementary instructional circles. 

If I wrote all I learned yesterday, my reflections from visiting classrooms would run to the length of a novel. Suffice it to say that I appreciated the chance to watch teachers and students in action, and to pick the brains of the teaching partners around me. 

Though I'm learning a lot, it can be awkward. After just a few teaching partner meetings, I've become conspicuous as the teaching partner who doesn't have a physical school, or a group of teachers to work with. When I'm called upon to discuss the ways I can apply the things we're learning, I talk theoretically about how I envision the work will look next year. Or, I tell stories of yesteryear, about the ways I've worked with teachers in the past. Of course, the discomfort is a small price to pay for the privilege of helping to plan for a new schools' opening. 

Being without teachers and a bustling school building makes me look forward to working with a new staff and all the exciting challenges we'll tackle. I'm anxious to pick the brains of educators who bring these terrific (but ultimately static) curricular tools to life in classrooms to catalyze learning. After all, learning curriculum tools is a little boring without teachers and classrooms to put them to the test. Teachers, especially those learning to work with new approaches, texts and methods, develop all kinds of tips, cautions, and best of all, stories about student responses to our best laid plans. 

Comments? 

Do you have any tips, cautions or stories about Number Corner? 

Do you have a favorite prompt from the Wonders curriculum so far that generated student responses?  

What would you write in your fictional astronaut's journal?