By Laura Robb
Cally (a pseudonym), a fifth-grade teacher, sits opposite me at my kitchen table. As she talks, tears slowly trickle down her cheeks. She hardly seems to notice them as she continues sharing her feelings:
“I faithfully read the script every day as I’m required to do,” she says, “but I can’t shake the thought that some of my students aren’t growing as readers. They practice with short texts, but they’re not developing the skill and stamina to read long novels and informational books.”
“Are you discussing these issues with other ELA teachers?” I ask.
“We lost our common planning period – so we stopped meeting. I miss the joy I had when I was able to make decisions that supported all students.” She hesitates, then adds. “I’ll finish the year, but that’s the end of teaching for me.”
Her sadness and frustration are palpable.
Cally is not alone.
What Could Cally Do?
After this candid conversation with me, Cally recognized that there were things she could do, and all of them involved collaboration, working with others to support her students’ growth in reading.
First, she could collaborate with parents and ask them to support independent reading at home. Cally drafted a letter to parents and caretakers, explaining how independent reading of self-selected books boosts students’ reading achievements and vocabulary.
She explained that their children would bring home self-selected books, and she encouraged parents to help establish a consistent reading routine at home. Consistency was important: thirty to forty minutes of independent reading on school nights develops stamina – that is, their child’s ability to concentrate – and exposes them to more than four million words a year (Samuels & Wu, 2004).
To embark on the journey to reclaim teacher agency – the professional autonomy that allows Cally and her colleagues to make informed decisions about curriculum and students’ learning needs – she agreed to invite her team to meet before or after school to discuss finding time to collaborate.
Together, they would explore ways to impact students’ learning, ensuring that all students were steadily moving forward in different subjects, and equally important, they would provide the support that could maintain and strengthen their own social/emotional well-being as teachers.
Collaborate with Short Check-Ins
Though finding time to collaborate during the school day can be challenging, consider developing 15–20 minute weekly check-ins and return to the collaborative habit you developed when your schedule still had one to two common planning periods.
Meet as a team in person before or after school or even virtually at an agreed-upon day and time. The point is consistency, so that small amounts of weekly time enable you to share personal frustrations and successes and gain emotional support from colleagues as well as to discuss students’ academic progress and behavior issues.
The collaborative suggestions that follow can rebuild your agency as you make instructional decisions that support students’ growth and you participate in professional study groups that offer choice of topic and enlarge your knowledge of how children learn.
Collaborate to Impact Students’ Learning
Whether you teach a scripted program or a teacher-developed curriculum, collaborating with colleagues to identify ways to improve and support students’ learning can assist you as you make informed decisions about students’ personal and academic growth.
- Team up to develop and discuss weekly lesson plans and share adjustments you made to support students requiring extra time and a different approach to a lesson.
- Explore engaging ways to build students’ background knowledge and to develop scaffolds and interventions that move them into their independent learning zone (Vygotsky, 1978).
- Look for an effective video, a series of photographs, or a virtual visit to a museum display that relates to a unit of study.
- Discuss the benefits of negotiating with students to make decisions: Invite them to help you establish deadline dates for writing and projects, create choices for writing topics and research projects, and develop behavior expectations for collaborative work.
You can also use your collaboration time to deepen your understanding of Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE), the belief that you can increase your positive impact on student learning when you work together. For more on CTE and the research behind it, review my MiddleWeb article “How Collective Teacher Efficacy Impacts Literacy.”
Collaborate Through Professional Study
Over time, ongoing professional study builds your knowledge of how children learn and can directly improve instruction as you test and refine strategies based on your studies and students’ responses.
Using Google Docs, grade-level teams or departments can tailor professional study to each individual’s needs by offering choices. First, team members brainstorm topics that address students’ needs and then form partnerships or small groups around specific topics. For example, a seventh- grade team had three professional study groups during the first semester of school: cross-curricular planning and teaching, note-taking and study skills, and questioning techniques.
You and team members take turns finding articles and/or excerpts from professional books on topics you’re studying and post these in your Google Docs collection. Pairs or groups read their article, underline key points, raise questions, and jot comments.
Decide, with your group, whether to meet virtually or before or after school. Then reflect on how the information might support your students’ learning. Before the meeting closes, you and other members can volunteer to integrate something you learned into your lessons. Take from two to three weeks to try a teaching technique or strategy in your class, taking notes on the process and students’ reactions. On an agreed upon time, meet with all groups in person or virtually to discuss lessons, share notes, detail students’ reactions, and discuss student writing samples.
If your school has one faculty meeting a month reserved for professional study, you can read and annotate articles or excerpts from professional books at the meeting, discuss them, and volunteer to apply what you’ve learned in your classrooms. At the next monthly meeting, you and your colleagues can discuss your experiences and share students’ reactions and work.
You can gather additional feedback on lessons based on professional study when you ask students to complete evaluations through a whole-class debriefing in which students discuss two questions: What worked? What can be improved?
An alternative is to develop two or three questions that invite students to state facts and then move beyond the facts to deeper thinking that uses that information. For example, the teacher of a sixth-grade class studying rivers asked: How do rivers become contaminated? Why is it crucial that people and scientists decontaminate them? An eighth-grade teacher posed these questions about climate change: What evidence is there of climate change? How can countries reverse climate change? Why is this important?
Use either of these techniques whenever you feel it’s important to gather students’ feedback on specific lessons. By collecting students’ reactions to lessons, you can apply their responses to adjust the specific lesson and to other lessons you plan to present.
Final Reflections
Teacher collaboration is a powerful lever for reclaiming instructional decision making and ensuring that all students make progress whether you’re teaching a scripted program or a teacher-developed curriculum. Moreover, you can use what you’ve experienced and learned about working together to develop student collaborations for researching a topic, completing projects, organizing book clubs and discussions of texts, or studying for a test.
References
Robb, L. (2026). Teaching in uncertain times: Strategies for reclaiming agency and impact on students’ learning. Routledge.
Samuels, S. J., & Wu, Y.-C. (2004). How the amount of time spent on independent reading affects reading achievement: A response to the National Reading Panel. International Reading Association 49th Annual Convention, NV.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
Author, teacher, coach, and speaker Laura J. Robb has devoted 40+ years to teaching in grades 4-8. She presently coaches teachers in reading/writing workshops and serves as a visiting teacher in middle grades classrooms. Laura has written over thirty books; her work continues to influence teachers and student learning. She received NCTE’s Richard W. Halle Award as an Outstanding Middle Level Educator in 2016. Read all her MiddleWeb articles here.
Laura’s most recent book is Teaching in Uncertain Times: Strategies for Reclaiming Agency and Impact on Students’ Learning (Routledge/Eye On Education, 2026). Her other recent books include Promote Reading Gains with Differentiated Instruction: Ready-to-Use Lessons for Grades 3-5 (Shell Education, 2023) written with Tim Rasinski and David Harrison, and her Increase Reading Volume: Practical Strategies That Boost Students’ Achievement and Passion for Reading (NCTE, 2022) is reviewed here at MiddleWeb.
