Overcoming Challenges - PWTA

 What have you seen as the biggest challenge for your cooperating teacher since you've been there? How are they working to overcome it? If you were in their shoes, how might you approach this challenge?

This week was really interesting because I was able to come in twice. Once just in the morning, and another time I got to be a part of professional development. The biggest challenge I have seen my cooperating teacher face is, as part of professional development, completing part of an equity audit. All the teachers were given about an hour to fill out one 2 sections of an equity audit, and my cooperating teacher worked with the other humanities teacher to do this. The conversation was long and in depth and they often disagreed on where they considered themselves on the scale for different categories. They worked through this by going back to the question at hand, and combining up with a common understanding of that question. Once that was done, and they got to the root of what the section was actually asking, they agreed on their score. 

If I was in there shoes I might take this audit as a time to do some serious personal reflection, and work on it as an individual. As the classes are so intertwined I think that collaboration is a great idea, but I would want that time by myself to think through and evaluate what I was doing. After doing that, reporting my findings to a colleague would help me to understand where to go from there, and through discussions might shed some light on parts of the audit I didn't completely understand.